Getting Grounded With Brad Stulberg

Do you want to feel more connected and fulfilled in your life? Have you been feeling a bit off course and disengaged? The practice of groundedness leads to a sustainable path to feeding a life in alignment with your values. In this episode of “Your Life in Process,” Diana discusses how to ground deeply in your values with author and executive coach Brad Stulberg.

Transcript

Do you want to feel more grounded,

More fulfilled,

More connected in your life?

And have the last few years thrown you off kilter a bit?

Today I'm going to talk with Brad Stolberg about the practice of groundedness on your life in process.

There is a healthier,

More sustainable model for success than the striving,

Doing more and feeling like you're never doing enough.

And that model is one where you are deeply grounded in your values as well as grounded in ways of living that help you feel more fulfilled and more satisfied in your life.

Brad Stolberg is an internationally known researcher,

Writer and coach on human performance,

Wellbeing and sustainable success.

He is co-author of the bestselling Peep Performance and The Passion Paradox.

And his work has appeared in the New York Times,

The Wall Street Journal,

The Los Angeles Times,

Wired,

Forbes and more.

And he's a contributing editor at Outside Magazine.

In his coaching practice,

Brad works with executives,

Entrepreneurs,

Physicians and athletes on their performance and wellbeing.

And he's also the co-founder of Growth Equation,

An online platform dedicated to these same topics.

In today's episode,

Brad and I talk about these principles of groundedness,

Everything from being more patient to developing more acceptance,

More movement in your life and more community.

And we start our conversation today with his struggle with OCD,

Which launched some of his interest in the practice of groundedness.

I love this conversation with Brad.

I know you will too.

And at the end of today's episode,

I'll give you some suggestions about how to apply some of the things we talk about to your life.

Well welcome again,

And we're going to talk about the practice of groundedness.

You have a background in peak performance and I think in some ways people would consider that to be sort of potentially ungrounded.

You're kind of launching yourself into being an optimizer,

But it really does feel like this work around groundedness was a shift for you in terms of your approach of balancing out the performance side of things with also sort of these deeper roots.

So tell me a little bit about where you're at now and your thoughts.

So the other book that you're referencing,

Peak Performance,

Is just that.

It's really about what are the practices and principles for when things are clicking and you're at the top of the metaphorical or for some people the real mountain and how do you stay there?

So how do you sustain that level of performance or at least stay there as long as you can?

The second book I wrote is not as well known and that was called The Passion Paradox and that looked at the difference between obsessive passion and harmonious passion or what I'll more colloquially refer to as good drive versus bad drive and focused on how do you cultivate good drive?

So more intrinsic focus than extrinsic,

More for joy and love of doing something versus the recognition that you get for doing it.

So that book's kind of about how do you climb up the mountain,

But what I had failed to address in those two books and what I now ultimately think is the most important is the base of the mountain because if there's no strong base,

If there's no strong foundation,

Then when there is rough weather,

The entire mountain is fragile.

And I had been hearing a lot from my coaching clients over the past handful of years just this feeling of restlessness and frantic frenetic energy and struggling to focus and feeling like they're always on and not wanting to be always on,

But also feeling a lot of discomfort when they turn it off or when they try to turn it off and just kind of stuck in hyperdrive.

In unison with that,

About four and a half years ago,

Somewhat out of the blue,

I got pretty sick with obsessive compulsive disorder.

So I had no family history of any kind of mental illness,

At least not that was diagnosed.

Up until that point in my life,

I was around 30 when this happened,

I was always known as the person that was cool,

Calm and collected when there was a bear sighting or a potential break in somewhere.

So it felt very discombobulating for me.

And through my recovery and therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder,

I started seeing so many practices that I felt were kind of siloed in clinical psychology that obviously not only helped me a ton,

But ought to be applied to the general population.

These are practices and principles that create the base,

The foundation of any kind of striving.

And once I got to the other side of my recovery,

Which I guess you're never really at the other side,

But once I was close enough to out of the woods,

I was able to start to think more intellectually about what I experienced and try to integrate that with my prior work.

And it ultimately became this book about what does it look like to have a really solid foundation before you start climbing.

And even when you're climbing,

Even when you're at the peak,

This is the stuff that you can never leave behind.

Great.

So I really want to talk with you about what are those foundational pieces at the base.

But before we do that,

It feels just sort of relevant to explore OCD.

And because not everyone may have an experience of what it's like to have OCD.

I mean,

Obviously,

If you're a therapist or you have a loved one,

But can you talk more about that,

What that experience was like for you?

So at first,

It manifested as a lot of anxiety and panic around my health.

So this story is in the book.

I think it's an important one to tell.

I was in New York City and I was training for a marathon and I did like an 18 or 20 mile run in Central Park.

So very long run.

And then I very quickly started meeting up with friends and going to do other things and didn't really eat much after that long run.

And I was under the impression that I was meeting my dear friend Adam for dinner around 6.

30.

But it turns out that it was just a bar and there was no food.

So it's not that I hadn't eaten anything,

But like a Clif Bar here,

A Clif Bar there,

I'm like,

I just got to get to dinner,

I'll be fine.

And my blood sugar likely plummeted and I had a panic attack,

Which is not uncommon for when one's blood sugar plummets in a situation like that.

Most people,

They do exactly what I did.

They go to an urgent care center the next day.

The doctor says your blood sugar was low.

You just had some panic.

You'll be fine.

And they get on with their life.

But for me,

I could not get out of this loop of something was wrong with my body.

So again,

Almost sounds more like typical health anxiety.

Started to see doctors and have my blood pressure monitored and all of these medical tests and nothing,

Nothing,

Nothing was wrong until finally they said that,

Hey,

This just sounds like some anxiety about what happened.

So I heard that and I actually felt like pretty relieved.

And for about three weeks,

I was doing great,

Very little signs of anxiety.

And I was on a long car ride.

And I had the most intrusive thought,

Which was,

Well,

Why don't you just drive off the road right now?

And the thought came out of absolutely nowhere.

But it was accompanied by this feeling,

This jolt of panic,

Anxiety,

Despair.

And I said,

I don't want to do that.

And then my brain said,

Well,

Why don't you want to?

Why don't you just do it?

We're all going to die anyways.

And it was a very quick spiral into just this loop of intrusive thoughts about self-harm,

Followed by me being terrified that I was having the thoughts,

Associated with terrible feelings and me wanting to get rid of the thought.

I had awareness that something was wrong.

I need to see a psychiatrist.

So I got into a psychiatrist.

And it was such a relieving moment.

And he kind of smiled and said,

You're not depressed.

You just have OCD.

And I always thought that OCD was exactly as it's portrayed in popular culture.

So you have to be organized.

You knock on a door a certain number of times.

You have to count in your head.

You can only eat red M&Ms,

But not blue ones.

And while there are some manifestations of OCD that show up like that,

It's this much broader category of disorder where your brain is just out of control,

Firing intrusive thoughts that are often associated with terrible urges or feelings,

Followed by you trying to get rid of them,

Followed by them coming back more.

In my compulsion,

Though it wasn't visible like tapping or knocking,

It was trying to problem solve in my brain all the reasons that I wasn't actually depressed or going onto websites and Googling,

Well,

What would a depressed person do?

So when I got the diagnosis of OCD,

I started on an SSRI,

Which is the first line treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder,

As well as with a therapist who I still work with because now she's just like my coach.

And I know you're not supposed to love a therapist.

And it's not in that way.

But she's just such an important person in my life,

Brooke.

And for about eight months,

I probably had a therapy session once or twice a week that for the therapist in the crowd worked through broadly what's called exposure and response prevention,

Which means exposing myself to whatever intrusive thoughts I was having and not problem solving,

Just being like,

Maybe I will,

Maybe I won't,

Which again,

In hindsight sounds so easy.

But when you're in the middle of this,

It's like a crazy mind.

It's not rational,

Followed by acceptance and commitment therapy,

Which was all about,

All right,

Life can't just be about rehabbing from OCD.

So how do you kind of carry some of the lingering parts with you and go on and live the rest of your life?

I think it's helpful for you to describe that whole span of events.

And for folks that may not be diagnosed with OCD,

The processes that you were engaging in,

Humans do.

And those same processes that underlie OCD are very similar processes that may underlie something like an eating disorder or an addiction,

Which is believing your thoughts to be true when our mind just produces these crazy thoughts.

We've all had the thought,

I might drive off that.

Every time I go over this bridge in San Yanez,

It has this really deep drop.

My mind always goes,

I wonder what it would be like if I drove off it.

But I'm not hooked by that thought and I'm not trying to prevent that thought.

And I don't believe that thought to be true.

So therefore I can just let that thought come and go.

So our mind is always producing like crazy thoughts,

Sexual thoughts,

Unusual thoughts,

Inappropriate thoughts.

But when you have something like OCD or you get hooked by them,

It can lead you down this never ending spiral that's just so painful.

So bringing this to groundedness,

I actually think when I think of groundedness,

For me,

It's a very embodied state of feeling our feet on the ground or if we're sitting on the ground or touching the ground,

Just the word groundedness has a quality to it of not in our head,

But arrows pointing down.

And in that feeling state of groundedness.

So it makes sense that you would be drawn to as sort of coming out of this really painful experience that you would be drawn to practices that are grounding.

And I'd love to go into some of those practices that we can also offer our listeners.

And we're not offering them as OCD treatment.

So I'll just say that OCD treatment is exposure and response prevention.

And that's the most effective treatment that you can have.

But I will say we all get caught in obsessive thought and we all get caught in problem solving and we all get caught in fear and in those strong overwhelming emotions.

And that's where some of these practices of groundedness can be really helpful.

And I,

As an executive coach,

So not doing therapy.

And of course,

I'm biased by my own life's experience and by the content of my books and the things that I read about.

But I ultimately think that whether it's exposure response prevention,

Cognitive behavioral therapy,

Acceptance and commitment,

Dialectical behavioral therapy,

All of these third wave therapies,

They work at the extremes when someone is sick.

And if they work at those extremes,

Then of course they can help everyone else.

So I'm a big believer that actually the same kind of exposure response prevention that I went through with OCD is what I do with many of my clients who don't have OCD but really struggle without checking their phone every 20 minutes.

And the exposure is not checking your phone and all the anxiety that comes up with,

Well,

What might be happening in the world?

What might I be missing out on?

And the response prevention is you don't check.

You just sit with that feeling.

And the first day you do it,

You feel terrible.

You feel anxious.

You panic.

The second day it's a little bit less.

Third,

Fourth,

Fifth day.

And by the sixth day you realize that,

Oh,

I don't actually have to check my phone every 15 minutes.

Maybe now let's try a half an hour.

And it's not as extreme because we all live with phones.

It's not considered a disorder to check your phone often.

But the mechanism of changing that behavior is the same thing.

So as a coach,

I look at clinical psychology and I see a toolkit for behavior change and progress that works in the most extreme cases.

So of course it's going to work in less extreme cases.

Yes.

And dose-wise it may be different.

So my early research was in dialectical behavior therapy.

And once a week,

Two-hour skills coaching with individual therapy,

Potentially one to two times a week with diary cards every single day.

Like that will just be overkill.

But the principles of dialectical behavior therapy and the processes that underlie it are the very ones that all of us need.

I mean,

They should be taught in our school system.

One of the things that you do in a DBT group is you do stuff like let's throw sounds at each other.

It's like I say the sound blah and you say blah back.

And then now I say ah and you say ah back.

And it's basically teaching people how to listen to each other and get out of our heads and just be kind of ridiculous.

Because people will need to be able to perspective take and need to mirror and do all these sort of interpersonal effectiveness skills.

But we could bring that more into the real world of just day-to-day living of how do we practice that.

So let's look at groundedness.

And the one that I'd love actually for us to start with is patience.

Because during the pandemic,

I was early on when you do therapy with your clients and you get to see what's in their bedrooms.

I had this client who showed me around her room and she showed me what was on her walls.

And one of the things that was on her walls were these beautiful images of these different values.

And one of them was patience.

Another one was adaptability.

And another was strength.

And the drawings all had symbols associated with them.

So like with patience,

There was a drawing of a cactus and a tortoise.

And with adaptability,

There was a drawing of an armadillo and a pill bug.

And with strength,

There was a drawing of birds of paradise.

And so thinking about patience is actually something that many of us,

When we are struggling with fear or thoughts,

It's like the last thing that we want to do.

But it often is the most helpful thing.

Let's talk about patience and how you conceptualize it and why you chose that particular one as one of our grounds to stand upon.

Well,

I think it's important to situate the challenge of being patient in our current ethos,

Which is all about speed.

How fast does my website load?

How fast can I get in to see my doctor?

How fast does someone respond to my email?

How fast can I get promoted?

280 characters.

Quick post,

Likes,

Retweets,

Immediate validation.

So we're in an environment that is very much perpetuating this notion of speed and speed being good.

And I think that a lot of the frantic and frenetic energy I mentioned that my coaching clients feel is completely losing their bearings in this environment awash of speed.

And it's very,

Very hard to step back and kind of let all that stuff swirl and fly by you.

But to be grounded,

I argue that you have to do that,

Or at least you have to do that occasionally.

And the great paradox,

Of course,

And you were alluding to this,

Is that by being patient,

By stepping back,

You actually get where you want to go faster.

At least if you're playing the long game.

If I wanted to be as productive of a person as possible today,

I would slam espressos and Red Bulls,

I'd sleep two hours,

And I'd get more work done today than I have in my life.

And if I wanted to be as productive as I could this week,

I'd probably do the same thing.

Maybe I'd sleep three or four hours.

But that's not how to have a successful,

Excellent career.

You're going to burn out.

You're going to be miserable.

So even day to day,

The ability to show restraint and to realize that what we're actually after,

Whether it's recovering from an injury,

Emotional or physical,

Or whether it's becoming an Olympic medalist is getting into a rhythm where consistent efforts can compound.

And that almost always requires restraint.

So to me,

The value of patience is being able to stop a little bit short,

To not need to always force things to happen,

To allow things to happen on their own at times.

Not all the time,

But at times.

And again,

This is like your superpowers work until they get in your way.

So many people that I coach,

They get to these wonderful leadership roles in these big organizations because they were so good at making things happen.

And now suddenly you're leading a team of a thousand people.

And trying to make everything happen is a recipe for disaster,

For your own health,

For the company,

For the people that report to you.

But that's what you know.

That is evolutionarily adaptable for you up until this point.

So whether it's looking at just being a human in the culture,

Whether it's looking at being a athlete trying to win a medal,

A leader in the traditional workforce,

It's so important to be able to step back and show restraint.

And the last thing that I'll say is in the book,

I use the word faith.

And I think it requires faith to let things happen instead of always making them happen.

But I like to define faith as confidence based on evidence.

And being patient,

You get evidence that it's like anything back to ERP.

The first time you wait,

The first time you don't rush,

It feels icky.

It feels anxious.

I need to make this happen.

And then you see the result.

And the next time,

Maybe it gets a little bit easier.

So that's how I think about patience.

Patience is an interesting one because it's been co-opted from us.

There are so many things that we used to have to be patient for that we're not.

And I think about my garden and I can't force my garden to grow any faster than it's going to grow.

And if I do,

I could do what they do.

Actually I had someone tell me once I was at one of those cheap garden stores where you get the plants that are all flowering.

Every single pansy is flowering and every single snapdragon is flowering.

And they were like,

Never pick those.

Because what they've done is they've fertilized the heck out of them to just force them to flower.

And when you bring it home and plant it in the ground,

It's going to be a weak plant.

It's a beautiful plant,

But it's a weak plant.

And the ones that you want,

Like I go to Island Seed and Feed in Santa Barbara,

California,

Where there's these beautiful nutritious soil and they've got nothing going on.

They kind of look like nothing,

But they're strong plants.

But we've lost our understanding,

Our intuition around that because everything is miracle growed.

We're dousing ourselves in miracle grow.

And at the same time,

As much as that's a needed thing for today,

It's an ancient practice.

It's part of the Buddhist Parimitas,

These patients.

I have the rocks around my office of the Parimitas and one of them is patients.

And I put them purposely so that when I'm sitting across the way from a client,

I remember,

Be patient.

Like don't try and miracle grow this person.

Be patient because the change,

It will happen.

First off,

That's such a beautiful metaphor analogy.

I will always give you credit and I'm going to use that with clients around the miracle grow versus a more durable plant.

It is also,

I think,

And I know this is a topic that you care deeply about,

Very much related to striving and healthy striving because I think it's a lot easier to be patient if you're in the process of what you're doing instead of focusing on outcomes.

So you're launching this podcast and you're a human.

You might be a phenomenal therapist,

But you're still a human with a human brain.

And there's going to be a part of you that wants to see download numbers and shares and all that stuff.

And that's okay.

But if the majority of your drive and your striving is because you like doing the work itself,

Because you like having the conversations,

I think that enables you to be more patient to let all that other stuff fall into place.

So I think a big part of this is making sure that whatever you're doing,

Whatever you're working toward is in alignment with your values.

Because if you like doing the thing,

Makes it easier to be patient and makes it hard to show restraint if you really like it.

But in the long game,

You're not rushed towards this result.

Whereas if you feel like I just need to get there,

And then once I'm the number one podcast,

Once I'm in New York Times bestseller,

Then I'll be happy.

That's just feeding the rush,

Rush,

Rush,

Which A doesn't feel good and B doesn't work in service of your goals anyways.

It's also based on a different paradigm.

So there's the paradigm of the linear economy.

So for those that are kind of watching,

I'm taking my hand and I'm shooting it up at a diagonal into never ending future.

And then there's also a paradigm of a circular economy.

And there's a circular economy has to do with like,

My hands are in a circle and I'm moving the circles outward.

A circular economy is a system which fuels itself.

And it is something where it's like,

I guess an example of a circular economy would be like people that are reusing clothing and they're turning it into like water bottles and then they're turning the water bottles into whatever.

Maybe it's the other way around.

They're taking the water bottles and turning them into clothing.

But what I think we haven't seen is that the benefits of that slow growth of the circular economy is that it feels so much better to be in it,

But we don't even question that.

I think we just get hooked by the end point and that goal.

And I wonder about that for yourself because you obviously are interested in performance.

You work with high performing folk.

We're talking about patience,

But there's also some other things in your book,

Other grounding principles that can help with that.

So the next one I think is the close cousin,

If not brother or sister of patience,

Which is presence.

And I foreshadowed here by saying that if you like what you're doing,

It's a lot easier to be patient because if you like what you're doing,

You're present.

And if you're fully present in the moment when you're doing something,

Time tends not to really be a thing anyways.

The Taoists called this getting lost in the way.

In Buddhism,

This is nirvana.

To the west,

The Greeks talked about arete,

Which is this excellence that had moral virtue of being completely engrossed in a craft.

And more modern psychologists might call this a flow state.

So you're just in the zone.

And when you're in the zone,

Again,

It's easy to be patient because time is not really a factor.

Time is slow,

Time is fast.

You're just doing the work.

And the more that you can align your work,

Your striving with your values,

The greater chance you have to get into those zones.

I think getting really practical and concrete for listeners out there that might be like,

Intellectually I get this,

How do I do it?

I think with both patience and presence,

We underrate the role of our environment and overrate our own willpower and self-discipline.

So unless you've done years and years of monastic training,

And maybe even if you have,

It's really hard to be present and patient if you've got a phone with nine apps going off in your pocket,

If you've got six social media accounts,

If you've got your email open on one tab.

And those things just completely encroach on your intention.

It's like telling someone,

Oh,

Resist scratching the itch and then dousing them with like itching oil.

It makes it a lot harder.

Now,

A lot of these things for lots of people are just a part of the job that they have to do,

A part of the game they have to play.

And that's okay too.

But I think trying to have some boundaries,

Some compartmentalization between,

Hey,

I'm going to walk into that stream of distraction and rush because I need to,

Because it's a part of my job,

Maybe even I enjoy it.

But then I'm going to be really intentional about walking out of that stream of distraction and rush.

So in my world,

We call this deep work.

And this is around setting aside blocks of prescheduled time where there are no distractions,

No internet,

No email,

No phone,

No nothing.

You are just working on the thing that you want to work on.

And in those moments,

It's really easy to be patient because you're doing the thing.

You're not thinking about the thing.

You're not comparing yourself to other people that are doing the thing.

So trying to be present and also trying to create environments that facilitate presence is really challenging in this day and age and really important.

Yeah.

And you use the word boundaries there.

And I interviewed Nedra Twab,

Who's the relationship boundaries guru.

She's all things boundaries.

She's fantastic.

And one of the things that she said is I set boundaries in my relationships to stay in the relationship.

I'm setting the boundaries so that I can stay in this with you.

If I don't set the boundary,

I can't stay in this relationship with you.

And I would say that's the nature of our work.

I set boundaries in my work so that I can stay in my work.

Because if I don't set boundaries in my work,

Then I am burned out and I will be like,

I'm going on retreat for two weeks.

In order for me to continue to do the work that I do,

And especially as a therapist,

As a mom,

Setting boundaries.

My work is so important,

But at the same time,

I've had a meditation practice for,

I don't know,

Dates back to my 20s.

And then it's changed over time.

In my 20s and in my 30s,

Pre-kids,

It was a sweet meditation practice with a lot of time,

And it was juicy and all that.

And now it's sometimes five minutes,

10 minutes in the morning.

But I have a consistent,

I come down to my space and meditate.

And I've always used Insight Timer as my timer.

I actually never used those,

The guided meditations,

But now that I offer guided meditations on Insight Timer,

I'm like,

Go use the guided meditations on Insight Timer.

But I love Insight Timer because it has a nice bell.

So I would go down,

I'd come down here,

Use my little Insight Timer,

Set it for whatever,

Five minutes of breath work and 10 minutes of meditation.

In the past two years,

I started coming down to my office and I'd open my phone.

This is like 5.

30 in the morning.

I'd open my phone to use my Insight Timer.

And then 15 minutes later,

I'd be like,

Oh crap,

I'm going to be 15 minutes late for my client because my morning is dialed to get to my 8 a.

M.

Client.

And so what I ended up having to do,

And I talked about this with Dr.

Judd in the distraction episode that we did,

But what I ended up having to do was put my phone on focus mode so that I only have access to Insight Timer and notes before 6.

30 in the morning.

Because I cannot,

Someone who's been meditating for this long and had this routine,

I cannot control myself.

It's that bad.

So it's not me.

These are devices that are designed.

Yeah,

But it is you.

It's you making that decision to get upstream of the moment.

Right,

But it's not me that was at fault for getting distracted.

I've given myself up.

Right,

Right.

No,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah,

For sure.

We all are.

But I think that,

Again,

It's so helpful here to zoom out and say that it's not just about being distracted in the moment.

It's about having the intentionality about,

Hey,

This is what I want to do.

In order to stay in this in a meaningful way,

I need these boundaries and it's not because I'm weak or I'm failing,

It's actually because I'm strong and I'm very self-aware.

Whether that's with work,

Whether that's with a relationship,

Or whether that's with your phone.

Because so many of the diseases that affect people in the developed world are diseases of too much.

And we live in a world that is like just too much distraction,

Too much food,

Too much pollution,

Too much porn,

Too much,

Too much,

Too much.

And it's stuff that feels really good in the moment when we're doing it,

But long-term,

It ultimately detracts from the kind of harmony we want to have in our lives.

So I think that in my experience,

People that rely on self-discipline in the moment tend to struggle a lot more than people that just say,

I'm no match for this in the moment,

But I can come up with some boundaries that will give me a chance.

Yeah,

Structuring our environment to support us in meeting our goals.

It's really foundational and it frees up our capacity then to put our energy where we want to put it.

So we've talked about patience.

We've talked about presence.

We've dipped our toe into acceptance a little bit because with ERP,

You're doing a lot of that.

But I also want to make sure we hit on two more before we close because they're actually two that I think are really foundational in our groundedness.

And one is movement and the other is deep community.

I was hoping you'd say those two.

Yeah.

Those are like my jam.

And movement,

I'm a believer that movement is.

.

.

I'm sitting on the floor and I'm practicing movement because I'm sitting on the floor because I'm holding my own body up right now.

Nothing is holding up my back but me.

So my body's moving.

I love Annie Murphy's work and she might be on the show before or after this,

But her work on the extended- Annie Murphy of the extended mind?

Yeah,

The extended mind.

Yeah,

Such a great book.

I would say Dopamine Nation was my book of 2021.

2022,

Even though we're only early into 2022,

The extended mind is just fantastic.

But she talks a lot about,

As I gesture my hands,

About movement and the importance of movement in our extending our mind,

The way that we communicate,

The way that we think.

But it's also a way of grounding ourselves is through movement.

So can you speak on that?

Well,

The first thing is that I had a.

.

.

I don't want to say an argument because I had such a positive relationship and still do,

Of course,

With my wonderful editor,

Portfolio Nicky,

But we had some heated discussions about whether to include this principle or not because it felt a little bit removed to her at least from things like acceptance,

Patience,

Community vulnerability,

These things that are more purely psychological,

At least at face value.

And it's like,

You want to put in exercise?

I'm like,

No,

I didn't say exercise.

I said movement.

Well,

Come on,

That's a euphemism.

You want to put in exercise?

No.

And that required some back and forth.

And I think I'm sharing this story because there's a lot of educating that we have to do with people that for better or worse,

People hear movement and they think exercise and they think being on an elliptical in a gym or training for a marathon or doing CrossFit.

And all those things can be super beneficial.

I've done some version of all those things myself,

But that is such a limiting way to think about movement and inhabiting our bodies.

So for me,

The term movement is any kind of physical practice where you are in your body and you're moving in space.

It can be gardening.

It could be running a marathon.

It could be dancing.

It could be swimming.

It could be hiking.

Ideally,

It's something that occasionally will stimulate your heart rate.

We know that there's lots of good benefits not only for physical health but also for mental health with that.

And it's also so important to sustainable success and excellence in work that is not athletic.

So this is where Annie Murphy's done a lot of good work.

There's some researchers,

I always forget their name,

From the University of Michigan that have shown the power of moving in nature.

And just how we think of our brain as this organ inside our head,

Which it is,

But our mind,

Our creativity,

Our ability to problem solve,

To connect with people is in our body every bit as much as it's in our head.

And our body evolved not to be static but to move.

Our proprioception,

Just being in space requires movement.

And then all of this nice mix of intellectual woo-woo talk aside,

The evidence is so irrefutable that for a solid base of mental health,

Short of medication and therapy,

And maybe even depending on the study at the same level as medication and therapy,

I like to think of all these things as tools in a toolkit,

Physical activity is associated with enormous benefits.

So I like to think of it as not performance-oriented,

Not aesthetically oriented.

It can be these things.

But for me,

It's really about setting a foundation,

A base for whatever you're doing in your life requires inhabiting your body and using it.

And that is true if you are completely able-bodied.

That's true if you have a disability that limits how you can move.

Most people,

Not everyone,

But most people can move in a certain way that lends itself towards this embodiment,

Towards this mental health.

Yeah.

I went to this retreat once with this yoga teacher who spent the class moving our eyes.

So we would paint the wall with our eyelashes up and down,

Up and down,

Up and down.

And then we'd go around the clock with our eyelashes one direction and then the other direction.

And by the end of my eyes were so fatigued.

I was like,

I had no idea.

I am not moving my eyes enough.

And actually there is some research that suggests that a lot of our myopia is associated with lack of movement.

We're looking at things too close.

So all these things are connected,

Right?

Our mental health,

Our physical health,

Our ability to think,

Our sense of groundedness,

And there's ancient principles that people have been using for a very long time and that movement was just built into our lifestyle.

But it's another one of those things where it's been miracle-grown.

So it's like now I go and I do my high intensity interval training for 60 minutes from 6 to 7 AM and then I sit all day long in my office chair.

And actually the benefits of movement would be,

Okay,

I'm getting my ball out,

I'm rolling my feet a little bit and I'm switching spots.

I'm in different spots all day long in my office from outside to inside,

From the floor to the chair to the ball to the whatever because it actually helps me stay in my body.

Because if I sit too long,

My body screams.

You've got it really dialed in because oftentimes a common challenge to movement is,

Well,

Easy for you to say you work from home.

I can't foam roll and do pushups at my desk.

Okay.

A starting point I have with everyone is get a nice water bottle that you'll feel cool owning and just drink from it all day,

Whether it's water,

Tea,

Not soda hopefully.

And then you'll pee more often.

And then you'll just have to get up and go to the bathroom and back.

And just throughout a workday,

These little spurts of up and down are so good for our physical health but also for our cognition.

And the other thing that I do,

Particularly with clients that have work that is more in their head than with other people.

So an individual contributor roles,

Some researchers that I've worked with,

Using the cue of being stuck and of leaning in and scrunching your eyes and being tight.

And I'm doing this right now for those that are obviously all of you are listening,

But I'm leaning into my computer and scrunching my eyes.

That is a sign to go take a walk around your office,

A walk around your house,

A walk around your neighborhood.

And when you come back,

You'll have research from Stanford.

So somewhere between a 40% to 60% increase in probability that you'll solve that problem that you're scrunched on.

So we can get cues from our body.

We're feeling stiff.

We're feeling fidgety.

And we can get cues from our mind.

We're stuck.

Yes.

So movement is different than exercise.

And Katie Bowman has a lot to say on that.

There's overlap,

But they are not the same thing.

And then community.

Now kind of all of these fit together,

Right?

Like let's move in community.

That's even better if we can do that.

This concept of deep community as part of the ground with which we can really source ourselves in.

And also another extended mind concept.

But as we close,

I'd like to talk about community and how you maybe approach community in the modern world with the people that you work with or even yourself personally.

Yeah.

So I'll start more poetic and more concrete.

I'm not a good enough writer yet to be concrete and poetic at the same time.

At least not on my first draft.

So the metaphor that I love to use for community is that of redwood trees.

So I know you're in partially northern California.

I spent a lot of time in northern California.

And we have these beautiful redwood groves scattered throughout the state.

And they are just absolutely awesome and spectacular.

The old growth forest,

The trees can be 200,

Even 300 feet.

Their trunks are the size of buses.

They're just these enormous things.

When there's windy weather,

They hardly move at all.

They're so grounded.

They're so fixed and solid.

Yet the roots of these massive trees only run about six feet deep.

So how can this enormous tree that's catching all of this weather only have roots that run six feet deep without toppling over?

And the answer is that in a redwood forest,

The roots of every tree interlock and intertwine.

So they're all holding each other up.

And we're the same,

Us humans.

If we want to be able to stand strong amidst all kinds of weather,

Then we need to situate ourselves in a similar community to that of the redwood trees.

And there's all kinds of science that shows this.

It's in all the ancient wisdom traditions,

Whether it's St.

Augustine talking about spiritual friendship,

Whether it is the Three Jewels of Buddhism,

One of those being Sangha or community or modern studies of resilience that show that having community is perhaps the number one indicator of being resilient.

Well,

Of course,

Because when the wind blows you down,

If you've got those other roots with you,

You come back up.

So community is really good.

Now the problem with community is community is not efficient and it's no way to optimize.

Community is long,

It's slow,

It takes time.

And oftentimes community isn't a means to an end,

It's an end in and of itself.

So in our culture that says,

Do more,

Be more,

Tweet more,

Be more efficient,

Optimize your life,

Well,

What's the first thing that's going to get crowded out?

It's community.

And if nothing more,

My hope with this chapter of the book was just to call that out for people and give people some language and allow them to see there's a real tension there.

And then the next step,

Again,

Back to boundaries,

Would be to know that,

Hey,

When I'm in a group,

When I'm pushing at work,

When I'm getting positive feedback from the world,

It feels great.

And during those times,

Most people,

Myself included,

We have a propensity to deprioritize community because everything's going well,

We're crushing it.

And then something bad happens and you're like,

I need my friends.

And the boundary there is to not deprioritize community,

To make sure that that is a constant route that you are watering in your own life.

So I think of community amongst what I'm going to call intellectual friends.

And we're not always smart,

So I don't mean like smart friends.

I mean intellectual in the sense that they have these kinds of interests,

They're writing books,

They're doing podcasts,

They're doing research.

And they can be all over the country,

All over the world.

And we can connect online.

And that's beautiful.

And that is real community.

And it leads to interesting relationships that can then be taken offline and creative thinking and all sorts of good stuff.

And then I like to think of community as my neighborhood.

So I'm going to not use their names.

I don't think they'd care,

But I'll make up names.

So Evan and Sarah next door,

Or Aaron and Joey down the street,

And their dogs,

And the barbecues that we do.

And the 11-year-old that babysits my four-year-old.

That community is equally as important.

And for me,

It's about having both of those and just making sure that they're both priorities in my life.

And that's so grounding.

Yeah,

I live on a piece of land in Santa Barbara where there's seven houses that share the land in a community-owned property.

And on our land is all these different fruit trees and spaces that you go hang out.

Like my kids will go down the lane and hook up their hammock in front of someone else's house.

And I didn't really appreciate it until as much as I do now,

Until the pandemic hit.

And I realized,

Oh my gosh,

I have this community.

Like if I run out of lemons,

I know I will always have a supply.

And my eggs will feed someone else's family.

You realize the value of community when the floor drops out from under you.

And what we often do is we put all this energy into these relationships that at the end of the day,

Those are great.

The intellectual relationships or the work relationship.

But at the end of the day,

Who am I going to call if when one of my kids needs to go to the ER and the other kid I need to leave at home?

It's my neighbor down the street.

Or I will just go walk down and knock on her door and pull her over.

I think we all know it in our bones because it's all part of our recent history.

We do have to start to think about our spaces differently than how we have in our communities.

So deep community,

It's important.

I also heard something that I really like about being politically and socially engaged right now,

Which is think nationally and act locally.

It's a lot of these big bucket items that we really care about.

Yeah,

They happen on a national scale.

But if you want to protect democracy or you want to protect LGBTQ trans rights,

Do it locally because like that's where you actually meet people,

You get to know people and so on and so forth and you make a difference.

And that's definitely impacted how I try to think about my own activism and engagement.

Thank you.

Thanks for spending this time with me.

It's been fun.

We started off in one direction down a totally different route than how we ended up.

And that's what's really fun about letting things organically evolve.

And I highly recommend folks that want to pick up the practice of groundedness.

There's these principles of groundedness and there's concrete strategies.

And that's what this podcast is all about is the application of these concepts.

And thank you so much for taking this time.

Thank you so much for having me.

I really enjoyed getting to spend the hour with you.

We started today's conversation with Brad talking about his own experience with OCD and how a lot of the psychological principles that he applied to OCD actually really also apply to our everyday living.

And one of the principles that we started with in terms of being grounded is the practice of patience.

I am one of the most impatient people that I know.

I can barely get my thought out before I'm thinking about the next thing.

And I have those three images that I talked about in the episode from my client now hanging over my bed and hanging right over my pillow is the patient's image,

The one with the tortoise and the cactus and a crystal on it to remind me to slow down and be patient and let life unfold.

So I want you to think about that for yourself this week of how you can practice patience and what areas of your life may need more patience.

It may be in your parenting.

It may be impatience with yourself.

It may be at work and certain projects that you're working on,

How actually dialing back a little bit,

Giving things some time and space to unfold will help you get there even faster.

The second couple of practices that Brad and I talked about were acceptance and being present.

And those are some of the core processes that we've been talking about all along in terms of psychological flexibility,

Being mindful,

Accepting and open to whatever shows up in life.

And I want you to ask yourself again that same question,

What calls for you to practice more acceptance and being present in your life?

Where would being present actually help you feel more grounded?

Because oftentimes when we are ungrounded,

It's because we're off in the future or stuck in the past and we're not giving enough time to just what is.

What's calling for you to be more present?

And third,

Finding some groundedness through movement.

We're going to be having Katie Bowman on the show coming up and it's a fascinating conversation about nutritious movement.

But just to get you started in thinking about movement is actually quite grounding for us.

It helps us connect back to our bodies and what's happening inside of our bodies,

As well as movement in nature.

Where can you find more groundedness through movement this week?

Think about movements that ground you.

They may be movements like doing yoga,

Getting on the floor more,

Or movements that involve you connecting outdoors and being in the real world with real people in nature.

And then finally,

Practices to build your deep community.

How can you make it a little bit more local for you this week?

What people in your life help you feel grounded and how can you interact with them more this week?

So try out those practices of being patient,

Present and accepting,

Moving and community.

And notice if you feel a little bit more grounded in your life when you practice them.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Your Life in Process.

When you enter your life in process,

When you become psychologically flexible,

You become free.

If you like this episode or think it would be helpful to somebody,

Please leave a review over at podchaser.

Com.

And if you have any questions,

You can leave them for me by phone at 805-457-2776 or send me a voicemail by email at podcast at yourlifemprocess.

Com.

I want to thank my team,

Craig,

Angela Stubbs,

Ashley Hyatt,

Abby Deal,

And thank you to Ben Gold at Bell and Branch for his original music.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatment.