Relating to Self

Relating to self. A podcast that helps you create a better relationship with yourself.

Hey, I'm Joachim, welcome. Do you realize that there is only one relationship that you will always be in? The relationship with yourself. Improving that relationship changes everything. On this podcast, I share my thoughts, and I invite real people to have vulnerable conversations about how they relate to themselves and what we can learn from that.

Richard, welcome to the Relating to Self podcast. Finally. Thank you very much, Joachim. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here finally in person. Wonderful. Yeah, you were one of those people on my very first list of people that I wanted to have on the podcast. And for some reason, it took many years for us to arrive here. But now we are here in the same space, actually. And that's so wonderful. I'm flattered to hear that.

And I'd also like to think that I am like the best guest I can be today in spring of 2023. I like that. Yes. You're a very different person now than you were when I originally asked you. I think we all are. Exactly. Great. So just for context, I'm going to introduce you as you're a sandboxer.

That's how I know you. I remember the first time we met was in Tokyo, which was kind of strange because we both don't live there. And it was a very kind of rushed affair.

We had dinner, but you didn't have much time. And then after that, I guess the most important part of our interacting happened on what we call the Friends Day calls, which is something we started during the COVID lockdown. Yeah. And since then, we've had a call pretty much every week with the four of us, Joshua, Georgie, you and me, and Joshua and Georgie have both been in the podcast already. Yeah. Yeah. One of the most consistent social interactions that I've had perhaps ever. Yeah. And really interesting for me as well, because it's such a different format to get to know people than to just like meet up for a drink or something.

Having these consistent Zoom calls with four people every week. Yeah. Great. They see us moving between continents, between relationships, between various emotional states. It's fascinating. So today we're going to talk about how you relate to yourself, or at least, you know, what that means to you, how you see that.

We'll be talking under the headline of relating to self. Exactly. Yeah. And anything can come up. But so my first question is, as always, when you hear the term relating to self, what does that mean to you?

Or what comes up? Well, what comes up today is, I'd say something that has a lot to do with language, too. That's my first association. I'm a strong believer in the power of language and the power of language to shape how we perceive the world and how we create our own worlds. And that, of course, is true, I believe, is true for me as much as it is for anyone else, that we understand the world through the words and the concepts that we have access to and that we have learned and that we have some form of grip on. And similarly, when we express things about the world or about ourselves, that's how we perceive the world and how we create our own things about the world or about ourselves or about others or about anything really, then we're also limited by those concepts that we have access to. Yeah, I'm really curious about this, because, well, in my, in the recording of the podcast I had yesterday with Anne-Laurent, we went a lot into the opposite of that, kind of like perceiving the world through the senses and the pre thought kind of aspect of being in the world almost.

So I'm really curious to see how that will relate to this perspective of words. But first, I'd like to ask, what words would you use to describe your relationship with yourself? I'd say reflective. That relationship is definitely one of introspection, I think it's unavoidable, quite irregular and sometimes also surprising in how I relate to myself. I have found more interesting, juicy, relevant things about myself when not trying to find them rather than when trying to find them. And coming back to a tangent to this linguistic or language oriented idea, I also find that I grow my relationship to myself, mostly in my interactions with others. So when I look at my journal, for example, large parts of it consists of outtakes from conversations or from written chats or from phone calls where I end quotes from other people. So I actually do a lot of my journaling just through being with others and through having those conversations and exchanges.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. That's when it's tested, right? I like to think that my relationship with myself, I have like, the aspect of training it almost, which includes all my practices. Yeah. And then I go out in the world and I meet people. That's the real test of any relating to. Yeah. It's like you have that relationship to yourself by yourself, right? You can definitely have it in solitude, but I think it's only really like it comes alive with others, right? It's somehow, yeah, it is alive with yourself, but it's also extra alive when you meet someone else. And I like to even think of like my relationship to self as this ongoing conversation with all the people I've met throughout my life to each stage I'm at now in my late thirties.

And there's this beautiful sort of ongoing conversation with multiple conversation partners that come and go over time, but I'm somehow keeping a lot of those threads going. And that's how I also find myself and like remain myself in these conversations. And I'm no stranger to picking up a topic that I talked to Alexandra about with Joanna a year later and say like, Hey, here's something I received in a conversation with this person that came up that time. That might be something that I'd like to now pursue in this new conversation with the next person. So I'm somehow the steward of these topics that relate to me, but I invite other people along the way to, to also give their perspective on it and to help me get further into those things. I'm curious, well, because you opened with this idea of words being the lens through which we perceive the world and make sense of it. And so when you look at your relationship with yourself over time, I imagine the words you've used for yourself, or maybe the words you've used to speak to yourself internally have shifted over time. And I'm curious if that was a conscious effort. If you're like, Hey, I noticed myself using, let's say bad words, words that are labeled as, you know, Oh, you're not patient enough, or you're not good at whatever it is.

Have you consciously tried to change the words in your mind when it comes to your self perception? Yeah, I think there are two things I'd like to bring to that question. One is just a simple sort of eternal couple of words, hate and love. And where, you know, in my relationship to self, I'd like to be like a loving person, of course, and less of a hating person. So I really try to reserve the word hate for when I really feel hateful towards something or someone or some situation or even myself. And for me, that is an important thing because I don't, the more, the more you use it, the more you speak it into existence. And the more casually, like I'm quite allergic to casual use of the word hate. That's something that I always react to because I know in my theory and the way that I understand how these things work and the way that I would like to think they work. And when, when someone throws around a lot of hate, like four or five hates per day, they hate the traffic, they hate like whatever else, the pollution, the even really big things that we should be hating, like perhaps climate issues or whatnot.

But the more hate you verbalize, the more you fill your life with hate, really. And you feel your, your brain and even your body with, with hate, I think, as you say it, because as you say it, you also somehow feel it. And I tried to do the opposite to really minimize the hate that I express. That's not to say, well, do I then just avoid the feeling perhaps? Yeah. But I like to think that we can also control that to some degree. And I can find by, by fine tuning my relationship to myself, I can figure out, well, hate is the easy go-to and say, I hate traffic, but I go a little deeper in that. I might find how I actually in my relationship with myself feel about this traffic.

I'm perhaps frustrated by traffic. That's a whole different thing because then I can start looking at, okay, what, where's this coming from and dig more into it. And the flip side with love, of course, the more I utter the word love, like I really love this croissant instead of saying, yeah, I really like it. It's actually quite good. Like love is like a whole nother level of, which I think is good.

Like, you know, loving and bake good. Yeah. Why not? You know, the more, the more love the better and love is not finite. Like I want to practice that love and like flex that love muscle in, in using it as much as I can. And for a long time, I was also fearful of that, of naming things as love because I felt that it needed to be reserved for some particularly strong feeling or sensation or very particular occasion. But I think we can, we can throw it, throw it around a lot more because the more we use it, the more it grows. Right. Yeah, that's interesting. I, I see these things probably as some kind of feedback mechanism.

I think it goes both ways. I think someone using the word hate a lot probably is already internally dealing with a lot of self hate and that's why they projected outwards into the world. And so I think it goes both ways. Using the words more helps you kind of navigate the field of words that you associate with yourself, but also then dealing with your emotions in some way, which is usually just for me, allowing them to be kind of takes away the, the charge from which the words would then maybe arise. So I'm curious if also your, your underlying emotional current of your life, let's say, right.

Has that generally improved over time? And is that also the reason why you can use the word love more?

Yeah, I definitely think so. Like I made efforts and stumbled into opportunities to, I'd say, extend my emotional range and like shifted in the direction that I want. And improv theater has been a huge eye opener for me, or I should say, perhaps a heart opener in that regard, or at least like an emotional opener where I've been pushed to express much stronger emotions. And that's goes back to it again, like by, by acting out these emotions in a totally made up situation, it's still like, renders it possible for me to then also feel them and behave them and live them in other real life, so to say, situations we can of course argue whether life is acting or acting is life or, you know, what's, what's on stage off stage.

Are we always performing? But yeah, I found that to be really helpful in something that's in the past years have really helped me to know that there is a whole, like a vast landscape of emotional expression outside of what I'm used to. And something that I'm still really working on expanding and finding where, where are my discomfort, discomforts on this range, like what, what feels wrong and like what, yeah, how do I respond to various situations, etc. And on an emotional level, and how does that emotion come to expression? Yeah, the one thing I've, I've been thinking about is this idea of being more precise with the words you use also increases the capacity we have to actually perceive things or experience things or feel emotions. I think my dynamic range, so to speak of emotions has widened a lot, just by learning to speak about them more and using more precise words. It's kind of almost what you said about the croissant.

Like, yes, you can say I love this croissant. But love is kind of like a generic word that can be used for so many things. It loses meaning. Yeah. If you can name like, ooh, I really appreciate the specific way the crust of this croissant feels between my teeth when I bite it. I think that leads to a richer experience of the world, but then also a greater capacity for for feeling and expression. And I'm curious if that's something you'd agree with or Yeah, I'd like to challenge you a little bit. I agree with your your general, what you're saying that the more we can, like, fine tune our language, the more we can, we can feel and the more variations we have in the perception. I would like in this case, though, if we stay with this silly example of loving a croissant, I think there is also like an infinite range of fine tuning within loving the croissant.

You don't need to like that. That's also then if we say, well, love, love is in this case can be so many things. You could love how it looks, how it is in your mouth, how, like how it crumbles or how carefully it was manufactured or the energy it gives you. So I think there's also an invitation there to like, stay with love for the croissant, but just go deeper into what that love is and how that love is and why that love is. Yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm a bit distracted because it's, it's morning. And right before this conversation, I was briefly chatting to my business partner. And we have this ongoing meme about croissants. We often say like, oh, it's morning. I crave a croissant. But instead I have to record a podcast. And now we're in the podcast.

And you're talking about croissants all the time. So I'm a bit like, oh, that's interesting.

Serendipity, I guess. Yeah. But I hear you. And I agree with your point, like within each of the words we then use, we can really just go deep in the way what that what does that mean to us, right? But I think the difficult part is then when other people come in. Because then we have to try to transmit what we actually mean. And if we use the same words that they use for something else, that becomes difficult. And sometimes there is a bit of overlap, hopefully, and sometimes there's no overlap at all. And then things really break down when I say one thing and you understand something completely different. Yeah. Richard, I'd like to switch gears and go back to this original point, like when I asked you about relating to self, and you came up with this idea of words as both the lens and also the creation method of how we perceive the world.

So I would love to know more about your relationship with the body. Like the nonverbal way in which we exist in the world, maybe through movement, maybe through just sensations in the body, right? Like, what is your relationship with your body? And if any, do you have any practices to improve that relationship? I think that I would be amiss at this question, not mentioning that I experienced a rather severe traffic accident, like now, two and a half years ago or so I'm very well recovered. And that journey in itself has meant that I've deepened my relationship with my body and definitely had a, like that relationship took a big turn with this, with this accident where it's like the point where I realized, oh, well, this body won't last forever. And it has like an amazing capacity to heal, which I'm like very proud of and very fond of. And that's something that I really tried to cultivate in my body by feeding it, by using it, by keeping it sort of fit for fight in some sense.

And, and I like to just on a reasonable level, like push my body. Then I had some, well, an example from, from recent times is I sometimes just make random decisions. Like, oh, I'm going to take double steps in the stairs. I live on the fourth floor, so there's four flights of stairs up. And I. And just, yeah, I'm going to do double steps all the way. And then it turns almost into like a light jog up the stairs with these bouncy steps. And I know that is, of course, a very privileged thing to be able to do. For me, it's also, it is an important part of my, my practice to, to maintain my body.

What else goes into that relating to self with the body? Well, feeling it, of course. And, but, but, you know, accepting imperfections, I think is super important. And just knowing like you are as you are and you make the most of where your body is at in a given day or in a given year or in a given life. And that's also very, something that definitely matters. Yeah. I like what you said about this perspective of the body won't last forever.

Like this idea of finite nature of life. And I'd like to share a moment I had yesterday, actually, I went to an exotic dance. And at a certain point, I don't know why, but this thought came up like, oh, I want to from this position of being on the dance floor and using my body to the fullest possibility to like really embracing this life force that is present in this body from here. I want to kind of send love and gratitude to me on my deathbed. Like I want this to be a moment I remember when I'm dying. Like, you know, you've made the most of this body, you've used it to dance and to experience these things. And that was such a beautiful, profound kind of moment, very internal, obviously. And so I'm, I'm curious about your relationship to let's say the idea of death. And if that influences your relationship with what the self is, in any way.

Yeah, again, this, this accident where I very nearly died, had an impact on that. I think that day was a fork in my life. And it was a bit of a coin toss, whether I would walk away from that or not. And I did, which means that now, in some ways, I feel like I'm living on bonus time. This is my second chance at life.

I made a mistake. I was lucky not to suffer the ultimate consequence of that. And now I'm in a position where I can sort of, yeah, every day could not have been, I didn't have that realization before this happened that, you know, that there's, there's a real risk that it's all over every day. And like, I've somehow already lived one of those days where it was all over. So it makes me think about my, my body and life itself as something like very, like contradictory, I think that, you know, it's, in one hand, something that's really extremely worthy, like it's, it's so precious that I should really be making the most of it. But at the same time, I also know that my life is in one way already over. So I have, I can hold my life a bit more lightly, because in some ways, like every day from here on, it's just a bonus day, because I'm on the lucky side of the fork in the road, so to say. That's beautiful. I love that. And I feel it's related to my practice of like, in the morning, I have this incantation I use every day. And it includes like something like a thought that is, one day I will die.

Today is not that day. Today I am alive. Yeah. Yeah. That's like celebrating this, the smallness of like the victory of life in every day. Yeah. That's very, in some ways, very ambitious. I don't know, I might even say, well, I wake up, I'm alive, I might not reach the end of this day.

But so far, I'm gonna try, right? And I'm gonna enjoy, even if it turns out that by 3pm, I'm not here anymore, I will still enjoy my life until 3pm, right?

You're so right. And maybe I should change it to, oh, you know, yesterday, I didn't die. So I'll try again to be alive today. Yeah, but I, well, no, I, for me, the truest that I can think of spontaneously in that form of statement is to say, today, I might die. And that, at least it's like what I take away from my experience that it can happen any day. And therefore, you know, yeah, treasure your life, but also hold it lightly, you know, it's like, really, really enjoy it, but don't cling to it.

I love that. And I think that goes for many things, actually, like that's life, but that's also many other things like a nice, you know, relationships or objects that you believe to some degree or other that you own or possess, or, you know, family, many things. Yeah, I think even just experiences, like in the moment, oh, I'm enjoying this, not clinging to that, just letting it pass.

Because it will all be over, right? So we better learn to practice to not learn to I think we can, most of us can already do it, but to really practice to deeply enjoy while it's there, with the knowledge that at some point it won't be right. And also somehow celebrate that fleetingness, because that also makes room for new things and other things. And that is also in your relationship to self, right? Like, you're not the best version of yourself today.

In fact, you never will be the best version of yourself. You'll just keep on being very many different versions of yourself every time you wake up. And whatever version now sounds like a motivational coach, but like whatever version of yourself you wake up with on a particular morning, that's the version that you should treasure and celebrate. And at the same time, let go of at the end of the day, because the next day, you'll wake up with a different version and a different potential and different opportunities. I couldn't agree more. I think that's a very beautiful way to be into life. I'd love to go back to the improv. Yeah, we've we've talked about improv on this podcast before I had Mary Lemmer. That's right. Improv for business also personal life.

Yeah, I remember. And so I'm really curious, first of all, how do you approach this improv as a practice of relating to self?

Is it something that just happened to you? Or did you intentionally decide to pursue improv to change something in the way you perceive yourself or the way you are in the world? Yeah, I went, I sought it out in order to challenge my, my planning side, my structured side, my, you know, voice inside myself that tells me that the more contingency plans, the more backups I have, the better, the more prepared you are, the better it will work out. Which is true in some regard of improv, like you can definitely train and practice and become more prepared to perform, but you cannot rehearse it, obviously, like as in a sort of spontaneous form of art that only appears on the spot in the moment, it, it really doesn't work that way.

So that's what I came in looking for. And what I found was that and also this really powerful mirror of who I am, because it, it has taught me so much about my defaults as, as a character in my own life, you know, as, as myself, by, you know, and then I'm always confronted with those defaults when I need to do something else.

Like, Could you name those defaults? Yeah, definitely. Like, I mean, an example would be, you know, you as whether you want it or not, you always have an age. And also when you step on stage as an improviser, as an actor to, to embody a character, you need to also somehow give that character an age. And unless you do, you'll be there with your default age, like your posture, your voice, your whatever it is, your appearance, your all your characteristics. And as soon as you want to shift that age to be younger or older, or even somehow ageless, you have to then act that. And as soon as you start noticing what you do to shift your age, you also realize, like, what was my starting point? Like, what am I, what is this in relationship to? And the same thing goes for how you express various emotions, how you respond to conflicts and relationships and situations. And there's just so much that you understand about, well, oh, is this my default way of, um, like sitting at a restaurant?

If that's what I'm miming, if that's what I'm doing, oh, well, I'm sitting. Yeah, this is obviously that's how I prefer to eat my food by sitting. I don't eat it standing or I don't eat it lying on the floor. Interesting, right? Like you, you find so many of these defaults and also in language and in like, how quick am I to respond? Where, what are the words that come up and like, how, yeah, where do I hesitate? Where do I really lean in and when, when do I take up space?

When do I back off? There's just so much to, to find there as you, as you try on all these different characters like, oh, is that, is that how I would behave as a, as a dog in a scene where there is a dog needed to accompany something, right? Okay. Well, interesting. And then also from that can find something in my actual self, just because I get this other coordinate of like Richard as a dog, which is an imagined thing, like a made up thing. But that also from that, it's, to me, surprisingly easy to extrapolate something about myself as Richard in the outside of the improv stage. I tend to believe that this is a pretty good heuristic for interesting people. I think interesting people have the capacity and the ability to understand that they have default modes and can also step out of them more easily. I think the more people are unaware that there is a default, they're just like stuck into a certain identity. And so what I'm really curious about is if improvisation has then made you question some of your defaults that you discovered, maybe to the point that you changed them in real life. I was actually distracted by a thought there, because I want to, again, call you out on sorting people into who is more interesting and not.

I think that is a bit of a tricky thing to do, because if you try hard enough and you'll find anyone interesting, right? And I wouldn't want to rate people by how interesting they are, if not, then I mean, because it also then invites other people to rate me on the scale of interestingness.

And I am perhaps not so keen on that. But wait, do you think that's impossible? It's possible to not do that? Because I think that's a default way for humans to kind of go through life. We are a social tribe, we constantly judge people and sort them, right? Yeah, I think there's no, like, perfect human who finds interest and even, you know, appreciation and love for everyone they meet, no, no, no, it won't happen. But we can definitely are, like, the mechanisms of our social selves and our emotional selves are fluid enough that we can train ourselves to find more people interesting, even if they, you know, don't come from the same background as we do, they don't work with the same stuff that we do.

They don't speak the same language as we do. They don't look like we do. They don't have the same values. But with practice, we can find, like, interest. And from that interest, also, then compassion and appreciation for a wider range of people, so to say.

Yeah, thank you for that. Can we go back to the question? Yes. Have you changed some of your defaults in your life through discovering that you had them by doing improv? Yeah, I think I'm very much my, like, default of when I speak up, and when I step forward, and when I step back. I think that's the one that I played with most.

What was it before? And how is it now? I'd say it was at least more unaware before. Now I see it and I can tell myself, oh, no, today, or around this table, rather, like in this particular social situation, I'm going to, like, break in a bit faster. I'm going to, like, not aim to but not be uncomfortable if I interrupt people, like three times during this dinner, because this is a case where my default would be to hold back more, and like, wait a bit longer until I say something. But I noticed that here, oh, this default might not be working so well here, or it would simply be interesting to try a more energetic participation and more abrupt participation in conversation.

Yeah, and I think in general, that's a good thing. Right? And it's something I relate to. I'm also usually more in the scale of like, I'm going to sit back, I'm going to hold back, I'm not going to share my thoughts. Oh, for someone else, it would be the complete opposite. Like they would discover it through an improv practice or through whatever other practice that helps them reveal their defaults, they would discover that they're usually often the person who takes up a lot of conversational space. And for them, the challenge of the default might be to just, okay, I'm going to spend five minutes chunks of time not opening my mouth, except for like, perhaps ingesting some food. Right. But yeah, that's, I think what else can be like defaults that I've found?

The other big one is just the my amplitude of emotion. Like, because you face so many extreme, like made up scenarios and situations and relationships in improv. And I remember one, one in particular, where my scene partner and I arrived at a point where they were like, either breaking up with me or my character, like their character was breaking up with my character or even divorcing them. And I had some form of lukewarm, oh, why, or like, aha, do you really want that kind of reaction? And our coach basically stopped the scene and be like, Hey, you know what, no, no, no, that's not after like, you know, we know from previously in the scene that you're together for a long time, you're married, you're, you're like, wait, invested in this relationship. Why are you now just accepting and taking such a, like, humble stance on this, like, bomb that just dropped, right, that, well, you're getting divorced, and you might even have been cheated on, like, we need outrage here. Like, this is not this is not humanly possible to be so calm in the face of this revelation. So that's also something that I went, Whoa, wait, then I of course, have to think what, what, how do I treat this kind of things in real life? Like when, when, when, when bombs drop around me or near me or against me, then why, like, how calmly do I react?

And if I react calmly and humbly, where is the turmoil? Like, am I just locking it up inside? Like where what's, what's going on with that? So that that, like emotional amplitude, and the same goes for positive things to like to get excited or to get like, fascinated or to get like, totally blown away by something like that's also the whole sort of this range of emotion of like, Oh, okay, here's a whole new emotion that I maybe didn't have a word for, or that I haven't really, like noticed to the to this precision before. But there's also amplitude, like the volume of the emotion itself, again, I think, learning to stretch, for me, at least personally, learning to stretch both of those and expand both of those is has been very helpful. And it's a good thing that I'm practicing, again, for others who live different lives, it might be the opposite, at least when it comes to the amplitude, right of like, practicing to to turn that volume knob down rather than up.

Yeah, I love that. That's beautiful.

I'm curious, because, well, since we are here together in this space, right, I don't usually see this, but I know that you have brought a notebook with some things that you've thought about before stepping into this conversation. So I'm wondering if there's anything that feels particularly alive for you that you would like to bring up at this point. Thank you.

That's a wonderful invitation. I'm glancing at my notes, I think I have actually managed to, to cover up a fair bit. One point that has, like, well, fascinated me recently, and also had has been very resonant in conversations that I've had with other people about it is like a shift that I've experienced in past years from trying to live ever wider and wider to living deeper and deeper. And that also goes with my relationship to self of like, reframing growth from like this kind of very expansive. Idea of, oh, I need new things, I need another language, I need to live in another place, I need to, you know, know entirely new sides of myself, but then rather coming at that with an acceptance of like, this is who I am, this is where I am right now, this is these are my skills. And what can I do to not like transform myself, but rather, like change myself, perhaps more gradually by going deeper, deeper into these things.

And sometimes that can be transformational, too, I believe. And I think that is really important to also consider when we have this urge to go wider, and just keep growing in width, and sort of try on new things and follow curiosity to channel that energy and that curiosity towards what is also already there. And I'm not saying it's a degrowth approach to personal development, because that would be very backwards, but it's a just a different dimension of growth that I was so much less aware of before. And I am, for a long time, I was living and was reminded by other people that I was living a very fleeting kind of grass is always greener somewhere else, sort of life, in terms of jobs, in terms of location, in terms of friends, in terms of relationships, always, like, being slightly discontent and thinking, oh, well, there could be there could be other better options. Now, I'm trying my best to be a person who is much more interested, not in if the grass is greener somewhere else, but how it is green, where I'm standing. And why is it green right here? And how will it be a different green tomorrow?

Like, what does this grass feel like, taste like? And like, why is it even green? What can I do on this grass? What like, why is this grass even here? To look at my current grass with much, much more interest and see much more potential in it rather than focusing on the other greener grass. But then saying, nope, that's not relevant today, I'm going to look at the grass I'm standing on the grass I'm feeling and see what that's like. I'm curious what that translates to, both in the outwardly expression of how you live your life, and also as like your, your inner experience. Yeah. So maybe you could be more concrete about how that has changed. Yeah, no, that's a very conceptual, philosophical kind of thought. But I still find that the, the metaphor of like going from looking at the other grass to looking more closely at the current grass is still holds, but practically, it means internally being much more at peace, and being less rushed, like allowing myself to take time and finding more, more acceptance for myself.

And but also finding like more power to change and grow. And because I'm like, rather going with my momentum, than trying to radically abruptly change something in my circumstance and go seek out something else. In the hopes of being some being someone else, when I find it, it's more about looking at who am I and where am I and what have I got right here that I can use to move in the direction I want, rather than saying, okay, I'm just going to put all efforts into grabbing onto that thing way over there. And once I hold that, I believe I will be completely transformed. So it's much more starting from where I am today and right now. So that's the sort of in inner side of it, practically, and how it comes to expression is just that I am, I'd say more focused on rekindling older friendships. I'm back living now in somewhat geographical region that I'm shaped by in my years growing up. And I am happy to be like, kind of settled in my career and looking at going deeper and advancing in the practice that I do rather than picking up something completely different and feeling this urge to go after new skills and new, well, completely new dimensions of everything, which there will come phases where that is important too.

But I think we can definitely benefit from also being a bit more focused on the grass, which is right where we are. And I think that also brings with it an invitation to live a more resilient and sustainable life if we're not always chasing after the new greener grass necessarily. Thank you. Yeah. I was curious about the self-acceptance part, like in the inner process of that, you named like, yeah, there's more self-acceptance, there's more like slowing down.

That's not easy, right? For me, at least, it was very difficult to like start accepting myself. So I'm curious what you have practiced to be able to be more self-accepting and to slow down your inner kind of like process. Yeah. I think there is a really interesting tension between discipline and acceptance. And it's something I picked up in one of your recent conversations with Patrick as well. He was talking about how he's sort of, has discovered and is on a journey to discover deep resting, as I interpreted what he was saying. And I think that for me also comes out as this idea of discipline versus acceptance, like trying to like discipline myself a little bit less and like bend myself a little bit less into who I want to be and rather start from who I am and say like, okay, if I can only do spurts of 30 minutes of computer work at a time before I start getting distracted and grab my phone or something, well, then let's chunk work up into 30 minute pieces. And then when the 30 minutes, this urge to look at Twitter again or whatever it is, when that hits, then I'll go grab a fistful of almonds from the kitchen and have a little snack and then I can throw the phone back under a couch pillow and do another half hour. Right. So it's like also that idea to accept the limitations and turn those into strengths rather.

And for me, that has a lot to do with, with discipline and concentration and focus. Yeah. So it sounds it was more like a conscious decision. And then you brought awareness to whatever was happening. And then you used focus and discipline to kind of like, yeah, I'm curious about this because it always feels easy to me, like after the fact, when people ask me like, yeah, but how did you change that for yourself?

I don't really have an answer. It's more like I noticed over time that that improved. Yeah. And yes, there was an intention, perhaps there was a desire to, to be more equanimous, to be more calm, whatever it was. Yeah. But I can't really point exactly at what it was that brought me there. Yeah. Something I do, which I believe is very, has, carries a lot of strength and potential for me is to lead by behavior rather than to lead by like saying something or even thinking deliberately thinking, oh, I want to do this, but not just do it. Like if you want to be the person who commutes by bicycle, just start doing it.

Like you don't need to talk about it. You don't need to necessarily research it that much. You don't need to plan it. You don't need to like even, you know, change your fundamental values or anything.

It's just a behavioral thing. It's just a habit. And that's, for example, how I got rid of flying, I should say, or lost flying from my life by realizing that, oh, well, flying is something that is not necessarily good for me, even on a very deep level. Like it makes me very unrooted and constantly feeding my opportunity to live this life in search of the greener grass. And I am, I decided, well, I'm going to do a flight detox. So I made sure I went somewhere where I didn't have many opportunities to fly away from and where I was just bent on, okay, going to be here in this relatively far away from everything else location and not fly out of here until I've learned to live without flying.

And so I did. And like that, um, yeah, starting from that behavior of like a new habit, a new, a new thing that I'm doing that, that then feeds my intellectual processing of it and my emotional relationship to, to that practice. And also my, my values of like, okay, as I'm now doing this, I'm living this way. I am de facto a person who has the values of not taking flights, not traveling by air travel. So, yeah.

I love that so much. I think that's something I've experienced so many times in my life where I tend to, I want to figure things out, you know, and then I just keep thinking about that bias for action that you just named. And I think that is the flip side of what you mentioned about when, when we look back, it feels like if, as if a change just happened, but for me, most of when, most of the times when I have that retrospective surprise of like, wow, I've, I'm, I'm someone different now where I'm relating to this in a different way. It often comes from just having started to, to do something differently. Beautiful. Well, Richard, this was a wonderful conversation.

We're already at the end of it, sadly. Thank you. I'm curious if there was anything that you really still want to mention, or maybe a question that you would have hoped that I would ask you. No, I'm simply just grateful for being here and for you to like, yeah, tease these things out of me and creating this platform of, for people to learn and exchange and share their approach to life and to relating to themselves. I think that's a very beautiful gift that you bring to the world. So again, I have nothing but gratitude in this moment.

Thank you, Richard. It's beautiful. Thank you. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to the podcast. You can also read more of my thoughts on Twitter, I will post a link in the description. And if you are interested in improving your relationship with yourself, please subscribe to my email list at relating to self.com. I will then send you meditations, rituals, practices, and more of these beautiful conversations. Thanks.