109 : Cultivating Resilience & Psychological Flexibility On The Path to FI with Dr. Adam O'Neil

Welcome to the Mindful Fire Podcast, a show about crafting a life you love and making work optional using the tools of mindfulness, envisioning and financial independence. I'm your host, adam Cuello, and I'm so glad you're here. Each episode of the Mindful Fire Podcast explores these three tools through teachings, guided meditations and inspiring interviews with people actually living them to craft a life they love. At its core, mindful Fire is about creating more awareness and choice in your life. Mindfulness helps you develop self-awareness, to know yourself better and, what's most important to you, by practicing a kind, curious awareness. Envisioning is all about choosing to think big about your life and putting the power of your predicting brain to work to create the life you dream of. Your financial independence brings awareness and choice to your financial life, empowering you to make your vision a reality by getting your money sorted out and, ultimately, making work optional. And here's the best part you don't have to wait until you reach financial independence to live out your vision. Mindful Fire is about using these tools to craft that life now, on the path to financial independence and beyond. If you're ready to start your Mindful Fire journey, go to MindfulFireorg slash start and download my free envisioning guide In just 10 minutes. This guide will help you craft a clear and inspiring vision for your life. Again, you can download it for free at MindfulFireorg slash start. Let's jump into today's episode. Adam, welcome to the Mindful Fire podcast. I'm so glad to have you here. Thanks for having me. I'd love to have you start by sharing a little bit about who you are, your journey and what you're up to in the world.

Yeah, professionally speaking, I'm a clinical and high performance psychologist based here in Boulder, colorado. I've done a lot of work over the last maybe 14 years with athletes, performers, singers, dancers, stage actors, things like a lot of folks in the tech industry really on just what it means to have a wide range of psychological health and flexibility and using mental training techniques to achieve some of those goals. For folks, training identifies just a white, male, cisgender person here in, born and raised in the United States, and I feel like I'm on a day to day basis just really working toward creating practices and strategies, techniques that really highlight social justice and equity with the clients with whom I work. I do a lot of psychological testing for folks in my private practice here. I do a lot of work with autistic people with ADHD disorders, people with trauma histories, anxiety disorders, things like that. But then I also find myself in performance situations where I might be behind the scenes on a pool deck in a locker room behind stage someplace, really just being there with people who are really getting after something meaningful in their life. I'm a dad. I got two little ones at home and they're growing up faster than I want them to grow up and I'm able to get through COVID, this time with my lovely partner and wife. So, yeah, I just feel like that's all important to know before I speak forward, because it's passing through those filters.

Yeah, thank you for sharing all of that. And I'm curious about. A huge area of your work is with high performance individuals, whether they be executives or athletes. I'm curious what's presenting in their life that they say I need a high performance coach. Like what do they come to you and say I need help with X?

Yeah, I think, if I get answered this way from like the Western scientific lens, right, there's something that many of these folks have picked up on in their life and it might be hard to articulate what's not feeling great. That's how I meet a lot of folks. So a lot of folks are just wanting some data, perhaps to inform what's going on in their mind and their relationships and their behaviors. Nowadays there's a good amount of folks who are structuring conversations around changing old habits and old behaviors that they may have developed over the last couple of years. That they're just it's not helping anymore. It might have helped to get through the last couple of years with COVID and social restrictions due to COVID. A lot of people are transitioning now to different work environments and structures there and they're finding it more difficult to adjust. The way that they might have. A big part of that population too, is just they have expectations for themselves. They have for the high standards for themselves and they're trying to figure out how do I be aspirational in my life and have ambition without paying such a high cost mentally? And so that's where I find myself in those kinds of conversations. But I guess, speaking more from like a Buddhist traditional standpoint. There's just there's suffering. There's a lot of suffering in regards to so many different environments. And suffering could be very helpful to help you push through things or it might be a motivating factor, but over the course of time it could be really fatiguing and not helpful. In a grad student, for instance, who has to perform at their very best and week 10, right, a week number one. But in week 10, when they're most stressed, when they're most hired, when they're most overwhelmed with lots of different tasks that they have to do or things they have to complete that that's challenging. It's really challenging and it's really hard for them to relate to other people in their life sometimes. Sometimes just don't get it what it means to be performing at that level for that long. So it becomes a really isolating experience for a lot of folks and lonely. But in general like I'm also there during championship games and during emotional relieving hugging your teammates after a playoff win, or people who just got drafted, or people who are entering into the program of their dreams or people who've just got a raise, something like really amazing. So it doesn't have to be just disorder focused or challenge specific. It could be during times of just really incredible emotional range of hope, optimism, gratitude, possibility. So it's a really fun experience for me just to experience that kind of range with and for my clients.

Very interesting. Yeah, so it sounds like often there's something going on in their life and their pursuit of their craft or their sport or their work that they feel like something's missing or something needs to change. There might be a little bit of suffering there and they come to you and you're able to help them work through that and give them some tools. And also it sounds like you're just someone they can rely on, trusted, knowledgeable person that they can come to in the good times and the bad, and you're going to be there in their most important moments and give them that level of someone's in my corner and I can talk to them and I can work through things that'll help me be my best in this moment.

That's the hope. Am I capturing that? Yeah, that's the hope, it's it. You'd have to ask, like if you've ever worked with somebody who just they go out of their way to try to get you. It's like they try to understand you or they try to really be there for you when you're in need. But you're also somebody that you think about them. When you just have like an amazing day or you get something on your phone, that kind of challenges, you like hey, text somebody that you really love today, you think of them. It's just nice to have people in your corner and sometimes it's just really hard to be vocal about those relationships, especially after so much social restriction in the last couple of years for COVID. I think that like finding ways to connect with somebody who actually cares what you say. That's who I hope I can be for some of these people. But you'd have to ask them if they feel that way. But that's a big part of my experience when I think about my life so far to date, making a list of people who I felt really got me. It's amazing to see like 30, 40, 50 people on this list. I just hope to support people in that way so that they feel supported. That's really at the end of it. I could care less if it's me. I just hope that people feel supported and cared for and yeah, and like what they're doing is meaningful and it's not just this isolated event that nobody really is noticing. I just want to notice. I want to notice those things that people are doing Very cool.

Yeah, I know two things you mentioned mental training and psychological flexibility.

Yeah, I guess to provide a loose definition of psychological flexibility there's a lot of life for me when there's options available. I think one of the things that really drew me to the field of high performance psychology is the folks that I get to work with. They're really pulling me behind the scenes on a lot of their stuff that they're working through, and a large part of it is just trying to be the best version of themselves as they can be, as cheesy as that sounds. So I find myself in conversations with people who are executive directors of schools schools for kids with special needs and an hour later I'm on a phone call with a professional athlete and then an hour later after that, I'm trying to get my kids to relax in a swimming pool and overcome some of those initial fears of like holding breath underwater for a really long time or something. My day is just really diversified in that regard. So I think a lot of life for me right now is just having opportunities for growth in lots of different areas. But yeah, I'd say mindfulness, resilience, mental training it's factoring into my life in lots of different ways, in my profession too.

Okay, yeah, I think what you had said related to that focusing on areas where there is growth opportunity. Given the many options we can pursue, how do we get clear on what we really want and focus on areas that will take us there?

Yeah, I could give you an example. Sure, a couple of years ago and I guess now is before the pandemic really swept us all away I was a part of a small research team where we invited a team USA Olympic team to go on a silent meditation retreat and we did interviews beforehand and afterwards. The goal there was to see what happens with intensive mindfulness training within a team setting, especially with a team who's really competing at a very high level of their craft and their sport. And obviously COVID came a couple of months later through everything under the bus there. But right now we're just starting to get back into the fold on that, reanalyzing some data, really starting to work with small groups of people who really know what it's like to study elite athletes first of all, but also, secondly, people who've studied intensive mindfulness training before, whether it's on silent retreat or a little bit more kind of formal practices like daily meditators, things like that. So, yeah, we're actually in the process, going through some initial original research right now. So right now I'm reading a lot more of the scientific literature, not just about mindfulness but the role that mindfulness has played for people during and after that initial huge way of COVID. We're not out of the storm by any means, but just now we're starting to get some of the research back from informal meditation practices those who really identify as being resilient people or hardy people and the role that mindfulness plays. It's just starting to get some of that initial data back, so it's been really fun to dive back into the research and see what's being produced now and how can we lend assistance in that regard for the literature base Interesting.

So you're like doing that, you're participating in the research with that team or with just more, not as specific as before.

Yeah, that team went on to win gold in the Olympics in Tokyo.

You did the retreat with that before. Yeah, okay, so it didn't get postponed because of COVID, you had done it already.

By the time we did the silent meditation retreat, it was September 2019. Okay, and then COVID was obviously March of 2020 here in the States, and then our initial goal was to follow up with the team again before the Olympics in 2020. Obviously, the whole game's got pushed back a year, so we were able to connect with a few of the folks on the team before the 2021 start date in Tokyo Games. So we have these multiple time points where we're doing interviews and collecting data to figure out what are the lasting effects, if any, of an intensive mindfulness meditation retreat, especially with folks who are really just right at the tip top of their game and the world standings especially. Yeah, it's pretty fun to get back into the research side of things and go back to the roots of this stuff. So that's just one example of a project I'm working on a daily basis here Very cool.

Yeah, so, thinking about it, the podcast is really about living mindfully on the path to financial independence and beyond. So it's like mindfulness, envisioning resilience and financial independence. And yeah, so it's really about what you were talking about right Be their best self, live in alignment with what's most important to them and using the tools of mindfulness and financial independence to create a life that allows them to do that right. Because if you're constantly stressed and you're constantly in that fight or flight, you can't do that. If you're constantly living paycheck to paycheck, you can't do that. I really like what you said about options. I'm actually putting together a presentation now for my team at Google about financial independence, and options are the focus, because I think that's really what it's all about. When you have options, the world opens up to you and I feel like you get a greater sense of ease and peace and agency when you have that. So that's what's been on my mind about that.

Yeah, I love that. I wouldn't say that I'm an expert in any regards for financial independence and there are, I guess, some of my psychologist colleagues that I've read their articles and there's some of their works, some of their books, as far as they're consulting with companies or individuals about financial health, financial options, for that matter. But for me it's almost like what I've found to be the most alive in those conversations with clients about money. It's almost like money gets to be a representation of how we relate to internal things too that we experience in our life. And this might be an example of just an overthinker overthinking stuff, but I heard this improv comedian the other day. I forget what I was watching, but they said there's four ways to manage money. You can spend it, you can save it, you can invest so it grows somehow else, or you can give it away for charity. And then the big joke was but you could also gamble. That's I'm taking out a context, totally not funny when I say it. But if you look at it that way, then for me I wonder, like, what about self talk? Like, let's say, if you speak really angrily to yourself after you make a mistake, do you spend that? Like, do you express it to somebody else, or do you say it out loud? Do you save it? Do you like, hold it inside and, just like you, just create a grudge with yourself? Do you invest in, in yourself? Talk, which means you proactively go out of your way to really identify what your self talk patterns are and work with that. It's workable as long as you're paying attention, you're aware of what it is that you're saying to yourself. What's the fourth one? Oh yeah, it's invest, save, spend, give it away, give it away, give it away. So sometimes, like this would be as if, like before, you say it out loud to somebody else, you edit. You edit the negativity, the angriness out of it, and what comes out to somebody else is a little bit cleaner. So why wouldn't you do that with yourself? Why wouldn't you talk to yourself that way, especially after having made a mistake or been activated in some particular way, like a surprise, for instance? So in a performance environment, this is a really important skill that people can harness, not just what you're getting from the environment, from your context, but there's an inner environment too, and you get to be the one to create the conditions for really optimal growth in that regard. It's just really hard to do if you have no awareness, no way to change yourself. So I think that's really how mindfulness is so important at a foundational level not just to be aware of what you say to yourself, but also to do so without reactivity, without so much judgment, without so much battery acid to the tone that you talk to yourself. For me, I find myself like drawing parallels like that a lot in conversations with folks, and sometimes it's just easier to think of it that way. For some folks it's like oh yeah, I wonder if I could give it away a little bit more. And, as it turns out, when we give away some of our money, when it contributes to charities, it's part of overall health, it's part of psychological health especially. So I don't know just little overthinking patterns of mine being exposed here on the podcast.

No, it's great. I think that I do that a lot too. I make connections between things that other people might think are completely unrelated, but that makes a ton of sense to me. And what you're saying about, especially this self-talk and the giving it away right. You can give away, like, think of, like kindness, right. Like you can give away anger. You can give away frustration. You can give away tension, which I have. That's been on my mind recently because I had a little bit less patience with my son around bedtime. It's because he's always like adding steps to the process and just driving me crazy. But I can do what you're saying and I don't need to give away the frustration to him, because that just amps us both up. Right, I can choose a different way to express that and change the outcome right, because, like you said, we're not just being affected by our environment. We are affecting our environment, and internal and external.

So yeah, I believe I'll be the first one to say I have not figured that out. The whole bedtime thing, yeah, it's really hard to have this awareness too. So mindfulness is not in my experience, at least as a parent, just speaking personally. Mindfulness is not this like awesome experience where your mind is being blown and you're like finding all these great insights. Sometimes the insights you find are not great, and so there's a fierceness to a mindfulness practice and, to give you an example, it's like wow, there's so much good stuff going on, but under these circumstances, let's say, it's late at night. You've had yourself a day, so, as your kiddo, they've had themselves a full day. There's overtired, there's an over fatigue that's a real thing. There's dysregulation that's a real thing. And here you are right the one in the family who either is, or should be, in control, or should be the calmest or should be the most patient person, or whatever. But the night after night it's just a really hard thing to access that patience, that kindness, that control. So if you're aware of your patterns yourself, it's like, wow, why do I always get activated at this particular moment of time or this particular environment where I go into? That's also what mindfulness can help you to become aware of is your own patterns that are really all that pretty all the time are not that helpful, definitely not that helpful or productive for people who you're around. So again, that's where the non-judgmental quality comes in. That, I think, is really the most important part of mindfulness training is don't forget about the judgment. The judgment is the tone that you talk to yourself or you talk to other people or it comes out. It's just really frustrating when you know that it's happening and it's still not changing, still not being helpful. So what do you do when you go home? Or you put your head on your own pillow that night, the privacy of your mind? How are you evaluating yourself under those circumstances? And if that adds up over time to be just night after night, you are just not happy with yourself and you don't really know how to change. Like, what do you do? This is a really difficult situation and I think this happens a lot in like corporate settings too. There's certain people that just draw something out of. There's certain environments where you go into. They just don't feel comfortable and I'm speaking from a white male doctor perspective here. There's very few environments that I go into and I feel uncomfortable in. But for a lot of folks that I've had a chance to work with or they don't identify in similar ways that I do this happens more frequently than a lot of that I'm really aware of. So again, can you have an awareness of your environment, Can you have an awareness of your inner environment, and then can you bring some non-judgmental qualities to that experience for yourself too. It could get challenging or then like easy and lemon dropy. It's not like a Disney movie here. This is. It gets hard really hard.

Yeah, I totally agree. It's funny. A lot of what you're saying is like it's resonating so much because it's like very alive for me because I just did it again and it's I do it twice a day and yeah, there's something about going into that environment. It's like my mind is like already expecting resistance and frustration, and I'm aware of it and I try to be non-judgmental about it. But it's very frustrating when you're like I'm like the mindful guy and I'm aware of it and it's still happening. And like today, I was like he does this thing where he like takes the remote for the fan and the light and he goes outside and he turns it on and off and on and off and on and off and opens the door and goes like just over and over again. Today I was just like I'm just going to let it be. And then it was like so I had the patience, find like I run out of patience at some point. It's like I'm doing great, I'm doing great, I'm doing great, I'm losing it. It's frustrating when that happens. But yeah, it's just, it's a practice and I've tried to be like okay, I know it's going to be this time. Let me just try to chill and breathe and be patient with him, because I realized, like the other night, like I don't want to give him this every night. I don't want him to go to bed with dad just yelling at him every time Like that's not good and that's not how I want to show up. But there's only so much patience in the tank and after we've had ourselves a day, as you said, everyone's tired. Some of us are overtired. It's really hard to create that space.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing actually just how mechanical this could work in a lot of those kind of circumstances, right? So if you know that there's this really predictable pattern that takes place, something happens either out in the world or in your mind, and then you have that initial kind of major response and then you're left with something at the end of this. And for those Avid readers out there, like big time, like nerds you could look at Judson Brewer's work on this. He's written a couple of great books on this process but it's a pretty, pretty predictable pattern. Something happens, you behave and you're left with something after the end of it. And I come back to this a lot. There's some really good research on this. So if you know about the pattern that takes place, it's like something happens. Let's say he grabs the remote control. That's the first thing. Your behavior is more of like oh he's doing this again when I was hoping he wouldn't do this today. Whatever it is like. You tell yourself you say somebody out loud, that's your initial response and then you do whatever you're going to do as a dad take it away, you avoid it, you distract yourself, whatever. That's what you're left with and then it happens again tomorrow. It's a really predictable pattern. So once you become really aware of just how like mechanical that pattern could be, then eventually you get to a place where you feel a little disenchanted by the behaviors that you've typically do. And one way to become a little disenchanted is just to ask yourself, like wow, am I getting that worked up over just this? Like wow, that's amazing, my son could do this and my body responds so strongly. I wonder if there's another way that I could go about this. And it really just starts with just knowing in this pattern, this boringly predictable pattern, it's like that's how boring it is. And then when you become a little disenchanted, then you can go through the same process that you normally do and you're just like wow, that's. It doesn't even feel like it creates a spaciousness, this psychological spaciousness where you can like start to entertain new ideas. But again, this doesn't really happen without awareness of it happening in the first place. I don't want to like lean too far into this experience that you just shared, or overthink that one too. But this is going through this like really predictable pattern of habits and asking is now the right time to change those habits? That's where I find a lot of my work comes in on a data basis, learning about people's habitual predictable patterns.

Yeah, absolutely yeah, you're right, that just happens again and again. It's just like me going in there and him doing something and me reacting. It's like the reaction is almost like out of like a, almost like a disrespect, like I'm feeling he's disrespecting me, even though I wouldn't say that or and certainly he doesn't even he's not doing it for that reason, but that's the way I'm receiving it, and so that causes me to shut down a little bit or get triggered in a way, and it's just yeah, like you can just become aware of that. And I think mindfulness is the perfect tool for that, because you need to come and be able to see it clearly without the judgment, because the judgment is just more trigger yourself, more Right, like yeah, and so if you release the judgment, you can start to see it more clearly. And the next step is choice. Really, everything I think about whether it's financial independence, mindfulness, like the overlap I see there is awareness and choice Right. First you have to be aware Right, and then taking it to the money aspect, like if you're completely unaware of what your life costs and completely unaware of how you're spending your money, there's, you don't have a lot of options and you don't have a lot of choice, but the more aware you are there, you can say, hey, actually I'm doing these things that aren't useful or I'm spending money on things that aren't useful. Let me choose a different way. And bringing it back to what you're saying, I can and I'm trying to practice choosing a different way, like today, not freaking out but going up and yelling at him when he's opening and closing the door five times just because I know it's going to happen. He's just doing a routine, he's all about routine and he just likes adding steps to the routine. Yeah, so, and like you said, is it worth me getting so worked up over this? Is this really what I want to get triggered and pissed off by? Yeah, no, so I can just choose a different way.

Yeah, isn't it funny how that happens. It's like when you're feeling like, let's say that if you were hangry, chances are you're going to be reactive. Or let's say you're late to something, there are environmental and situational conditions that kind of make us go back to these really early lessons of like how do we handle stress, and it almost feels like totally unlike ourselves. So to be in an environment where you have to perform at your very best and you are being scrutinized, often by other people, all of a sudden you have this like little bit of wiggle room psychologically where you can make that choice. Let's say, for instance, if we and this might sound weird, creepy maybe, but let's say that you set up a whole bunch of cameras, 24 hour, closed caption cameras around your house and then you just continue to live your life the same way, I wonder how you would react under those conditions. You could still be hangry, you could still be late for something, but if you knew you were being filmed, potentially watched and scrutinized by other people, I wonder if that would create that little bit of extra space before you react it. And then you, that's. That difference between action and response is when you know that other people are scrutinizing you. There might be a little tiny bit of like second guessing, just enough so that you can maybe look like you're a little bit more patient or look like you're a little bit more kind, but internally you're just still struggling. It's a little tangent there. But creating those like little mental games that you can play with yourself, that might interest you a little bit or bring in a little bit more curiosity, that might be a helpful singular step before expecting that you're going to have a choice in the matter, because sometimes you just don't. It's a good point.

Yeah, yeah. Having a little curiosity, I think, really opens things up right. It builds on the awareness and starts to move towards possibilities that you might not regularly think or go to because you're so entrenched in that pattern. So, adam, one of the things you mentioned that when you were describing your work with these high performance individuals is you try to give them tools for psychological flexibility. Could you tell us a little bit about what that means and how you equip them with those tools?

Yeah, it's funny. My mind went to like three different places with that question. One place it went is to compare psychological flexibility to its antithesis, which would be being psychologically rigid, and to go through an environment that's quickly changing and very challenging, such as a performance environment, it'd be really helpful to be flexible and to work with what you get. To see everything around you is potential workable data, and that's really it. So imagine like being on stage. If you've ever been on stage, I don't know, doing improv comedy or singing or doing a play or something like that and then all of a sudden in the crowd, what you see in the little light that you see, how does somebody falling asleep or a heckler under those circumstances, if you were being pretty rigid, if you just try to stay with your plan or your song or whatever everybody notices and you might actually tense up a little bit more sweat, a little bit more quiver to your voice, something like that. But when you look at some really amazing performers on stage, they already thought how do I be my best under those conditions when somebody's falling asleep or heckling me? And it's not like they prepare the words that they would say or the jokes they would tell the heckler. They just prepare for the feeling of having that unsettledness. They build into the algorithm what it means to be uncertain how the next few moments are going to go and if they do, that's being really flexible. Very different from being a rigid, which is like holding on tight and hoping for the best, being very different when you talk about psychological flexibility, of being able to work the moment that you're in the other way. That my mind went is when we talk about psychological flexibility, we can also address things like the stigma around mental health. Sometimes I'll meet somebody who says, oh yeah, I don't need a psychologist, nothing is wrong with me. So there's the assumption that to work with somebody who's a therapist, a counselor, a psychologist, social worker, things like that, that means that something is wrong and you have to be vulnerable in order to benefit from that work. But if we take a wider view of what it means to be psychologically healthy, there are evidence-based practices that we can take to savor those moments of happiness a little bit longer. We can change our relationship to things that maybe have been scarier at one point in time, but we can fall in love with something in the future. What it means to be psychologically healthy and mentally healthy is not just the absence of disorder or the absence of challenge, it really is inviting and having a presence of a wide range of emotional health. I guess that's where I'd go with it. Being flexible is I'll just imagine, having a gajudo approach to life. As life just keeps throwing stuff your way, you have the wherewithal of the flexibility to move with it without getting stuck. If we can move from a restricted or a stuck place to a more liberal not so much in the political sense, but we feel liberation and freedom to do what we want to do and we feel good in our skin to be able to do that that's a really big process for a lot of folks. That's what I mean by being psychologically flexible.

It sounds like you cultivate the ability to handle anything that life throws at you.

At least expand your toolbox. We don't have to get ahead of everything. In fact, we can't predict the future. I read this really great book called Super Forecasters a few years ago. I think it was like 51% of the time is the best humans on earth can predict the future 51% of the time. Outside of that, it's a crapshoot. We don't have to know what's going to happen. We don't have to be certain about every little thing that we do. When you are in a performance situation, there is a letting go that's almost required for that process to take place. What is your relationship like to that process? It didn't go of control. What is your relationship like to feeling those feelings of anxiety? What is that relationship that you've developed over the course of your life to doing something under judgment and scrutiny of other people? That's something that we learned as we've grown up. Can we change the things that we would want to change if it means that we can actually be ourselves a little bit more frequently in performance environments Again, cheesy, but very tangible when you feel that.

How does mental training fit into developing this ability to be more psychologically flexible?

Mental training is not that different from physical training. You can train your spirit if you identify spiritually with something, or religiously. This would be chalked up to a training regimen where you're developing skills, you're developing practices, you're developing a competency with certain things or relationships, whatnot. If you took the mind as a trainable mechanism, then we can continue to get better at it with a little bit of intention, with a little bit of practice. Can you think of a time when you've been at your absolute best?

Yeah.

Yeah. What words could you use to describe what that was like for you?

I would say, embodied, open. What came to mind in this moment, and when you were talking about psychological flexibility before, is when I'm facilitating at Google. So the course I teach is called Search Inside Yourself. It teaches emotional intelligence and leadership through mindfulness. When I'm facilitating that in person predominantly, I feel like I really need to show up and embody the material that is going to communicate more than any words that I use, and I really feel that, to the example of psychological flexibility, feel like I can handle anything that comes up. When you were talking about it, what came to mind was the time when the fire alarm went off. When we were doing it, we had to get everyone out of the building and then we had to come back. And how do I just get back into that, embodying the material, which is mindfulness and presence and openness. I was able to do that and I was able to guide a new facilitator through that experience. That's what came to mind, really just open, flexible, present. Yeah.

That's awesome. Thank you for sharing. What I heard was two big things. One is that when I asked you what was that experience like for you, what word or words would you put? The first couple of words that you said was I feel, or I felt I hear this a lot, too is when people are at their best. Sometimes it's a feeling. That's the memory. It's not so much the content. It's not like you could tell me the date that happened you might, or the room number that you were in, or exactly what slide you were on if you were using PowerPoint. In that moment there was a feeling that stayed as a memory. Sometimes this becomes. The reference point for a lot of people is when they're at their best. In other words, how do they create that standard for themselves for future performance? Sometimes they'll go back in time for a feeling. The second thing that you said was embodiment. That was a big theme that I heard. If I were to ask you here directly if embodiment of the material was a trainable thing, how would you train it? I'm actually curious. Maybe I'll stop myself and ask just directly.

Yeah, I think it's. I would train it through meditation. I would train it through bringing mindfulness to my experience, to my thoughts. I think that I'm a little bit more aware of my inner critic or my internal self-talk, which we talked about earlier. I'm able to be a little bit more aware of it and less caught up in it. I feel like there's a little bit more space, and so I think it's really mindfulness is the primary practice that I did for that, but also just being a little bit more open to seeing what's going on in my mind, without believing everything or getting caught up in it or judging it as good or bad, right or wrong.

Yeah, yeah, so that's it. That's what mental training is. It's, first of all, being aware of what's happening for you and from one moment to the next, some moments seem bigger. They're just more emotionally like laden, so you can investigate that after the fact. Let's say that this embodiment is something that you experienced in the moment. That's a really awesome trainable thing. But if you can get ahead of it, you can proactively train embodiment so that it's there for you when you really need it. Now we're starting to work with that. So for people that I work with, if what they're answer to, what's it like when you're at your best, if their answer was I was really confident, then yeah, that's really nice to say, oh man, I wish I was confident back there. It's something very different if they said no, I am confident right now, and that's even something different if you said no, I'm gonna proactively train confidence so that it's there when I need it. And that's really the arc of mental training, and you can find lots of evidence-based practices that really tap into what it means to have a mindset that's really flexible in threatening or performance situations. And it's just proactively training that up, knowing what makes you feel like yourself and then sometimes getting creative with just training your mind in that particular fashion, with also, like addressing some of the expectations that you might have for yourself. So there's a ravelling up of some training and then there's an unraveling of some things that are just no longer helpful and so practically like.

if you wanted to feel confident, like, what would you practically do to practice that feeling?

Well, like we can lean on some research from the 70s Albert Bandora, probably the most eminent psychologist of all time, one of the most cited psychologists. He recently just passed away, unfortunately a couple of years ago maybe almost a couple of years ago now but he studied self-efficacy in the 70s and he was able to identify a few sources of what it means to be self-efficacious. And loosely translated into you can get confident from things that you've done in the past, things that you've mastered. So if you see a bike and you've always ridden a bike, you can pick one up and be pretty confident. Now, if I gave you a bike at the top of a mountain, that might be different. You might be a little less confident. Right, you can get confidence from vicarious learning. So you can look at somebody else go down that same mountain on a bike and say, oh, okay, so it's okay to grip the brakes all the way down the first time. Okay, well, under those circumstances, okay, I can do it, I can do it. You can have people give you support coaches, peers, things like that Say no, I believe you can go down that mountain. You can do that. I've seen you in similar circumstances. You can do that. So that's another source of confidence, and a big one too, is just how are you feeling? Are you feeling the sensations of confidence? Do you feel those butterflies in your stomach? But for you, that relationship to that feeling is like, oh yeah, cool, here we go. Then your body has basically given you all the stimuli it needs for you to make that statement. But really it comes down to self-talk. You're the one saying, oh yeah, I've done this before. You're the one saying, oh well, they believe in me, so, yeah, I could do it. So it really comes down to the quality of the words that you say to yourself, the tone the which you talk to yourself and the science bears this out in lots of different contexts. It really comes down to self-talk and previous experience and the relationships you have. It's really hard to be confident in a vacuum. There's usually something, even the idea of somebody else being at the end of this route for you, that by itself that idea can get a little bit more confidence Got it.

Thank you for sharing those examples. That's definitely helpful. Let's talk a little bit about resilience. I know a lot of your work is in the resilience space. That's actually how I came across your work. You were invited to lead a series of resilience talks at Google on my team. Bringing it back to the podcast, this podcast is really all about living in a way that you're creating the life that you dream to live right and using the tools of mindfulness, financial independence, resilience and envisioning to make that a reality. And so when you work with people who have a vision of their life whether it's winning a gold medal in the Olympics or getting an Academy Award or a Tony Award or something like that it maybe doesn't need to be that specific, but they have a vision for their life that they're trying to make happen. What do you see as the role of resilience in that path? Maybe we can start by defining resilience.

Yeah, yeah. Resilience again loosely defined, is. I remember my sixth grade teacher told the class they asked this question what is resilience? He spent what seems to me like hours and hours, probably like five minutes. But really resilience is your ability to bounce back. So sometimes I'll loosely define it like that, not to get too heady about it, but to bounce back from what you know. Usually there's the presence of something that is surprising or stressful, oppressive in that regard, and your ability to see your way through. You've found a way to get through Despite the circumstances. Because of the circumstances. What have you? So I just say, loosely defined is bouncing back amidst chaos, amidst turmoil, amidst hard stuff. I feel like resilience is one of those things that's very often talked about and I'm probably just another talking head when I define it the way that I just did, but when I see it in person, it's the vision that somebody has for what's possible. That's the reason why somebody would want to bounce back in the first place. So if you feel like you're absolutely needed on your team and it's that social connection that you get from being a part of that team or contributing to that team's success overall, chances are, when you're injured, when you're pushed down, when you experience stress, when you're surprised, membering the importance of being a part of the team or remembering other people as being reliant on you, or even just the thought that other people are rooting for you when you're out, that opinion of itself can give a whole lot of courageous energy to that moment. So I feel like you need a reason to be resilient, and it's also helpful to be really opportunistic in the moment too. And so how would you train this proactively? Train this quality? I think it starts with people building those quality relationships with others, letting people know what's going on for you and how important this endeavor is. This task is, even if it's just like getting through a day, just getting through a day. See if you can get home, see if you can leave all the stress in the car, if you're driving home, or on the subway, using public transit or something like that, and see if you can transition into your home with a little bit more peace, a little bit more kindness, a little bit more focus, a little bit more presence, a little bit more curiosity, whatever that might be for you, whatever is really important to you. But if you let other people know, then you create these accountability structures that really help you to bounce back if you ever really need to bounce back. But you can practice resilience mindfulness training. There's a lot of good research on this. For people who are interested in the research but they really want to know a ton of practices, I'd point you to Sharon Salisbury's work. She's been doing this work for a long time, connecting at that intersection between mindfulness and resilience and the importance of being around people, social support, love, kindness. It's really important. I don't know if I answered your question, but that's how I sit in that space of resilience and mindfulness and support overall.

Yeah, it definitely resonates the first thing that you said about using your vision as the reason why you want to be resilient and it's not. It's like not an active maybe it is, but it's more like it just happens right. When you have that clear vision for what you want to create in your life, you have a reason to keep going Right. And when you have a reason to keep going, whatever comes your way, you're gonna try to figure out a way through it or around it or over it or under it, and so that was really interesting. I do want to again qualify that.

Resilience is this really broad, general term, and it often can come off as shame inducing, and so if other people expect that you should be resilient, why aren't you bouncing back? You should be fine by now. I just want to name that too, because that's a really crappy place to be when you receive that message and you're doing the best that you can to keep your day together. So when we talk about being resilient, I think it's really like a very personal experience, something that we can often relate very deeply to. But I think sometimes in communal settings it can be tossed around as like a standard or an expectation which is just. We could just develop really caustic relationships to what it needs to be resilient. So I just want to name that first before really diving into it, because it's not that different to really say the word resilient, but you really mean resistant. So if you're being resilient, you'll know it. You almost feel it there's a reason, there's a pathway. You feel like you're an agent for your own life. You can change your own life, you can direct your own life in some regard, in even a small way. If that hope is there, that optimism is there, then I think resilience follows suit.

And what's resistance? How does resistance differ from that?

Yeah, so kind of like we were talking about flexibility and rigidity earlier. Maybe this is another way to frame that conversation. So to be rigid is almost to hold on tight for something that you're I don't know. You've always held on tight too, like talking about financial independence. So if you think about the very some of the very first lessons you've ever had about money even those like fun ideas when you're a kid, like walking home from school or something like that, and you see a suitcase full of money, what would you do with it?

Let me ask you what would you do with that? There was a different answer back then. Back then, I'd probably be like I'm gonna buy a Ferrari, yeah, and though I can't drive and I'm 10 years old or whatever, now I would invest it yeah, which is a not that fun way. When I have my own things, I'm working through with money and being cheap and being too frugal and all of these things and really trying to live more, enjoying it now, not just only oh. When I get to the point of financial independence, then it's all good. I've had a couple of interesting conversations on the podcast recently exploring that. But yeah, I'd probably invest it.

Yeah, it'd be awesome. Funny how things change when you develop executive functions and your brain fully forms. Yeah, you start thinking about the future a little bit more, you start thinking more symbols, and I guess so. So if you think, if you were living your life really rigidly to be dramatic about it then you would spend it on a Ferrari today, just like you would when you're six. You're holding on to that idea and you're not gonna let it go. And that's a little like resistance. Resistance is a little bit like like there's an opportunity to change and you almost don't wanna even explore those alternatives, even if there's a better solution, just gonna hold on to the way that things have always been. That's that resistant quality, but more flexibly. Then you start to explore other alternative ways of being and you can still stay with the choice that you just made, but after you span out psychologically, create some more space to entertain some other ideas. Maybe that's what it could be like to be resilient, because if you feel like you have options, even when you're stuck, that's a really powerful place to be psychologically speaking Totally yeah.

And when I think resistance, I think of just like denying what is right. Just this shouldn't be happening, this can't be happening. I have this vision. I need to like, like you were saying like there's a heck, you're on stage, there's a heckler in the crowd and you just keep going. You just keep, just bite your teeth and that's not happened. When you're resilient, you're like this is happening. I might not want it to happen. What do I do? Yeah, I have this vision. I'm moving towards. How do I keep moving in that direction, given that this is happening, whereas resistance is like this isn't happening, yeah, like, or pretending it's not happening. Yes, of course it's actually. It's obviously happening, but I'm pretending it's not happening. Yeah, yeah, interesting.

Yeah, and believe it or not. There's like specific, evidence-based ways to train that mindset where you change the relationship you have to the heckler in the crowd or that little, small voice inside of you that just says, no, I can't do something different, this is how I was taught Like, this is how it always has to be. It's the same thing. It's just quieter in your mind. It's like a little the little heckler that we have inside. I'm sure somebody has probably coined that term. I'm creating it now. That's good, I like it.

No, it's so true because we have this voice inside and I obviously have had it my whole life, like everyone. But I was totally unaware of it for a long time. But I was. It was there, I was just believing it. I wasn't realizing that there were just thoughts and that I could relate to them differently. And practicing mindfulness and sitting and seeing them arise over and over again Really was like oh, those are just thoughts, like I don't need to believe those, I can choose. Big thing that's helped me. You mentioned the word useful. A lot is asking is this useful? Or you've mentioned helpful, right, like I think of it as is this useful, the story I'm telling myself, is it useful? And if it's not useful, I can let it go. It might come back five minutes later, but I can choose to ask that question and let it go again and again when it's not serving me.

Yeah, yeah, you're just having to compete with, like, the speed of life. It's something to like practice meditation and raise awareness and maybe to change some patterns of your behavior. But then within the context of a really busy life where you're feeling late to things or behind on things or pulled to be in two places at once or somebody's asking you is dinner ready that's the context of life for a lot of people. And so to find these little wedges of mindfulness into that really busy life, that could take a little bit of time to create that space. So if there's any listener up there who might relate the way that I relate to it is like you might go through these waves where you might find that energy to wedge in some mindfulness practice, some actual practice, into your life. And then there are times in your life where it's just really hard to do that. Yeah, it's just, that's okay, that's okay. There's informal ways to practice, there's subtle ways to practice too, and just being aware of this thing that's happening inside and in your environment too, just even just doing that a little bit more awareness, you might actually notice that there's more space than you think to start with. So no shame here, don't want to shame any listener here.

Yeah, no, I really like what you're saying. You know what? That you brought that point up around shame and I should be more resilient and I should be able to handle this and you should. Why aren't you over this already? Like all of that, like a lot of times, resilience is talked about as like Grit and just like bite in your teeth and just charge in forward. The way I think about it and I would love your thoughts on this is like the flexibility, adaptability aspect is almost more important, and so I'm curious what are your thoughts on the kind of the grit approach to resilience versus the Flexibility, adaptability approach?

Yeah, I. For me, it's like I'm a little Wary of some of the research that I read. It's not to say that it's not good science, but the research around grit or mental toughness, hardiness, resilience. I pay a lot more attention to who is the population that's being studied from one scientific study to the next, and how are people operationally defining this based on their cultural backgrounds? That I can guess, because not a lot of researchers will I Identify at the get-go of a paper that they write like this is how I identify. This is even just the way that, like cisgender, researchers will write about things or conceptualize things is Not so much silencing People who don't identify as cisgender, to give an example. But I'd love to hear more examples from populations of people, researchers as well, studying populations of people that are really represented in the scientific literature as much as we would hope. I'd love to hear what more people are talking about as far as Great goes, when it comes to black and brown communities, for instance, and I'm sure there's stuff out there if you, if there's a listener, that's like oh yeah, I got an article or a book, please send it my way. But that's where I start before buying into the concept and and there's some concepts that are really quite compelling Because they span back many generations and many cultures a lot of mindfulness research, but also just overall books that don't come from America or Canada North America, rather. Those are really intriguing to me at this point, by going back to what it means to be a mindfulness practitioner in Sri Lanka, or If the conceptualization of mindfulness is very different from, like, a cognitive neuroscientific perspective. So I guess that's I'm. I'm on the fence still, I'm reading, do what I can to catch up and, of course, I think COVID really threw off a lot of the scientific articles that I'm reading is just the way that we study people is different. It's inherently different. Now we can't make the same assumptions that we might have been able to make a scientific community Even three years ago. So I'm still reading, still getting there, but gripping on the holding on in order to get what you want. I think we can start to change that narrative around a little bit. There's a way to feel free, there's a way to feel liberated, there's a way to feel like yourself and still get the things that you are Wanting to get after in life. I don't think you have to buy into like the hustle culture kind of thing, where you do it this way and it has to be a private experience and don't tell anybody that you need some help. I'm not buying into that at all.

Yeah, all right. So, adam, let's switch gears now into what I call the mindful fire. Final four and the first question is One thing that you mentioned when we connected about doing this interview was that you're really thinking about when in your life there are areas for growth opportunities. I'd love to understand what that means to you. What does it mean to really identify the areas in your life where there's opportunity for growth, and how would you recommend people think about or identify and invest in those areas in their own life? For me, I think.

Change happens within the context of relationships and if there's an opportunity to develop and cultivate a High-quality relationship with one or more people, I feel like I'm right now. That's what gives me life. What's this? What gives me some fire? It's gives me some energy. But it also helps to have a decision-making framework around that, you know. So sometimes, like for me, I might get called in for like a one-off or a speaker series, I guess speaker kind of thing, or a lecture. If there's growth within the larger organization, that's gonna. I feel it. I feel that it's almost like my body has computed that algorithm for me so I don't have to cognitively make the decision in order to invest in those opportunities. But I've done enough isolation in the last couple years. I've done enough loneliness over that feeling. I'm not at my best there. So right now I'm trying to Really get to know people and also have a lot of express, a lot of spaciousness with people, as they're also trying to thaw out From this time and to relearn what it's like to really cultivate quality relationship. A long-term relationship Doesn't have to be years and years long, but if there's an opportunity to make impact with, with somebody in their life and there's a welcoming of the time that it Takes to build that kind of trust. Yeah, it just feels like that's where I'm at right now, very different from when I was in grad school. Whereas all transactional, it's like you want me to do this, yes, I wanted to do that. Yes, now it's very different. It's like let's see what the sunshine is and let's see kind of like dark cracks I can crawl up in order to get to that sunshine. That's how I'm thinking about growth these days Interesting.

so it sounds like you're looking for areas you want to invest in your life, or the areas where there's an opportunity to grow a relationship beyond just a one-off Transaction, where it's like, oh, I want you to come and speak to my team about resilience and you're saying, okay, that's great, but like do I feel that there's an opportunity to make a bigger Relationship with this person and when this organization, where it's gonna grow into more Sustainable work over time, is that?

yeah, yeah, without getting too dramatic or deep about it too, there's a brand new coffee shop I'm addicted to coffee, right. There's a brand new one not too far away and I'm trying to go there a little bit more frequently, and there's two or three baristas there and we got a little fist bump thing going. So I said thanks and they started it. They just gave a fist bump. I think they do it to everybody. I'm taking it personally. I think it's just for me, of course, of course. But yeah, like that's the thing is. Like now I'm interested in going to that place, and when I'm interested, the thing that follows from that is a little bit of courageous energy. I might be doing something that I might not be used to doing. I might, I might initiate the next fist bump. Right, I might start to get out of my own way, thaw out myself. From this time and when I have that energy, then there's a lot of joy there. It's almost like this, like cascade of like positive things that happen, but it really just starts with like being interested in what could be within this relationship. So it doesn't have to be like a really rich, deep, therapeutic relationship. This is on an everyday Day. Let's just get together as a humanity, as a species, and see what happens, like, hey, we all just well, we all made it the last couple years. Can we just celebrate that Just a little bit with this little fist bump? And then I get caffeinated to some psych.

Right, yeah, yeah, no, it's a good point, like it's. I'm feeling that a lot as well, right, like I've moved across the country during the pandemic, from San Francisco now in New Jersey, and I just don't have a lot of social Community here. I don't have community. I'm feeling like I want more of that and I've been trying to cultivate it online with the podcast and other things, but it's not really the same and I'm craving that, and so it's interesting to hear like you're just taking little small steps. Right, go into the same coffee shop talking to the people, like I go to Dunkin Donuts every day. I don't talk to anybody, I just take my coffee and leave. But I could and I think one of the things we said at the very beginning is, like when we were talking about the negative self-talk and how do we give it out? Right, like, how do we? We can give a little bit of kindness, we can say thank you, we can be specific, like we can ask people how they're doing and actually care about what they're gonna say, even those small things, and I need to. I've thought about, like going to like the rock climbing gym here and I've held off on doing that because of COVID. But I could wear a mask and I could Try it and would be good for me physical fitness wise and also Community wise, not gonna just fall into community, it's not just gonna happen without me taking any action.

Yeah, that's the idea, right, it's like there's an opportunity, just like you the other day told me that every building that you see was somebody's vision. So one thing you could just like pass through really quick. But if you add up like after day of passing through and that turns into years after years and years of passing through, I don't know. It just seems like there's these little tiny opportunities for just a little bit more space. And then, if you had a little bit more space, what would you do with it? Again, cheesy, general, very like stereotypical, psychologist statement. But yeah, who am I if I'm gonna have these conversations with people without really trying it myself? So that's where I'm trying to get to trying to get to that a little bit more frequently every day.

Yeah, any tips on how someone can tune in to the areas of growth in their life, or the opportunities of growth, I should say in their life?

It's a really good question. I'm myself like hesitating to provide like an answer, just because there's so many people who are just they don't have the luxury of that right now. Like, hopefully there's listeners to this conversation. Everything we just said, there's always a quick yeah, but hopefully there are listeners, because that means to me that they're taking in our conversation, they're thinking about it in their own life, they're placing it in their own context, they're kind of checking the boxes that they can and they're finding that there's a lot of boxes that are left unchecked just due to cultural considerations or where they're at financially. If we were talking about like, oh yeah, I just go on vacation five times a year but people are just barely making ends meet, that's going to come off really different. So to feel like you have the luxury to have some growth in your life, I think that's a bit of a luxury. So, instead of having that as a goal or something to pursue, I wonder if we can just take the smallest, tiniest little step and maybe that is just having a moment, let's say 13 seconds to check in with yourself as far as what are those areas where I could grow? If I had the capacity to grow. Where would I want to start? So it could be like, I don't know, maybe academics going back to school, or maybe it's something family related. Maybe it's something like an easy win, like be a little bit more conscious about social media usage every day. Just don't change it. Just be a little bit more conscious about it. Because if we can start like the little tiny baby steps of growth through curiosity, awareness, being a little bit more interested in how your life is going right now, that's just inviting the conversation to continue on with growth. It's like if we're being really literal and you're thinking about a seed, it doesn't just start to flower. In a way, there's like tiny, little tiny steps where nutrients are being sucked in and it evolves into something. It's a very slow moving process. Maybe that first step is just slowing down. Just slow down a little tiny and just see how am I doing right now? And then just ask yourself a question as you go, without kind of the expectation that you need to have growth or you need to demonstrate it. You have to prove it to somebody. This is really about who you are, to yourself or yourself. We start there. But one of my favorite ways to spark curiosity is just to say, that's it.

I got that for start with that.

There we go or really love that word, because when you look at something like, let's say, a tree, and then just maybe you'll think, huh, that's a tree right there. When you do that, it like forces a present moment awareness. It forces your focus to stay on that thing. It almost invites the brain to start to invest and explore the contours of the tree, maybe even like some random creative ideas like are the branches the exact same mirror replica of its root system? That's the thing you just do, it Interesting, and then you just can move on with your life. But if you had two or three of those a day, eventually you just start. You've noticed that you don't buy into all sorts of expectations as frequently as you might have used to, but you start to see things just a little bit with a little bit more like pace, a little bit more sensation, a little bit more curiosity, which is really the point here.

Yeah, yeah, it's like a practice of curiosity, and that's something that I try to do, aspire to do, I should say Aspire to practice curiosity. All right, adam. The second question is what piece of advice would you give to someone early on their path to financial independence?

I'm still figuring this out too as a 40 year old person, and I say that maybe that's the advice that I have. It's like at what point in your life do you start to think about being financially independent? What does that even mean? Starting from a really rural environment, I grew up in Central California in a town called Bishop, and I grew up in the 80s and 90s there, and what financial independence for me, as I was learning about money, was that I was able to buy a house. That was it, and then college wasn't ever really discussed. It was just not something that was in our community all that much. While I was a kid at least, I didn't really see a lot of that messaging. But as I got older, financial independence meant that I had a house, might have had some kids or at least a family to show or whatever, but then I had a job, I had a career. That's what it meant to be financially independent, so I didn't have to rely on an unreliable source of income. But at some point in time I started thinking about just the abundance of what money really is, even though I was born and raised from kind of a scarcity standpoint, like whatever money you get, you hold on, don't gamble. I remember hearing family members say don't gamble, you just lose your money. And there was a scarcity approach to financial independence, which means just save and then pass it on to your kids when you die. That was the messaging. But it's only until recently well, maybe the last couple of years where I started to revisit some of those internal narratives, those messages. So I'd recommend listeners to do that. At what age are you in this more spacious psychology around what money means to you in your life and my partner's? Reading this awesome book called the Soul of Money right now I'm just starting to flip through some of the initial pages. It's a good one. Maybe get a guidebook like that and just explore and lean into some of the exercises and just see what comes up for you. I'd start there and then I think some of the answers will come to you, naturally, given your own cultural background, your own family background, where you sit right now and then I guess, I'd start there.

Yeah, it's a good approach. It's not something we've heard on the podcast before, but, yeah, just what would that mean to you and when would you want to start thinking or evolving your mindset in that way? And also, yeah, Soul of Money by Lynn Twist is a fantastic book. Yeah, it opened my perspective to what money means. Another book an author I had recently on the podcast it's called her name's Sarah McCrum, and she has a book called Love Money Money Loves you, and it's an interesting book. It's like a written, it's supposed. She says it's like a channeled book, which means that it just came through her. She says it wasn't her words, Cool, which was a little bit interesting. But it's all about the energy of money, explaining how it works to humans. It's very interesting. It's a different, totally different than Soul of Money, but same. The title of Soul of Money is very related to what this book talks about. So, just a totally. It's interesting to expose yourself to different ways of thinking about these things.

Yeah, yeah, I'll take the shameless plunks all day, by the way.

Why not right? So the third question is what piece of advice would you give to someone getting started with meditation and or mindfulness?

Oh my gosh, allow error. If you tell yourself I'm going to do this 20 minutes a day for the next month and then you forget to do it tomorrow, what you'd probably experience is like huge, heavy dose of judgment. But if you allow mistakes, you allow failure, you allow error, you allow the judgment to come, you'll notice that it'll come and it'll go and you don't have to sit and levitate off of a cushion. In fact, the hardest part in my experience about being in that role of telling people or teaching people about meditation is it's not the meditation part, that's not the hardest part. It's, like I said before, like wedging it into a really busy lifestyle. But we also, especially if you identify as a high achiever right, you might have a long history of figuring stuff out as you go, not asking for help. I'm going to do it all by myself. I'm going to be independently minded, independently successful. If you have that notion to you and you have this history of achievement, you might actually be like secretly, without your own consent, creating these standards for what it means to be a good meditator. And so if you build in a little bit of wiggle room as much as you can to fail to not have a streak of days on your first week's, then I think that's probably the healthiest way to begin this process. Just knowing this, it's just got to compete with old habits and if that's the case, fine, no big deal. No big deal, just do like five seconds. Call it a day, great job. Tomorrow I'll do like six seconds. You don't have to read every book, you don't have to understand how it works, you don't have to feel good doing it. It's not going to create happiness, it'll just create a little awareness. So, even having the attention to do it on day, one day two week one, week two, the work, good job.

Yeah, I love that advice Allow for error. And the way I like to talk about that is start again, right? Whether you're meditating and your mind's wandering all over the place, start again. Yeah, you're doing it right. You have a hundred day streak and you forget start again. You have a one day streak and you forget start again. It's can always start again, and that's true of everything. We make it into this whole thing that we don't want to do it or we've failed or whatever, and we can just start again. Yeah, all right, adam. The last question is how can people connect with you online and learn more about what you're working on?

I've had a couple of really important people in my life over the last five, six years who just were really direct with me and they said don't go on social media. And I've listened. So I have one social media link it's LinkedIn and my business partner and I just created this private practice in Boulder and we created a website from that. It's called atlaspsychologybouldercom, but it's really just promoting our private practice here in our local community. There's not like I'm not doing like blog posts or anything like that. So when it comes to like marketing, I'm not that great at that Like I'd love to hear from people. I can give you my email. I'm open to direct emails and really interacting on the one-to-one level and I'm not like writing New York Times bestseller books or anything like that. I don't think I'm like in too many people's ears, but yeah, I'd say just maybe check out the website and shoot me an email, connect with me on LinkedIn, and I really do like get a lot of energy from hearing how people are engaging with some of this content and what they're working on in their life and yeah, but there's not that many avenues, you don't need that many.

But I applaud you for being off of social media. I was off for a couple of years and then I started a podcast and realized no one's going to know about this if I don't tell them. But it really is totally designed to suck you in and I have been sucked back in. But, that said, good on you for not getting sucked in. And, yeah, I'll put links to your website and LinkedIn in the show notes and people can certainly reach out to you through those channels and share their thoughts or questions with you. Yeah, I'd love to hear. Thank you so much, adam, for being here. It's been a great conversation and I've learned a lot, and I'm sure the audience has as well. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining me on today's episode of the Mindful Fire podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, I invite you to hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this. This just lets the platforms know you're getting value from the episodes and you want to be here when I release additional content. If you're ready to start your Mindful Fire journey, go to mindfulfireorg. Slash start and download my free envisioning guide In just 10 minutes. This guide will help you craft a clear and inspiring vision for your life. Again, you can download it for free at mindfulfireorg slash start. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next time on the Mindful Fire podcast.