Whether in creativity or life you need to listen to YOURSELF 👇

A lot of the times, we run around trying to live or create things prompted by all kinds of false assumptions and ideas that we’ve picked up from OUTSIDE rather than being aligned with our nature which is to start from the INSIDE-OUT.

When we live in this outside-in way, we just end up distorting our own inner voice or damaging our ability to listen to it and this just causes us to create all kinds of unnecessary inner friction.

This inner friction causes problems in our lives (or with our ability to create) because it causes us to: 1) try and solve problems that don’t exist (like running around trying to ‘find’ ourselves when we’re already there, or to 2) try and act out our lives as a set of ideas rather than something to experience.

Claude Larson (@claudeblarson)is an artist, educator, and presenter who works in a variety of different mediums to explore the natural world, seasons, cycles and her outdoor adventures. She also has an amazing Youtube channel where she shares her artistic process and philosophy in intricate detail and gives a lot of food for thought and insight.

One thing that I really appreciate about Claude is her ‘no BS’ approach to the whole thing – she truly understands that getting things ‘done’ is about following the prompts of your intuition, getting out of your own head and whatever assumptions and pretensions might be hiding in there, and then allowing the work to come to the surface and speak for itself.

This was a potent but chill conversation where we explored the attitude that you need to be able to work in this way. We also looked at some of the myths around ‘art’ and ‘artistry’ and what it really means to produce something real that speaks for itself in a way that people want to be spoken to…

If you want to level up your artistic game then check out this episode and start flowing with yourself.

Listen on any podcast player or use the embedded player above!

(Scroll down for show transcript)

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Episode Links:

Claudes’s website: claudelarsonart.com

Claude’s Youtube channel: youtube.com/@claudelarsonart

Stay up-to-date with Claude on Instagram: instagram.com/claudeblarson

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Show Transcript: The Myth of the Artist

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast about using your creativity to improve your life, basically in all areas because the creative process actually turns out, at least that’s what we’re learning here on this podcast, is the process of becoming more whole within yourself.

That just means that you basically make the unconscious conscious and accept everything that’s going on inside of you so that you can get into the creative flow state and live a life that you actually want to live.

That’s the abridged version but it’s the main theme that keeps popping up. If you don’t know, my name is Oli Anderson and I’m a creative performance coach and author. I work with individuals and groups sometimes to help them tap into their creativity and to basically become more real.

All of my work is about that, becoming real, testing our assumptions about ourselves, getting the self-limiting beliefs out of the way, making sure that we truly can live lives as human beings instead of just ideas of what it means to be human. Don’t get me started on all that stuff. This particular podcast episode is an interview with a lady called Claude Larson.

Claude is very real, very matter of fact. She seems to really understand the creative process, especially in terms of just getting things done, getting out of your head and just doing what you need to do in order to allow what needs to emerge to emerge. Basically, this conversation is about a lot of the myths around being an artist, around art itself, around what it means to engage in all those kinds of activities.

So yeah, Claude, thank you to you for your time. Hopefully this is going to give you some insight and if you’re interested in doing creative things, maybe it’ll help you get a fresh perspective here and there about what you’re doing in the first place. If you want to work on any of this stuff, you can book a call with me on my website.

Just go to olianderson.co .uk. We can talk about all this kind of thing. Really, I just want to hear people’s stories these days. That’s my main thing. Then see if I can help you to write the next chapter.

That sounds very poetic, but anyway, it is what it is. Anyway, here’s the interview and I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening and see you next Monday for another episode of Creative Status.

Here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Claude. Thank you for joining me today on Creative Status. Based on our previous conversation, which covered a lot of ground, I think we’re going to be talking quite deeply about some myths around the creative process and what it means to be an artist in itself.

That’s just purely speculation because we haven’t got started. But before we do get started, would you like to introduce yourself please and tell us who you are, what you’re all about, what you’d like to get from this conversation today?

Claude Larson: Sure. Hi, I’m Claude Larson and I live in New Jersey in the United States. I am a primarily self-taught artist. I give myself that title because I had a mind shift maybe 25 years ago where I was producing things. I was making things. I liked creating things, but when I decided I was going to be an artist and actually saying, this is not my sewing room. This is my studio. This is not where I paint. This is my studio. I’m a painter and artist, which I know a lot of people don’t want to put that title on themselves for whatever reason, but I kind of embraced it knowing that whatever was going to happen, I wanted to elevate what I did.

I think that was the mindset shift. There are people who make crafts and they follow other people’s directions and they produce similar things over and over and over again, but when you say, I’m going to be an artist, you’re like, I am making one of a kind things.

Oli Anderson: I suppose the obvious question there becomes, what is your definition of an artist in the first place? It sounds like it’s not just somebody that’s doing technical things or they’re doing crafty things. There is this higher level of elevation or something like that, but what exactly is the essence of an artist?

What do you say?

Claude Larson: I think the difference between people who make things and create things and an artist is the ability to be okay with uncertainty, to be uncomfortable, to be like, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m going to try this anyway.

I think that is why a lot of people, that stops a lot of people from saying they’re an artist because they think, if I’m an artist, I have to know what I’m doing because Leonardo da Vinci knew what he was going to make. Michelangelo knew what he was going to make and the reality is they didn’t. These amazing sculptors who were like, well, I just carved away the marble that didn’t want to be there and then I had this sculpture.

They were drawing on the marble and measuring. No, they were like, I’m going to start chipping away at this and then I’m going to take away what, basically I’m going to edit this down into only what’s essential to be there, to make my sculpture. I think people get hung up on this.

If you’re an artist, you have to know what it’s going to be at the end. If COVID taught us nothing, we had no idea how this was going to work out. Everybody thought you were going to be home for two weeks. Two years later, we’re still talking about it.

We’re getting on to three years and it’s like, okay, I don’t know. I’m going to start painting. When I paint, there’s 10, 12, sometimes more than that, layers of collage and paint and line and all kinds of things I put in there. I used to be like, oh, I’ve just started. It’s the first layer and it’s terrible and it would make me take pause.

Now I’m like, I’m never going to see any of that in the end anyway. What am I worried about? People worry like, oh, what if my art is no good? I made plenty of things that were not very good, but the more you make, the better you get. Then you’re not very good. It’s something you wish you could have done 10 years ago. You’re like, well, this isn’t very good, but 10 years ago, you would have thought, man, I rocked this.

Oli Anderson: It sounds like what you’re saying then is the main distinction between somebody that just makes things or creates things for fun and an artist is the mindset that they approach their work with. Is that a fairer? assessment.

Claude Larson: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because any one of us, any one of us could be an artist, any one of us. And there are people, you know, those who are like, oh, I don’t want to say I’m an artist.

Are you afraid somebody will judge you? And so like, you know, or, I mean, I’ve had people who like, like when I, you know, I had a career full time job, all of that. And then when I left, they were like, what are you going to do now? I was like, well, I’m going to pursue my art. You know, like I am an artist.

And like I had one woman, she like had to hold back her laugh. And I thought like, okay, like it makes me so happy to go in my studio and you don’t get it. So that’s, that’s cool.

Oli Anderson: Yeah. Like that, that judgment says more about them than it does you. That’s how I always see that kind of thing. But there is kind of an interesting thing here where that word artist has become so loaded and so kind of polluted because of so many misconceptions that people have picked up about it because there, there are a bunch of people out there that want to be artists, but they approach it in the complete, I don’t want to say wrong, but they, they approach it with a very unreal mindset where, you know, they tried to be a tortured artist or a gifted artist or a insert adjective here artist.

And that just causes a lot of people who are viewing them to think that art is something that it isn’t, if that makes sense, because those kind of people, they’re using art almost as an escape from the kind of process and the kind of mindset that you’re talking about, I think.

Claude Larson: Yeah. You’re, oh, you’re absolutely right. I mean, you know, one guy cuts off his ear and the rest of us have to torture ourselves. Like, yeah, I’m good.

I’m fine. I go in my studio. Sometimes I make things that I really like and sometimes I’m like, wow, that’s going to need a lot of work before I can get it somewhere. Or that was a great experiment. I’m going to chalk that up to, you know, a learning experience and like get on with my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lighten. And they think, they think if they’re not going to be Leonardo da Vinci, like they should never say that they’re going to be an artist.

And I think to myself, you know, Leonardo da Vinci on his deathbed was like, oh, you know, I don’t want to die because I have so much left. I want to do. Right.

And I think that’s, I mean, that’s part of the artist mindset. What do you like, what do you want to do next? You know, what right now I have two series going on. And I’m thinking about them, but I also know that when I get to the point where I feel complete, I don’t want to make another one in this series, in this color palette, in this style, in this process, there is something that is going to come along that’s going to peak my curiosity and I’m going to want to play with that for a while. And I think if you don’t, if you can’t deal with, you don’t know, first, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out because we don’t always know how something is going to turn out. I mean, that’s kind of a metaphor for life, I think.

You know, really. Yeah, 100%. 100%.

Yeah. If you can’t just embrace that and stop being hard on yourself or thinking that everything you make has to be Instagram worthy, you know, you’re not going to, I don’t know, you’re not going to, one, you’re not going to enjoy it because part of it is just like the fun of going in there and seeing what’s going to happen. And I think there’s a lot of people who, you know, they talk, if they’re going to go to a party, so let’s say they’re going to go to a party, they want to know like what food is going to be there or who’s catering it so they have an expectation. They know what other guests are going to be there so that they know who they’re going to talk to, you know, as opposed to what if you went to a party and you had, this was a new kind of food from a country you’d never eaten that type of food before and you didn’t know any of these people.

Like how would you, some people would be terrified and they would not be able to leave their own home and some people would be like, well, let’s see who I meet there. And that’s, that’s, that’s art. Like that’s art.

It’s kind of like, here’s a color palette I’ve never worked in before. Oh, it does this. This is unexpected. And it’s not something you can predict because you can say, oh, I’m going to put blue over here.

Right. I’m going to add blue to this painting. And depending on all the other colors around it, you don’t know what it’s going to look like until you actually put the blue there.

People want to know before they do it.

Oli: Yeah. That’s the main, the main problem, I think, when it comes to all this stuff. So the whole theme ultimately of this podcast is that creativity is just anything that allows you to keep moving, keep growing and to keep becoming more real, IE more authentic. And there’s an overlap between that way of living and the creative process that you’re talking about and the overlap ultimately comes down to this experiential, experimental way of being where instead of just living according to concepts or ideas and thinking that you’ve got it all figured out and just repeating the same old patterns over and over again, you’re actually going deeper into life by learning from life or learning from the creative process.

And so if we back it up a little bit, what we’re saying about the tortured artist is a kind of perfect example of the two different paths that people can go down. So the tortured artist, they’re leaning more towards the conceptual way of viewing and living and creating art versus the experiential one. And because they’re more in love with the conceptual side of things, because they need certain concepts to be true for whatever reason, because they’re emotional stuff, they’re more in love with the torture than the art itself.

And if they were doing it in this other way, the real way, it would be more experiential and they’d be able to use the art as a way of overcoming whatever it is that’s causing to feel causing them to feel tortured in the first place. Does that make sense? So you can either just go into it with ideas, i.e.

a map, or you can go into it with a desire to experience the actual territory, not just the map in your head.

Claude: That’s that’s it. That’s brilliant. I love that.

And it’s it’s like going on a vacation to someplace you’ve never been. Do you want to know everything you’re going to do and have a schedule for when you get there?

Do you just want to enjoy it and have something unexpected that was delightful happen? Why not? Yeah, why not?

Oli: Yeah, this is where art and life become the same thing. I think.

Claude: Absolutely.

Oli: Yeah, because what you’re talking about, like allowing serendipity or whatever it’s coming to play, that is when you are actually living as a whole being or whatever word you want to use to describe it, instead of just an idea of yourself. That’s that’s how I see it. Right.

Claude I think, you know, as you’re saying that, I think what stops people is again, that fear of uncertainty. And you have to believe you have to believe in yourself enough to say, and I think, you know, people go out into the world and they go to their jobs and they go to, you know, wherever they go.

And when a problem arises, they solve it because they have the belief that they can solve their own problems. But when they go to art and they say, but what if this painting is no good?

Or what if I don’t know how to use this particular tool or medium or whatever? It’s like, they don’t trust. trust one, they don’t trust the play and experimentation and they might not yet believe that they have the ability to solve the problem that might come up while they’re playing with materials and learning.

Oli: Yeah, 100%. Like that’s the main thing I believe that causes people to fear uncertainty and to not want to take risks. And there’s always a risk involved in the creative process. The problem being that at some level they don’t believe in themselves.

So they think that some terrible thing is going to happen as part of the creative journey, whatever it is, some hypothetical thing they see in their heads. And they believe that when it does happen, all of their power and all of their capacity to make choices about how to deal with things is going to leave them.

It’s an illusion that they kind of put in their own path before they even get started.

Claude: And I think, yeah. Self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Yeah, exactly. What if my art is going to suck and then it does and then you’re like, see, I knew this is how it’s going to turn out.

Oli: Yeah, it’s that. But also, if they have that self-fulfilling prophecy or that mindset before they get started, not only do they fulfill creating something that’s not as good as it could be, but a lot of the times they don’t even get started.

And so they’re just, you know, they’re procrastinating, they spend so much time in the preparation phase, whatever it is, because they’ve put an obstacle to that path that we’re talking about, the path of exploration and growth and all those things.

Claude: And that’s where you get that like, you know, imposter mindset. Like what if I’m not good enough, right? Well what if I just procrastinate? Well now I’m not actually even making art. So why am I calling myself an artist? And I’m not really an artist, but it’s, you know, this self-feeding cycle, you know, because the loop they play in their head, well, I’m not making art, so therefore I’m not an artist, but I can’t make anything because I’m not good enough and it won’t be good enough.

But just go enjoy yourself. Like really, it’s not.

Oli: Yeah, do you think people, like we’re talking about the myth of the gifted artist kind of and all this stuff, but actually there’s a lot of myths around art itself. Do you think people take art too seriously in general?

Claude: I think, oh for sure. And people who, you know, there’s the artist who takes it too seriously and then paralyzes themselves and it’s kind of like, they will make more paint and there will be more canvases or you can paint over this one or there’s always a trash bin, you know, like it’s, and everything’s going to be okay, right? Like I have never heard of an art emergency.

Like, you know, okay, maybe there’s a, you know, a theft of a painting. Okay, that’s an emergency, but I mean, in my life, I don’t have an art, I don’t have an art emergency. But I don’t get in my studio today, like a giant hole in the earth does not open up and swallow me whole. And it’s okay, but I get to the point where it is painful to not have time in my studio because now we’ve just, you know, we’ve had holiday time and the days are a bit a little disrupted. And now I’m just eager to get back into a regular process. It’s actually more, I don’t want to say painful because that’s a strong word, but it’s more frustrating to not be in my studio than it is to be in my studio. Like I just want to get down there.

And even after a couple of, you know, I mean, it hasn’t been a couple of weeks, it’s been a couple of days, but when you are away from it for a couple of weeks, it’s like that muscle has a little atrophy and it takes a little something to get back started.

Oli: Yeah. Wow. Like it’s, it’s interesting because actually when you’re in your studio, obviously, yeah, it might be hard to create the art, especially if you have to push through your own limits and all that kind of stuff we’re talking about.

But it’s also hard, like you said, not to be in the studio doing that because actually that studio time that you have, that is your place or your practice to become more of who you are, to become more real. And so if you’re not giving yourself that time, then you’re just getting caught up in the world. I’m assuming anyway, getting caught up in the world and you know, you’re not really giving yourself the attention that you need to be able to express what you need to express.

Something like that.

Claude: Oh, it’s, it’s, it’s such an act of self-care. And there’s a lot of people who have, they struggle with self care.

They’re going to take care of everybody else around them. I’ve heard this so many times, you know, by the time I’m done, you know, making the meals, cleaning the house, doing the this, doing the that, by the time I’m done with all of the things that I have to do for everybody else, I don’t have the time or energy. And I’m kind of like, well, what if you did this first?

Right. Because my, like when I have creative energy, wow, like it takes a lot, you know, like, and I sometimes I come out of there one, I’m starving. I’m so hungry. And like, I need a minute to just kind of sit and rest. But if I’m going to go like clean my house, I don’t need creative energy to do that.

You know, that just, that just needs doing. And I think people don’t, they don’t want to prioritize it because similar to the woman who had to stifle a laugh in my face. Like if I said, I didn’t get to, you know, whatever, cleaning the bathroom, or I didn’t get to running that errand because I was creating art. People will view you and judge you as selfish. Yeah. Like you didn’t do everything for everybody else first.

No, you did. Like take care of yourself first. And the rest will, I assure you, fall into place and you’ll be less resentful about having to do all those other obligations because you will have already like filled your well, you know, and that’s my thing.

I’m always like, dig the well before you’re thirsty.

Oli: Yeah. It’s so important. And I think what you’re saying is just a good reminder that actually when we’re creating things, whether it’s art or writing a novel or whatever the hell it is, that is when we’re being real. That’s when we’ve been authentic. And all of this other stuff that the world is constantly asking us to do, like go working a job that we don’t really like or go spend time with people we’re not bothered about or whatever it is. All of that stuff actually is secondary to the foundation we can build for our lives by getting in touch with ourselves, but also with reality itself and the way it works in the creative process.

Actually. And so whatever self care thing we do that puts us in touch with that is going to give us a more solid foundation for going out into the world and actually been better to other people, actually, as well as giving more. It makes that.

Claude: That’s so true. Like you nurture yourself, take care of yourself. But then when you go out, you are happier on the inside.

That’s energy, right? You start attracting happier people. You start being happier. How I’m not going to say suddenly your job is transformed and it is like, you know, the happiest place on earth, you know, it’s not, didn’t become Disney world because you took care of yourself.

But, but, you know, your last. less frustrated there. You suddenly clarity comes in suddenly you start to get like that birds eye view you put things in perspective like I am making a mountain out of a mole hill because I am not taking care of myself when I take care of myself I am happier I am more joyful I am less stressed and when a problem arrives arises I believe in myself and then it either resolves more easily or at least I don’t bring the frustration to it right at the start it makes life it just makes your life so much more fulfilling like day to day moment to moment event to event and the people and it’s funny because you talk about the people you can’t be bothered about man more art I make the more I curate who I spend time with.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you’ve taken control of your life basically you’re not by doing by creating art and spending time in your studio you’re ultimately becoming more present.

Claude: You can’t you can’t be otherwise in your studio. Yeah, and even if I if I have to be somewhere like I have an appointment or I have an obligation I have to be somewhere if I go in my studio I will set my phone alarm to give me 15 minutes to get out of there and you know put a change if I need to change or you know whatever I need to do I set the alarm so I don’t have to think about time I don’t have to think about anything beyond what is right there that I am engaged in the energy I’m feeling the materials I’m working with the process because if you’re worried about oh I got to make something so I can post it on Instagram oh I got to make something that other people won’t think is crap like don’t like don’t bother you know don’t bother because you’re you’re adding stress that’s unnecessary it takes away it takes away the joy.

Really, I mean when you look at paintings or you look at other people’s artwork you see their soul and if all they were worried about was will other people like this yeah you wouldn’t like it yeah yeah because they’re trying to fill the somebody else’s opinion rather than I made this I was so happy making this when I look at this I’m so happy with the outcome this was a joy and if and if you’re not bringing that into your studio if you’re doing it for somebody else you know and that’s why I don’t really do commissions someday my plan is if people want commissions which I have been asked if people want them my plan is to say I’m going to make four three or four and you’ll pick your favorite one because then you’ll be happy I’ll be happy everybody’s happy but if I’m trying to make something that I think you’ll like because you say I would like it to be this size and this color palette or similar to this work right I’m not going to recreate something I’ve already done but um and then and of course the the outcome is to oh you don’t like any of them okay then you need to find somebody else make you a convention you know what I mean like I can only create what I can create I can’t get in their head and they if they have a vision of what they want in their head then they should either pick up a paint brush or you know come with a more open mind.

Like I don’t know it’s uh that’s just one of and that’s one of those other art things you know like if I don’t make highly rendered portraits if I don’t make uh you know some specific type of art that somebody else makes then I’m no good

Oli: Yeah yeah like like a lot of people fall into the trap of um they’re sourcing their inspiration from the outside in instead of the inside out so based on you know your journey I guess and what you’ve learned what are some things that people can do to kind of become more aware of that problem first of all but also to ensure that what they’re doing is actually authentic to them is there some kind of barometer or a way of knowing?

Claude: I will say that um there is a value to looking at other people’s art not to reproduce it but to analyze it and say I like this why do I but why do I like this and I you know I have done that and when I look back on my art over time the art that I like is colorful but then again I like black and white you know so sometimes I work in black and white but it’s colorful but really it’s about shapes I love color I love shape and when I look at all of my art you’re like wow okay yeah she likes color and I like shape and rather than saying I like this painting I’m going to try to do this you could say I really like this color palette what I’m going to mess around with this color palette I really like you know when I look at these maybe I like these three or four or five pieces of art what is it that I like about them are they you know very dark and heavy and they have a sense of you know depth do they have what is it about all of them collectively and you have to get like is it the feeling that they give you is there a particular the way they use line oh I wish I could use line like that well you know start messing around with line get four or five different kinds of pens and markers and you know brushes whatever and start messing but figure out not oh I you know I like Vincent van Gogh what do you like about it do you like his yellows do you like his color palette do you like his rainy little brush marks?

Like what do you like about it and then play with that like it’s all about discerning what it is that attracted you in the first place yeah right and then making but you got to make that your own yeah um and there and there are times when people you know something will happen an event will happen in my life or somebody will say something and it’ll just spark a curiosity in me and I’m like oh and you know sometimes I’ll um sort of type it into my phone send it to myself as a message just so that later when I have the opportunity, I can post that on my studio design wall or write that down at my cutting table, at my sewing table, at my painting table, like whatever it is, because for whatever reason, that comment or that event or that thing that I saw, or that conversation that I had, will inspire something.

And that’s, I mean, my recent series happened that way. I was having this conversation, I’m a Reiki master, so I work with energy healing with clients. And when I am in a session, I am surrounded by spirit guides, like I feel them.

And many of my clients will say, it felt like there were six hands on me. And I’m like, yes, you know, like, I don’t do this by myself, I invite them, and they come and they help me. And I don’t tell them that until after the session, because I’m gonna make sure they’re okay with the whole, but then at the end I go, this is the woo-woo part, because I present myself as like, I’m a professional.

This is one of the jobs that I have done in my life. But I had this whole conversation with a client about it, and she was like, sometimes I feel like there’s somebody in the room with me, and I was like, it could well be your spirit guide. You might wanna just like sit, meditate, and like ask what their name is, or ask them to show themselves, reveal themselves, do something, whatever. And now I’m in the midst of a series, and I’m calling them sentinels, because I feel like these are my spirit guides. They’re just sort of coming out of me into, I’m making them in collage, I’m also making them in fiber.

And they’re just arriving. And that, I mean, that comes from inside of me. I just start cutting, and I’m sort of putting, and things will drop to the floor, and I am like, okay, so we’re not using that right now.

And it sounds crazy, but I feel like they’re looking after me, not in a big brother kind of way, but in a, you are loved, you are supported, you are cared for, you are protected, you are all of these things. We all have them, you get quiet, you start to feel them, and you start to feel them when you edit out the noise. Because if you took your whole day, and you started to say, what parts of my day felt really great today, and what parts of my day I would not have missed if they didn’t happen, right? And when you start editing and editing, and reducing the amount of sensory input, and mental clutter that we all accumulate, you get so real with your art. And that’s when I can really edit it down, that’s when all of a sudden I’m like, why am I looking black and white right now?

You know why? Because my life was overloaded, and when I edited and edited, I needed to simplify, and that’s when all of a sudden I’ll get a series of black and whites that come out of me, and it’s almost always, right after I’ve had an overwhelming period of time.

Oli: Like there’s so many amazing things that you just shared, and it reminds me of this other kind of myth around the creative process, which is just that the creative process is just about one person in isolation expressing something that’s existing in them already. But actually, it’s much deeper than that, and the stories you’ve kind of just shared, a good reminder of that.

So it’s not actually about our independence in the world, and we’re just expressing something that we already know. The creative process actually is about interdependence, and I always find, like normally if I’m doing something artistic in scare codes, it’s writing, but I find when I’m in the writing process, I might set out with an idea about what I as an individual want to do, but then as I am writing, I will kind of see things in the world around me as I’m going about my business, or somebody might say something, or you’ll see something here, you get all this kind of serendipity and these synchronicities that feed the work, and it becomes a process of not just you putting something on the page or on the canvas that already existed in you, it’s more about you responding to what life is teaching you as you’re going through that process.

And as you do that, if you can listen to what’s out there, then you’re more likely to do this thing of making your unconscious conscious through that, but it’s the interplay between what you think you know about yourself, and what the world is telling you at the time, and what you’re ready to listen to because of whatever’s going on inside you, or whatever is about to emerge. I don’t know if that makes sense, but…

Claude: Well, you know, as you’re saying it, I’m thinking so many artists, they go like, I need to find my personal voice, my personal voice, you know? And they get stuck on this, like…

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Claude: Like they only have one, right?

And I’m a firm believer that my personal voice today is a culmination of my experiences, what I’ve seen, what I’ve done, where I’ve been, who I know, what happens to me today, like that’s my personal voice today. It is going to change.

My personal voice 20 years ago, wildly different because now, where I am, one, where I am in my life, the experiences I’ve had, the… I don’t wanna say like accomplishments, but like the art that I’ve made, like the things that I have worked through, the problems that I have solved, that’s it, that’s your personal voice.

And it’s kind of, it’s… You know, people who are trying to find it so that they can get to the destination and make that for all of time, they’re missing the point, that you can’t, there’s so much more, and it will change. And if you’re looking for a destination, then art is gonna be very hard for you because there’s no end point until you are no longer able to make art.

Like that’s it. And even then, your personal voice will change because then you are now a person who made art, has all those experiences, and for whatever reason, you wish you could still make it. Sometimes it’s age, sometimes it’s physical limitations. Who knows, doesn’t matter, but chasing the personal voice is like, no, it’s right there. Like it is what it is to get. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don’t have to look for it.

It is whatever comes out today.

Oli: Yeah, that’s the thing, right? So people who are chasing this personal voice, actually what’s going on by the act of chasing, they’re not listening to what’s already there because for whatever reason, they don’t want to accept that because they’ve bought into some cultural thing, that their voice needs to be more tortured or that they need to have something more profound to say or whatever it is, they’re judging the voice that’s there.

They want it to be something else. And so they go on this kind of wild goose chase trying to find something that doesn’t exist or can’t exist.

Claude: That’s it, it’s the wild goose chase.

Oli: Yeah.

Claude:  And your personal voice exists today as it is, but tomorrow it may be different. And a year from now, it will surely be different.

And if it’s not, then what you really need to do is start making the rest of your life more interesting and get on a journey of experiences. But honestly, you can’t go through any day without having an experience.

So just take it, take it for what it is. and commit all of it to this point in time, you’re gonna make whatever art you’re gonna make based on your personal journey, right?

And that’s why it’s your personal voice, but it’s not stagnant, it’s not one thing. And all these famous artists, it’s like, oh, Starry Night, Sunflowers, Haystacks, that’s Vince Amego, and that’s what he did. But that’s what’s been curated for you to see that he did by so-called experts, right? I went to the Met, and this was several years ago, and they had Leonardo da Vinci, but it was like his sketchbooks, right? He had things where you could see he was trying to figure out, how am I gonna draw this hand, right? Because he’d have to figure, and then five or six different hands around it. You know, that’s what he was doing at the moment, but then he had architectural drawings. Then it was his other science that came in there, and it was his personal voice, but they curate and they say, well, only this one is worthy of making famous and showing to people, but the reality is, if you saw their entire body of work, you know, like Picasso didn’t just draw strange-looking heads where the ear was coming out the top and like the face was blue. Like that’s not, you know, he also did sculpture.

He also, he did a lot of things, but they’ve said like, well, this is what’s remarkable, and that’s what we’re going to tell everybody. This is what we’re gonna connect to that artist, as opposed to you saying, at this point in my life, this was the type of art I was making, and I see it now, right? My life was very disconnected. I was struggling with, you know, maybe a stressful job or whatever, and I can see that in my art, but now as I’ve gotten older and wiser, this is what I make now, and it just seems more cohesive, and this is how my life feels right now, more cohesive.

And then I don’t know what my life’s gonna be like 10 years from now, so I don’t know what, I can’t predict what it’s gonna look like. It’s going to be whatever the personal voice is at that moment.

Oli: That’s so powerful, and it’s so true. Like our voice is a reflection of where we are right now, right? And if human beings are being real, then they will continuously evolve, they’ll continuously grow, there’ll be new things coming up, new things getting stripped away, and so the voice will keep changing.

But I think probably because of the way that art is curated in museums and stuff, like you just said, it makes people believe, especially like if they’re trying to be an artist or a writer or whatever it is, it makes them believe that they can only have one voice or one dominant voice that they express themselves with, and so everybody actually, not everybody, but a lot of people, are trying to put themselves in a box, but actually by putting themselves in a box of the personal voice or whatever it is, they just end up removing themselves from the process of growth that will actually allow them to create something that is meaningful to them, and hopefully by extension other people.

Claude: And I think right there, we circle back around, oh, I found my personal voice and this is what I make, and they make it and they make it and they make it and they make it until they hate it. And then, guess what they do? They procrastinate. It goes right back to it, and it’s kind of like, it just means you’re done.

You’re done with this, move on, and go explore something else, and you’re not gonna know how it turns out, and you be okay with that.

Oli: Yeah, how does identity feed into all this, do you think, like the way that the artist identifies?

Claude: Well, you mean as far as, I mean, I know some people who are afraid of calling themselves an artist.

Oli: Yeah, I suppose, sorry, there was a bit of a curveball that question, but so what I was thinking is, if somebody reaches the end of the line, they’ve just become so attached to a certain genre that they just keep making the same thing over and over again, basically, maybe a bit of variation here and there, but they ultimately become identified with a certain way of working, and so they can’t see a way out of that particular medium or that particular genre, whatever it is, because if they get out of that, then they actually lose themselves as they know themselves now.

And so, yeah.

Claude: Here’s what they lose: They lose the people who liked what they were making before.

They never lose them, they cannot lose themselves. If they say, I feel complete and I am moving on and I am going to go do something else, right? We’ve all done that in life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This relationship is over, this job is over, this house, I no longer live there, right? We move on. And if you’re done, you’ve made landscape paintings for 20 years and you’re the thought of making another one just does not inspire you, right?

Yeah, yeah. Then go do something else. It’s still your personal voice. At that point, they are more attached to what will people think if I completely change what I’m making as opposed to… Yeah.

And I’ve said this, oh yeah, I used to work like that, but I don’t work like that now, I work like this, right? And if you lined it up chronologically from where I started to where I am now, you’d see a progression, but then you’d also see, I think it’s like in the evolutionary process where all of a sudden there’s like this weird anomaly and like a major thing happens, it was like, and the dinosaurs became extinct, you know? And there’s some of those leaps in there too, because then all of a sudden, when I learned certain things about the properties of paint, it was like I completely abandoned one thing and you’re like, wow, this was a quantum leap, that happened here. But then from there, there was a progression. And if I were to change mediums, there’d probably be some backpedaling because all of a sudden you’re like, oh, I don’t really know what this does and it’s not gonna turn out so well until I get a handle on it. But then maybe there’s a quantum leap. It’s, I think it’s like any journey, you know?

Some parts go easy, some parts don’t. And as long as you are making progress in a direction that is teaching you something, and by that, I don’t mean like, oh, my work got better, better, better, better, better. It’s, I learned what to do with this. And then the next time I tried that same material, it was easier and you could see there was more freedom in the work. And then you could suddenly, once I really understood this, now I feel the joy and you can sense the emotion of joy in the piece versus the hesitation because I don’t really know what this is gonna do and I’m experimenting and it’s not all pretty, like that’s for sure. But you have to just accept, yeah, people don’t like to be wrong, people don’t like to fail, of course not. You’d rather be right more often than you’re wrong. But in our experience, if you’re worried about being wrong or failing or not being famous, which, you know, some of them didn’t get famous until they were dead.

So, it’s not going to have, you know, really, it’s not going to, it’s not going to bother you either way after that. But like, I think of like, Hilma of Clint, right? Like, she stored these massive paintings. I went and saw them at the Guggenheim. They were massive. And they were amazing. And they were abstract. And I guess in her time, right, she was a woman, she was an artist, she was making abstracts, like all of this was very not accepted in her affluent society. She hid them in a closet. They were discovered after she was dead. I’m thinking like, yeah, I don’t want that to be my art legacy.

I don’t want these to be one sold at a yard sale or, you know, nobody discovers them until they empty out the closet when I die in 105. You know, like, it’s silly. Like, just put it out there.

And the people, honestly, the people who love you will, they will, they will support you, especially if you’re honest about it. Oh, I, I’m just learning how to paint. And so I made this, this was my first attempt. They’re going to be like, oh, okay, you know, good job, like good for you going to be, they’re not going to be like, well, it’s not the Mona Lisa. Okay. And, you know, well, that’s already been painted.

So why would I paint that? And I think that’s, that’s we’re editing out the wrong people, you know, the people who aren’t supportive, the people who are going to look down on you because your work isn’t where it’s going to be 20 years from now. You got to edit those people. Don’t ask, don’t one, maybe don’t show them your work to don’t certainly don’t ask for your opinion. And if they’re the type of person who’s going to give you their opinion anyway, like take it for what it’s worth.

Okay, an uneducated opinion. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. Yeah. I mean, it’s easy to like, you know, beat ourselves up and be hard on ourselves. Life’s hard enough, right? There are enough people out there who are looking to judge and criticize.

Don’t don’t surround yourself with those people. It certainly doesn’t help your artistic process.

Oli: I think it’s like we said, it all feeds into itself is like a two way street. So the more time you give yourself to do this practice of self care or whatever we want to refer to it as the artistic process, the more you understand yourself, the more you know what you have to offer.

And the more you will be able to have real relationships with other people, which means that you’re becoming from a stronger foundation. So you’ll keep the real ones around, and you’ll tell the other ones to a GTFO or at least just ignore them so you can get on with this process of learning and growing and live in the life that you need to live.

And it’s all ultimately rooted in the same mindset, which is that we’re either learning or we’re just trying to stay the same and to not really get anywhere.

Claude: Yeah, and that’s where I think the satisfaction comes. I mean, how many times have you done something? You’ve accomplished something even on this podcast, right? You’ve done these things.

And, you know, you click that button and you’re like, wow, I did that. And you’re super proud of yourself. And it wasn’t, and it wasn’t the easy thing that you’re super proud of.

You’re like, this is the thing that I like, toiled and struggled, and I was uncertain and I solved problems. And I did these things. And man, I did that, you know, and I look back on that even 20 years ago, the first thing I made, fairly awful, really. But I was like, wow, I did that. You know, and then the next thing I made was still fairly awful. Oh, I did that, you know, like this is totally different than what that was. But I made this too. And you just kind of have to give yourself a little grace.

Nobody starts out as an expert. And, and, but if you’re, but enjoy it, you know, like that’s the thing, right? What, what, how and why, like, what do you, what are you interested in painting? Are you interested in painting landscapes? Are you interested in doing portraits? Are you interested in doing abstracts?

Are you interested in collecting trash off the beach and building amazing sculptures? Because I have seen people do that. It’s like, what interests you, right? Why do you want to do that?

Right? Is it I love to be out in nature and that’s why I want to paint landscapes outside. And then how are you going to do it? Oh, am I going to use acrylic paint? Am I going to use oil paint? Am I going to use watercolor?

Am I going to use charcoal and a pencil? What, why and how? What do you want to do? But really the important thing is why do you want to do it?

Because if you don’t have a why, like, I want to be an artist because, and your why is like, because I’ll be famous. You can’t really control that. Sorry. That’s the bad news.

You can’t really control that. But, but like, what do you want to do? Why do you want to do it?

How, how are you going to get there? And if you can answer those three things, like, go play and enjoy yourself.

Oli: Yeah. And I think actually, that word enjoy or just joy in itself. That’s kind of the ultimate feedback that you’re doing the right thing, I think. I think if you’re feeling that joy in the creative process, and it ultimately means that you’re, you’re learning and you are growing. When we’re growing in that way, there’s always joy that comes with it.

I find in my own life. And so if we’re constantly hesitating and holding back and trying to be conceptual and just do things we already think we know, then actually the amount of joy in our lives will go. But also the quality of our work will diminish because this is stagnant.

Like we said, we’re not evolving and we’re not flowing. We’ve been talking a while, the time’s gone quick, but have you got, how would you sum up all this? So there’s a lot of themes, a lot of threads.

It’s all kind of interrelated. But what’s the main takeaway from this conversation, would you say that you want to share with people?

Claude: I think that there are a million things you could tell yourself to stop yourself from learning, from being happy, from finding joy, from making art.

There are all the reasons. You’re not good enough. You don’t deserve it. You won’t be good at this. You, I love this one. I can’t draw a straight line.

I say to people, if you want to draw a straight line, they make rulers. But you know, like you could tell yourself a million things, but honestly, if you were to say to yourself, what would make me happy right now? Right? I have this time to myself and I want to go make something. What would make me happy to try right now? Because when you are happy making art, it shows. I have seen artists who are grumpy and who make the same thing over and over again, because that’s what’s expected of them.

They’re making it out of obligation and their work falls flat. And when they, you know, and then all of a sudden I’ll see something and I’ll say, oh wow, that’s from this artist and you know, I know some of them and they go, yeah, I just, I don’t know, like I just, I just got in a mood and just hit me and I just started doing this and I’m like, this is great. Like do more of this. This feels joyful.

This feels free. This I feel positive energy from and they’re afraid because they’re, well, I’m known for this. Like, you know what, I don’t expect that on my deathbed and thereafter that people will be like, she only worked in this way. And so the, you know, it’s going to be one of those like, look over the span of her life, she went from this to this to this to this to this. Here’s this full body of her work, just like the full body of her life.

Like let your art reflect your life, but make your one, take care of yourself and make it something that makes you happy. Makes you happy. Because in the end, whether it sells or not, whether it hangs in a museum, it won’t matter if you spent your life being tortured over it.

Oli: So powerful is so simple. By the end of the day, art is, there is a very personal thing, isn’t it? But if we do it right, there’s a chance it’ll touch other people as well. But at the end, that doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that it helps you to get where you need to be. And in a way, you’re, it sounds a bit cheesy, maybe, but in a way, you’re already there. It’s just allowing yourself to be there so you can do it and then do more of it. So, wow.

Claude: Give yourself permission, right?  Give yourself permission to be happy. I don’t know why. I don’t know why we do otherwise. Honestly.

Oli: It’s crazy. But that is how it is.  Most people, they don’t give themselves that permission. Something you said a few minutes ago that was quite powerful. You said there’s no obligation.

And I thought that was, you know, that’s really true as well. So in the creative process, there is no obligation whatsoever to be doing the same kind of thing you were doing yesterday or a week ago or 10 years ago. You can start fresh any moment that you actually want to.

And I think that that is such a powerful thing for just life in general. And I think what you shared in this conversation, ultimately, you know, whether it was intentional or not, there are so many overlaps between the way that we live and the way that we do art. And it’s very personal in both cases. But the more attention we can give to feeding into that process in our own lives, the more likely we are to actually be able to give something to other people in their lives. But either way, it doesn’t matter because we’re all going to die one day.

Claude: It’s I know you want to live a tortured life and then die, or do you want to live a super happy life? And, you know, be yourself. And, you know, part of that too, I think is I’m going to be myself. Parts of me are pretty vulnerable. And if you don’t like what I do, and that’s the thing, be your own best friend, right? If you don’t like what I do, you can say so. But I’m still going to look at it and go, This makes me happy.

When I look at this, this makes me happy. So you can have any opinion you want, because there are plenty of paintings out there. And I think any one of us could go to any museum and find something that we really like and something that we would stand back from and go, Huh, I just don’t get it. But then it wasn’t for me. They didn’t, they, you know, that is just not my thing.

And that’s okay. And so if people, there are people who walk right past my art, when I was hanging in a gallery, they’d walk right past it and no comment. And then there are people who would just stand there and then lean in and then, and I’d say, Well, if you have any questions about this, feel free. And they would be mesmerized hearing about the process or the materials or anything they’d ask, you know, they’d ask some questions, but it takes a little vulnerability.

Again, that’s a, that’s a hard one for humans to just be like, Hey, I just put my soul out in front of you. You know, please Yeah, yeah. Yeah, some people will. They’re not usually very happy people.

Oli: But And even if they do that, you know, it’s not going to do any damage really, if you think about it. Um, have you, um, I know you’ve just given you final words, but have you got any final final words about where people can find you? And you’ve got a YouTube channel as well, right? Where you kind of share a lot of this kind of stuff.

So can you tell people about that?

Claude: So, um, if the lowest level of contact you can have with me is to follow me on Instagram. CLAUDE, that’s my first name, Claude, middle initial B, Larson, L-A-R-S-O-N. I have a YouTube channel, Claude Larson Art.

So you can go there. I have a bunch of videos. Just, um, I try to be helpful.

I try to be informative. And I am big on like permission to experiment. Here are some experiments that I did, or here, you know, I’m working on scaling up. So this is what I am doing. You know, like, so if you’re also working on scaling up, or you just are working on mark making, whatever, you know, I have all these videos. And, um, I have a website. So Claude Larson Art, seemed to have a brand starting to form here.

Um, ClaudeLarsonArt.com. And I send out a weekly newsletter, and you could receive my blog posts. My blog is on there.

So if you wanted to visit it, but I mean, you could have it sent to your inbox blog posts. If I make a new video, you would get that. If I release new work, you would see what that’s about. And I generally make a video about work so that you can hear about the process. Yeah, that’s, you know, pretty much how to, how to get a hold of me. I’ve also written a book. That’s a different website, Claude B Larson LLC.com. And you can hear about that.

It’s really all about finding your own personal success.

Oli: Wow. I’ve seen some videos on YouTube. I really love how you deconstruct this whole creative process. So if people, you know, like this conversation, I think they’ll definitely like YouTube. But thank you for coming on in and going over all this with me. Maybe in a few months, I’ll get you back on them and go even deeper if that’s cool with you, but no pressure, obviously.

Claude: That sounds great. This has been a very, it’s a fun conversation about things that are important to us. Right? Like, that’s the thing. Like some people aren’t into art. Okay, you don’t have to be.

But you know what? It’s important to me. It’s important to me.

Like, otherwise, I wouldn’t spend my time and treasure on, you know, buying supplies and spending time in my studio. Right?

Oli: Well, that just means we’re practicing what we preach. So we talked about something that’s personal and that works for us. If other people like it, that’s cool. And if not, well, we can go jump out the window or something like that. So, Claude, thank you so much for coming on here. I’m banging on the table and making loads of noise.

Claude: Thank you so much. Bye.

Taking responsibility for your life is a vital step but being RESPONSIVE is the way 👇

The ‘problem’ with us human beings is that we can get caught up in thinking our DEFAULT human way of thinking is the way things actually are.

Yeah, we have to ‘think’ to function and make sense of life but if we fall into the trap of thinking that our thoughts are WHO WE ARE or WHAT LIFE IS then we’re gonna have a ‘bad’ time (by adding friction to our lives).

A more REAL approach is to be HORSELIKE and to try and learn to respond to life instead of neurotically trying to control life.

The short-version of this is that we CHOOSE where we want to go and what we WANT to do in the moment and then we ride ourselves in that direction with a sense of spontaneity and presence.

This requires a lot of higher-level human (and horse!) qualities like learning to trust, being outcome-independent, and understanding the limitations of identity but it’s always REAL and REAL ALWAYS WORKS.

Jocelyn Ring (@jocelynjring) is a brand expert and coach and also – rmore relevantly to this episode of Creative Status – a Horse Medicine Leadership mentor and guide who uses the (direct) wisdom of horses to help people figure out some of their blindspots and to tap into their deeper intuition.

She provides equine guidance, training, mentorship, and retreats to help people improve their relationships with themselves and reality by using these powerful animals as a path to discovery and insight.

In this conversation, we wanted to explore some of the lessons that could be extrapolated from the lessons she’s learned working with horses and to see what we could learn about the creative process and life itself… The short-version is that there was LOADS.

Some of the things that came up:

-How horses teach us certain qualities that are essential for getting where we wanna go in life.

-How horse can give you FEEDBACK about your own ego and what you have going on with your own ‘stuff’.

-What horses have to teach us about being tribal mammals.

-How horses can show us a better way into managing our own intuition and instincts.

-Tons more.

Listen using the player above or on any podcast platform!

(Scroll down for the show transcript)

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Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus

Episode Links:

Jocelyn’s website: jocelynring.com

Jocelyn’s branding website: theringeffect.com

Stay up-to-date with Jocelyn on Instagram: instagram.com/jocelynjring

Creative Status Links:

Book a call to work with me

Free creative workshops to level up your life.

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Follow me on Instagram

My YouTube channel

Get my books on Amazon

Show Transcript: Being Horselike for Real Life & Creativity

INTRO

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there! Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status. If you don’t know, this is a podcast about using your creativity to improve your life. Improve your life in this context really just means that you’re doing things that allow you to move towards a whole more integrated version of yourself that is aligned with reality and all of the wonderful things that can take place there.

Reality has a bad reputation, but if you think about it, it’s the only place where anything happens. I am a performance coach and an author. And well, I realized that ultimately it all comes back down to this kind of stuff, this idea of finding some kind of a creative project or a creative vehicle or a creative vessel that will allow you to bring the real you to the surface. And so then I just decided to start interviewing people about that kind of thing.

So here we are. Today’s interview is actually one of my favorite ones so far. Like I say that hand on heart, it’s with Jocelyn Ring. Jocelyn, she does branding and coaching and all that kind of stuff, but she also works with horses, which is just super cool in itself.

So she spends a lot of time outside. This conversation, what we wanted to do was ultimately to explore what horses have to teach us about the creative process. That was a creative challenge in itself, potentially.

But actually, as we got into it, it just opened up into this huge kind of thing about how horses are just so real and they can give you feedback, almost instantaneously about your own relationship with yourself and your own ego. We looked at how the wider creative process comes into all this, how we need to learn to manage, I guess, and get a rein on our instincts.

Basically, there’s loads. There’s loads of metaphors that are very practically applicable to the creative process and life itself that comes from the horse thing. So hopefully, by the end of this episode, you’ll be more horse like or you’ll feel more horse like and you’ll go out there and be more real. Jocelyn, thank you so much for coming on and having this conversation with me. Everybody else, hope life is good.

I hope you enjoy the interview and see you next Monday for another one.

INTERVIEW

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Jocelyn. Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. Before we get into it, and I start asking you a million and three questions, do you feel like introducing yourself and letting people know what you’re all about? And why you’re here?

Jocelyn Ring: Yes. Well, thanks for having me. My name is Jocelyn Ring. I have spent the last almost 20 years working as a brand strategist, and I have evolved my practice to integrate a lot of different modalities that I have taken a long way that I find very effective to kind of turn into my own secret sauce when working with clients.

So anything from traditional brand strategy to business strategy, coaching and personal development. And then this last layer that I’ve incorporated in the last few years is working in partnership with horses to teach people about their personal brand and leadership.

Oli Anderson: Wow. Like the horse thing, this last layer that you’ve just mentioned, that was the thing that made me really want to talk to you because I just think that it’s so interesting, especially from the point of view of this whole podcast, which is ultimately the abridged version, that we can use our creativity to become more real, which just means getting more closer to reality and becoming more present.

Your work, what I read about it, and saw you talking about online, was very much aligned with that because you’re using horses, are you allowing horses to show you more about what reality actually is, and that’s allowing you to get results for your clients because they’re learning from that experience and becoming more real as all. So really, what I wanted to do in this conversation is just unpack that to death and learn everything that we can about what horses have taught you.

So where would you say is a good starting point for that conversation about horses? Like why horses, I guess, are not some other animal?

Or yeah, what do you think?

Jocelyn Ring: So I’ll start with I’ve been around horses my almost entire life. And even though I was a competitive equestrian, my favorite time was just being in the barn or out in the field with them. I had this like deep sense of peace being around them.

And I kind of intuitively understood that, but didn’t really know it. And then my journey with horses continued. And I worked with them in a therapeutic setting. So they’ve been used to help people with different emotional and physical challenges. And I just think, you know, to that question of why horses versus other animals, I think there are some animals that have kind of showed up on the scene to help humans along.

You know, dogs, you often see them in situations where they can help with search and rescue, they assist with the blind, they can even detect, you know, disease and seizures about to happen in people. And horses have that same quality. And so why that works very well is that they are prey animals. So they are highly, highly attuned to their environment to one another. And they can even pick up things that are going on with us that we’re not aware of at a conscious level.

So that’s where that’s where that all begins.

Oli Anderson: Wow, so what kind of awareness do you think that they have or what kind of lessons can we kind of learn about ourselves from the feedback they might be giving us if that makes sense?

Jocelyn Ring: Yeah, that totally makes sense.

So this is where my work starts to kind of converge. So when I work on branding, whether it’s with an organization or with it, whether it’s an individual, I don’t like the word authenticity. I feel like it’s been used to death, but it’s really like pulling out the realness of that organization and the essence and the heart of that company or the individual because I think we spend so much time when we’re marketing is looking at what other people are doing, putting together a strategy that we think is going to land for a client or a customer.

And it really, it starts to remove us from what we do really well, who we are. And the horses unpack all of those layers and that kind of BS that we’ve built up and really force us, if we’re willing to look at ourselves and who we are.

And they do that by when you, when I take people out to the field with a horse, the horse has no ego. It has no agenda. It doesn’t care what your job title is. It doesn’t care how much money you have.

It doesn’t care about your client roster. They basically, they force you to, they don’t force, they, they provide you the invitation to be really present in the moment. And all a horse is going to do is mirror back what’s going on for you.

Oli Anderson: Do you think, and I suspect you already do, do you think there’s a kind of parallel there between this relationship we can have with the horse and the relationship that we can have with life itself?

Jocelyn Ring: So, I mean, again, it’s that like we can. So I’d say probably in the last year that I’ve switched my definition of branding to branding is your presence in relationship. It’s how you show up.

You can choose to show up very superficially or you can choose to kind of peel back the layers and really show up kind of in the truth of like actually what is happening in the moment. And it’s, it’s funny, like I’ve taken people out with to the horses and we do an exercise in the beginning where we just observe the horses. And I try to get people kind of out of their heads and into their body and they, they’ll say, I thought I was really grounded in this moment, but I’m still spinning around in my head.

And so when you’re spinning around in your head, what that does is it blocks you from connecting with yourself, which blocks you from connecting with other.

Oli Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly how I see it as well. So I think the main thing that causes issues in our lives is some kind of disconnection of fragmentation within ourselves that causes our relationship with ourselves to kind of distort our view of life or to stop us from really connecting to people and to life in the highest way that we possibly can.

And what’s really interesting is something that you just alluded to actually, like a lot of the time people are running around, living their lives on the hamster wheel of the same old thoughts and the same old things that they do every day again, the same old results, but they think that they are being very present. And then something will happen in their lives or they’ll come into contact with something that maybe shows them there’s a gap between the ideas about themselves and the reality of themselves.

And if they can go through the process of closing that gap, that’s when you get transformational change. But it sounds like what you’re doing, you’re actually kind of speeding up that process in a way because the horse is a way of getting actual real-time feedback, I suppose, about how wide that gap is within yourself.

Jocelyn Ring: Yes. That’s exactly what it does. It also, because it’s experiential, when you land on that awareness, now you have a felt sense. And so my clients will say, after they’ve gone back to their home or their work, they can drop into what it feels like when they feel more aligned.

And what the horses also do is they, like you said, they help you listen to those thoughts that are constantly running through your head on like an auto loop that we don’t have any awareness of. And so as a facilitator, when I see an interaction with the horse, I can ask somebody, like, what thoughts are coming up or what are you feeling?

And they’ll express the thought that’s run on autopilot. And then they can decide if that’s helpful or if that’s something that they need to shift.

Oli: So have you noticed any patterns, I suppose, like in the kind of thoughts people are having? Like, maybe that’s too broad of a question. Sorry. Like, what are the main barriers, would you say, the main ideas and beliefs that we tend to carry as a species that are stopping us from being as real or as present as we might need to be to get the results that we actually want from life?

Jocelyn: I mean, I think, like, kind of in a broad sense, what I’ve seen is people just get very heady and trapped in their thoughts. Like if I ask people to choose a horse that they want to connect with, they’ll get they’ll get frozen in decision.

Right. Do I pick this one? Do I pick this one? And all the reasons of like how they decide, they don’t even realize that there’s so much processing that goes on within a decision. And the different kind of forks in the road they have is they’re trying to make a choice. And so that’s just it’s fascinating to take with the internal dialogue and, you know, bring it out and take a look at it and see, wow, this is how I’ve been running my life without even thinking about it.

Oli: Wow. Is there something here to do with control? Because one thing I found when I’m like working with people like in my coaching practice is that the main thing basically, the main problem that most people have in life is that they’re resisting things that they can’t change and they’re trying to control things that they can’t control.

And actually, if they have a lot of underlying shame or guilt or trauma in the most extreme cases, I’m always talking about the same three emotions, but if they have a lot of unresolved shame and stuff like that, then they compensate for that a lot of the time by trying to control everything in their lives. They become control freaks.

Yes. But actually that just causes them to not be able to ride the horse, so to speak. And so they don’t get the results that they want from life. And so actually the only way to really ride the horse and to win the game is to not control it or something like that.

Jocelyn: Yeah, it’s just it’s that like being able to be with what is rather than trying to change it. I mean, I think it sounds so simple, but one of the biggest takeaways that people have is because we do spend a lot of time just quietly observing and being with the horses, not asking anything of them, not asking anything of ourselves.

And they say it’s very uncomfortable to try to just be. But then once they do, they’re like, wow, this is this is quite interesting. And, and then they can see where they try to control things. Like if I’m if we’re watching the dynamic between two horses, they’ll project a relationship that they have onto that and they can see how like what the dynamic is and how, you know, something.

that they can’t control like a partner leaving them or somebody dying and the things that they do to try to you know avoid feeling the sadness that would come from that right but already is like that’s but that’s not even what’s happening right in this moment like That person is alive or that partner is still here So, you know, we can that’s another thing is that we we tend to either live in the past Right and then or we start worrying about everything in the future the horses don’t do that That’s another thing they teach is you’ll see that as you’re watching our herd of horses. It’s very fluid Right, they’ll shift and change roles.

They will see what’s happening in the environment They will respond to it as soon as the shift happens. They shift again And they’re not sitting there, you know stewing about what one horse did to them five years ago Or they’re not worried, you know that food isn’t gonna show up.

So it’s just watching them just kind of navigate moment to moment is is That’s a nice example.

Oli: Yeah, it’s amazing like actually it just reminds you what life is I know that’s another kind of simplistic thing to say, but it’s so true like the main problem for human beings like I already said is that our conceptualizations and interpretations and All of this stuff we’ve got going on in our head that stops us from actually seeing what’s right in front of us , that’s what causes the issues and actually like you said, you know, really we don’t need to be worried all the time about like, you know whatever food and scarcity and all these things we with the horses if you’ve got that horse mindset of whatever you call it horse Magic, I think you call it horse medicine.

Sorry Then wait if you’ve got that way of being and way of seeing things then You’re just more aligned with the way that reality itself actually works. It’s like you’re plugging back into your nature ultimately.

Jocelyn: Yes, and I think I think what it also helps people see is like Here is a situation the situation is neutral. It’s not good.

It’s not bad. This is happening Yeah, yeah, and I am a creative resourceful and whole person, right? I have and so and so empowering people to see I Have a lot of options here and because that’s the thing we can do too, right? Is we get into tunnel vision like I have this problem, you know and a lot of times in business It’s like I have this problem in my business. The solution is money.

I need more money Like is that the ants? I know and they just and then they can start to Wow, you know really kind of Not be able to problem solve right then then all the like the old stories come in and the Kind of the walls close in so if if you can then just look at a situation and then and Then this is another thing too, right?

The horses are herd animals They’re not solitary like some other animals So they have other members of the herd that they can lean on So that’s a lesson to us like if you do get to that place where you start to go in the tailspin Who can you call on to help pull you out of it? Who can give you a different perspective?

Who can step up and lead when you just you are not capable of it right now?

Oli: There’s so many things that you said that I’ve just sent my brain in all these different directions It’s all kind of linked though to this idea – which is becoming the main theme of the conversation, actually – of stepping back from the filter that we place between ourselves and life Because of our identity basically and the stories that we tell ourselves because of that…

And so when you were talking about the horse has been fluid that is actually just a reminder that You know we can change the way that we see ourselves actually like if I decided that tomorrow I don’t want to be a coach anymore and I want to go down a totally different road and do something else that’s fine.

Like the only thing that would really stop me doing that is my attachment if I have one to an eye my identity. That’s that’s a huge thing obviously but then the other thing that you said just then that was super super interesting to me and which is related It’s this idea that the horses themselves they remind you actually that all of these interpretations and stories we have are value judgments so we judge everything as either being good or being bad.

And when we do that like you said it limits the options that we perceive to be available to us but reality itself is beyond duality it’s not about good and bad reality just is what it is  – and if you can get into that place of non-duality or just is this or being or presence or whatever we call it that’s when you have freedom like you there were there were infinite or myriad at least options that are available to you.

And that is an amazing reminder right there what you just said, so I’m rambling I can tell you want to say something.

Jocelyn: No, I love and I love that I think that’s that’s really as I’ve Evolved my work with the horses. I’m like wow this is it’s that and it’s it is the identity You know and you talked about trying to control things and I think we try so hard We get we get attached to our identity, right?

Yeah, a lot of times especially when you’ve worked very hard at a building a career, right? You know people say, you know, what do you do or who are you don’t talk? You don’t start with your your hobbies or your family or your friends you start with your job title Right and then you you work so hard to do things to make sure Your identity in someone else’s mind because if somebody else thinks that you’re Competent Experienced trustworthy then that means that you are do you know what I mean like book book placing? Your identity in someone’s brain to validate what you believe your identity is.

Oli: Yeah, that happened a lot Yeah happens a lot, but I always think if people are doing that It’s because they don’t truly believe in identity like it’s tenuous. Yeah, and so There’s an element here then about Outcome independence so ultimately the horses I suppose if we’ve got this this horse. I keep saying the horse mindset like how would you reverse with you?

Jocelyn: So that’s what I say. I say, you know thinking like a horse.

Oli: All right So if we’re thinking like a horse and being like a horse,we’re not gonna be concerned actually about the outcomes that we get from the things that we try to do if that makes no we’re just doing it and if it works out, that’s obviously amazing And if it doesn’t work out well, we still feel really good about ourselves because our identity is not contingent on the results.

Jocelyn: Right and even like when they’re in a herd You know, they’re typically is a hierarchy, right?

There will be a lead mayor in the wild and I’ll lead stallion which is a very interesting dynamic It’d be like having co-ceos one man one woman and then you know They tend to generally have kind of a pecking order and you can see how they maintain that by the way that they interact with one another. But like I like I said, it’s very fluid.

So if there is a lead horse If he or she needs to rest, they will lie down and someone will step into the role of leader and cut and then there will be other ones that stand guard over the resting horse like again because they’re prey animals. They’re very vulnerable and then it shifts and changes. I’ve seen situations where one of the youngest members of a herd stepped up to lead Because he had there was something in our environment that the other horses were not sure of so again prey animals it could be a plastic bag blowing in the breeze or it could be a mountain lion and they can’t discern immediately.

But they know they have to take action to get away from it and then reassess when they’re safe and you know See if that was a threat that they really need to worry about or not But so there was something in the environment and one of the youngest horses approached it it was a road sign on the outside of their pasture Decided it was not scary and led the entire herd from one field to another Wow, right so it’s not like his identity was like arm.

I’m the youngest I probably shouldn’t step up and do this because I’ll offend someone , like that was the situation. That was his capability So it’s they’re not wrapped up in identity that we are and not trying to like protect Their identity.

Oli:  Yeah. Yeah, it’s more about just uh necessity, I guess like what do they need to do? What’s the the best thing for the the tribe or the herd as a whole right and just getting it done like you’re right.

We could we could learn so much from that to be honest so much and I think.

Jocelyn:  I mean I adore the clients that I work with they’re They’re committed to their work to their craft You know trust and integrity are usually top values for them And so if they’re if they’re ever becomes a situation personally or professionally where they feel like they have to let someone down that to them is Like death by a thousand paper cuts, right? They would rather turn themselves inside out. I’m like, but you know, is that a reasonable request?

You know, could you you know renegotiate the contract? You know, is this not the right, you know, so they guess they just think like Failure or letting someone down or not being being able to deliver That’s their identity. So if they can’t do it, then what does that say about them?

Oli: That’s um Going back to the emotional thing. I guess and like the the control free agree like how How do you think people can get over that kind of?

I suppose imposter syndrome or people pleasing or something like that?

Jocelyn: And it goes back to what you say you have to really Believe that about yourself like yes, I am still capable and trustworthy and I operate with a lot of integrity But this external Extenduating circumstance has come up, you know and I can deal with it if and then, you know, sometimes you do have to let people down.

Oli: That’s it. like letting people down is actually It’s something we’re all going to do. So it goes back to this idea of You know accepting reality like we don’t need to be perfect all the time. We just we are what we are is a get away from the value judgment.

Yeah. What one question I’ve got now is – s o we’re talking a lot about how the horses remind us to ultimately be present to step out of duality and judgment and all these things that hold humans beings back because of their um their identity and all that stuff – but one thing that I often think is like human beings need to, we need to do the being part, but we also do need to do the doing part.

That’s just a strange sentence in order to um to to keep growing and evolving in the way that we need to and so if we can choose something that we want to do that is aligned with you know, our real values and our real intentions and whatever else we need to bring to the surface well, we can set a vision for ourselves and then move towards it in a real way which is where we’re going to be kind of aligned with who with nature and all the things we’re talking about are an unreal way where we’re trying to transverse that territory by using our ego basically in order to try and control everything.

So I always think that what we need to do actually is is to be spontaneous and controlled at the same time if that makes sense? Or to Inject our being Into the things that we do.

So we’re not just doing things for the sake of it.

Yeah, I can tell you you get one coming from but how does this fit into the horse thing?

So the way that I’m thinking of it is say you want to ride a horse you’ve got a destination so in terms of you know, what this podcast is about creativity and everything you might set a destination for yourself so you’re going to paint a picture you’re going to write a novel whatever the hell it is and you’re going to get on the horse, basically of life, to take you there Is there a lesson there somewhere? That was very convoluted.

Jocelyn: I totally get it and I I’ve struggled with the being and doing I I came from a very doing background, you know productivity and hustling and Achieving and then it was funny. I found myself almost um, you know, kind of black and white thinking because then I then I went into the well What if you just you know, lean into your being and just are but I mean like you said there we have to do also, so It’s I think it’s coming from a place of beingness And then again looking at all the different options.

So if you talk about setting a vision I’ll work with clients and we set a vision And I say that’s fantastic now We will Back it up to where like where are we today? And then um, it’s more of I think I’m allergic to step-by-step programs and very discrete instructions because say you map out this plan and then you get to a step and something happens and it just blows everything apart. Then what do you do?

I like a more fluid planning. So you start with your beingness. You figure out where you want to go and then it’s more like a GPS, right? So it’s, you know, how a GPS you would set your destination and then you get going and there’s a traffic jam and it routes you around or, oh, I’m running low on gas and you can push, you know, a button to find out where the next gas stop is. And so it’s not, you’re not looking at mapping out the 500 mile journey. You’re doing it like kind of one step at a time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then assessing, okay, how did that work? Yes, that was productive but it really didn’t feel aligned to how I like to do things. All right, to get to the next piece. We want a little more of this and a little less of this.

So it’s very, it’s a lot more dynamic and organic doing this but you still achieve and get things done. Yeah, that’s kind of the way the horses are, right? So if we watch them in the pasture, you know, I’ll say, what are they doing? And people will say nothing, just standing there.

I’m like, there is so much happening out in that field, right? They’re grazing, they’re making a decision about whether to move. One horse will move and invite another one to come along with it or break off from the herd. They will be, you know, picking their heads up to assess the environment, you know, you watch their ears, you watch their eyes, you watch their posture. So I mean, they’re achieving the mission of keeping the herd safe. They’re staying fed, they’re moving around, they’re connecting with one another. So yeah, it’s very, and it doesn’t look forced.

So I’ll ask people, like this is, this is your level set. This is kind of your everyday existence. This is what we call back to grazing. So this is you getting stuff done, but it doesn’t look frantic. However, should you need to lie down and rest, you can go down into resting mode. If there is something that requires your immediate attention, because life happens, right? Whether someone gets sick or a project starts to go sideways or, you know, a supplier cancels something on you, then you might have to like sprint into a gallop to get stuff done.

But you can’t maintain that, right? So it’s that, like, there’s that back to grazing of productive, but not frantic rest and then stepping up into that kind of what we call like a fire drill, and then coming back down. So that’s, that’s kind of the getting things done model.

Oli: Yeah, I love it. It’s basically, instead of just making a plan, and then rigidly sticking to it, which never ever works, because the plan is always just, you know, it’s based on our best thinking at the time, but the journey’s going to change us anyway.

It’s about the interplay, isn’t it? Like horses, the way that they’re doing it is an interplay between whatever they’re actually trying to achieve. So the map that they’ve set off on themselves, the plan, but also what’s going on inside of themselves. So actually, they’re more intuitive, I guess, in the sense of they’ve got self awareness, okay, but they’re intuitive, intuitive enough to be responsive to life, if that makes sense.

Jocelyn: Yes. I mean, they deal with what comes up, right? It’s a nice peaceful afternoon. They’re grazing. And then something starts wrestling in the, in the woods, you know, to the side of their field. Oh, well, we got to get up and move. It’s not like they sat down in the morning and said, we’re going to go for a sprint at three o’clock.

Oli: Yeah, it’s, they’re responsive. It’s a responsive way of being and living.

So obviously, like human beings, apparently, we’re more rational than horses and other animals. So we can use our heads as well as our hearts. In a way, the head-heart thing is, it’s like the being-doing thing. But I often find, especially online, people fall into this trap where they think all they need to do in life is to just follow their heart.

But actually, if you just follow your heart, well, you know, you’re living in the short term, you might have a nice time, but probably, you know, you might end up in jail or something will go wrong horribly. And, you know, you, so you need the head and the heart. And based on what we’re saying, maybe I’m pushing it a bit, but the head and the heart thing is kind of like what happens when you have a person who is in touch with themselves, enough to be, you know, sensitive enough to the feedback they get from life and to not have this ego thing causing friction and blah, blah, blah. It’s a person like that riding a horse to where they want to go. And they’re following, they’re responding to the territory of life, not just the map in their heads.

Jocelyn: Yes. And then, you know, at the decision point, it’s both and, right? It’s my heart, which is my values and my, how I want to live my life and how I want to show up to challenges. And then there’s a rational problem solving of like, okay, how, and and it is possible to align the two.

Oli: This is, is taking it down a bit of a rabbit hole potentially. But do you think when you’re in this horse mindset, thinking like a horse living in this way, being responsive to life, ETC, do you get more synchronicity?

Jocelyn: I believe so, because I think like when you’re in that very strict control mindset or like following the, you know, step by step plan to the dot, you’re very focused and you’re, you’re not open to alternative opportunities, right?

Like if I just think about myself the time that I you know, decided, even when I decided to learn how to do this work with the horses, it was crazy how things lined up for me. And when I was, and if I, if I think about, so back in 2012, I was rebranding my consulting practice and I remember I was in a mastermind and I was trying to name it and I was also, I was trying to force like the horse piece into it because I was explaining like everything I’ve learned about nonverbal communication and how teams work and just the lessons from the horses. I was trying to jam that into my facilitation and branding and it just wasn’t landing for people and they weren’t getting it.

So it was just, it was, it was kind of crazy because in that frustration, 10 years ago, somewhere, I don’t know, in my heart, in my soul, wherever it was living was like, you’ll get there. You’re forcing it right now. You need to do more work on the kind of getting experience with the brand, the facilitation and building up that part of your practice, but the horses will come. And then when I was ready for it, the right mentor showed up the right opportunity for horses to practice with showed up.

I mean, it was, it was funny how it works.

Oli: Yeah, but I found that in my own life as well. So if I’m living like, like a horse, which I didn’t realize I was doing until this conversation, like because I’m not blocking my own path and I’m more connected to life like as a whole. So do you know what I mean? Like it’s not like it’s just me and life.

It’s all one thing. When you live like that, well, you do get more synchronicity and things kind of working out and it’s very surreal, but you just have to go with it. And if you go with it, that actually just kind of solidifies this, this horse mindset, because you’re, this is getting a bit too philosophical maybe, but in those cases, it’s almost like all the things that we’ve said about riding the horse. And if we have less barriers in ourselves to, you know, being connected and blah, blah, blah, then we’ll get the horse will trust us and it’ll go where we want it to go.

Life does the same thing if we have this same mindset. And so actually, there is no separation if that makes any sense.

Jocelyn: No, it makes total sense and I get where you’re going with this. And then the reminder is, we use the horses as a model for how they operate with one another in a herd and how they are able to stay in the moment.

We will never get there as a human. So it’s funny because I always find myself, like if I can find myself moving more back into that doing this and trying to be productive and work really hard, now I have awareness around it from the horses and I can see what’s happening and kind of pull myself back. So I like using them as a kind of like a guardrail, right? As opposed to like, I want to be just like them. So, all right, you’re kind of wandering back into your old patterns, you know?

Let’s take a breath for a second and check in with why you’re overworking.

Oli: Wow, yeah, that’s super interesting in itself. Like actually human beings, the human condition, I guess, is that we are for whatever reason because we’ve gone too far technologically or just the way we structured society or the way we think, whatever it is, we’re always going to be slightly disconnected from nature if that makes sense.

And like actually, there’s the whole thing, isn’t there? Like in coaching and the self-help community or whatever we want to call this community, where it’s about the difference between surviving and thriving and when we talk about the horses, they’re in the fields, they wake up and they respond from one moment to the next and they just do whatever they’re being tells them to do. They’re actually thriving, if that makes sense.

From an outside point of view, they’re surviving. Okay, they’re in the fields. I mean, obviously if it’s a farm, they get involved after all, but we would think that they’re just surviving whilst we’re thriving, but a lot of the time it’s the other way around.

Jocelyn: It’s been very interesting to move away from how I grew up with horses, especially in that competitive environment where we project everything that we feel like is comfortable, like we put them inside a barn and we put blankets on them and we feed them a diet of grain that’s high in sugar that they would never eat out in the wild. And then as I’ve learned more about equine behavior, like we’ve got a cold snap that’s about to come here and I’ve been, do we blanket them? Do we bring them inside?

What do we do? But they’re built for, I mean, their whole physiology is built to deal with the elements and if they’re out in the wild, they will lose weight during the winter and it’s okay because they will come back in the summer when they follow the patterns of nature much differently than we do and they’re fine with that. So when I’ve returned my horses to as much of natural state as can be even while they’re domesticated, so they live outside, I’ll show up at the farm and it’ll be rainy and cold and I’ll think that they’ll be under their shelter no, they’re outside, they’re fine.

Oli: Do you think, like all this stuff we’re saying about horses, do you think you could learn more of this or more deeply or more quickly or whatever from wild horses versus the domestic animal? And if so, what’s the main difference between them? I mean, behaviorally, there’s a lot of similarities that are kind of ingrained in them.

Like I was watching some work of an equine behaviorist that follows wild herds in Spain and she was showing how they eat grass and so they’ll put one foot of front foot forward and they’ll graze like in the shape of their foot around that one foot and then they’ll take a step forward and they’ll graze around the other foot. Now, sometimes when you put a horse in a stall inside it will start weaving from side to side and what it’s imitating is that motion of what their body would be doing if they were grazing out in the wild.

So it’s like for humans, we would say that horse has a vice. He has a dysfunction, he’s a weaver. It’s like, well, is that really true or do we have him in the wrong environment? So I’ll say to people in companies, they’ll talk about an employee, I’m like, is he in the wrong position?

Does he not have the right support should he is this just even the correct culture? Right, so being able to look at somebody not as what they’re doing wrong or their behavior but like really thinking about what is that showing or telling us. So it’s interesting like that. But then I mean, even in a domesticated situation, the horses will, especially in the facilitation work, they’re still gonna have that response to us in the same way that like intuition and sensitivity.

So that’s not my experience. The horses that I’ve worked with in a domestic setting that hasn’t been doled, but I imagine that it could be.

Oli: Yeah, I think I was just romanticizing the wild horses but the lesson there is that actually the instincts and the nature of the horse itself and its capacity to be what it is, is never gonna go anywhere, is it? And actually that’s super interesting as well if you apply that to human beings.

Cause I think a lot of the time, like the tendency in our culture at the minute, definitely is to look at, you know, nurture before the nature thing. But actually probably there’s a human nature actually that we all need to embrace to be as happy as we could possibly be if that makes sense. Cause then we’re living with our reality.

We’re not blocking it with all this social programming and stuff like that.

Jocelyn: And you know, experiencing all of the emotions, right? So it’s not just my main goal is happiness.

No, my main goal is to experience everything that I get to experience. Like you said, it’s the non-duality. It’s the, it is what it is. Yeah, and then the other thing I think that’s interesting about the horses is they are incredibly patient with us humans.

So if you think about the evolution of our, like relationship to them, so they have been, you know, humans have ridden them to be able to get to places that they couldn’t have gotten, you know, on foot. They’ve been beasts of burden to help us with agriculture. They’ve been helped us with transportation. They showed up on battlefields. A horse that’s a prey animal that has a like serious like flight instinct to, you know, say, okay humans, this is where you are in your evolution.

I’ll help you here. And then, you know, the competitive world of horse racing and show jumping and, and, you know, now I think their work is evolving into more of this therapy and leadership development. I’m seeing that type of work gain more momentum.

So it’s just, it’s fascinating to see how they’ve partnered with us for thousands and thousands of years.

Oli: Yeah, literally. Like actually human civilization would not be what it is now without horses. That’s basically a fact, right?

Joceylen: Yes. Yeah.

Oli: It’s kind of, kind of amazing. Just with the nature nurture thing or just looking at how society is structured You’ve mentioned a few times like some of the values I guess that horses embody or that they remind us to have

Just to kind of bring this whole thing like into like a full circle kind of thing What? What are the main values?

The horses have do you think that our society or human beings in general would benefit from cultivating.

Jocelyn: Um Fascinating question. I mean, it’s hard to not project our, you know, kind of human mindset onto that, but I mean I think if you Look at them out in the wild the mission is you know protection and safety of the herd and they all align to that and If there is a herd member that doesn’t go along with that they’re Reminded of what it is and then they you know then they you know, they have they have a kind of a neat like a natural way That things get organized and they just, yeah, they integrate and respond to the environment and I mean they’re still here. They keep going

Oli: Hmm like one of the values mentioned was patience, so I suppose, you know, that’s one and I suppose I don’t know if I want to say courage presence is definitely something that it seems like we need to value more.

Yeah with would you um I’m kind of backtracking a little bit, but a lot of this stuff that we’re talking about is about how Basically people can be too Individualistic and if you’re too individualistic That actually Dehumanizes you basically it dehumanizes you because you forget that you’re a tribal creature we’re all interdependent and we’re all linked to each other and what you do affects everyone else So you get that problem, but also by thinking you’re too independent It takes you out of reality in the way that we’ve been talking about Because actually all this control freakery and ego that we’ve mentioned Is just the illusion that you are it’s just you you’re separate and that it’s all about you and you’re gonna take what you come From the world and control everything and you know just try and meet your own emotional needs so Would you say horses?

Are they dependent on each other or are they actually embodying that? Interdependent.

Jocelyn: As you were talking like I’ve seen that illustrated in a herd Like I said they have you know, they have like a Hierarchy of lead lead horses and I remember once I was observing a herd of 26 or so horses and a new mare was integrated into the herd and she just kept challenging the lead mare Right that like I want your position.

I want your position. I want your position And she just she caused all of this chaos in the in the herd and what happens when a horse does that is your You’re wasting energy right because they need to conserve that energy Like I said in case there’s a threat that that becomes present They need to get up and go and if she’s you know harassing the other horses and you know kicking and biting and just you know causing a ruckus while everybody’s trying to graze Other horses will let her know like that’s not acceptable and so you know they may One horse will stand next to another horse and get that horse to move and the horse that moves is kind of lower on the in the hierarchy and so She just wouldn’t stop and it it doesn’t like a lot of people will be around horses They never walk behind a horse.

They’ll kick you you’re getting a lot of warning before a horse kicks Right, they will if you watch the herd like they made faces at her like ears back, you know I wrinkled nose, you know then some teeth come out Then you know they would ask her to move and finally they just you know like you’re not getting the message And so another horse walked up to her backed up and double barrel kicked her in the side Well, and it stopped right so the message was like well, you know You you kind of move along with us and Integrate yourself and find your place in the herd or else you’re gonna be out like will ostracize you and a horse Can’t really it’s so vulnerable.

I mean a national horse by itself in a field Surrounded by mountains with bears and coyotes and wolf mean that’s it So they can’t so but she you know if you think about a person that’s you know trying to control the situation It’s very political and is advancing their own agenda. I mean, what does that do to the people? They’re with and then what does it do to themselves just like you said.

Oli: Wow. So yeah, like if that situation with the man was like human being like if somebody, you know, maybe wouldn’t like barrel kick them in the side or whatever it was, like you might, you know, castigate them or say something or whatever to kind of put them back in their place and to bring the group back together. Some people might think that’s actually a bad thing.

They might say, oh, that’s really offensive or you know, you’ve been horrible to this person, whatever it is. But if you look at the dynamics, well, actually, in the, in the long term, if that group offers that person survival value, then it’s actually for their benefit that we do act in this kind of interdependent way because actually what those horses are doing, they’re protecting the culture. If that makes, they’re protecting their culture.

Jocelyn: 1000%. Yes, that’s what I was going to say because say, say that human, you know, ascended to that position of power they wanted, but they still had that way of being. How toxic wold that culture be?

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.

Jocelyn: Like these are the rules of how we operate and how you’re welcome to come on board. We will find a place for you. We appreciate your strengths, but you know, these are the hard lines of what we do and do not do.

And people think that that’s cruel. But I mean, think about it in a personal relationship. If you’re constantly like, you know, like adapting yourself to somebody’s behavior that you don’t particularly like, and you just keep people pleasing and overextending yourself, that’s not an authentic relationship. But if you can, if you can have open communication with somebody about, you know, this is how I feel about this. I mean, again, going back to that presence and relationship, if I can say, “Hey, that’s, I don’t appreciate that”. Or “Hey, I would appreciate if we could communicate this wa”y or I mean, even think from like a work standpoint, right? If you go back to overextending yourself for work, I’m available for my clients 24 seven.

What does that do it? Like, you start to resent people reaching out to you at one o’clock in the morning with emails and expecting a response. If you like, if you have boundaries around your day, look, I am here for you from nine till five, and then I will respond within 24 hours.

Oli: Wow. Yeah. So even with like boundaries, which is just saying no, the horses actually, they instinctually understand it overall.

Jocelyn: I mean, they get a message like, and it’s just like people, right?

Some people you might have to say, Hey, you know, would you mind doing X, Y or Z and other people they need to hear it several times, or you need to escalate and become more assertive.

Oli: That’s what I think. So a lot of the time when, you know, human beings become people pleases or whatever it is, they have actually something has happened to them that has conditioned them out of having those natural instincts to set boundaries and to protect themselves. Actually, that’s what I think.

Like, maybe they’ve been shamed by somebody or I don’t know, they had a strict parent, whatever it was. But the actual, the natural instinct is to protect ourselves, I think, or to protect the tribe as a whole. And actually, if we go against that, then I don’t know, some things happen somewhere to condition us into an unreal way of being.

Jocelyn: Absolutely. And then I mean, think about like, like we’re, we keep connecting the dots forward backwards and sideways. Like it feels like we’re going all over the place. But in my mind, I can see how this all makes it.

Think about people pleasing behavior. That is you’re trying to control your identity.

Oli: That’s exactly what it is.

Jocelyn: If I people please the heck out of you, you will like me, you will not abandon me.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s that fundamental disconnection from the self that we talked about. It’s always shame. So the way I see people become ashamed of themselves are sometimes trauma in extreme cases, then they just end up hiding and they try and, you know, win love for other people or whatever it is through people pleasing and stuff like that, because they don’t know how to give themselves that love or more accurately, they don’t know how to let it flow because it’s already there. They’re just blocking it with their mental stuff. And so the horses, they’re actually showing us, you know, how we’re supposed to be.

I suppose it’s a mammalian thing or something like that, but we’re all wired in the same way, basically.

Jocelyn: Yeah. And here’s the thing too is they had that, you know, the horses had that interaction where they had to kick her, which is, you know, pretty aggressive behavior.

But then it went, it went back. So if you think about like, all right, if I disappoint somebody and they get annoyed with me, that’s like, that’s life. People are going to get, you know, things happen and people are going to experience whatever emotions they are. But, you know, you can come back to the herd or, you know, like if it’s not the right fit for you, you know, sometimes relationships end or it’s not a good fit or you move on, but, you know, trying to control like keeping everything the same is just, that’s not what the horses model is.

Oli: Never going to work. I’ve got one more question about this situation with the mare. So obviously the mare that was trying to take over and become kind of a dictator within the herd. Why do you think she became that way? Was it just because of her, you know, the chemical makeup of her hormones or whatever it was?

She’d like maybe have those testosterone or something.

Jocelyn: So she, she, and this is where it gets interesting with domesticated horses. So she came from somewhere else.

So it could have been, I don’t know a ton about her history, but she might have been a lead mare in another herd.

Oli: Right.

Joceyln: And then got to this place and was like, hold up. Somebody has my position.

Oli: Yeah. So in a way, that’s the identity thing.

Like she might not have, you know, not literally had thoughts in her head saying, oh, I’m the leader, but she was accustomed to being treated in a certain way.

Jocelyn: Right. And I tell people that story is, is basically the example for onboarding.

Right. Somebody starts at a new company or starts in a new friend group, or, you know, they’re going to try to, they’re going to try to figure out where they fit. And some people are going to come in with very sharp elbows. And this is how I did it at my old company.

And this is the, the role that I had. Some people will come in with humility and just wanting to observe and see how things work first before, you know, finding their way. So it’s just, yeah.

Oli: Like every, every culture that you enter is basically a, it’s a new system, isn’t it? And so the system, it’s going to, all systems eventually reach a state of homeostasis where there’s balance.

And that’s the culture that you’re talking about. But if something new comes in, obviously it’s going to disrupt it. And there is going to be that, you know, forming, nomen, storming, whatever it is, period, where things have to readjust.

But like it always goes back to a baseline. That’s really amazing. I’ve been talking a long time. This has been really interesting.

Like honestly, thank you so much for this. I could keep going for a lot longer. I know. Me too. I won’t. So don’t worry. But have you got, have you got anything just to wrap this up?

Like how would you summarize, I suppose, the main lessons or insights from this conversation, if there are any? And can you tell people where they can find you as well, if they want to learn more about this stuff or work with you or anything?

Jocelyn: Yeah, I think, I just think it’s fascinating that, you know, my work with the horses translated to the work that you do, and we were able to find so much common ground and so many threads and themes.

Like you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t really think that. So I love when I have the opportunity to do the work with the horses, to, you know, talk to other people who have the same kind of ethos and things that they do in their work and just see how, you know, how it can be applied to everything.

So I loved it. Like I said, I feel like, you know, maybe we did go all over the place. But if I map this conversation out, I’m like, Oh, look, no, there were some, there were some common themes and threads in there. You can connect the dots.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. Like that’s the way I like to do things anyway, is to just take it where it needs to go. Like a horse, I’ve been horse-like.

Jocelyn: You are horse-like.

Oli: But like, the dots always come back, ultimately, to us just understanding more about truth. Like all of these things are just different ways into the same reality.

And I feel like I’ve, you know, when I first got in touch with you, I was saying, look, there’s got to be something here about this horse thing and like reality. Like I was super interested and excited. And I think like, it is cemented all of that in my head.

So I’m so happy that we have this conversation. What’s your website and stuff like that? Just so people can find it.

Jocelyn: Sure. So my, I have, I actually split my practice into two last year. And so my more traditional brand consulting can be found at theRingEffect.com. And my coaching and personal leadership and more of the horse work is at jocelynring.com.

Oli: Brilliant. So I’ll share all that stuff in the show notes. But Jocelyn, thank you so much.

Jocelyn: Thank you so much.

So life is just a series of MOMENTS… 👇

…and the moments are just made up of our CHOICES.

It’s kinda simple when you look at it like that (because it is) but that doesn’t always make it easy.

Making REAL choices in an UNREAL world can often be the hardest battle we all face.

But even though it’s ‘hard’ that doesn’t mean it’s not WORTH it and – no matter who you are or what your life looks like right now – you still have some POWER to choose real moments for yourself.

It might start with something ‘small’ (though still amazing in the scheme of things) like just pausing the broken record of thoughts in your mind to watch the rain on the window or the rustle of he wind in the trees.

It might be something ‘massive’ (but still small in the scheme of things) like building your own house or expressing yourself through some mad performance.

Either way – no matter what size it might seem to others – in those MOMENTS you have chosen something REAL over something unreal and that’s how you start moving towards WHOLENESS and feeling the flow.

Mari Reisberg is a Creativity Coach and the host of the Sustaining Creativity Podcast. She also works as a therapist and is a performer and nature lover who works to help people reclaim their creative power.

After hearing Mari’s podcast, I thought it might be interesting to turn the table and ask her a few questions about her creative work and how she uses creativity as a vehicle for helping people to navigate themselves and the world. Turns out that was a good idea because we got some really great insights in this conversation.

Give it a listen if you need some creative motivation and want to bring more creativity into your day to day life without shaking things up too much or being too dramatic (unless that’s how you wanna roll, of course).

We cover all kinds of interesting and practical ‘stuff’:

-What exactly creativity even is.
-How you can improve your life right away by looking for creative ‘moments’.
-The link between safety and the creative process.
-How joy fits into all this.
-Loads more.

Definitely a motivating episode that brings it back to the basics and will help you build something real!

Listen using the player above or on any podcast platform!

(Scroll down for show transcript)

—————————–

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus

Episode Links:

Mari’s website: sustainingcreativity.com

Stay up-to-date with Mari on Instagram:instagram.com/sustainingcreativity

Creative Status Links:

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Show Transcript: Building a Real Life via Creative Moments

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status.

If you don’t know, I’m an author, I write books about being real and deconstructing your ego and facing your shadow self so that you can become more connected to yourself and life and grow more whole as a person, tune into your true values and intentions.

This podcast is about creativity and how you can use the creative process in order to basically become more real, face all of your illusions that you might have about yourself, see what’s blocking you and stopping you from living the life you actually want to live. Today’s episode is an interview with Mary Riesberg. Mary also has a podcast about creativity called sustaining creativity. I thought it would be really interesting to turn the tables and to ask her some questions. So that’s exactly what happens in this interview that’s about to come up.

We explore all kinds of things, we go down a lot of different rabbit holes, we look at what exactly creativity is, how people can be more creative, how you might need to tap into the present moment in order to facilitate that unblocking or that process overall.

Basically there’s loads of stuff going on and I’m sure that you’ll get some value out of it if this is your thing. Other than that, Mary, thank you so much for coming on here, giving me your time, everybody else get in touch if you have any questions or you want to work on any of this stuff and that’s basically it. Here we go and enjoy. Thank you.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Mary. Thank you so much for joining me today on Creative Status. You are usually on the other side of the microphone because you have a podcast about creativity as well called sustaining creativity. Before I start asking you all these questions that I’ve got lined up, do you feel like you’re introducing yourself and telling us what you’re all about and why you care so much about creativity that you decided to start a podcast?

Mari Reisberg: Absolutely. Thank you, Oli, so much for inviting me to be on the other side of the microphone today.

Yes, I normally host the sustaining creativity podcast. I am a lover of creativity. I use it every day in my own life and support others to find it and awaken it and flex it in their lives. I am a dance movement therapist, a certified creativity coach. I work in addiction recovery and use a lot of creativity in all of the things that I do, but I support performers and non-performers to find creativity and sustain creativity in their life. That’s what I’m all about. Yeah.

Oli Anderson: So a very busy, very creative person. So what is it about creativity that you love so much if it isn’t too general or too broad of a question?

Mari Reisberg: No, that’s perfect. What I love so much about creativity is how it can change your life. There are so many benefits that creativity can provide us, like it helps us navigate and decrease stress in our life. It brings more joy. It increases confidence. It decreases anxiety and depression.

It supports sleep. There have been studies done that show when you engage in creative activity, you actually live longer. So there’s a lot of benefit to flexing and using creativity in your life. And that is why I love it. And it just brings me a lot of joy and I have fun and I love the experience of satisfaction that I get.

You know, there’s a lot of like neurochemicals that are released and that satisfaction dopamine when you complete something or when you make something and can see that completion happen. So I love all the benefits that you get from creativity, but it’s also super fun to be creative.

Oli Anderson:Like when you put it like that, it’s kind of interesting that there are some people out there that maybe don’t like creativity or they think that they’re not creative and they don’t need to get involved in a creative pursuit of some kind.

Why do you think there are some people like that in the world that maybe, you know, they’re too locked within themselves or whatever it is they’ve got going on, where they don’t really appreciate how real and amazing creativity can be?

Mari Reisberg: I love this question. So I think for many people, creativity is only associated with the performing arts and the only people who are allowed to be creative are performers, whether it be dancers, musicians, actors, singers, something in that career world that we call the performing arts. However, creativity is innately part of our human experience. Think of being a kid and and asking a million questions. That is curiosity, which is the part of creativity.

So we all do it and we all have the ability to engage with it. But I think there’s also people who believe that you need a certain special gene to be creative and they don’t have that gene. But the narrowness or the narrow view of thinking creativity and creative people are only allowed to do certain things is so limiting.

So when we can expand that view and say, accountants are creative, if you’re a stay-at-home mom, holy bananas organizing a schedule is pure creativity. Getting children to and from school and fed, that is an act of creativity. Making dinner, pulling things out of the refrigerator and creating a meal or ordering something in and how you put it on a plate is a creative expression.

So when we start to change how we think and view creativity, we start to see how creative we already are in our life and can step away from that very narrow view of what creativity is.

Oli Anderson:  Like everything you’ve said is just so amazing and it opens up so many of the deeper issues around creativity that I tried to explore in this podcast. Main issue, I think, in society is that a lot of people have lost touch with their real humanity. So they’re running around, they’re locked inside themselves, they’re waiting for permission to live their real lives and to do all the things that they truly want to do, live in alignment with their true values and intentions and all this stuff.

And creativity is the thing that just cracks all of that open because like you said, all human beings are creative. Creativity is not special. It’s just a basic human thing that we’ve all evolved and we can all use and we can all flex and we can all develop and the more that we do develop that, the more real we become and the more authentic and amazing our lives will become by extension.

So that’s me getting excited as well and running and raving a little bit. But your definition of creativity that I can kind of pick from everything you’ve said is that it seems to be a lot to do with like solving problems or working with limitations and that kind of thing and finding creative solutions.

Is that the full extent of it or is they multiple as well? Would you say?

Mari Reisberg: I think there’s multiple definitions of creativity because there is that problem solving, active engagement, but then there’s also a generative experience of creativity in thinking up new ideas, whether you put them into action or not is not important because that process of daydreaming is creative. That process of excitement you feel when you are doing something in your life.

Yesterday I needed to shift my mood and I put on some music and danced around my backyard and that was a creative experience and expression and brought me so much joy. So I think there’s a few definitions of creativity. There is a very tangible action oriented component, but then there’s also a very free flowing experience of it that you may not be able to put words on it.

You just have that inner body knowledge. Yeah, like I think that free flow version of creativity is actually the most potent version and I think It’s very healing. So the way that I look at it, like I already kind of said earlier on, is like a lot of people are running around and they’re living as a kind of limited version of themselves. Normally when that happens, it’s because they’ve got some kind of an emotional relationship with themselves, which is causing them to have inner blockages basically. So they create an ego version of themselves.

And then there’s a lot of stuff hidden in the shadow territory, as I call it or in the shadow itself. The creative process is about ultimately getting out of your head and allowing some of the parts of yourself that you might have been hiding to resurface and to be reintegrated and all that kind of stuff. And when you do that and you start flowing in the way that you’re talking about, you can live in a way that’s much more present. You’re more in your body, you’re more in the present moment, all these kinds of things. And I think that’s why creativity can actually be used as a vehicle for allowing us to become a lot more authentic overall.

What do you think about it? Absolutely. I mean, I think creativity is the gateway to authenticity. You find your creative voice, but I think that’s where people get caught and stuck because of our mind saying, oh, that’s not creative or that’s terrible, or we’re just judging it as opposed to getting curious about it. Well, why don’t I like this?

Why do I think this is awful? Being able to ask ourselves those curious questions, I think is so important in keeping creativity alive. But also being really honest in answering those questions is where you discover your own authenticity.

Yes. And I love how you said it’s about removing judgment and kind of being honest with our answers to certain questions. Because ultimately, that’s what it’s all about, accepting every single part of ourselves and accepting life and using creativity as a vehicle to be more aligned with reality or truth or whatever you want to call it.

And the main thing that stops people doing that is the mind stuff, like you said. I think our natural state is to constantly evolve and to keep growing and all these different things. And if we do that, we’re basically flowing with life. But the only thing that stops that is all of the mental chatter, the judgments that you’ve alluded to, the self-limiting beliefs, whatever it is, negativity, all this stuff that we have in our heads that causes us to hesitate and to hold back and to not allow all of this stuff that needs to emerge to emerge. And the creative process is, I think, a way of getting back into that way of being.

Yeah. I think it is and there are things that need to be in place for that creative process to emerge. So many people believe creativity starts with brainstorming a lot of ideas or having a lot of ideas. And I believe that creativity starts with a foundation of safety. When we feel safe enough, like there’s never perfect safety, but when we feel safe enough, we can get to the edge of our comfort zone, which is where creativity comes alive.

And we can start to take small creative risks that continue to build our confidence, that continue to bring us joy. But without that foundation of safety, it’s really challenging to get into that creative process. And when I say safety, I think that is a word many people throw around these days. But the idea is safety has many layers and can be found in many different areas. So if we think mind safety, what are the thoughts I’m telling myself? Is my mind safe? Or time safety? Have I actually scheduled time for myself to do something I enjoy doing?

Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. And when I get into those thoughts of, I just don’t have enough time to be creative or when there is time, I’m exhausted. So that’s kind of is there safe time? And then what is the space that you have to create in? Is that a safe space? Do you have things that bring you joy or comfort or reminders of who you are as a creative person? So what are your thoughts on the foundation of safety for creativity?

Yeah, I think it is really important. As you were talking, it was making me think about how, you know, I was saying at the start, there’s so many people in society that are kind of locked inside themselves. And actually, a big part of that is because the way that society is structured and the way that so many people are just caught up in the rat race or whatever it is, or they’re just living hand to mouth and all these kind of things. A lot of people don’t have the time or they can’t prioritize their time in such a way where they can dedicate themselves to some of these higher level lofty activities, like figuring out our human values and getting involved in the creative process and all this kind of stuff. And it’s a shame because actually, like we’ve said, everybody actually is creative.

This process that we’re talking about of using creativity to kind of grow and evolve or to solve the core problems in our lives so we can become the next version of ourselves or whatever it is, that is something that all of us would naturally be doing, I think, if things were different and society was structured in a slightly different way, maybe. And I agree, the safety definitely needs to be part of the process because if you don’t have the safety, then of course, you’re going to just have loads of distractions, you’re going to have more stress, and stress is just going to cause you to be, you know, have a lot more mental chatter and to be judging yourself more and to be fearful and panicked and all that kind of stuff.

And so, I think you’re right, obviously 100%, you do need safety, but I also think there’s probably things we can do a lot more than we might initially realize to create a space for ourselves to get involved in that process. If that makes…

Mari: Absolutely, yeah, for sure.

And I think we already, people are already engaging in creativity, whether they recognize it or not.

Oli:  Mm-hmm. If somebody does have a very stressful life, so let’s literally just pick that pieces a little bit. So if somebody’s got a really stressful life, they caught up in a job that they maybe don’t like, maybe they’ve got like three screaming kids, whatever it is, and they just constantly stressed, they can’t find any time for themselves, there’s just the hamster wheel of thoughts going around in their head and they’re never present, they’re never in the moment, how can somebody like that start to get involved in this creative process that we’re on about?

Mari: Mm-hmm. Well, I would start with what are they already doing that we might call creative? Are they organizing three screaming children’s schedules?

Oli: Mm-hmm.

Mari: Can we see that as a creative endeavor? Are we, or are they, you know, having the moment, you know, creativity doesn’t need hours and hours and hours, it just needs a moment. And so what are those moments of taking a pause, noticing birds chirping, or a cloud?

That can be a creative experience and creative moment. And when we start stringing those together, we have more creative opportunities arise.

So I think some of it is pausing, breathing, noticing what is going on. The noticing could be three screaming children, I’m exhausted, and next I have to do that.

However, pausing to notice all those things brings you back to the present moment and to yourself.

Oli: Yeah. I love it.

I love it. I think that what we’re talking about actually is there’s two things going on. There’s a wider definition of creativity than just painting pictures or dancing around or whatever it is. And there’s a process of building on what you need to do to be able to get into the creative flow state that we were on about at the start.

And so if someone is really stressed and they don’t think they’ve got any time or anything like that, actually, if we take this very, very wide definition of creativity, it’s just been anything that allows you to get more closely aligned with the truth or with reality or whatever you want to call it, then meditation or pausing and just taking a moment or feeling grateful about life or whatever it is that you do, all of those little things that take you out of your head and put you in the moment, they’re the first step to getting involved in the process, something like that.

And so like you said, you can make an active effort to do that. And then over time, if you do that enough, you get out of the survival mode or the survival mindset that people find themselves in. And then you can start using the creativity to maybe thrive and move forward in your life as well. That’s when you have to change things. You have to mix things up, maybe.

Mari: Yeah.

I mean, I think there’s, I read something fairly recently about slowing down actually helps your, you increase productivity. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. I think it’s like counter and counterintuitive in our minds of like, if I slow down, there’s no way I’m going to be more productive.

Yeah. And yet when we actually slow down, there is something about how our focus changes. We, the cortisol shifts in our system, that stress hormone. And so we’re able to actually get more done and feel less scattered when we slow down. Yeah. But it feels very counterintuitive to what we think.

Oli: Yeah. Like, believe it or not, I was talking to somebody about this yesterday, that slowing things down actually speeds up your results. And the reason is, I think, is because when you slow down and you’re in the present moment, well, if you’re making better decisions basically, or you can make better choices, because all that really happens when you are caught up in that hamster wheel of thoughts that makes people panic and try to rush and try to get results is that you create friction between you and life or you and reality or whatever.

And reality is the only place where you actually can get the results. And so by slowing down, you’re actually more equipped to respond to what’s going on instead of just reacting to things that you think are happening, but are actually just the products of your stress and anxiety and that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Yeah. And so the first step on this creative journey is that slowing down. So something I’ve heard you talking about, like very recently, because you told me about 10 minutes before the call or something, is the idea of the creative flexing. So how can the creative flex help people with some of this stuff? So somebody is one of these really harried, stressed out people and they want to start bringing more creativity into our life.

And then to stand it, how can flexing help them in your terms or your philosophy? Whatever we call it.

Mari: Yeah. So what I see creativity is a skill we can learn, but you have to use it. So you have to flex it like a muscle. Like if you wanted to build a muscle, you would go and do specific moves to build that.

And you would have to do it regularly and consistently. Creativity is the same. So if you want to build more creativity in your life, you start by doing small things that help you flex that creative muscle. And this isn’t about doing additional things in your life.

It’s looking at the things you’re already doing as creative expression and creative experience and maybe taking a little, a few more moments with the things that you are doing to see them as a creative experience. So for example, we all get dressed in the morning, right?

Oli: Speak to yourself. No, I’m dressed. I’m dressed.

Mari: I’ll change it. Many of us get dressed in the morning and many of us have multiple options of what to put on. Maybe you’re pulling things out of a closet or a dresser or a hamper. And when you pause for a moment and think about So, how do I want to feel today with these clothes I’m going to put on my body?

That’s a creative moment. How am I putting together an outfit that I want to share with the world if I go out in the world or just have for myself? Maybe I’m feeling like I need some connection to family members and so I might wear something that someone gave to me and recognizing that that is a creative moment but it’s not an additional moment. It’s the moment was going to happen anyway but I’m looking at that moment through the creative lens and allowing my creative muscles to flex in that moment.

Oli: Wow. So, is it fair to say that that kind of creativity at the most basic level is just about the choices that we’re making? So, we either make a creative choice or we just do what we would normally do or we act on autopilot or we’re just unconscious of what we’re doing and that is not a creative choice. Can we say that?

Mari: That’s a good question.

Would I say it? I think, yeah, the difference between mindful moments and mindless moments. Okay, well.

They aren’t, I don’t think one is better than the other. We go through life making mindless decisions all the time. Yeah. You know, if you’ve ever sat and eaten or opened a bag of potato chips and then eaten the whole thing and thought, how did that happen? You know, that’s a mindless choice. However, that mindful choice in those moments I think is what differentiates bringing creativity to the forefront as opposed to having it just sitting in idle in the background.

Oli: Wow. So, actually then the question now becomes like in terms of creativity and making choices, I know you’ve just kind of like talked about it a little bit, but what makes those creative choices real or more creative ones? Like what’s going on in those moments?

Mari: Yeah, I think being able to look at something as creative or just being curious about it. You know, I read a statistic not too long ago that the average five-year-old asks 120 questions a day. The average 40-year-old asks four. So, we stop asking questions and we stop being curious, you know, in the span of 35 years. And so, how can we bring some more curiosity to our present moment, our present life? You know, sure, it’s exhausting to get curious sometimes and we don’t want to and that’s fine. However, making the choice to be curious about something. Well, why do I want to try this?

Or why doesn’t this make sense? What could I learn here?

Oli: It’s about getting out of your conditioned or habitual way of doing things and kind of opening things up basically. So, you can make a choice to do something different just for the sake of it or because it’s playful or you’re going to enjoy doing things different or because you might learn something different. Or there’s another element as well which is you kind of alluded to it when you were talking about the clothing thing.

But sometimes you might make a choice because you want to express a certain message to the world or something like that or a certain image of yourself or a certain idea or something like that. So, I suppose they could be six different things going on but actually the creative part of it is that you understand your reasons for doing things basically. We’re not just caught up in just mindlessness like you said and we’re not just acting like a robot. We’re really just responding to the present moment again basically.

Mari: Absolutely and to add, our brains are designed to follow the path of least resistance.

We like familiar. We like that and so it’s going to take some effort to do things differently and once we start building those new neural pathways and neural networks, then those pathways will become the least resistant pathways but it does. It will take some effort and energy from you actively doing things differently or thinking about things differently.

Oli: Yeah. And I think that’s where this comes on to the kind of mindset required for being creative. So I personally think like if we keep growing in the sense of kind of pushing through that habitual way of doing things, stretching ourselves, getting out of the comfort zone and then creating a new comfort zone basically and evolving and going deeper into ourselves and life and blah blah blah.

If we live like that, then we can spend more time in the creative flow state that we’ve talked about. But like you said as well, it’s kind of hard to do that. And most people because of our biological wiring are conditioned to resist that actually, because like you said, the brain in order to conserve resources just wants everything to be the same as it always is.

So it doesn’t have to keep making these new connections and evolving and changing and so on and so forth. And so actually, even though we feel better by pushing through that biological wiring and to make sense of social conditioning, our natural tendency is to resist it, which is why we become less creative and just get caught up in the same old way of doing things.

So again, I’ve been long winded, I’ve had it. What is the mindset required? Or what can we do?

What qualities do we need to develop maybe in order to kind of live in that more creative way, even though it is slightly more difficult? But actually, sorry to interrupt you there, it’s only more difficult in the long term. In the long term, it is the beneficial way to do things. In the short term, of course, it’s not.

Mari: Exactly. I mean, I think the biggest is curiosity, developing curiosity, asking questions, wondering, daydreaming, what would it be like if, you know, those are some pretty non-invasive ways to start flexing creative thinking and shifting your mindset to align more with creative thought and creative thinking.

But there are also so many exercises that you can engage with to start to develop more creative thinking opportunities. Yeah, so like there are so many exercises out there that you can do on your own through a coach through, you know, how are you having more creative thoughts faster?

Because creativity is a very valued skill in the industrial world right now.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s true. Like it’s the most valued thing, I would say. How do you think people’s emotional lives play into this?

So one thing I always think about most human beings is that they’re all dealing with some kind of emotional ;stuff’. It’s usually shame. And the shame causes them to kind of fear uncertainty and to doubt themselves basically.

So a lot of people are running around with doubt and a fear of uncertainty. But actually, in order to get all the long term benefits of living in this creative way, you have no choice but to go through uncertainty and doubt to some extent because the creative process is about evolving beyond what you already think you know.

Mari: Yeah, I mean, uncertainty is the status quo.

I think we forget that and we forget that uncertainty is where we all live. We don’t know. I mean, we do not know what will happen next. We just know at some point, we will die. We don’t know when, you know, so the uncertainty may be very morbid. I apologize.

Oli: No, no, no. That’s basically my favorite topic. It’s true. Yeah, yeah. That’s one thing we can all agree on. So it’s the best starting point. And it means that everything is changing. Everything is evolving.

And so you need to go with that really if you want to live a real life. Don’t get me started about death. But yeah, we’re all going to be dead one day.

It’s fantastic news. And in the short term, you need to embrace change as you move towards it. But a lot of people, a lot of people resist the change.

So why is that?

Mari: Why do we resist change? Because it’s scary.

We don’t feel safe in change. We like certainty. We need to know something is certain before we risk it because what would happen if we made the choice to risk it all and lost it, lost it all. So I think it really comes back to safety. How do you have that foundation of safety so you can take a risk? And I’m not talking about big, huge risks.

These are small risks. Asking someone out on a date, that’s a risk. Rejection. I think the fear of rejection keeps us from taking action in so many areas of our life.

And creativity can help you navigate rejection in a more playful way, in a fashion of curiosity, and creativity allows you to reframe it in your mind. When we reframe failure to learning, what did I learn? I think if I were to break this down, it’s super important to acknowledge what it feels like to fail. What emotions come up when you fail.

What is the dialogue or narrative story that’s happening in your mind? Feel all of it. Notice all of it. Be really mindful of it. And then get curious about it. So what did I learn in this moment? What lesson could I take and maybe change when I try it again?

When we fail the first time, often we just want to give up, throw in the towel. In the world of psychology, we call those cognitive distortions. That all or nothing thinking, personalizing, these are all cognitive distortions.

And we can easily get caught in them thinking they are real and factual and the only way. So when we bring creativity to those moments and say, wow, I’m really curious, what can I do differently next time? Or how, what did I learn about myself from this process and from this experience? And did I like it? Did I hate it? Was it fantastic?

Was it terrible? Maybe I’m noticing all the judgments about myself. Oh, I wish I hadn’t done XYZ. Okay, next time I’m gonna be a little more mindful about that and try it again. And maybe I’ll practice a little bit more before I put it out there.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Like that’s the, it’s going back to what we were saying about the creative process is a healing process. And the reason that it’s healing is, I think anyway, if you feel like you need to evolve and to become more whole because there’s something wrong with you or you’re not getting the results that you want or you just always stress that you hate your life or whatever it is.

Normally there is some shame and other emotional stuff that is driving you to distort your view of reality, basically. And as you go through the creative process, like you just said, okay, you improve your relationship with yourself, but what is actually going on? Well, what’s actually going on, I think, is that all of those distortions and the veil that they put between you and reality is being reconfigured so you can just see things more clearly.

And when you see things more clearly, two things happen. The first thing that happens is you become more accepting of yourself and the world, I suppose, and reality. You accept yourself because you can, you realize all these distortions were just bullshit, basically, pardon my French. And then the other thing that happens as a consequence of that is you can live in a more outcome-independent way.

So outcome independence is basically, I’m sure you already know, but for the listeners, it’s this experimental way of just living and doing things and you’re not investing your self-worth in the results that you get as you go out and try to achieve things. The short version of it is just do your best and forget the rest, but you can only do your best and forget the rest if your emotional relationship with yourself isn’t too distorted anyway because of the shame and all those kind of things. So is there something here then about the judgment thing?

Like the main problem seems to be judgment because we distort reality, which causes us to judge ourselves based on the results we get and we judge life anyway, because we think if we get certain outcomes, then that somehow reflects on our self-worth when actually our levels of self-acceptance should always be optimal anyway because we’re just all amazing. So the problem I think is judgment, we judge life, we judge ourselves, I’m not good enough to recreate, blah, blah, blah, you know what I’m saying?

So what do you think about that? Well, first of all, if it were so easy, we would all be doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not easy. It’s not easy. I mean, we have to know what we’re doing before we can change it. So that’s where the mindful awareness comes in. You have to know that you’re having judgment thoughts or catching your judgment thoughts, but I wanna remind listeners, a judgment thought can be a negative or a positive. Judgments are both.

So I can love something is a judgment thought as well as I hate something is a judgment thought. So stepping outside of those judgment thoughts is around checking your facts. What are the facts of the situation? The fact isn’t I love it or hate it, that’s my opinion, that’s my judgment, which we are 100 % allowed to have.

The facts would be I walked across the street and someone I don’t know said something to me. Those are the facts that if a group of people watched a video could all agree on. The other fact would be I had a judgment thought, but the experience is my experience. It’s not a fact. It’s not something that a group of observers would know. That makes sense?

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.

So I always think there’s the difference between reality itself or the facts they said, and then our interpretations that we put on them. And then those interpretations are almost always informed by the stuff we talked about, like the shame and everything that’s causing us to distort reality and to create a little version of ourselves, the ego, whatever you wanna call it, that we cling to to avoid all of the emotional stuff. And then we filter basically everything through the ego is how I see it.

So we filter all our interpretations, we filter our judgments, blah, blah, blah, so that we can stay the same ultimately. And so like I agree completely, but the slight difference maybe, I think judgments, yeah, they are good and they are bad, but actually reality itself is kind of neutral.

So… When you step out of all judgments and this matrix or web or whatever you want to call it, of duality that we project over things because of our emotional relationship with ourselves and our needs need to interpret everything, like we have to make interpretations obviously, or we go back.

Yeah, but when we attach to those interpretations and those judgments, actually, that’s what is part of the thing that causes the blockages from flowing in the way that we need to. And so when you have these peak experiences or when you’re just in the present moment dancing around in your garden or, you know, me doing yoga or meditating or whatever it is, when you have those moments, you actually step beyond any judgment or any duality, I think, and the creative process is moving you towards that place, whatever that place is.

And I don’t think we can, we can’t live there all the time in this non-dualistic place, but we can taste it more and more. And the more we taste it, the more we remember who we are, I think, and then the easier life becomes or maybe not easier, but the more enjoyable, something like that.

Mari: Yeah, we start experiencing pleasure in our life and experiencing joy in new ways. Absolutely. I agree.

Oli Do you think joy is just the absence of judgment? Like, is that all it is? Like, when we’re just enjoying ourselves, there’s just, that’s it, we’re just accepting life.

Mari: That’s so great. I’ve never thought of it that way, that joy is just an absence of judgment. Huh, I don’t know. Yeah, I’m curious about it for sure.

Oli: We’re going down a lot of rabbit holes. So, okay, so how does all this come together? Because obviously we’ve spoken about a lot of things in a very short amount of time. We’ve covered creativity itself as a definition, like all these kind of obstacles people are going to face and maybe the mindset they need to cultivate in order to go through the creative journey.

We talked about the safety thing, flexing. Have you got any kind of thing that you want to say to kind of bring all this together or kind of maybe wrap it up?

Mari: Yeah, I think just a reminder that creativity can start small.

It doesn’t have to be a huge creative flex or creative expression. It can be very, very small and non intimidating. And no one else has to know that you’re doing it. You don’t have to share it with anyone else.

Just that reminder that it doesn’t have to be a presentation for others. It can be a very personal, private experience that you have with yourself. Because that is life. It’s your journey. It’s no one else’s journey. There’s a freedom in giving yourself permission to try something new, something small that you’ve always wanted to try and see what happens. Going in with an openness to explore and be curious and learn something.

Creativity really comes alive with learning and allowing yourself to fully learn something new. It could be crap, but you could be terrible at it. That’s okay too. But it’s okay to be a beginner.

I think we forget that. I think many people assume they have to be perfect at it the first time they go out and try it. And I want to remind everyone it is okay to be a beginner.

Oli: Yeah. I love everything you just said. Ultimately, creativity is a personal thing. The fact that it is so personal shows actually that creativity and life are inherently linked.

Your relationship with creativity is your relationship with life. It always goes back to the most personal level of where you are now, what you need to learn, what you are learning, where you’re going and all these kinds of things. By having this attitude that you’re talking about, I’ve seen yourself as a beginner basically.

Just experimenting and not worrying if you make mistakes and ETC, it allows you to live a better life because you’re just becoming more aligned with what life is.

Mari: Absolutely. Nice wrap up. Thank you.

Oli: I couldn’t have done it without you in your little summary at the end. This is actually amazing for me because normally I struggle to keep things on time, but it looks like I’m about to do it.

That’s good news for me. Yes, I’ll go celebrate now. I know you just wrapped up, but have you got any final words before we both die?

Have you got a website or anything like that that you might like to share with people so you can tell people where they can find you?

Mari: Absolutely. My final words. Come find me on social media. I am at sustaining creativity on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok. My website is sustainingcreativity.com. You can find my podcast, sustaining creativity podcast on my website or literally wherever you listen to podcasts. I would love for listeners to go check it out and comment and like it. If you have any questions about creativity, I love answering them and do quite a bit of it on Instagram.

So send me messages and I will happily respond. Go try something creative or look at something as creative that you’re already doing. That’s a great place to start.

Oli: I love that idea of just reframing it because people are more creative than they think. I’ll share all your links and everything in the show notes, but thank you so much for coming on here and listening to me ramble and going down all these different rabbit holes and everything. I had a really good time and I’m really happy that we had this conversation. So thank you so much.

Mari: You are so welcome and thank you. I had a blast. I love talking about creativity. So thank you for the opportunity

Seeing yourself as a ‘victim’ just makes life WORSE 👇

Human beings – including ‘You’ – are always expanding, evolving, and growing REAL.

This is a NATURAL drive that we all have towards wholeness and you can either move with it and feel ‘good’ or you can try and resist and feel ‘bad’.

Sometimes, we think we’ve found a social strategy that makes life easier for us but these strategies can only ever work in the SHORT-TERM.

One of the most common strategies is to try and see ourselves as a VICTIM and to get others to see us in the same way (a similar strategy is to try and be a HERO but both are unreal).

Playing our ‘Victim Card’ may make people give us a pass here and their and make exceptions for us but all that really happens when we ATTACH to a static idea of ourselves like ‘Victim’ is that we create FRICTION between ourselves and life and take ourselves out of the flow.

Terry Tucker (@sustainableexcellenceauthor) is a speaker, author, and coach who helps people to live uncommon and extraordinary lives – a lot of his work is about staying motivated and embracing the realities of life but also about writing a REAL story that serves the world.

In this conversation we explore some of the very profound lessons that Terry has learned over the last decade by battling with cancer – that might sound like a pretty ‘depressing’ topic for a podcast conversation but it blossomed into a fun exploration of how life works and the natural laws we need to be AWARE of if we’re going to make the most of it.

I think the one thing most people will be able to get from this conversation is PERSPECTIVE… Sometimes, we get so caught up or blocked in our own BS that we find it hard to move forward. By hearing stories and lessons from people that have really been in the thick of it we can step back, step up, and get moving again because we’re reminded of our own strength as human beings.

We covered loads of interesting things here about resilience, creativity, turning our pain into energy, realising that our breaking point can actually be a turning point (because normally the breaking point is nowhere near where we think it is), and loads more.

If you wanna stay creative and keep moving forward then check out this episode!

Listen on any podcast player (including Spotify) or click scroll up and use the player on this page.

(Scroll down for the show transcript)

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus

Episode Links:

Terry’s website: motivationalcheck.com

Stay up-to-date with Terry on Instagram:instagram.com/sustainableexcellenceauthor

Creative Status Links:

Book a call to work with me

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Show Transcript: From Breaking Point to Turning Point

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status, this podcast about improving your life using creativity as a vehicle for doing that.

So that’s good. This episode is an interview with a guy called Terry Tucker. Terry Tucker is a speaker, he’s a coach, he’s an author and he has a lot of very real things to say about life and moving forwards and overcoming obstacles and making the most of the journey and all that kind of stuff. This is quite a real conversation.

Not that the other conversations we’ve had on this podcast haven’t been real, but just some of the things that Terry has been through, super intense and it’s just really interesting to hear him be so candid and frank about his journey. So hopefully you’re going to get some value out of this. Otherwise, I’m not really going to talk that much in this introduction.

I have a bad habit of just rambling, which I’m doing right now and I’m going to stop. But here’s the interview and I hope you get some stuff out of it. And if you do, that’s awesome. Leave a review somewhere, subscribe to the podcast, send me a DM if you want. Let me know what you thought. Find Terry on his Instagram or LinkedIn or somewhere. Say hi to him and enjoy this. It’s pretty intense in places, but it’s kind of amazing as well:

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Terry. Thank you so much for joining me today on Creative Status. A lot of the work that you do is to do with motivation and moving forward basically and getting where you want to be in life.

That’s a major theme of this podcast, so I think you’re going to add a lot of value. You’re going to have some amazing insights to share based on what we’ve already talked about off mic. Before we get into all that, do you feel like introducing yourself and telling people what you’re hoping to get out of this today?

Terry Tucker: Sure. First of all, Oli, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

I’m looking forward to talking with you today. I’ll give you sort of the condensed version of me. I was born and raised in Chicago, the third largest city in the United States. I’m the oldest of three boys.

You can’t tell this from my voice, but I’m six foot eight inches tall, and I actually got a scholarship to play basketball in college despite having three knee surgeries. When I graduated from college, I moved home to find a job.

I’m really going to date myself now, but this was long before the internet was available to help people find a job. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, so I was all set to make my mark on the world with my newly obtained business administration degree.

I look back now and realize how little I knew about business just because I had a degree. Fortunately, I was able to find that first job in the corporate headquarters of Wendy’s International, the hamburger chain.

Unfortunately, I live with my parents for the next three and a half years as I help my mother care for my father and my grandmother who are both dying of different forms of cancer. Professionally, as I said, started out at Wendy’s, then moved to hospital administration and then made a major pivot in my life and became a police officer.

One of the jobs I did as a police officer was I was a SWAT team hostage negotiator. After law enforcement, I started my own school security consulting business. I coached girls high school basketball.

I became an author in 2020, but for the last 10 years have been dealing with this rare form of cancer. Right now, my goal, my purpose I feel in life is to put as much goodness, as much positivity, as much motivation, as much love back into the world as I possibly can. So I’m excited to talk with you about that today.

Oli Anderson: That’s amazing. It sounds like you’ve had a very boring life. Like you haven’t really done very much or been anywhere or experienced anything.

I imagine that going through all those kind of things that you just shared, you’ve obviously learned a lot and that’s probably informed your work and some of the things that you do.

So your main area that you seem to work in is the motivation thing. Is that a fair assessment?

Terry Tucker: It is. Guys, I started a blog back in 2019 and I call it motivational check. But what I always say about motivation is it’s kind of like lighting the fuse. If you’ve just got motivation, it’s going to be hard to do anything.

But if you have motivation coupled with discipline and coupled with good habits, you can do just about anything you want in your life. The problem is a lot of times people are lacking one or two of those things and they don’t understand, you know, I’m trying, but why can’t I be successful?

Like you don’t have good habits or you’re not disciplined to carry out those habits or you’re just not motivated to get up in the morning and start that journey.

Oli Anderson: I found that a lot as well with the work that I do with coaching and stuff. A lot of people, they’ve bought into this kind of cultural myth or whatever it is, where they seem to think that motivation is the only thing that you need. And I think that’s because motivation is kind of a passive thing, right?

Like it’s sometimes it gets kind of confused with inspiration, but it just kind of pops up and you decide you want to do something. But then actually, because we’re human, you eventually run out of steam and that’s where the discipline comes in and the habits and all that kind of stuff.

How do you get people to be more motivated in the first place? Do you think? So somebody’s kind of, you know, bored with their life or whatever it is. How do we help them to find motivation?

Terry Tucker: I think motivation comes from within. It’s got to be something that you have. There’s an entrepreneur here in the United States by the name of Ed Milet and he talks about the four types of people and he said the first type is the unmotivated and he said that’s that’s the vast majority of people at least here in the United States.

You know maybe it sounds from your experience maybe all over the world and then there’s the the motivated group and that’s kind of a you know carrot and stick kind of thing where if you do this then you will get that and then there’s the inspirational type of people and inspirational comes from in spirit so you move people with your energy.

Then the last group and this is this is what I strive for I’m not anywhere close to it yet but I’m striving for is the aspirational group where people aspire to be like you so you know if you figure the vast majority of people and I’m old enough to kind of I think agree with that that are just unmotivated they’re they live a casual life and as a result their goals their dreams their ambitions become a casualty of that unplanned living and – – you know if you don’t have that spark if there isn’t something that gets you up in the morning and that’s not something I can do for you that’s not something you can do you know for your clients.

You have to want to do it you have to have something inside of you that you feel this is my my purpose or my passion or my why and I always tell especially young people if there’s something in your heart something in your soul that you believe you’re supposed to do but it scares you go ahead and do it because at the end of your life the things that you’re going to regret are not going to be the things you did they’re going to be the things you didn’t do and by then it’s going to be too late to go back and do it.

Oli Anderson: Wow love it and I think you’re right like so many people in general do seem to be a bit lost maybe it’s just the way the world’s structured or something like that but I think the majority of people maybe I’ve been a bit unfair but a lot of people they’re just so used to just kind of been told what to do or they they’re too fearful to do the the final stage that you just talked about one of the final stages of actually looking inside themselves and seeing what they truly want and what they truly value instead of what they’ve just been told to want and value which causes them to be uh not as happy as they could be in the first place.

Terry Tucker:  I think you you made an incredibly important point there you know we we talk a lot about goals in our life and you know at the beginning of every year you know people make new year’s resolutions and I forget what the statistic is but it’s like 80 or 90 percent of those new year’s resolutions have fallen by the wayside by February and it’s sort of at least for me begs the question why and and what I always come back to at least in my life is that if if you just have goals but those goals aren’t tied to anything specific more importantly if they’re not tied to your values you know so I think before you you start saying okay here are my goals for the year go back and say what are my values you know what am I willing to die for what am I willing to give my life you know in the pursuit of what the understanding that I may never get there but if you understand what you value in life you can you can put your goals you can attach your goals to those values and you you can see a much better chance of reaching your goals because they’re tied to something concrete in your life.

Oli Anderson: Yeah and they’re they’re tied to something that you genuinely 100 care about because those values are an expression of your core self the real you the soul whatever you want to call it but a lot of people they like you said they don’t know what their values are in the first place or they they’ve kind of buried them beneath the surface of societal values or cultural values or external values that they’ve picked up somewhere along the line and confused for the things that they really would be chasing if they were more in touch with their real self.

Terry Tucker: I totally agree with you there absolutely and that’s just it we don’t we don’t like being alone with ourselves I was reading a book recently called do hard things by a man by the name of Steve Magnus and he quotes a study that was done by this professor and it was a very simple study he took people and he put them in a room with nothing in the room but a chair and a table no devices no friends no windows nothing just a bare room with a chair and a table and on that table was a buzzer and all he did with that I want you to stay in this room for 15 minutes but if you want you can press that buzzer but if you press the buzzer you’re going to get a shock well and 67 % of the men and 25 % of the women press that buzzer including one man who pressed the buzzer almost every five seconds for 15 minutes wow and you I know you laugh at it and you say oh my god seriously but if we can’t be alone with ourselves for 15 minutes yeah yeah you know how are we possibly going to be able to do anything in our lives if if we can’t be alone with ourselves.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, that’s amazing and actually it opens up a whole kind of worms around the deeper issues actually and the deeper issue in life for the majority of people is exactly what you’ve just said they’re out of touch with themselves and so they’re constantly seeking distraction rather than just sit alone and be present or do things that make them more present so they can be connected to themselves so you know do yoga or go for a hike or sit in a room and be quiet rather than do any of those things they they’re constantly looking around for distractions even though the distractions may literally end up causing pain and in the example you’ve given that’s like a literal a literal thing but actually distraction always leads to more pain because it just exacerbates the distance between you and yourself if that makes sense.

Terry Tucker: It totally does and that’s why I recommend to people at least spend five minutes alone with yourself every day no distractions like you say no device is nothing just and let your mind go wherever it goes you know there’s it’s not like meditation where you’re trying to concentrate on one thing or anything just wherever it goes it goes and eventually you’re to a point where you are happier with yourself.

Oli Anderson: I think the problem is that in the short term if people have been disconnected from themselves for a while it’s almost always because there’s some kind of emotional chasm shall we say within them there’s a gap between how they think they feel and the identity that they’ve created for themselves and how they actually feel beneath the surface and so when people are sitting alone in a room or whatever it is eventually these feelings will start to resurface that’s what I think anyway because you can’t hide from that stuff you can distract yourself but if you run out of distractions eventually that stuff’s going to resurface and I think that’s one of the reasons as well why people struggle to go down this pathway you talked about at the start of motivation discipline and habits it’s easy to have the motivation to do things because a lot of the time especially if we are disconnected from ourselves or out of touch with whoever it is we really are well we just get motivated to do things that are not necessarily goals that are aligned with our real values and all the stuff we said but they make us feel good because they think that it’s a form of escapism basically but actually if you start really pushing into doing these things – doing the hard things like you said the name of that book was well then you become disciplined and you have habits but then you have to face yourself because that’s when you’re going to have to come out of your comfort zone and so I think that’s why a lot of people they like the motivation thing it feels nice or even the inspiration thing but when it gets down to the discipline and the habits that’s when people start to have a lot of fun a lot of problems.

Terry Tucker: I totally agree with you. Absolutely.

And that’s just it. You’ve got to do the hard work. You don’t grow. You don’t get better. You don’t improve when you’re safe and in your comfort zones. You only do that when you push yourself outside of that. And part of that may be, like you say, you sit alone in a room and all these emotions and things bubble to the surface, well, that’s part of the hard work.

That’s part of dealing with those things so that you can get motivated, have the good habits and the discipline to implement them.

Oli: Wow. That’s really important. I think a lot of people think that when you set out on a journey to kind of whatever purpose you’ve chosen for yourself, so to do some big goal or to move towards a vision, there is only really going to be a lot of the external things that you need to do. So you think of actions, you think of goals.

OK. But actually, most of the work, I think, is an internal thing. And maybe this could be a good segue into something that you shared earlier before we started recording about the four truths. So you have four truths, basically, that can help people by the sound of it to kind of start really getting better results as they go down this path that we’re talking about, of motivation, discipline, and habits, and getting things done, live in a real life.

Terry: Yeah. The four truths are things that I’ve come up with, certainly over my 10-year battle with cancer. And they’re just one sentence. And I have them here on a post-it note in my office. And so I see them multiple times during the day, and they constantly get reinforced in my brain. So I’ll give them to you. However, if you want to go into a little bit deeper with them, we can. The first one is this.

You need to control your mind, or your mind is going to control you. The second one is embrace the pain and the difficulty that we all experience in life, and use that pain and difficulty to make you a stronger and more resilient individual. The third one, as I said earlier, when you and I were talking, is more, I think, of a legacy type of truth.

And it’s this. What you leave behind is what you weave in the hearts of other people. And then the fourth one, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. As long as you don’t quit, you can never be defeated. And I look at these four truths, and I call them sort of the bedrock of my soul.

They’re just a good place, I think, to start to build a quality life off of.

Oli: OK, so the first one of the four truths, Terry, is this idea of controlling our minds. And in my opinion, that is one of the most important things that we do need to work on as human beings, because our mind affects the quality of our relationship with ourselves.

And our relationship with ourselves basically affects everything in our lives as a whole, the way that we can relate to other people, how we see the world, all these different things. So in your view, what are some things that we can all do to start working on this first truth of controlling our minds and getting better at improving our relationship with ourselves basically?

Terry: We all become what we think. And of these four truths, I think that number one about controlling your mind is probably the most important, because we need to be incredibly careful of how we talk to ourselves.

We all have sort of a self-talk where our brains are kind of doing their thing. But if you, I’ll give you an example. I mentioned I play basketball all the way through college. The same part of your brain lights up when you practice, actually take a ball and practice shooting baskets. It’s the same part in your brain that lights up when you think about shooting those baskets.

So you’re making those connections. You’re making those synapses come together. And if you keep telling yourself, for example, you’re a student and you’re taking an algebra, for example, and you’re like, I’m bad at it. I’m terrible at algebra. I’m never going to do any good.

I’m going to. That negative self-talk will eventually get to the point where you hardwire your brain so that you are not good at algebra. And it would be incredibly hard for you to flip that around. So be very careful how you talk to yourself.

I think that’s the important thing. And I learned when I was in high school, I had three knee surgeries. And I remember when I went back playing basketball after those knee surgeries, my brain was putting all kinds of negative thoughts into my mind.

Things like you’re probably a step slower because of those surgeries. And college coaches aren’t going to be interested in recruiting you to play for their teams. And I remember thinking, wait a minute, I’m still playing at an elite level.

And coaches are still reaching out to me about the possibility of playing for their school. So I realized kind of early on, I needed to change that narrative. I needed to say, wait a minute, that’s a negative thought.

And I guess this is important too. We’re human beings. We’re going to have negative thoughts. Don’t think that if you have a negative thought, that oh my gosh, somehow I’m a bad person. No, it’s OK. We’re human.

It happens. But understand that that is a negative thought. And turn it around to something positive that you can use to your benefit as opposed to that negative thought, which is definitely not in your favour.

Oli: Do you think there is a trap, though, sometimes where we can be too positive or overly positive or almost sort of naively optimistic?

So we tell ourselves that things are going to work out, mainly because that’s what we want rather than what is possible or because we’re actually doing the work and that kind of thing. Sometimes overly positive thinking can be detrimental, I think.

Terry: Yeah, unrealistic thinking can be detrimental. Absolutely.

I totally agree with you. I don’t know if you can be too positive. You have to be realistic. There’s probably not a chance I’m going to win a Nobel Prize in physics.

I’m not very good at physics and I don’t know anything about it. But if that’s a goal for you, and if you’re in a situation where you’re trying to make that happen, and I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, are you willing to do the work?

Are you willing to do the hard work to do that? And if it is, then you need to be positive about doing that and believe you’re moving forward. If you’re just motivated, but you know you’re not doing the work, you can be as positive as you want. You’re just being unrealistic. And you’re going to fail just simply because you’re not doing the work that you need to do.

Oli: 100%. Like that’s something that is so important and is so simple.

And I often end up explaining it to people. But if you’re not taking the actions or you’re not doing anything, then you’re actually just not going to get anywhere. And it’s crazy that I even have to say that, because it is so simple.

But a lot of people, because of the reasons we talked about, they love skipping out the discipline and the habit stage, which is ultimately about action. And then that’s when they do lapse into a kind of naive optimism or whatever you want to call it.

So you’re right. I think, yeah, as long as you’ve been realistic or real and you understand what you’re capable of and you keep moving forward with it, then you’re probably going to be okay.

Terry: I agree. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But if you’re not, and that’s okay. And that’s the thing, people somehow think, you know, I’ve seen this happen a lot in the United States, especially, I don’t know if it’s true in your country as well. But, you know, we start down a goal, or we start down the path to a goal, and something we wanna do. And then we butt up against an impediment.

Something gets in our way, and we tweak it over to around it or through it. And so we quit. And we just don’t quit here in the United States. Now we need to blame somebody.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Terry: You know, we need to blame our parents, or our boss, or our station in life. Very few people take personal responsibility for their own success and happiness. Nobody owes you anything.

Nobody’s coming to your rescue. If you want something in life, figure out what that is. Use your unique gifts and talents, and go after it with everything you have in your life.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. Like, I completely see life the same way. Like, it’s the day that you step up and take responsibility for your life, and your feelings, especially, and all the things that happen to you, and you take action. It’s a very liberating thing. This idea that nobody can save us but ourselves, it seems depressing at first, potentially.

If you’ve been brought up with all this conditioning where, you know, the way you feel is more important than anything else, and blah, blah, blah. But actually, it’s very liberating. It’s very freeing.

It gives you a lot of power, and a lot of people are scared of that power, I think, because of the emotional stuff we were talking about earlier.

Terry: Yeah, it’s going back to, are you doing the hard work? You know, are you doing the things to get yourself in a position where you can succeed?

And, you know, like you say, so many people kind of sit back, and, you know, when I want to distract myself because I’m afraid that if I’m alone with myself, I’m gonna have to deal with some pretty heavy things. Well, that’s hard to do in the hard work, and like you say, and that’s liberating when you do that work and you come out the other end, and you’re like, I’m a better person than when I started.

Oli: Yeah, in a way, it’s the difference between living in the short term and living in the long term.

And I think the long-term way of living, that’s when you start to be able to live for something bigger than yourself, whether it’s a vision, or it’s your values, or it’s, I don’t know, a drive to give something back to the world, whatever it is, that always involves thinking of yourself in the long term and your evolution.

If you caught up in this lack of personal responsibility or victimhood or whatever we want to call it, that’s when you just kind of, you’ve been broken down basically by your feelings, and it’s caused you to be passive and to tell yourself a story that’s unreal, unrealistic, and it stops you from moving. And actually, it’s not a, it’s kind of a paradoxical thing to say, but being a victim is not as fun as people seem to think it might be when they’re trying to justify that mindset and all that kind of stuff.

Terry: True, but being a victim is very easy. It’s hard to do the work.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Terry: Be a victim and not doing the work. That’s the answer.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, but that’s exactly it. But that’s the paradox as well, because the whole victim thing, it sells it as though their situation is so difficult that they’re not gonna do the actual hard work, which is what they really actually would benefit from doing in most cases.

This actually segues quite nicely into your second truth, which is the idea of embracing the pain or the difficulty. So I suppose the question becomes, why are, it’s kind of a, maybe there’s an obvious answer, but there’s a deeper answer as well, maybe.

Why are people so averse to the pain and the difficulty and the obstacles and all these things that you actually can do anything about anyway, because they’re just part of reality, part of human nature. So there’s no point complaining about them. You just have to accept them really. But what stops people accepting them and working with them?

Terry: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think the answer is ourselves. Our brains are hardwired to avoid pain and discomfort and to seek pleasure.

So to the brain, the status quo, the way things are right now is comfortable and familiar and should just be left alone. But kind of like we were talking earlier, the only way you’re gonna grow, the only way you’re gonna improve, the only way you’re gonna get better is to step outside those comfort zones and to do things that make you uncomfortable.

And I always recommend to people, and I try to do this every day of my life, do one thing every day that makes you nervous, that scares you, that’s potentially embarrassing.

It doesn’t have to be a big thing, but if you do those small things every day, when the big disasters in life hit us and they hit us all, we lose our job, somebody close to us dies, we find out we have a chronic or a terminal illness, if you do those small things every day, when those big disasters in life hit, you’ll be so much more resilient to handle those when they come. And instead of running from pain, what I’m suggesting is just the opposite. Take that pain, flip it inside of you, burn it as fuel, use it as energy to make you a stronger and more resilient individual.

Oli: I love it. The reason that it makes you stronger and it gives you energy is because when you go through those painful situations, you find out what’s actually real about you. That’s what I think anyway, right?

And when you find out what’s real about you, actually what happens is you let go of all the unreal nonsense and bullshit, pardon my French, that you’ve been holding onto that’s been weighing you down.

And by holding onto all that stuff, the unreal stories that you tell yourself, the unreal assumptions you carry, the limiting beliefs, the fears, all these things that you hold onto, that is what weighs people down and causes them to have less energy than they actually do naturally have, I think.

And so by pushing through the edge of the initial discomfort or the fear or the brain’s natural instincts to run away from the pain, by pushing through that, again, like the personal responsibility thing we were talking about, it’s always a very liberating thing, it’s freeing, but people, it’s counterintuitive.

Terry: It is because, you know, our brains, and I understand why, you know, our brains don’t like pain and discomfort.

Well, that’s a defense mechanism.

That’s what has been built into your brain to keep you safe. You know, it would be like if you got up this morning and said, you know what, I’m going to go skydive it. Your brain would be like, oh, wait a minute. You know, the plane might crash, your parachute may not open, or, you know, your brain starts putting all this negative garbage in there.

And if you really want to go skydiving, you have to find a way to overcome that. Yeah, that all might happen, but I think I’m safe and I trained and I’m going to be with people who know what they’re doing.

So I’m going to go ahead and do that. And I know that’s kind of an oversimplified example, but that same thing happens every day with these little things that pop up in our lives is like, wait a minute, you know, maybe, maybe I’m not, I’m not, oh, maybe I’m not good enough at that, or maybe I don’t have enough knowledge, or what are people going to say about me if I fail? Who cares? I mean, really, I mean, who cares what people say about you? So many people live other people’s lives.

We try to live vicariously through other people. You’re not on the same journey as that person. You don’t have the same gifts and talents as that person.

Let them live their journey, be happy for them, encourage them, but live your own life and stop comparing yourselves to other people, because all that’s going to do is drive you nuts.

Oli: Wow. Like, again, all these four truths are obviously linked out there because they’re all just talking about the human experience and what it is to be to be real, basically.

Do you think this is a personal question? But obviously you’ve suffered or maybe suffers not the right word, but you’ve experienced illness quite a few times, like you said. Did you learn a lot about reality from going through those experiences?

So the reason I’m asking this question is in my own life, I had some health issues that were really serious and they taught me a lot of these truths as well because they showed me that reality is just a certain way. Actually, there’s nothing you can do about it. And the way is ultimately that we’re all going to be dead one day.

And before we do die, there’s going to be loads of problems and obstacles and challenges and all these things that we can either set ourselves up to feel friction towards because of our expectations or the assumption that reality should be something different. Or we can work to accept ourselves on a much deeper level and use all these challenges and obstacles that arise to accept ourselves and to accept life even more.

And when you get to that place of acceptance, that’s when things actually start to click and you’ve got all this energy we were talking about and you feel amazing and things work out. But you can only get to that place by either really training yourself to face reality no matter what, which is difficult if you don’t have something bad happen to you or something bad, scared quotes happens to you and it wakes you up. But do you feel like, you know, when you when you had cancer and all that stuff that taught you that a lot of the things you previously thought were maybe not true or it showed you how life really works and all that kind of stuff.

Terry: Absolutely. I mean, I think we all have a breaking point, you know, point where I just can’t go on. But my experience and again, I can only speak for myself. My experience is that that breaking point is so much further down the road than we ever gave, than we ever give ourselves credit. We quit.

We give up. It’s like, oh, that hurts. I don’t want to do that anymore. You know what? Take that pain again, flipping inside, burn it as you will. You have that pain to push you forward to make you a better individual.

So yeah, I really think that the, I’ve got a friend of mine who’s a former Navy SEAL branch of the military here in the United States, some of the toughest men and the SEALs talk about what they call their 40 % rule, which is basically if you’re at the end of your rope, if you can’t go on, if you think you’re done, you’re only at 40 % of your maximum and you still have another 60 % left in reserve to give to yourself. So whenever I feel bad and don’t get me wrong, you know, I don’t want your audience to think that, you know, I’ve got a big S on my chest and I fly around with the cape with magical powers. You know, I don’t, I have bad days.

I’m a human being. I cry, I get down when I, when I have to go to treatments and things like that. But I always remember that I have so much more left to give to myself when I get into those kind of down places.

Oli: Well, I suppose what you’ve said kind of resonates with me as well. Like the illness thing. So I had, I’ve got kidney failure.

So I’m on dialysis, but like, I’ve just been through so many crazy things because of that. And actually I realized that the 40 % thing, like I never thought of it in those terms, but the 40 % thing is so true because actually you can take so much more.

Then your fear allows you to think that you can take in the first place. Like when you push through that edge, you can always go deeper and we’re all a lot stronger than we think. And actually by challenging ourselves in this way, our strength always comes out. It’s like you’ve always got the strength, it almost always, unless you die, there’s always something there that you can do.

That’s, that’s how it seems to me now. And I think it, going through this or something like this, it kind of, the end result is, is kind of a peaceful feeling. Do you know what I mean? Like eventually you get to a place where your tolerance of just day to day pain or strife or drama or whatever it is, the tolerance because of the other stuff is, is very high. Like it just doesn’t bother you. It doesn’t phase you because you’ve got perspective. I think that’s ultimately what it’s about.

Right. Eventually you get to a point where your perspective shows you that, you know, pain is, is basically relative. And so you can keep going or you can keep pushing through. And so by conditioning yourself, whether you’ve got an illness or you’re just a, you know, a normal person, whatever.

Well, by conditioning yourself, you can actually train yourself to be able to take more and more and probably that 40 % the tank gets more and more full, something like that.

Terry: I totally agree. And I think pain and discomfort, they reveal things to you. You know, there, there’s, there’s just a point where I, one of the things cancer taught me is I don’t really think you know yourself until you’ve been tested by some form of adversity.

Yeah. And so you, you have to, you have to go through adversity to, to bring out all the, all the things in your life. And I’ve always believed that everything you need to be successful in your life, however you define success is already inside. You know, you just need to find it, pull it out and use it to your benefit.

But we’re always looking externally for something. You know, I’m going to read this health book or I’m going to, you know, listen to this podcast or I’m going to do this and, and, and I’m going to get something that I don’t have. You’ve already gotten it. You just need to find it and use it to your advantage.

Oli: And that, that’s why like, actually sometimes like illnesses or adversity or whatever it ends up showing up as is a blessing.

And it’s a blessing because it shows you the real version of you, like you were saying. And actually, I think this goes back to the thing we were saying about embracing the difficulty. The reason it’s so difficult sometimes, especially at the start of these journeys is because we don’t know ourselves.

And so actually we’re holding as the trials and tribulations and the difficulties test us, what they actually do is show us that our identity is not what we thought it was. And if you can let go of your ideas about yourself and take the lesson and flow with it and evolve and to, to grow into the next version of yourself, it’s a lot easier, but a lot of people, they resist the lesson because actually they want to cling to the idea of themselves that they have at the start of that journey.

But that just makes it a lot more difficult than it needs to be. to be. Do you see what I’m saying?

Terry: I totally do. I told you, let me read you something real quick that I find amazing. And this is something that I think we if you think about it, it’s very simple, but it’s just a quick paragraph.

And here it is. In order for you to be born, you needed two parents, four grandparents, eight grand, great grandparents, 16 great, great grandparents, 32, third great grandparents, 64 fourth great grandparents, 128 fifth great grandparents, 256 sixth great grandparents, 512 seventh great grandparents, 1024 eighth great grandparents, and 2048 ninth great grandparents.

For you to be born from 12 previous generations, you needed a total of 4094 ancestors over the past 400 years. Think for a moment how many struggles, how many battles, how many difficult, how much sadness, how much happiness, how much love stories, how many expectations of hope for the future.

Did your ancestors have to undergo for you to exist in this world?

Oli: Wow. Yeah, I love I love that so much. And I’ve thought about something similar before, which is all of our and the fact that we’re here means somebody has worked their ass off basically. Like our lives in the modern world are a bit too easy, maybe like if you think about all the, I don’t know, the saber tooth tigers or whatever it is that people have had to battle just to survive.

That’s a slightly hyperbolic example. But the struggle is what’s allowed us to be here. And I’ve never thought about it in, you know, such a vast number that you’ve just put on out, but it’s actually amazing to think about. But that’s, that’s the natural state of being isn’t it? Yeah, like the world we’ve do you think the world we’ve created now, or the world we live in is, you know, it’s making a struggle, but by causing us not not by making us too comfortable. So we struggle because we’re too comfortable, if that makes sense. And the struggle is, it’s not real.

Terry: We’re too soft.

Oli: Yeah, basically. Yeah.

Terry: Yeah, I absolutely believe that we have all these conveniences. And so we get soft and soft times create soft, you know, just like hard times create hard, hard people.

Oli: I was I was gonna say that as well, actually, there’s the thing is that it’s like a meme. So you just said it, yeah, like hard times create soft men or whatever is.

So I can’t remember how it goes. But yeah, the point is that every generation basically feeds off the next one. And if it’s too easy, then it’ll be hard next time round.

And if it’s too hard, then, you know, you create a world that’s good, but then you end up creating kind of softer people.

So what what do we do about that? That’s the question. Maybe this feeds into your third truth, which is about what you leave behind.

So in a way, that the meme that I’m referring to, which I can’t remember verbatim kind of is talking about isn’t it is talking about our responsibility from one generation to the next, to create a world that is I suppose aligned with reality or at the very least, is going to create something that allows, you know, the next generations to thrive or whatever it is.

What what what what do you mean by that? I suppose that’s the question.

Terry: Absolutely. You know, I still have friends who read the obituary, you know, paper, or the obituary section in the newspaper or online, for two reasons, one to keep themselves humble, and two, to help them realize like you were talking about a minute ago, that we’re all going to die. You know, when I found out I had these tumors in my lungs, and I was going to have my leg amputated, I went with my wife to the mortuary and to the cemetery and to the church, and I plan my funeral.

And because I go on podcasts and talk about, you know, motivation, or I give speeches, or people read my book, I got some brushback from some folks that were like, you know, plan on your funeral, don’t you think that’s kind of defeatist? And I kind of laughed and, you know, looked at it was like, Well, the last time I checked, we’re all going to die. Don’t think anybody’s working on a cure for life right now. Every one of us is going to die.

But not every one of us is really going to live. And I heard a Native American Blackfoot proverb years ago that I absolutely love and it goes like this. When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a way so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice. That’s what I want.

That’s what I’m looking for. You know, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking to hasten my demise in any way. But death is not nearly as scary for me, because I believe I have lived the purposes for which I was put on this world to do. You know, part of that is passing on what I’ve learned to my daughter, you know, my wife and I have one child, a daughter, and it’s like, you know what, yeah, you’re going to go through hard times, deal with it, suck it up, learn something from it, not just, Oh, honey, I’ll take care of you.

You don’t learn again, when you’re in those comfort zones, you learn from the difficulties and the struggles you have.

Oli: Like the death thing is really important, I think for actually, making all of this stuff work. So something I’m always going on about is, you know, people will disagree about just about anything these days, especially, but death is something that we can all at least agree.

I’m sure somebody out there will disagree, but 99.9 % of people will agree that death is a thing that happens. And so you can take that as a starting point for how to actually live a good life. And if death is inevitable, well, it just opens up so many different things that you need to embrace in order to live a good life. So the first thing is that if death is coming, that means everything is changing.

And so if everything is changing, well, okay, that means the static illusions and interpretations that your mind shows you of life are not true. And so you can, you know, improve your relationship with your mind in the way that we said, if death is coming, and everything keeps moving, that means you are going to have all these difficulties, and there’s going to be things that you have to learn to accept and blah, blah, blah. And so the death thing is, you know, is vital.

Like, maybe that’s an ironic word to use. But it’s vital in the sense that if you don’t embrace death, then you will never ever be able to live a real life, even if it’s just because you won’t appreciate your own time. Do you think that’s something that’s inspired you to be more motivated? The fact that, you know, death is coming, you’ve been planning your funeral, momentum or all this stuff. But the psychological consequence of that probably for you is that you’re just aware of the value of your time. Maybe I mean, I’m speaking of my own experience, but that’s how I, you know, I assume it might be.

Terry: I agree and people don’t don’t like to talk about it because it’s it’s unknown but it’s it’s the most fair thing in the world because we all get it you know we all get death once that’s it boom you’re gone and we are here for such a short period of time I mean even people that live to be a hundred years a hundred years is nothing you know I mean I just I read you that thing about what it you know the number of people that needed to do the right thing to you know to go the right way in order for you to be here and that was over 400 years there were 4,000 almost 4,100 people that needed to do the right thing at the right time in order for you to be here and that was only 400 years I mean so we’re here for such a short period of time and it’s over and life just keeps moving forward it’s not like you know oh Terry Dougherty’s gonna name you know a building after me or a street or put up a statue nobody’s gonna remember I was here except the people that I touched and I you know we all get caught up and you know I gotta make money I gotta have power I gotta have influence I gotta have a nice car I gotta live in the nice house at the end of your life the only thing that goes with you is the same thing that you brought into this world and that’s the love in your heart so I had a nurse recently asked me what it was like to have my foot amputated and my leg amputated and this is what I told her I said you know what cancer can take all my physical faculties but cancer can’t touch my mind it can’t touch my heart and it can’t touch my soul and that’s who I am that’s who you are all that’s everybody’s listening to us is and we spend so much time on dealing with our physical body am I wearing the right thing is my hair look good does my beard good I mean spend more time working on the things that you really.

Oli: Yeah yeah yeah yeah that’s what it all boils down to in my view like the stuff that’s real about us and the stuff that’s unreal basically and these kind of things that we’re talking about you know facing challenges and going through trials and tribulations and yada yada all that stuff is just showing you what’s real and the real stuff like you’ve also said it never goes anywhere because what’s real is always real and all of these material things or these physical things or whatever it is that we spend our whole lives chasing that is superficial and empty and meaningless and not real and so most people are running around like we said because they’re conditioning just chasing things that aren’t real and actually by opening up to death and all these things you’re gonna be able to make choices that allow you to do stuff that is more real so just back to your third truth about you know what you leave behind is what basically what you leave in the hearts of other people how do we you know use the time that we do have before we all drop dead to kind of embody that truth.

Terry: I think we need to share our lives with people and I you know I when I was young I was I was a kind of a quote-unquote disciple of a basketball coach here in the United States by the name of John Wooden probably one of the one of the greatest college basketball coaches and our memory was being interviewed by a reporter at one point in time and you know I was sitting there listening to this and I was a kid you know I had a pad of paper and a pencil I’m like okay come on coach give me some good X’s and O’s that I can use you know you get better at basketball and the reporter asked him you know what’s the most important thing that you want your players to learn and understand and I was like okay come on coach give me some good X’s and O’s and he said the most important thing I want people to understand is love and I was like no no come on give me something good but really he wanted his players and the people around him to understand the importance of love love for what you do love for yourself love for your fellow man and I think in one word that is really you know and especially guys guys you know we don’t talk about that’s not something you know but it’s so important in our lives if we love each other which means you know we care about each other we support each other we want the best for each other instead of you know this what we talked about earlier you know what hey you got more money than I do or you drive a nicer car you know so I’m now comparing my life to you and thinking that you know I want what you have no you’re on your own journey I’m on my journey be happy for me in my journey help me along the way if you possibly can but don’t be an impediment don’t put something in my way don’t be a roadblock for me to get to where I want to be a lot so I would say the most important thing that we do for each other in our lives is to love you.

Oli: Yeah you’re right like a lot of guys especially don’t like talking about that but it is love and death that’s who are the most controversial topics but they’re the most real topics or maybe not controversial they’re the most avoided topics at a real level like we’re all gonna die and actually if we’re all gonna die it means we’re all precious because we’re not gonna be around forever and so actually love is just appreciating that I think it’s about appreciating how valuable every single person is and how valuable their lives are and how you know if we can get out of our heads and we stop judging ourselves and then judging each other and we stop judging life for what it is and how it works then we can just allow people to do what they need to do basically and they can have freedom because love I think is just acceptance and when you get when people give you acceptance you get the freedom that comes with it and if you can treat people like that which is personally it’s a work in progress like I’m not like I’m not saying I’m like a you know I’m the Messiah or something like I want to live like that most of the time like obviously life creeps in or whatever it is but if we can live like that I think then we at least increase the odds have been remembered for a little bit longer than when we’ve just dropped dead initially.

Terry: Yeah and but again I mean you think about all the people you know again what I what I read earlier there’s there’s 4100 people 99.9 % of those people you have no idea you probably have no idea who your eighth great parents were you know no idea what some but they are they set the table for lack of a better work for you you know they they had expectations they had goals they worked hard they did what they needed to do and probably in some really difficult times that we don’t I mean we think we got it tough now I mean you can you imagine having to you know kill your dinner every night.

They got that they did that and now you’re here yeah and I always say you know what it’s my responsibility to set the table for the next generation for my daughter’s generation you know and to leave that I hope I leave this world in a better place than when I came into it I can’t change the world but I can change my little corner.

Oli: I love that a little phrase you just concocted about setting the table I think that should be a thing but how do we bring this all around with the the final truth which is about not quitsing so we kind of talked about it a little bit at the start when we were talking about the motivation and discipline habits thing but how do we get to that place where we can be tenacious and not quit unless we you know we decide it’s the the real thing to do for whatever reason but how do we get to that place where we can keep going we don’t quit but we’re not so outcome dependent that we drive ourselves crazy trying to get certain results if if that makes sense?

Terry: It does and I think it goes back to kind of what we were talking about, you know, what’s your motivation, what discipline do you have, and what are the habits that you’re forming in your life. And the way I look at that quote about, you know, as long as you don’t quit, you can never be defeated, you know, I look at it personally and say, you know, someday my cancer, my cancer journey, my pain is going to end. You know, it may end through surgery, it may end through some type of new medication.

Quite frankly, it may end when I die. But if I quit, if I give up, if I give in to pain, then pain will always be a part of my life.

So again, I think it comes kind of full circle. You need to do the hard things, you need to face the things in your life that scare you, that make you uncomfortable, that are things that you’re trying to distract yourself from. And if you do that, you’re facing up to that pain. And once you can conquer your pain, you can move forward no matter what happens.

Oli: Wow. Like this, something actually kind of comforting in knowing that we are going to die one day. I know that I said that already. But like, actually, if you think about the extreme, the most extreme way of quitting is to kill yourself, right, is to commit suicide.

If things get so bad that you do that, then obviously you’re in a lot of pain and, you know, that’s just awful. But actually knowing that you’re going to die one day anyway, can kind of release you from that. Because like you’ve said, you know, things do keep changing. It might be really hard now, but you know, you’re going to die one day anyway.

So you might as well find out, just stick around and find out what’s going to happen. And it’s this, you know, that I’m giving a very extreme example. But even if you’re just, you know, you’re working on your business, or you’ve got a creative goal, or you’re writing a book or whatever it is, you’re trying to learn a yoga pose or something.

Just keep trying, like find out, I think that’s a really good philosophy or a good approach, this kind of experimental way of doing it, just find out it’s about letting go of the control. Do you think that makes sense?

Terry: It totally does.

Absolutely. You, and this is definitely something I’ve learned through cancer. I used to be, you know, I was the type A personality that I needed to always be in control. And cancer has taught me I am totally not at all. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, when I, when I found out, you know, I was having my leg amputated, and I had these tumors in my legs. About six months ago, my oncologist showed me the CAT scan of my lungs. And I have no medical background.

I don’t know, you know, what should be there and not. But I had fluid all around the pleural spaces of my lungs, had these big tumors in my lungs. And I looked at my oncologist and I said, how was I alive? And he kind of got this smile on his face and sort of shook his head.

He’s like, I don’t know. Wow. You know, which said to me that, and I have a very strong faith that God’s not done with me yet. You know, when I die, where I die, how I die, way above my pay grade. So I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about dying.

I spend more time worrying about living and what I can put back into this world.

Oli: I think that, that, that final sentence that you just said really kind of, you know, it sums everything up, right? Like it hits the nail on the head.

That’s what it’s about. Just living. I know, I know that’s, it’s almost too simple again, but it comes down to having that mindset that lets you really commit to life. Basically, that’s what you’re doing. You’re committing to life because the lessons you’ve learned, these four truths can help anyone do it.

Have you got any final words to sum all this up? We’ve been talking quite a while. I didn’t realize how quickly the time had gone. I never do.

I should probably pay more attention. But anyway, have you got any final words to sum this up? And can  you tell people where they can find you as well? If they want to get in touch or read your writing or any of that stuff? Sure.

Terry: I’ll start with the last part first. I have a blog that I put up a thought for the day, every day. It’s called Motivational Check. On Motivational Check, there are recommendations for books to read, videos to watch.

You can leave me a message and things like that. But MotivationalCheck.com will get you to me. My book Sustainable Excellence, you can get pretty much anywhere. You can get a book online, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, iBooks, wherever you can get.

You can also get it at MotivationalCheck.com. But let me leave you with this story. Here in the United States, I’ve always been a big fan of westerns growing up, sort of the Cowboys and Indians thing. And 1993, the movie Tombstone came out. You may have seen it. It’s one of my favorite films.

I was, yeah, that’s what I’m… Yeah, huge blockbuster. It started Val Kilmer as a man by the name of John Dock Holiday. And Kurt Russell as a man by the name of Wyatt Earp. Now Dock Holiday and Wyatt Earp were two living, breathing human beings who walked on the face of the earth.

They’re not just made up characters for the movie. Now Dock was called Dock because he was a dentist by trade, but pretty much Dock Holiday was a gunslinger and a card shark. And Wyatt Earp, his entire adult life, had been some form of a lawman.

And somehow these two men from entirely opposite backgrounds formed this very close friendship. And at the end of the movie Dock Holiday is dying of tuberculosis at a sanitarium in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, which is about three hours from where I live. The real Dock Holiday died at that sanitarium and he’s buried in the Glenwood Springs cemetery. And Wyatt at this point in his life is destitute.

He has no money, he has no job, he has no prospects for a job. So every day comes to play cards with Dock and the two men pass the time. And in this almost last scene in the movie, they’re talking about what they want out of life. And Dock says, you know, I was in love with my cousin when I was younger, but she joined a convent over the affair, but she’s all that I ever wanted. And then he looks at Wyatt and says, what about you Wyatt?

What do you want? And Wyatt kind of nonchalantly says, I just want to lead a normal life. And Dock looks at him and says, there’s no normal, there’s just life and get on with living yours. Ola, you and I probably know people that are sitting out there maybe listening to us that are like, well, you know what, when this happens, I’ll have a normal life. But when that occurred, I’ll have a successful life. Or when this arises, I’ll have a significant life.

What I’d like to come to you, get out there, find the reasons you were put on the face of this earth, use your unique gifts and talents and live that reason. Because if you do it, at the end of your life, I’m going to promise you two things. Number one, you’re going to be a whole lot happier.

And number two, you’re going to have a whole lot more peace in your home. Terry, that was beautiful.

Oli: Thank you so much for coming on this podcast and sharing all this stuff.

Terry: Well, thanks for having me. I enjoyed talking with you.

Being real is about understanding your STORY.

The stories that we tell ourselves and others affect our WHOLE lives:

-The story that we tell ourselves about ourselves affects how REAL our lives will be and whether or not we’re growing in the way that we want to.

-The story that we tell others about ourselves affects how REAL our relationships will be and how we CONNECT with others in the world.

As per usual, it comes down to EGO vs REALITY:

-If you filter your story through ego then you end up holding yourself back behind static ideas and BS.

-You also end up taking yourself away from your own humanity because you will try to be ‘more’ or ‘less’ than what you really are (e.g. a ‘hero’ or a ‘victim’) and you won’t connect with people on THE LEVEL.

If your story is told in a REAL way then it keeps you growing real:

-You will be a WORK IN PROGRESS and so you keep expanding and evolving with life.

-You will be able to share what’s RELEVANT to people so that you can ceate something relatable and amazing together.

-You can write a NEW story whenever you like because you’re not held back by the past and the patterns and scripts that come with it.

Elena Chow (@words.by.elena) is a story consultant and copywriter who helps businesses and individuals to tell figure out how to tell and share their REALEST stories.

This conversation is about how you can find and tell YOUR own real story and how that will help you get better results online.

Check out this episode if you’re interested in telling your own real story in a creative way and you wanna give some thought to:

-Story structure

-Amplifying the real stuff about you

-Researching and getting out of your EGO so your assumptions don’t kill your ability to tell stories

-How to be relatable by solving specific problems

-Crafting a bigger picture for yourself

-Figuring out your storytelling tone

-LOADS more

This was Elena’s first ever podcast but she completely smashed it!

I really hope you enjoy listening and I’m sure you’ll get some insight if you do!

Listen on any podcast platform (including Spotfiy) or use the player above!

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus

Episode Links:

Elena’s website: wordsbyelena.com

Stay up-to-date with Elena on Instagram: instagram.com/words.by.elena

Creative Status Links:

Book a call to work with me

Free creative workshops to level up your life.

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Follow me on Instagram

My YouTube channel

Get my books on Amazon

Creative Status is a podcast about using your creativity to increase your status and improve your health, wealth, and relationships.

To live a real life in an unreal world, you need to REBEL 👇

That might sound like being edgy for the sake of setting the edgy-o-meter off the charts but it’s true…

For whatever reason, the world is UNREAL and it wants you to be unreal too so that you’re compliant and malleable and easily TOLD what to do.

That might give some people comfort (so they don’t have to make their own decisions) but – for many others – living in that way is a denial of their REAL HUMANITY and the true values and intenstions that come with it.

If you want to step up and RECLAIM the birthright of your realness and the NATURAL DRIVE TOWARDS WHOLENESS that comes with it then you need to REBEL:

-REBEL against the conditioned/fake version of yourself they taught you to be and you became comfortable acting out.

-REBEL against the unreal world that asks you to live according to false values and false intentions.

-REBEL against anything that asks you to be ‘more’ or ‘less’ than what you truly are and to keep growing and EXPANDING into something REAL.

Roz Duffy (@rozduffy) is a coach and facilitator who works with individuals and teams to help them reach their creative potential and to boost emotional intelligence whilst flowing and unlocking possibility.

In this conversation, we dived down the rabbit hole of creativity itself and uncovered all kinds of insights about how we can all live in a way that’s more creative and makes us more REAL.

Some of the topics we explored:

-The SHADOW SELF and how part of the creative healing journey is about befriending all of the parts of ourselves and moving towards unconditional self-acceptance.

-CREATIVE REBELLION and how we need to rebel against the world and outdated versions of ourselves to grow into wholeness and flow.

-Finding BALANCE when it comes to our feelings so that we can actually feel them without being held back from our real desires.

-The value of REST and not forcing everything through ego.

This was a really powerful exploration of creativity that will help you to push through to the next level on your own journey and get that REAL LIFE you’re on the path to building.

Listen on ANY podcast platform or by using the player above.

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus

Episode Links:

Roz’s website: rozduffy.com

Stay up-to-date with Roz on Instagram: instagram.com/rozduffy

Creative Status Links:

Book a call to work with me

Free creative workshops to level up your life.

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Follow me on Instagram

My YouTube channel

Get my books on Amazon

7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose

Creative Status is a podcast about using your creativity to increase your status and improve your health, wealth, and relationships.

Creativity increases your AWARENESS and the only thing you can really become AWARE of is the truth about life.

This is why creative activities like yoga or anything else that helps you to FIND OUT WHO YOU REALLY ARE and what life really is are so important.

When you find an awareness-raising activity that works for you then you are able to PRACTICE improving your relationship with reality so you can live a better life.

This is why they say “TAKE YOUR YOGA OFF THE MAT” – the lessons you learn in that practice make you better equipped to deal with life itself because – in those moments – you become more AWARE of exactly what life is and how it works.

The only thing you can really become AWARE of is the NATURAL LAWS that apply to us all – this is because yoga or anything else creative exposes the GAP between the ideas in your head and what’s actually real (this is THE EDGE).

When you become aware of the NATURAL LAWS then you can align yourself with them which removes unnecessary friction and STRESS from your life (which causes most of the mental and physical problems in your life).

Bryan Kest is the creator of Power Yoga – his Power Yoga video series is one of the best-selling home workouts of all time and has introduced millions of people around the world to daily yoga practice.

Bryan is also the founder of Santa Monica Power Yoga, based in Santa Monica, California, and he leads yoga classes, retreats and workshops all around the world. He is also credited with pioneering the practice of donation-based yoga in the United States.

If you’ve ever known or spoken much to me in real life then there’s an incredibly high chance that I’ve recommended Bryan’s workouts to you… I have been doing them for years – literally done them thousand of times at this point in my life – and, even though they’re an amazing physical workout, it’s Bryan’s philosophy of life and the mindset he espouses in the videos that offers the most real power.

In this interview, we explore this philosophy in detail and look at the overlap between yoga and creativity for living a REAL life.

There’s a ton of incredible insight that Bryan shares here about strengthening the benevolent and eradicating the malevolent in our lives, living without mental stress, ACCEPTANCE of ourselves and life, taking our yoga off the mat, universal laws, flow, reality, and ton of other things that will help you live a happier, more creative life!

There’s loads of amazing insight in this interview – check it out on Spotify, any other podcast platform, or by using the player above.

(Scroll down for show transcript)

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus

Episode Links:

Bryan’s website: poweryoga.com

Stay up-to-date with Bryan on Instagram: instagram.com/bryankestpoweryoga

Creative Status Links:

Book a call to work with me

Free creative workshops to level up your life.

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Follow me on Instagram

My YouTube channel

Get my books on Amazon

7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose

Law of Attraction for Realness Mini-course

Show Transript: Bryan Kest: Strengthen the Benevolent & Eradicate the Malevolent

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status, this is a podcast about using your creativity to improve your life. In this context, creativity isn’t just about painting pretty pictures or dancing around under the moonlight with a crystal and sticking your finger in your belly button or any of that stuff.

Creativity actually is just a natural drive that we all have towards wholeness and integration and acceptance of ourselves, the world and reality. That ultimately means that anything you do that makes you more present and more whole and more real and involves you in that process can be considered a creative act.

At least that’s what I’m now starting to think about all this stuff. If you don’t know, because you just discovered this podcast and you’ve made it this far in already, my name is Oli Anderson, like I said, I’m an author, but I also work as a creative coach for people. I help people to figure out how they can be more creative or how to get better results from their creative work. I won’t run loads about that. Today’s guest is Bryan Kest. Bryan Kest is a yoga instructor. He’s very, very well known in the world of yoga.

If you’re into that, I actually found his work more than a decade ago. When I first started doing yoga, I discovered his DVDs. He has an amazing Power Yoga series. In fact, he’s the guy that invented Power Yoga or at least gave it that name. If you know me in real life, then I will have definitely recommended these workouts to you.

I’ve probably sent the videos to on YouTube or whatever, or told you to go get the DVD and just ranted and raved about how much they’ve helped me. What I love about Bryan’s work is not just the workouts themselves, which are still the best workouts I’ve found in the world of yoga anyway, but the philosophy that he kind of interweaves into the workouts themselves.

He’s got a really amazing understanding and grasp of, I think, the human condition and how we can be more human, what it means to be accepting and to live a life without judgment. You’re going to hear loads in the interview that’s coming up, so I don’t need to rant and rave about it. This is a really good interview, in my opinion, with somebody that I really admire.

Bryan, thank you for coming on and giving me a time. I hope whoever you are listening to this, you get some value from it. I’m pretty much sure you will, because the philosophy that I just talked about is expounded upon here. Other than that, I’m going to stop talking so we can get into it, because it’s more interesting than anything I’m going to say here. But yes, enjoy this interview. I’ll see you next Monday. Bryan, thank you again for coming on and talking to me about all this stuff. Here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Hi there, Bryan. Thank you for joining me today on Creative Status. As you know, I have done a lot of your workouts. I spent a lot of time with your yoga videos. Just in case people listening don’t know who you are or what your work is all about, would you mind just quickly introducing yourself and telling us what you stand for and all that kind of thing?

Bryan Kest: Yeah, sure. Hey, you guys. My name is Bryan Kast. Basically, I’m a yoga instructor. I’m a yoga instructor that has been through a lot over the last 42 years of yoga involvement. I did a three-video set with Warner Brothers that got out a style of yoga called Power Yoga that I created.

That became quite popular worldwide. I created PowerYoga.com, which was one of the very first online yoga streaming sites, created one of the first online yoga teachers trainings, and also started the Western World’s first donation-based yoga studio. So I experimented with a lot of things and had had an amazing journey along the way.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, it’s not really an understatement to say that you’re a very influential person in the world of yoga. One reason that I wanted to talk to you today is because even though, obviously, the workouts that you’ve shared in the Warner Brothers videos and all that kind of stuff, amazing workouts physically, there’s a kind of undercurrent of philosophy that runs through them, which I have found to be really helpful in my own life, but which I also think has a lot of practical applications in life and in the creative process, which is the whole point of this podcast.

When I was going over all of the different things we could talk about, I was going to accommodate it from all these different convoluted angles, but there’s something that you’ve shared quite a few times, which you’ve said is the core of your philosophy, and it’s this idea that yoga ultimately is about strengthening the benevolent and eradicating the malevolent.

Could you give us a quick summary of what you mean by that before we start picking its piece?

Bryan Kest: Yeah, ultimately my goal for my yoga practice was health, was me being as healthy as I can be. That was my goal. That’s still my goal. I’m feeling as amazing as one can possibly feel, I can’t imagine, that not being everybody’s goal, because that seems like the foundation of enjoying everything else would start with you feeling amazing.

As the journey progressed, I realized that a lot of, if not most, all of this well-being originates in your mind state, not in your body. In other words, having a healthy mind is the most important aspect of having a healthy body. Then we get into what is a healthy mind, and a healthy mind is a calm and peaceful mind, a mind that is not producing incessant stress and poisoning the body with stress.

So what is that? What is a peaceful mind? What is a mind that is that’s creating wonderful vibrations through the body as opposed to sick vibrations and disease producing vibrations and that is a mind that’s full of benevolence.

Benevolence means benevolent qualities. Benevolent qualities whether it’s gratitude or compassion or humility or any of these qualities that as a species you know humans admire you know it’s the qualities that all the great beings propagated you know whether it’s Jesus and non-judgment or Buddha and moderation and Mother Teresa compassion you know we’re Gandhi non-violence or Martin Luther King equality all the great ones propagated these these qualities right that these are the benevolent qualities and what I what I realized was is that these benevolent qualities are muscles or very much like muscles in other words they can be developed or they can atrophy.

So this initial search for health and wellness has led to the development of benevolent qualities and and along the way or within all this is included you know a physical maintenance practice something we need to do for our bodies but also you could call it a mental maintenance practice something that we also need to do to our minds in order to to achieve the objective of health and wellness.

Oli Anderson: Wow so a lot of people especially if they don’t do yoga they assume that yoga in its modern form at least is just a physical thing but actually what you’re talking about is it’s a mental practice as well maybe fundamentally and primarily that is the main purpose of it.

I found in my life that when I do yoga and I you know push myself to the edge and I have to I don’t know if I if I can’t do a certain pose initially I have to keep doing it until I can do it. A lot of the things that I learn by going through that process are just about letting go of all these doubts and uncertainties and a lot of the malevolent qualities I guess that stop me from seeing things clearly. Do you think that’s a fair assessment of the philosophy you’re sharing?

Bryan Kest: Yeah that certainly can be one way to describe it and because there’s multiple ways you can describe this and you probably seven billion ways you know considering there’s seven billion of us and we all have a unique perspective but but I believe it is true what you said you know I mean it’s in the West we’ve looked at yoga as a physical practice but that is not what yoga has ever been until it morphed into that in the Western world but you know if you go to India you know 99.999 % of all of yoga there it’s not physical it’s devotional practices and meditation practices which means which means practices that address your mind state and you know it’s not surprising that all the great beings that walked on this planet didn’t address the physicality they address the mentality and it’s not surprising now that modern medicine is telling us that 90 to 95 % of all physical disease is coming from mental stress you know maybe these yogis understood you know what what modern medicine is understanding now if you really really want to be healthy and well you have to address your mind state.

Oli Anderson: I think everything in our lives does ultimately start with our mindset and the way that we see ourselves or the way that we relate to ourselves and so if we have an unhealthy or malevolent relationship with ourselves in the sense of being disconnected at some level or hiding certain parts of ourselves from ourselves because of shame or guilt or trauma or whatever if we’re fragmented in that in that way then it ends up impacting our lives as a whole because what’s we don’t see the world as it is but as we are and so if we don’t understand that and we don’t have some kind of devotional practice in our lives like yoga or creativity or anything else that’s just gonna impact everything that we do so it’s something else that I’ve heard you say or read you write somewhere is that we should ultimately take our yoga off the mat how does that feed into all this stuff that I’m saying?

Bryan Kest: Well you know the yoga practice that yoga the yoga practice is called yoga practice for a reason you know you’re you’re practicing something that supposedly you know you’re gonna get good at you know that’s why you’re practicing it to to strengthen it to get better at it and because you want that practice that thing you’re getting better at to affect you at all times so that you that yoga practice is created to transcend the yoga studio and permeate your life it’s created to develop.

It’s like if you if you are in the gym and you are strengthening your bicep you know you go to the gym and you’re doing bicep curls to strengthen your bicep that strong bicep not only helps you lift that weight but that strong bicep helps you in so many different things in your life – it helps you pick up groceries it helps you pick up children it helps you pick up grandchildren you know the bicep that you develop in in the gym helps you in your life and and that’s the same thing with everything we’re doing in yoga.

Actually, in yoga the whole reason that we’re doing that is to improve the scenarios of our life to increase the benevolence within all the moments and scenarios of our life so yeah we are we are doing it in yoga in order to strengthen our ability to do it outside of yoga you just we need a place to practice that’s why they call it yoga practice.

Oli Anderson: So what when we do in a yoga session then and what quality specifically would you say that we’re developing that can help us with life so you’ve already mentioned a few you said kind of gratitude humility and I would add acceptance what what kind of things do you think we’re like ultimately practicing in that yoga session yoga practices.

Bryan Kest: Well you know in order for this to be physically healing as well in order for your body to benefit from what you’re doing you have to also be developing those benevolent qualities and, you know, you could you could say one of the qualities is awareness you could say one of the qualities is gentleness right you could say one of the qualities is focus You know you and yeah you can say hey you know compassion and gratitude and humility and acceptance.

These are all the qualities that you have to work on in order for this to be healing listen You know There’s universal laws that you become aware of that you just start to notice that one of the laws is The harder you are on anything the faster you destroy it Right, this is a universal law. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your automobile or your marriage or your body The harder you are on anything the faster you destroy it, right?

So right there listen if you know that if you want to live as long as possible and you want to feel as amazing as possible The last thing on earth you’d ever want to do is push your body hard because the harder you are on anything the faster you destroy it Right so right there Right there Basically, Western Fitness has turned upside down and inside out Right because all the Western Fitness is based on pushing and no pain no gain and more is better And it’s this whole fitness mentality of doing more and getting more and being more in this whole thing, right? So The first thing you realize is that’s all bullshit.

Yeah That’s all bullshit. That’s all ego driven vanity driven It has nothing to do with the true objective of wellness So then what has to do with wellness if the harder you are in anything the faster you destroy it But yet at the same time at the exact same time if you avoid something then it completely atrophies So avoidance isn’t the answer and aggression is not the answer.

What’s the answer? Well, the that’s what this is what Buddha taught the answer is the middle path not too much not too little So right that middle path is called moderation Right moderation is another word for gentleness Gentleness means touch it, but don’t touch it aggressively. Don’t don’t ignore it. Don’t be aggressive gentle, right? So then you got to start dealing with this this concept of gentleness Right, which is you got to admit, you know You got to admit that that’s the number one most important quality of probably all healthy relationships on planet earth Being gentle with the people around you and you got to bring that to yourself being gentle with yourself, right?

So then okay, so then you’re looking at gentleness, right? Like what like how do you become gentle like well, you know in order to be gentle You have to start being a come aware of your actions Right, you have to develop awareness because you’ll never know if you’re being gentle if you’re not aware But you have to start paying attention to how you are in other words You can no longer act in a habitual or unconscious manner You have to start becoming aware also in order to be gentle Right that that means that you’re not gonna develop your body in a way that you would develop your body if you were aggressive.

So you’re not gonna be able to over develop your body You’re not gonna be able to over develop your muscles You’re not gonna be able to become overly flexible because you can’t do that stuff being gentle for that stuff You need to be aggressive Right, so now you’re not gonna look the way your ego wants you to look right now You’re starting to deal with ego and vanity issues now you need to develop now comes humility Right like which is your ability to get out of your ego and back off So now with gentleness comes awareness it comes humility So all these benevolent qualities need to start engaging in order for you to act in a manner that’s aligned with With common sense with universal laws.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah, I love everything you just said and for me It all comes down to that like ultimately it’s about Improving our relationship with reality. So those universal laws if you’re aligned with them You have to live in a certain way and that way is going to be a stress-free Ish kind of way where you have removed unnecessary friction from your life You’re not putting blocks in your own path because of all your own ego bullshit and all that kind of thing and you’re constantly Moving forward into more wholeness or more appreciation of life because of the choices you make because you understand that the universal laws They’re not it’s not it’s not about if they’re on your side or they’re not they just something you have to accept and through that acceptance.

That’s when you can increase your health and well-being to the greatest extent possible This is where I think what you’re saying about yoga aligns with the creative processes at all so Just in case you don’t know the the main theme of this podcast is that we can use our creativity to improve our lives and the way that we do that is we create some kind of a path for ourselves to go on where we’re basically pushing ourselves without judging ourselves and allowing ourselves to grow through the current version of our ego and The ego is always always always the thing that stops us from living with those universal laws So do you think yoga in that sense is ultimately just about that?

Aligning ourselves with these universal laws so we can remove the amount of bullshit in our lives.

Bryan Kest: In a sense it is you know what what yoga really is about is Becoming aware of the universal laws becoming aware of The truth and then once you’re aware of it then you have a choice Right if you’re not aware of it you have no choice Right you’re just going along with that as quo. You’re not really thinking for yourself.

You’re, you’re more acting out of this program that’s been implanted in you Right so a lot of people are they’re just programs either. There’s a universal Well, I don’t know if it’s a psychological law that says the more you see something the more you believe it Right so, you know, we all grow up seeing things a certain way and we start believing it without questioning it Right like like, you know, we believe what a man is or we believe what a woman is or we believe how we should be Or we believe how we should look and we start believing this is beautiful and this is not beautiful It’s all about cultural concepts, you know, it’s like it’s like people see You know, they don’t they don’t see their aging process as beautiful because we live in a culture that that honors The most ignorant and experienced and petuous group of people on earth the young people And we discard the wisest people in our culture, the old people.

You’ve never seen a 70-year-old on the cover of a fashion magazine or a 70-year-old starring in a TV show. It’s like we kind of discard them.

They’re no longer beautiful. And so, you know, we start believing this and then we start getting older and we think, you know, we start thinking there’s something wrong with us. And because this is the program, like we’ve been programmed all kinds of things. We’ve been programmed how to act. We’ve been programmed what’s right and what’s wrong. You know, if someone lets out a big burp, you think it’s disgusting because you’ve been told that’s disgusting.

Right? Or maybe you look at yourself in the mirror and you have judgmental or critical thoughts about the way you look because you’ve been told what’s beautiful and you don’t fit that image. So we’ve basically been programmed and then we go along with this program not questioning it. Right? And this program is creating everything we see in our lives that we complain about.

Right? But at the same time, we don’t realize that, you know, we’re contributing to it, that we’re a player in this program. And Yoga’s idea is to shine a light, to bring awareness of how you are so you can choose. Like, do I want to be that way or not? And if you decide I don’t want to be that way, then what happens is you stop feeding mental energy and unconscious loyalty to this program that’s been implanted in you.

And whenever you stop feeding something, it starves and dies. Right? So I call it killing the enemy. Right? It’s like you start recognizing this mentality that’s been placed in you by your parents, the media, the culture.

Right? And then you decide whether that mentality is optimal for you or not. And if you decide it’s not optimal, then you stop feeding that mentality. And if you stop feeding it, that mentality starts to starve and die because the universal law says if you give it food, it becomes strong.

And if you don’t, it starves and dies. Right? So in yoga, the idea is to shine a lighter, to become aware. Right? And that awareness creates a choice.

So yoga would never say act this way or do this. Right? That’s what religion does. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? Yoga is not a religion. Yoga will never say act this way, act good or act bad.

Right? Yoga says become aware of it and then decide for yourself. And according to your decisions, right, you’re going to have certain experiences. And then those experiences will allow you to make new decisions. Mm-hmm.

And the end of growth starts to happen.

Oli Anderson: Wow. That is so powerful and amazing and it’s so true. Like ultimately, that is all yoga or in the context of this podcast, the creative process really do.

They just increase your awareness of the way things actually are. And because so many of us are so conditioned by society, like you said, or we’ve picked up shame and stuff like that in childhood, this causes us to create a fake, unreal relationship with ourselves. A lot of people are just running around on autopilot with no understanding or awareness of what life actually is.

And that’s fine if you believe the whole ignorance is bliss thing. But I think on a long enough timeline, living in that way where you’re not in touch with yourself and you’re not in touch with life just causes you to have an emotional void inside yourself and a sense of restlessness.

And then that’s when you get on this kind of hamster wheel of just running around trying to fill a void inside you by trying to be more beautiful or being as beautiful as you think you should be because of certain standards or chasing material goods or chasing things that you don’t really want in general, just to fill the void that doesn’t even need to be there in the first place.

This thing that you’ve said about choice, do you think if people don’t make the choice for those universal laws and for alignment and all that kind of stuff, what kind of thing will happen in their life? Like how does, you know, is there an easy way to get feedback from reality about good choices and bad choices?

Bryan Kest: Yeah, well, there’s for sure, because, you know, if you’re not making choices, right, then you basically can’t steer yourself in the direction that you want to go. So, you know, you can’t, if you’re not making choices, then, you know, it’s much more difficult for you to act in a healthy manner.

So, you know, here’s a little example. And even when you are acting, you think you’re acting in a healthy manner, like some people are thinking they’re making the right choices because they’re going to the gym or they’re going to school to become a doctor or something where, you know, they’re going to have this great career and make a lot of money or whatever.

Even when you think you’re making choices, a lot of times you’re not making choices because those choices that you’re making are part of the program that was implanted in you. In other words, you’re making choices you were told to make instead of making your own choices, right? Because you were told that, you know, money is success.

So, you were told that, you know, big muscles is health. So, you think you’re making choices. People will say, I’m making choices. I’m getting up and going to the gym every day, you know, but the question is, are you really making choices or those choices made for you according to the culture that you grew up in? You know, one of the examples I give is that, you know, you would not even know, if you grew up on a deserted island, you would not even know that you’re fat and ugly.

Yeah, thank heavens. But you understand what I mean? Like everything you think about yourself is not really what you think about yourself. It’s what they told you to think about yourself.

Yeah, 100%. Like everything that you are or you learned or you want might not actually be who you are and what you want, but it might be what they told you you are and what you should want. And so, you know, that’s where the unfulfillment comes in, right? That’s where you talk about, you know, you were talking about this emptiness in you. I say it’s like people running around trying to fill a hole that’s not even there.

They just been convinced it’s there. You know, listen, since the time that you grew up, I mean, if you grow up in a Christian society, Catholic society, right? I mean, basically, you’re born a sinner, right? Like you’re fucking tainted from birth.

Right? You’re born a sinner. And then all along the way, you’re constantly being told you’re not good enough. You’re not pretty enough. You’re not young enough. You’re not rich enough. You’re not strong enough.

You’re not successful enough. It’s like that’s our society. That’s the rat race. It’s like more we always need more like it’s never good enough. It’s probably why you know my country leads the world in destroying the world.

Right because we actually believe that more is better. And you know we’re constantly in school. We’re graded.

Right? We’re graded. Like you’re good.

You’re not good. It’s like we’re constantly being told you know they actually you know when you watch television your eyeballs don’t move. And when your eyeballs don’t move you’re in a very receptive place.

It’s called alpha level. And you know they say the average 30 year old American has already watched 2 million commercials. And basically every commercial says the same thing.

Right? It says you’re not good enough the way you are. You’d be much better if you had this. They even hire psychologists to design the commercials to make you feel so inadequate about yourself.

You have an urge to buy their product. So we’re constantly being told we’re not good enough. And we end up believing it. Right. And so now that now and that was so we’re trying to we we run around trying to fill this hole that’s not even there. Yeah.

Right. Trying to get trying to trying to get to a place to make us happy. But that happiness doesn’t come from getting somewhere because as soon as you get somewhere then you want something else because your mentality is I’ll be happy when.

At one point or another everybody anybody who really wants to be happy which is really the foundation of health. Right. Because happiness means that you’re OK with what is and that’s the opposite of stress. Right. And in order to be happy at one point or another everybody’s going to have to say I’m fucking cool just the way I am.

And and all we’re saying in yoga is let’s start realizing that right now.

Oli Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. 100 percent. Like ultimately what you’re talking about is this idea that judgment is the main problem actually. So there’s the universal laws that we talked about reality whatever you want to call it. That’s benevolent if you can accept it and work with it and flow with it. The only thing you can do with reality is accept it. And that applies to the reality of ourselves as well. But for whatever reason we get conditioned by the world with all this like horse shit to start judging ourselves judging the world itself judging reality itself. And we become identified with and attached to that judgment.

And actually that is what causes 100 percent of the problems in our lives because it stops us being happy by by causing us to not accept what is in the way that you’re talking about.  That’s a great way to say it. Definitely.

Yeah. So with the yoga thing then and the creativity thing I think that the main benefit of yoga and the creative process is that it helps us to detach from the identity that we have created for ourselves to run from our own emotional bullshit and to uphold the conditioning of society in the world that we’ve been brought up in.

In your yoga videos there’s a shiva’s ner at the end obviously that’s the final pose anyway. You always say you say in the video that this pose is the most important one and it’s about dissolution or about dissolving.

I always think in that moment where I get that feeling of dissolution or whatever that the thing that dissolves is that identity that is causing me to judge myself and judge life. And when you step away from that you can experience just benevolence in itself. Do you think that is bullshit or is it something that actually you know people can practice in their lives which is just stepping away from their own identity ultimately.

Bryan Kest: Yeah that is the practice of yoga and I certainly feel that it’s not just me you know I mean the millions and millions and millions and millions of people who practice yoga must feel the same and yeah that’s that’s it but you know the thing is that you just have to understand that you know what what you’re saying is is you know definitely true but you know what you’re saying is true is what you’re saying is it’s not as easy as it sounds. Right and so that’s it’s the problem is not with what you’re saying. The reason you have a podcast is you know on this topic is because you know you want to espouse this truth.

And the reason people listen to it is because they want to hear the truth. The issue is not with what you’re saying and with what you’re supporting. The issue is that to acquire what it is that you’re espousing is really fucking hard. Yeah right that’s the issue that’s where you lose people it’s not the concept right we put Jesus on a pedestal we put Buddha on a pedestal we put all these great beings on a pedestal because we agree with what they’re saying. Right but very few people actually can follow the teachings because agreeing with it and living it are two different things. Like who doesn’t agree with the Ten Commandments right I mean it’s the most agreeable thing that’s ever been written.

But but tell me who have you ever met that can live the 10 Commandments? Yeah Yeah, right? I mean so this is the problem the problem is not agreeing with it the problem is living and that’s where we start losing people because it’s not easy to start disempowering these programs and these habit patterns that we’ve cultivated this level of denial that we’re in you know everybody knows it’s difficult to break addictions and you’re talking about breaking the largest addiction of someone’s life can you imagine the ferocity of the withdrawal symptoms they would have to go through nobody wants to deal with that shit hmm hmm what is the choice you have to deal with it if you want to be free.

Oli Anderson: Yes yes this is the thing so I suppose that the obvious thing to say there is this is why it’s called yoga practice again right you have to keep getting back on that mat to remind yourself who the fuck you are because ultimately if you don’t then you get off the mat you go out and start living your life again and before you know it the world starts creeping in all of the bullshit that that entails your relationship with yourself that caused you to be addicted to a certain version of yourself in the first place isn’t really going to improve unless you’re actively working on it in a disciplined way or whatever.

So what can we do to not make the process easy but to ensure that we you know actively engaged in it as much as possible both when we’re doing yoga sessions obviously or some other equivalent that has the same purpose or just in life in general on a day-to-day basis like how do we make this easier and let go of this addiction to our personalities that so many people have?

Bryan Kest: Well first of all the way I look at it is it’s just that it’s like a muscle you’re developing a muscle and that’s what you say you have to get back on your yoga mat every day it’s just it’s the same as developing a muscle if you know in order to develop a muscle you have to use it quite often and if you if you use it it will develop but if you stop using it it will atrophy so you know there that’s what yoga practice is it’s the incessant development of the nevel and qualities right because if you don’t keep developing them if you don’t keep using them they will atrophy that’s number one so yeah you you make an effort to meditate on a daily basis right so you’re constantly developing these and growing them deeper and stronger and so forth but another thing that happens is you you start to develop it to such a degree where you notice that you’re actually able to continue developing these qualities even outside of your yoga practice right so maybe let’s for an example you’re looking at yourself make it in the mirror and you start having judgmental or critical thoughts about the way you look right and because of your yoga practice and the awareness you try to develop in yoga all the sudden outside of yoga you’re looking at yourself make it in the mirror and you’re having judgmental or critical thoughts about the way you look and it would be very difficult for you to imagine anything more sick and self and stress producing than self-loathing right so you’re doing something really harmful right you’re judging and criticizing yourself right and so now in now you become aware you’re like oh my god I’m judging and criticizing myself right now the awareness is there because of what you worked on in yoga you’re developing awareness so that now that awareness helps you start noticing things outside of yoga.

Wow I’m judging and criticizing myself then once you have that awareness I’m judging and criticizing myself then you start to have a choice do I want to continue judging and criticizing myself or not if you decide not to right then you pull your mind away from these sick tendencies and what happens is these tendencies start to become weaker because you’re no longer empowering them with mental energy and unconscious loyalty right so now you’re starting to disempower sick tendencies and that’s happening due to the awareness that you created on your yoga mat but now it’s helping you off your yoga mat maybe you’re maybe you’re driving to work and you and you you start noticing that you’re rolling in angry thoughts or fearful thoughts or sad thoughts and you say hey do I want to roll in these stress producing qualities no so you pull your mind away right so what happens is is you start disempowering the shit that’s hurting you but it’s not easy to do because you’re addicted to rolling in these qualities right so pulling your mind away is not easy like you you just start that you start thinking I just want to have like you start thinking some angry thought like you know this is what I’m gonna do to this person next time I see them because because they hurt me and then you try to pull your mind away from these angry thoughts and you realize it’s not easy because you’re really getting off on your angry thoughts.

Oli Anderson: Do you think so we’ve talked a lot about how this addiction to the ego personality whatever a lot of the causes for that social things so it’s society basically wants us to think of ourselves in a certain way so we judge ourselves according to these social standards but I think most addiction as well is actually fueled by shame or trauma do you think yoga can help with that stuff so for example if we have a lot of underlying shame that we’re not good enough because mommy or daddy or whoever it was in our childhood told us that we were useless for whatever reason that’s going to create a version of ourselves that will become addicted to to protect us from that shame and then if society says oh you know you’re fat and you’re ugly or whatever because of certain standards if we have that shame then we’re more likely to believe the social bullshit yoga I think can deconditioners at both levels the social stuff and the self-hypnosis that comes with it.

Bryan Kest: Yeah well though the shame that someone experiences due to you know whatever they went through in their life whatever they heard from their culture or from their parents or whatever you know that shame is manifesting in something called thoughts right though that shame is those are the type of thoughts that this person is having so what happens is in yoga the idea is to start becoming aware of these thoughts right become aware of these feelings and start to disempower them by not indulging in them but so that’s you have to go to where this stuff’s coming from. This stuff is coming from this this program that’s been implanted in you. What you have to do is recognize it because you buy into that program.

Once it’s recognized then you have the choice. Do I want to continue with this type of mentality? If the answer is no then all you got to do is pull it’s now it’s not easy to do but all you have to do is pull your mind away from that stuff because that stuff has a certain kind of food and the food is your mental energy you give it. It’s like every time you indulge in an angry thought you strengthen anger. Any time you indulge in a shameful thought you strengthen shame.

So most of us are constantly walking around every day strengthening the things that are hurting us. We’re indulging in this mentality and the yoga is about creating the awareness that you’re doing it because once you have that then you can pull your mind away. So let’s say you’re having a shameful thought or you’re having an angry thought or a fearful thought and you start to become aware you’re like holy shit I’m having an angry thought. So what you do is you pull your mind away from that angry thought and you place your mind on anything in your life that’s happening right now. You become present in your life right? If you’re walking if you’re walking you just start feeling your feet touch the ground like it’s that simple. If you’re breathing notice that you’re breathing. In other words bring your attention back to what’s happening in your life right now. Pull your attention away from rolling in these six tendencies and these six tendencies become weaker and weaker because you’re no longer rolling in that. And the thing that I like about this is that two things number one you know that’s the way everything that we’ve ever seen in our life works right?

If you stop feeding it dies right? So number one it’s not like you have to believe in anything esoteric. I mean this is this is law of nature this is what you’ve seen your whole life right?

If you stop feeding it will die. That’s number one. Number two is no one’s ever said another way to get rid of this shit. The only other alternative anybody ever gives is drugs whether you whether the psychologists are prescribing drugs or your self medicating with drugs and alcohol. It’s like even modern psychology is moving in this direction it’s called mindfulness.

You know as I was married to a PhD in psychology you know and she’s telling me hey Bryan this is the way modern psychology is moving it’s towards mindfulness because they don’t even have answers. This is what I love about it is that it’s so practical and yet it’s so reasonable. It’s like and there’s no other alternative like what else are you supposed to do? You have to recognize it and stop giving it fucking food.

Yeah yeah yeah. And no one’s ever mentioned another way.

Oli Anderson: Yeah there is no other way because actually what you’re talking about is just embracing reality at a fundamental level which is the the present moment and been connected to yourself and everything else and all this benevolence and everything you talked about.

It’s fundamental. The reason that a lot of mainstream or whatever word we want to use scientific theories just end up giving people medication and stuff like that is because it’s just dealing with the symptoms. The medication will help you deal with the symptoms of disconnection.

It will help you deal with the disconnection itself and what you’re talking about and what we’ve learned from yoga and increasing awareness is about becoming aware of the thing you need to be aware of in order to not be disconnected anymore. That’s basically it. I know you’ve got to go in a few minutes.

I got one more question that’s kind of linked to what you just said. So to heal ourselves and to become reconnected or to start moving towards wholeness again in ourselves and life and ETC we need to get into the present moment but one thing that I’ve found has really helped me with yoga is giving myself a direction to move in that is challenging. So on the yoga map, in fact I think in one of your videos you said challenge yourself without judging yourself. I think both in yoga and in life that approach can actually speed up or make it easier to some extent to deal with a lot of the things that we’re talking about here in this conversation.

So in a yoga session if there’s a difficult pose or whatever and you can’t do it the first few times you’ve given yourself a goal for the next couple of sessions or however long it takes to keep getting up again when you fall and to basically keep doing it until you can do it. If you can’t do it that’s okay but you’ve given yourself a direction to moving. In life it’s the same thing we can set ourselves a vision, we can set ourselves a goal and as long as it’s real it’s not something that we’ve chosen as an escape from all of our shame and you know or as a way of reinforcing the social conditioning we can move forward while still being present if that makes sense and understand life a lot more because we’re actually in motion we’re not just trying to stay the same i.e. in our ego we’re growing through the edge and we’re pushing our ego to be more aligned with reality than not.

Does that make sense? So the question is how do we move forward in life while still being present and using this kind of mindset that you’re talking about to unlearn all of the stuff that stops us from being who we truly are?

I know that’s a big question.

Bryan Kest: Yeah well you know I would just get rid of that mentality of just needing to move forward with our life. I would get rid of the mentality of needing to get anywhere because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with who you are and where you’re at. The idea that we need to get somewhere I think is part of what’s creating the rat race that’s got everybody sick. Everybody’s complaining about the rat race. Everybody’s running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to fill a hole that’s not even there.

We just been told that’s there. I think the challenge is not in acquiring something. The challenge is in realizing we don’t need to acquire anything because we have everything that we need. There’s a challenge. If you’d like to be challenged then you’re going to be really happy in yoga because there’s a lot of challenges. But the challenge isn’t what you think it is.

The challenge isn’t to acquire something or get somewhere. The challenge is to make it completely okay to be who you are and where you’re at. If you can be who you are and where you’re at fully, if you don’t need to get anywhere because there’s nothing fucking wrong with you, why would you need to get anywhere if you thought that you were perfect? If you didn’t think that you were broken why would you need to change anything? If everything is perfect then what’s wrong?

Why do you need to change anything? So in yoga the idea is not to need to get somewhere. The idea is to start realizing that you’re perfect the way you are. In your perfection, in your unique perfection of who you are, as a human you have certain desires. What are those desires? Maybe the desire is to become a doctor. Maybe the desire is to become an athlete. Maybe the desire is to write.

Maybe the desire is to have a podcast. As a human you have a lot of desires. And there’s nothing wrong with moving forward with those desires.

But it’s not like you have to challenge yourself to accomplish something. You just are loving yourself doing what you love. And whatever happens in the process is beautiful and perfect because that’s also who you are and where you’re at at that moment.

Oli Anderson: So when we go to the edge, the way that I see the edge is that we set out with a load of ideas about how life should be, who we should be, should, should, should, should, should. And then we challenge ourselves in life or in a yoga session or in the creative process or wherever it is.

And all that actually happens is all of our ideas end up meeting these universal laws that you talked about right at the start. And by those ideas meeting life itself, we just end up unlearning a lot of the bullshit that we have become identified with and addicted to that stopped us from accepting ourselves in the first place. And so that’s why I found the challenge yourself without judge yourself thing so important because have you heard, there’s a quote by Mike Tyson.

He says, “man wasn’t made to be humble, but to be humbled”.

And I think a lot of the time that’s how I’ve experienced yoga or life itself. Like I set out with all these ideas about how amazing I am or whatever. And then boom, life just comes along and the idea meets reality and you’re just left with something true.

And I think the only truth like you said is just the stuff that you can become aware of that was there the whole time.

Bryan Kest: That’s a great way to say it. That’s just, yeah, like I said, like we started this conversation, there’s, you know, eight billion ways to say it, but you know, you, you, you, hopefully we’re all saying the same thing in our own way. But yeah, that’s, that’s definitely another way to put it for sure.

You’re going to, you know, in your, in your desire to achieve the program that’s been implanted in you, you’re going to start to have to, you know, you’re going to, unless you’re in total denial, you know, you’re going to come across the stumbling blocks to help you recognize that you’ve been programmed.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s it. That’s how I should have said it.

So when you do these difficult yoga poses, ultimately all you’re doing, you just put in a stumbling block in your own way, in your own path so that you can reveal what’s actually true and what’s not. And if you can do that without judgment of yourself, then you’re actually going to be more present because you’re going to experience the truth or the universal laws that were there the whole time.

And ultimately that’s what it’s all about. I think Bryan, we’ve been talking for ages and basically I’ve run out of time, but I just want to say thank you for coming on here and sharing all this stuff. I’ve found it like very insightful. Love your energy and all that stuff. Have you got any final words or anything like that that you want to share just to sum this up and can you just remind people where they can find you if they want to, you know, do some yoga or if they want to read your writing as well and all that kind of thing.

Bryan Kest: Yeah, we have, you know, we have so many, you know, blogs written.

I mean, like, you know, books worth of blogs written on our website, poweryoga.com. We have thousands of classes where people, you know, the idea of these classes, it’s yoga practice, right? It’s to take you through a journey of wellness while trying to implement, you know, these concepts that we’ve been talking about for an hour because, you know, you can talk about it forever, but at one point or another, you have to practice it.

You know, you have to develop the ability to stay calm in a difficult moment like calmness is a muscle.

You have to develop the humility it takes to get out of your ego and back off, you know, you have to develop the ability to be accepting of who you are and where you’re at. These are all like muscles that need to be developed.

And, you know, this is the kind of stuff we’re working on. And so it’s kind of like this, I call it a safe place to practice living, you know, so you get so good at it that one day you can, you know, it transcends the yoga mat and permeates your life. So, yeah, all these concepts are great, but, you know, it’s like a, I always say like, you know, you could go to church on Sunday morning and the preacher usually says the most amazing things. And everybody in the congregation screams, amen. Like we all agree with the preacher, but then we all go back to our life and nothing fucking changes.

Yeah, yeah. How come nothing changes? And the reason nothing changes is because you have to do more than agree with the preacher. You actually have to develop the qualities that preacher was preaching about. You can’t just agree.

That’s not enough. You actually got a set in motion. These ideas and concepts that you were agreeing with. And that’s the difficult part.

And the easiest way to do that, I believe, is to find a community that values these things. Right? Because it’s hard to be a spark in the middle of the ocean.

You keep getting put out. But when a bunch of sparks come together, you get a flame and it’s much harder to put out the flame. And that’s what community is. It’s people of like mind supporting each other in a certain mentality. So it’s easier for you to hold on to that mentality. That’s why the yogis go to the ashram and the Christians go to the church and the Jews go to the synagogue and the Muslims go to the mosque.

Because those places support a certain mentality and it makes it easier. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re supporting a certain mentality. That’s the people that are listening to you are being supported in something.

Oli Anderson: But you’re right. Ultimately, it comes down to acting on it.

And if you act with more people, then of course you’re going to get more results and it’s going to make a bigger impact on your life because other people are going to mirror you, but it’s going to make a bigger impact on everybody else that’s sharing that journey with you.

Bryan, thank you so much. Honestly, this has been amazing for me. I just love everything you just said about the sparks and the flames and everything. Bryan, thank you so much. Honestly.

Bryan Kest: My pleasure, man. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. It’s always an honor to be invited. Thank you.

Creative Status is a podcast about using your creativity to increase your status and improve your health, wealth, and relationships.

Action changes your brain 👇

When you take action and move forward in life your brain learns to FORGE new connections and to allow you to expand into WHOLENESS.

This is why there can be no real growth or momentum built in your life without taking action and allowing this process of CONNECTION to actually take place.

The opposite of this NATURAL DRIVE TOWARDS WHOLENESS is that we allow the fragments of ourselves to hold us back, cause us to hesitate, and to BLOCK our own path with all of the things we ‘think’ we already know instead of actually going out there and finding out what’s true for ourselves.

The most common of these ‘blocks’ is the sense of IDENTITY that we CHOOSE for ourselves (often unconsciously) because of the things that we’ve already been through and our need to SURVIVE and protect ourselves from similar things in the future.

There is nothing ‘wrong’ with this but when we FILTER everything in our lives through this identity we end up blinding ourselves to our own truth and potential and become PASSIVE in order to keep this ‘identity attachment’ in place.

Part of the solution is to cultivate a BIAS FOR ACTION as this will get us in the habit of moving, growing through the limitations that this identity ‘filter’ shows us, and becoming more WHOLE as a result.

This works in both life and creativity (really the same thing)!

Genein Letford (@geneinletford) is keynote speaker, coach, host of the podcast Create and Grow Rich, and the developer of Intercultural Creativity. She helps people to improve their lives by using creativity to be more confident and courageous.

Her background in education and creativity has given her a unique perspective on how the development of our minds and bodies can affect us throughout our whole lives. We discussed the mechanics of this in this episode a long with a whole host of things that will help you on your creative or life journey.

If you want to know how to develop a better relationship with yourself and how some of the science behind creativity and the creative process can help you reach some of your goals then check this out for sure.

There was a lot of great insight and energy in this conversation and it will definitely make you more creative if you can act on what you learn!

Listen using the player above or any podcast platform!

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus

Episode Links:

Check out Genein’s website: geneinletford.com

Caffe Strategies: caffestrategies.com

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