#888 - David Sutcliffe - How To Stop Betraying Yourself & Be More Authentic

How do you come to think about the role of authenticity in a good life? Well, I guess I try to be as authentic as I can. I don't know if that's a thing that we can ever do perfectly.
And we have to be discerning about where we want to be authentic. But as long as we're making choices, meaning I'm not going to show up and work and always be my authentic self, there's always a mask that we're wearing.

But if I'm doing that consciously, then I can still maintain my authenticity.

For me, authenticity is really just truth.

Can I be in the truth of who I am?

Which takes a lot of work because we don't always know who we are.

And we have habitual thought patterns and responses to life that cause us i mean we're authentic to those but to be authentic to ourselves to go after exactly what it is we want um to be present all the way maybe that's a another way to define it being present in the moment which is a really hard thing. Always being present.
There's so many ways that we leave, whether it's through distraction or drugs or alcohol or pornography, or we get lost in our mind. So part of authenticity for me is just being embodied, being here, being present, being in the moment, telling the truth as best we can.
And I think that's empowering. I think that leads to an empowering life.
And it's really what I try to teach people. How do we find our authentic self? I know it's an overused word, but I think that's what we're all longing for, because we're aligned in some way within ourselves.
We're true to ourself and that feels good.

So even if things go badly, at least we're true to who we are.

We're making our own mistakes, not being guided by some idea of who we're supposed to be or what we're supposed to be doing.

And I've certainly done plenty of that in my life.

I made a commitment early on.

If I'm going to make mistakes, I want them to be my own mistakes.

I'm going to learn from my failures.

Oh, that's such a cool idea. The idea of making a mistake and it not even being yours.
Painful. Painful.
I learned this as an actor because when I first started out in Hollywood, you get there and you think that everybody knows what they're doing. And they're smarter than you.
At least that's what I thought. And so uh, you know, so you listen to a lot of directors, you know, tell you how to play scenes.
And, um, it got to a point where, uh, you know, I would, I would see the scene and, and I thought, yeah, I don't think that was the right choice. Now it's my face on the screen, right? So if it's not resonating, people aren't thinking about the director, they're thinking about me.
So there's a certain point I just decided to take ownership of everything. And occasionally you'd get into conflict with directors, but the choice was I got to do it my way.
I want to listen, of course, to what people are saying and take that information in, but ultimately I have to do it my way and live or die by it. Is there an interesting feedback loop between authenticity and confidence? It seems like in order to be able to sort of stand up for yourself and to have a faith that your intuition or your instinct is right, you need to be confident in it.
And then presumably the more that you do that, the more it feeds back into confidence. But as with most things that kind of spiral, they also spiral in the opposite direction, which is the longer that you live out of authenticity, the less confidence you have in being authentic and the less you know what authenticity is, which makes it harder to become so on and so forth.
It seems to me like that's the kind of dynamic that goes on. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
I might use the word faith, having faith in your inner impulses, to stay in the television and movie acting references. When I was growing up, I was a big fan of John Cassavetes and he was the kind of the original independent filmmaker.
And his films were wild and raw and crazy. And he had a, he had a great career as a mainstream Hollywood actor, but his films were just something else entirely.
And he had this quote about all these people, um, they hollywood and they start getting into commercial projects and they say one day that they're going to do something creative they're going to do something artistic do something true to themselves but they never do because once you buy into that and exactly what you're saying once you stop listening to those innermost impulses, you start to forget that they're there.

And so that had a huge impact on me. And I've done my best, not perfectly, I don't think any of us do it perfectly, to live by that, to live by that inner intuition, those inner impulses, that thing that is inside me.
There's a knowingness that we all have, and only we know it. and if we start asking everybody, you know, is this okay? Is that okay? They're going to be, maybe they'll be able to give you some legitimate reflection.
But at the end of the day, I think anybody who's successful at a certain point, they stood alone. They just went on their own intuition, their own gut, and they took a risk.
And that's how they became successful. You have to follow it.
The more you do, the more confidence you have in it. And exactly,

the less you do it, the more, I think, lost you become.

What would you say to somebody that feels like they haven't tapped into that authenticity in a

while? Is there anything, have you got any prescriptions or advice for how someone can begin to start listening to that little voice that maybe has been drowned out for a long time? Well, this happens with my clients all the time and I give them an exercise and I have them list like things in their life where they had an intuition and they did it and it worked out. And you'd be surprised how long a list everybody has, right? So trying to encourage that kind of thinking but it requires faith it requires a deep faith and you know i'm a big believer in in synchronicity i mean it just i don't know how it works but it seems to be real on some level i don't know if it's just a a trick of my mind or you know back in the day, they used to look in the fire, right? And you look in the fire for a sign, but what are you really looking for? You're looking for your own unconscious to be reflected back in the fire so you can trust what you see, that it's not an image necessarily in the fire that you're seeing that's separate from you.
You look at the fire long enough, you can get into a meditative state and suddenly your own unconscious is going to be projected onto that fire and the thing that you see is something that's actually you and so practices like that like meditation i think are very valuable or the thing that i do it's like with mexico you know i'm gonna move down to mexico why am i moving to mexico that's crazy i don't speak My wife speaks Spanish, but it just seemed like such a big leap. But I asked for signs.
I do this every time. I asked for signs and I got them.
The week after I asked for signs, the three people that I know in Mexico all came up in conversation with strangers. It's like we ended up knowing, I'm like, you know that guy? I know that guy.
Yeah, he's a friend of mine who lives in Mexico, like that in the same week. That kind of shit happens to me all the fucking time.
I can't explain it, Chris. I don't know what it is.
I'm sure there's a lot of doubters out there, but that's how I do it. When I have a strong intuition, I ask for signs and almost always I get them.
Is that, for want of a better term, is that a mature man's game, not a young man's game? Well, I think so. I mean, I've been around, I'm 55, I've lived a life, ups and downs, success and failure, rich and poor.
And you start to learn how to just go go with it all go with the flow and then when you look back you see that there was a logic to all of it like it was all working in your favor somehow even the the tragedies even the failures and i think ultimately you know you go back to authenticity and confidence and i said the word faith it really is about faith like that's what i've learned at this point in my life like your faith will make it so and the faith in something like a faith in yourself or or a project that you're engaged with like there's a there's a vibration there's an energy in that that that I think makes things manifest. And it's also very attractive, somebody who has faith.
And so you end up attracting people to you because I think when you're in that state, everybody wants that. Who doesn't want to have absolute faith, which is trust, which is the absence of fear? and I you know to use a sports analogy i was used to be a hockey player and you know i was okay but um the worst thing was coming up against a guy who had absolute faith in their ability or that they were going to win like you just realize i can't knock this guy off going to do to this guy.
Kind of regardless of their ability, the faith was kind of more important. Exactly.
And that, I realized, was the strongest quality in a player. You don't want to come up against a guy who has absolute faith.
There's a Bill Burr quote that says, you're going to be fine. And even if you're not going to be fine, isn't it better to just exist thinking

you're going to be fine until it's not fine?

And then when it's not fine,

you can just deal with it then,

but it makes no sense to ruin right now.

Yeah, Bill Burr is a very wise man.

That's how I am with the belief in God.

I mean, belief in God makes me feel more powerful.

So why not believe in God?

It's really that simple for me. I mean, there's other things for me I've had experiences.
It's like the productivity bro Pascal's wager. Right.
Exactly. Exactly.
Exactly. God is on my side.
Just sort of thinking about the opposite side, you used the word fear there. It's something I've been kind of obsessed with this year.
Why is it that fear is so sort of prevalent in that way? Why do we see threats where there are none? Why is it that we're so concerned with that? And what's a way to get us to sort of move out of that fear-based perspective? Well, that's a big question. I mean, it goes back probably to childhood.
I mean, we all have fear. We come into the world, we're vulnerable, totally helpless, totally dependent.
That's a scary thing. And if we don't get the attunement we need, the love we need, the comfort we need, the needs that we need, there's going to be fear there.
And so I think it's built in in some way, like this, this feeling of like, I'm not entirely safe. And I, and I, you can have the best parents in the world, but, um, I don't think there's anybody walking around who doesn't have some kind of issues or, or fear around unconscious fear around their own safety that they then project on to the world.
And then of course we live in a culture, particularly with the media that weaponizes fear to keep you watching, to keep you under control. And so I'm reading the Screwtape Letters right now and it's all about the devil essentially.
And it's all about fear. If you can keep a person in fear, you can control them.
So fear is really the biggest battle that we're all facing. And we don't want to feel it.
That's really what it is. If you're not afraid to feel, what are you actually afraid of? And so we do so much to avoid avoid feeling our fear and so one of the practices that i've done and is and i encourage other people to do is to constantly put yourself in situations where you're confronting your fear and then go through it and feel the panic feel everything that comes up and then on the other side of that you realize very quickly it was all illusion.
It was all in your head. It wasn't real in the way that you thought it was.
So how do you confront it? You have to take risks. You have to be willing to move towards your fear.
There's really no other way to do it. And to understand that there's a very strong force within you, which I call the lower self, you might call it the shadow, that is afraid and is doing everything that it can to what it thinks is protecting you.
So it's going to convince you, it's going to tell you stories, all kinds of stories about why you shouldn't do that or why that's scary or why that woman that you want to ask out is probably a bitch, so what's the point, or it's never going to work out. This is the voice of fear.
So you have to start to understand that your negative thoughts are actually just the voice of your fear and then understand that the culture is trying to keep you afraid. And so it takes a lot of work.
I mean, I think you have to work every day in some way to mitigate against all of that fear. Is that a top-down solution? Is that a bottom-up solution? Is it something else? Because I think there's a tendency for perhaps the sort of people that listen to shows like this one to think that they can think their way out of an overthinking problem or think their way out of a feeling problem.
And I'm not sure whether that's possible. No, you can't solve a problem of the mind with the mind.
It has to be through action. You have to be willing to take action.
You have to do something different. The mind is tricky.
The mind is not a reliable narrator of your experience. That's one thing that I've come to understand.
I don't necessarily trust my mind, particularly when

I'm in a state of anxiety or fear or confusion. That's when it's the least reliable.
It's most reliable when I'm feeling good, when I'm feeling aligned, when I'm feeling connected, let's say. and so um you know i think yeah you ha you have to be willing to do things, right? Take risks, take action, um, move your body in, in some way.
Um, I mean, you, you probably know this cause you know, Huberman talked about a lot this, this, um, when we're in a fierce state, um, we're agitated or frustrated or whatever it is, if you go for a walk, it solves the problem instantly because what are you doing? You're walking forward in space. So that's telling your brain there's no fear there.
So you can be lost in something that's overtaking you, that's consuming you negative thoughts. And you can go for a walk and literally five minutes later, it's clear.
So that tells you just a walk can solve most of your problems. This episode is brought to you by Function.
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Talk to me about the cost of betraying yourself, about not being fully honest, about allowing that lower self to take over more so this this is really i'm going to say this a lot this is the heart of my work i sit my clients make fun of me like this is the most important thing you have to understand um but we all had to betray ourselves as children in order to stay in connection and in favor with our caregivers There were certain things that they wanted from us.

And so we gave them that. And there were certain things we intuited or were told directly that they didn't like about the way that we were.
And so that betrayal process starts at a very young age. The primary survival strategy for any child is to stay in connection and favor with their caregivers.
So they have no choice but to betray themselves. So that self-betrayal becomes a pattern.
It becomes a way of being. And so we believe that we have to betray ourselves in some way in order to stay in connection with other people.
So the unconscious belief when we do betray ourself or abandon ourself or don't speak our truth or give ourselves away, whatever phrase you want to use, is what we're actually afraid of is the disconnection from the other person, which on a primal level is a threat, of course, because we want to stay connected to the tribe. We need to stay connected to other people to survive.
And so the illusion that we have to shatter is that you can actually stand on your own, that you can tolerate the feelings of disconnection. You can tolerate saying something or doing something and feeling the disapproval from your friend or from the world or from your spouse, and that you're going to be okay.
It's not going to kill not going to kill you. Um, the way the unconscious mind thinks it thinks it would as when you were a child.
And so that's not an easy thing to do. First, you have to understand that you are betraying yourself.
And because it's so habitual, very often we don't, we're just left with a feeling of we're angry, resentful. Um, we don't feel empowered in our life.
The world out there is somehow controlling us and we're at effect to our environment. Those are all signs that we are betraying ourselves.
And so once you start to understand that, then you can take some self-responsibility. And the question I ask in all these situations with betrayal, let's say, oh, I have a client show up.
It's like, you know, I was betrayed. My girlfriend, my boyfriend, whatever, said this, did this.
And the question I always ask is, was there a moment before the betrayal where you betrayed yourself? Like, was there some intuition, some instinct, something you wanted to say, but you didn't say? And every time there's always a yes. And it's like, well, why do you say it? Because I was afraid.
Afraid of what? Well, afraid of how they're going to react. And so we all have that, right? And so it's just a practice.
It's an awareness first and then a practice because it's the only way we really can be free, right? If otherwise we're modulating our behavior based on the external world, based on how other people are going to react. We're caring what other people think, but it's really deeper than that.
Is that why the fact that the self-betrayal begins in childhood in relationship with your caregiver typically, is that why relationships are such a breeding ground for this to come up? Exactly. It's now mirroring the first time that this happened.
Yeah. I mean, you're going to heal all your childhood wounds in your relationship.
I'm finding that out. And it's tricky.
It always comes up. I'm projecting my issues with my mother, all the issues from my childhood on my partner all the time.
And she was doing the same to me. And it creates this confusion.
It creates this resentment. We get at each other.
And fortunately, she's a pretty aware, evolved person. So we're able to get to the heart of what's actually going on for both of us and then come back into unity.
But it's really about self-responsibility. It's like, how am I co-creating this? There's something that I'm doing.
There's some distortion I have. I believe this thing.
Is it actually true? I grew up, my mom left my father, left my stepfather and didn't really attend to my needs during that process. I mean, she was overwhelmed.
She was very young. And I felt like, hey, you know, does anybody want to check in with me, see how I feel about this? So my conception of women was I don't trust them and they don't care what I feel.
And so I walk into a relationship and that's, I'm looking for evidence of that everywhere. And I'm building a case against her and any little little thing that she does that confirms my belief, I point to it.
And then I stack it up until I blow up. And I'm like, you're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this.
And maybe she is doing some of those things, but my reaction to it is completely out of proportion because of my history.

And because of that, I'm not actually seeing the good things that she's doing.

I'm not seeing the ways in which she is, in fact, very trustable.

And so we all come in a relationship with those kind of distortions.

Just going back to that authenticity point and sort of folding that into relationships,

how much room do you think there is for self-editing in a relationship?

I think discernment is the key.

I don't think you have to share everything in a relationship. That's my feeling, but you have to be careful that you're not hiding because if you're hiding something, it's going to be felt, right? And if you're hiding it out of shame, that's going to be felt.
And ultimately, it's going to come up. So I think, you know, and we can dilute ourselves, we can rationalize, oh, I don't need to share everything with my partner, I don't need to share this, it's not really important.
But oftentimes, that kind of vulnerability is terrifying, right? To really reveal who we actually are to our partners. And I think for men, particularly, it's like to reveal that sometimes you're just afraid, that you have fear about whatever.
you know and uh there's something maybe shameful about that and and the reframe for me is that if

you can take ownership of your fear and sort of be with it, you know, and not put it on her, not, it's not, you're not asking that she take care of it or do something about it, but what it does is it brings you into presence, right? Because she can feel that something's going on. And so if you can name it for yourself and contain it within yourself, it actually creates safety, right? That kind of vulnerability is really important.
The difference is if you're afraid and you're looking for her to be your mother and take care of you, or she has the instinct to want to take care of you because you're afraid, which as a man, you want to resist that because you don't want her to be your mother. But I think that kind of vulnerability is really important.
I don't think you have to share all your troubles with them, all the details of the thing. But if I'm having a bad day, I want to make sure that my wife knows that it's not about her.
So I want to give her some kind of indication like what's going on on for me, be present with her, because that's what she's longing for. She's longing for me to be present.
And if I don't reveal myself in those moments, I'm not present. And if I'm not present, she's going to be agitated.
She's going to create a story in her head that she's done something wrong, or she's going to be upset or angry and something's going to happen. So that's 10.
And it's not exactly an answer to your question, but that's how I think about all that stuff. I guess we've got this sort of strange balance between betraying yourself to maintain a connection with someone or to not have to open yourself up or whatever.
But then if you do do that, this person isn't in connection with you, they're in connection with this projection that you've just put forward. But then there's also the sense of, well, you need to be discerning, like you don't need to tell them about your new athlete's foot protocol or you know whatever it is that you've got that's going on i had chronic flatulence in the office today honey like some things perhaps are best kept for the boys uh but as soon as you open that door the discernment it is a it becomes a decision right you need to make this sort of editorial choice about what is it what what is that I'm going to do, and that can become a very slippery slope.
A lot of guys can use that to excuse ever having to open up, and then you end up hiding things that you probably shouldn't really be hiding, and then you start having expectations that are unspoken resentments because you wanted this thing, but you never said it. and yeah that balance between uh betraying yourself and then ending up with somebody connecting to a person that you're not is a very dangerous slippery slope i think for a lot of guys yeah i agree you see that a lot in the um the kind of red pill community like never share your feelings with your woman.
And I mean, I understand, uh, they're reacting to, uh, the opposite pole of that, which is there's this movement, um, to sharing everything with your wife, like she's your best friend and you want to open up, you want to be vulnerable. And it's, it's important that she sees you feel and that creates connection and intimacy.
And, and, and, and, and, you know, I'm a therapy guy. So I, I, I can relate to that to a degree.
And I did that, you know, when I first, when I started therapy and especially into my training, and that's all you're doing is revealing yourself over and over and over again. And then I would do that in my relationships.
And it took me some time to realize like, no, that's too much. Like I don't need to be sharing all of that with her.
So I have to be discerning. I have to be able to contain things within myself.
I think that's a real practice learning containment, which is not suppression or repression. There's a difference, obviously.
There's certain things, yeah, I need to take to the boys. And there's risks I have to take with my wife that are going to be vulnerable, right? There's things that maybe I need that I need to express to her.
Or the example I just gave that there's places where I feel afraid right now. The whole game for me, as I said, is presence.
Like if you are not present with her, then she's not going to be happy. She's not going to feel safe.
And so you have to find a way to be discerning, but share enough so that you're present so that she can feel you. She has to be able to feel you.
If she can't feel you, she doesn't trust you because you're actually not trustable. If you're not in touch in some way with what you're actually feeling,

you're not trustable. And the reason why is if you suppress your emotions or you rationalize

them in some way, you're going to act in compensation to those feelings in a way that's

not authentic to you, right? And that's going to create problems for you. So it's really,

really important that you understand, know without shame what it is that you're feeling and how and when you choose to share that with her is ultimately up to you. Why is self-compassion so hard? We want to have our own back, if nothing else.
If we're going to do containment we need to be both a like a firm supportive school teacher and also a pretty sort of ruthless prison guard at the same time i suppose uh but we need that self-compassion why is that often quite difficult to access because it it it comes into conflict with um a lower self aspect of us that believes that we are bad and what do i mean by that well going back to what i was saying earlier about we we have to um repress or deny or disassociate from certain aspects of ourself in order to stay connected and in favor with our caregivers. Well, the child has no discernment, no consciousness, right? The parents are God.
And so they're going to make the assumption, they're going to draw the conclusion that those parts of them are bad. That part of me is bad.
And so most of us, I would say all of us, but I'll say most of us have some place inside us that doesn't trust our own inherent goodness, that there's some part of us that's bad. And it's know deep in the unconscious and it can be masked by

a kind of confidence or bravado but most people have some degree of shame and so that um that part of us that thinks it's bad uh it wants to continue to tell ourselves the story that we are bad. Why? Because that's what creates safety for us.
And meaning that this part of me, right? Let's say for a guy, it's my aggression. Okay.
A lot of guys think their aggression is bad. They've been told their aggression is bad.
So if I show my aggression, I'm going to get in trouble. Like mom's not going to be happy or the world is not going to be happy or my girlfriend's not going to be happy.
So we make that part of us bad. So whenever it comes up, we're going to tell ourselves a story that there's something wrong with us.
I'm out of control. I need to work on this, something that it's not okay.
And so it takes a lot of work to sort of override that to accept, and maybe this is why on on a deeper level it's hard to accept the depth of our shadow it's hard to accept how cruel we can be it's hard to accept that all of the insanity that we see out in the world that's horrifying to to us also exists in us and maybe we don't act it out in overt ways but sometimes we act it it out in subtle ways. All of us are capable of cruelty and given a certain set of circumstances, would I have been a Nazi? Maybe, probably.
I mean, I don't know. So that lives in me.
And I think it's very hard for people to come to terms with that and accept themselves there. Generally, what we do is we suppress it because we want to create an idealized self-image that we're good.
We don't want to know that part of ourself. And so it's in the place where it's hard to be compassionate for ourself.
It's really hard to be compassionate from that place where there's this deep root of belief that there's something about us that's not okay. yeah something wrong or broken it is odd that i don't know i i can't think of a much a much less functional belief than that it's it's not really going to contribute to having a flourishing life or thriving uh and yet it's so endemic to most people especially uh people that are high performers yeah well there's and i understand it you know there's there's a belief that if i'm hard on myself like i'm going to achieve more right having that that militant general in your head and i and i think that's useful i mean i want a tough coach i loved tough coaches I love coaches that pushed me and who were clear.
And if I wasn't meeting the standard, they'd let me know. I liked that.
And if they were disappointed in me, they also let me know. This episode is brought to you by Whoop.
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That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. But at the same time if that coach doesn't have the capacity to um love me to be there for me to see me as human right and to to transcend the the performance of the goal and go underneath that i don't really trust him and ultimately it's going to unravel and you see these coaches those hard- coaches, they don't last long.
They move from team to team. It's like a little bit of medicine that maybe that team needs for a couple of years, but then they move on.
So I think we need both things. We need to push ourselves, but we also need compassion for ourselves and and again you know it's easy to rationalize like again the mind is very very tricky and so it's like i could take the day off today things like that and so we want to mitigate against that so it's it's a really really tricky balance and i you know i struggle with it all right? Like, where is the balance between pushing myself and self-compassion? Yeah.
It's strange that by continuing to whip yourself into submission and push yourself harder, you become successful in the only way that other people can judge you, which is outwardly. But nobody really sees the personal price that you've had to pay to get to the position that you're in.
And that means that a lot of the time the trade-off, one of the metrics is observable and another one of the metrics is hidden. And you will almost always trade a hidden metric for an observable metric because people will happily spend an extra hour and a half daily commute going to and from a job that's one rung up the ladder higher and another 15 grand a year in terms of annual revenue but what have they lost in terms of sanity and sleep and time with their kids or the relationship quality well those are all hidden metrics the observable metric is what's your job title how much do you earn per year where did you go on holiday last year and uh yeah i there's this cool insight i learned from an evolutionary psychologist about how um ancestrally there's two ways primarily that leaders uh ascended within tribes so one was through dominance and the other was through prestige so dominance being more tyrannical more top-down more authoritarian and authoritarian, and prestige being more egalitarian, sort of voted by the group, one that's come maybe from the bottom up.
Now, what's interesting is that you need different kinds of leaders at different periods. So it seems like the more domineering leader that's top-down, you want that person in times of war and conflict because they're decisive, they're ruthless, they'll garner everybody together.
Everyone needs to get on the same fucking page or else we're all going to die. Okay? Like, stop dicking about, Johnny.
But then the other side, the problem that you have with that, and I think that I'm certain that there's a parallel when it comes to sort of the way that we treat ourselves. The problem with having a tyrant is that when the war's over, you've still got a fucking tyrant.
And the prestigious leader, the one that's risen from the bottom up, he's raising everyone else along, he's able to play the game, he knows what to go. He's not going to get a look in because this fucking tyrannical, top-down authoritarian bastard has now surrounded himself with sycophants.
He's fort himself and i really think there's something to this about how we sort of treat ourselves and i think that the most obvious place is when you begin doing anything and you're on the launch pad of self-growth or understanding discovering who you really are getting a business off the ground leaving the city or the country that you don't want to be in anymore, leaving that relationship, getting out of the family that you don't want to be in, whatever it is, you need to use whatever fuel you can get a hold of. And it's kind of like you're in war.
If you're going to make something happen from zero, you're at total, the RPMs are at zero, the miles per hour at zero, there is nothing. There's no inertia or momentum to carry you off.
And you need to rip this motherfucker off the launch pad one inch at a time. You could probably do with someone that's good at going to war.
The problem is, after you get out into orbit and you're just floating around, you go, I know that that was a really useful mindset. I know that that tyrannical leader was one that i needed to domineer over me but i really wish he would fuck off now but unfortunately he's still there yeah i think that's that's exactly right um different energies different qualities at different times in our life but i i agree with you if i was going from zero trying to get into shape i'd want a hard-ass motherfucker driving me all the time.
I don't know. David Doggin screaming in my face.
Exactly. That's going to get me there as quick as possible.
I'm going to learn something about myself. But then once I arrive and I'm satisfied with where I'm at, maybe, maybe that energy wants to shift.
So it might be also like, I mean, while you were talking, I was thinking about the balance of the masculine and the feminine. It's not exactly what you're saying, but, you know, there's something about that too.
And both are necessary at different times. You know, you need that strong masculine force.
And sometimes you need that comforting feminine force. You said earlier on, the reason I asked about the mature man versus the young man strategy is, I'm 36 now, so I guess I'm kind of straddling both of them.
And I get the sense that when you're starting out with something, you really need to be a bit more prescriptive, and you probably do need more of a drill sergeant than an Eckhart Tolle. But as you start to accumulate a little bit of instinct and experience, that is precisely the thing that's hard to replicate.
So not only are you allowing yourself to sort of aggregate all of your life experiences, you're finding more ease, you're finding more play, you're competitive in a manner that other people simply can't do. Because unless they've had all of the experiences that you've had in precisely the same sequence with the reflections that you've got for the amount of duration of time that you've done it for they can't be you there is no blueprint that can work that back because frankly kind of like youtube's algorithm open the black box they don't even know how it works you don't even know how your own instinct works right um and i'm i'm just fascinated at the moment you know i spent a lot of time when I first started this show seven years ago, very much productivity bro, the five-daily step routine that I need to do to ensure that I get my three-month sprints and my one-year goals and my five-year vision and all the rest of the stuff.
It was very prescriptive. It was very rigid.
It was very compartmentalized, and it was very useful. Fuck, it worked.
But I'm really interested now in what a more sort of fluid, easeful version of that looks like, one that does allow me to use instinct and aggregate all of this experience a lot more. And I kind of get the sense that that is moving from the tyrant across into the sort of benevolent leader.
That's kind of how I've got it in my head. Yeah, no, that's beautiful.
Well, you're 36 years old. You're at the height of your powers.
It's not your time to be self-reflective. You're attacking, and that's what you should be doing.
You're just following your energy. You're following what you want to do, right? Later in life, you can look back and, and, and, and maybe make sense of it all.
So, and I was that, right. And right around your age, I started to think there's something else, right? Because I, you know, I went to Hollywood and, you know, I was hungry for it and I went after it and it was thrilling and it was exciting.
And, you know, I was making money and meeting all these people and having success. And then there got a point where I just like, there's, there's more.
And I didn't know exactly what that meant. Um, but that's when I started on this, this journey that I've, that I've gone on.
Um, but I can tell you now at 55, uh, uh my approach to life is completely different and it goes back to what i was saying earlier it's just instead of like make it happen i i think let it happen it's going to come to me i want to be in the flow i don't want to force anything and that was very hard for my ego to come to terms with you know you're not not in the driving seat anymore? Yeah, my ego was screaming. Like, what the fuck, man? Impose your will on the world, bro.
And that's a very powerful feeling. And I did that.
And it feels fucking great when you impose your will on the world and you get what you want. But that is a diminishing supply.
And it, it, at a certain point you want to just experiment with doing something differently. Like what's another way to meet life? Like there's, there's more information out there and, you know, um, like I'm in my wise man years apparently, uh, which is sort of weird because, you know, I, I have some wisdom I've accrued along the way but there's another part of me that's still trying to figure it all out and making mistakes but there is there is something about what i just said like having faith letting it happen um that life is gonna unfold that you're not really in control of things um and the more conscious and present that you can be, the more you're going to see the entirety of everything.
And, and as of course, as you get older into your paternal years, you're like, you've climbed the mountain. You know what that feels like.
You have that satisfaction. You're in a different place in your life where you want to, you know, hold things, you know what I mean? Help other people and share what you've learned.
And it's deeply gratifying. I mean, I'm just coming to this because I was pretty aggressive and ambitious in my youth.
And I still am, but I approach it now as an older man in a completely different way

it's so interesting saying in getting what you want from the world imposing your will on the world again it's that sort of domineering energy uh but one of the things that it assumes a lot of things the thing that's so funny that it assumes is that you know what's best for you to want how fucking like narcissistic are you to think that you know what's best for you? Yeah. And that's something I'm very much sort of leaning into now.
Again, a lot of parallels, being able to make things happen, agency, having a vision, bringing it into the world, breaking through it, smashing through whatever barrier it was that you thought. Even, you know, small, mundane, boring successes, thought patterns that you never thought that you could get past, or belief structures that you thought that you were going to have, or ways of seeing the world, or ossified social networks that you were just adamant would kind of always be there.
And breaking through those is very, very impressive. but yeah I get the sense that I am not necessarily always

the best advisor for what I need in the world. And that maybe just having some faith and getting out of my own fucking way.
And again, this is the only thing that you can do. I appreciate that this might sound like a sort of opulent position to be in.
But after a while, after you've accumulated enough momentum and inertia with good habits and good routines, and you kind of have a sense of, you know, everything's moved from system two thinking where it's very deliberate into system one thinking where it's a little bit more sort of automated. You have to assume that most of the things that are going well in your life aren't coming because of what you're doing consciously.
You did all of the conscious stuff before. So it's like, right, okay, why are you gripping so tightly to it now? Why are you sort of holding? And why are you that adamant that you actually have that much control over the outcomes that are coming in any case? How much of it is intention and fear and rumination and concern and anxiety and worry? And how much of it is just that you've accumulated some competence and over a long enough time horizon, people tend to get what they deserve because they rolled the dice enough times.
Well, I can only speak for myself, but I think a lot of us go through this time when we realize that what was motivating me was not what I thought. Yep.
Yep. I thought I wanted it for this reason, but in fact, it was something else.
And and for me i realized at about 37 that almost everything that i was doing was to win the love of my father and i didn't i didn't i you know i i learned that in a uh a process like a you know i do this you know somatic therapy called uh core energetics and you know you you get deep deep into your, um, this was not something that I was aware of at all, but in the, in this process, all of a sudden this awareness came and these thoughts came that, you know, I played hockey and it was like, I, I said these words, like I play hard for him. And, um, and then I thought, what else am I doing in my life to win his love? Because my dad wasn't, wasn't around.
And, and I thought, well, if I'm doing it for that reason, I'm not actually free. And what is it that I want to do? And that was a real crisis point in my life.
I don't think we can avoid it. I think we all want to win the love of our father.
We want to please the father. I think that's built in.
So I don't necessarily think it's wrong, but once you've achieved, I did what I had to do. My dad was proud of me.
I'd achieved that. But then the rest of my life, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? Well, I want to do what I want to do, but what is that? Because I've been driven by this thing for so long.
It's overtaken me. I've created stories around it uh for the reasons why but what what is it now that's a very uncomfortable place to be um because you're letting go of everything that you you thought you know everything you're attached to your entire identity and you have to go on this hero's journey you know let go of the known world enter into the uh the unknown and uh's fucking scary.
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And that's why, you know,

going back to what you were saying,

you know, I had this thought,

this is, you know,

this is why people need therapy. I think it's not even necessarily to solve a problem that you have, but just to reflect you back to you in the places where you may have distortions or blind spots.
Because when somebody is talking to you and they're kind of full of shit, you can feel it, right? You can feel that they're off just a little bit. And a good therapist is going to be able to sort of name that for you and then lead you back to yourself.
Like I don't give advice to my clients. I just try to reflect what I see back to them and lead them back to their own internal compass, their own internal wisdom.
That's the best I can do. I heard the other day, eventually you just get sick of yourself.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's so good. A lot of, a lot, it sort of refers to a lot of things.
I think first off, uh, that sort of selfish energy that you were talking about before the, that you can't really be in service. You can't really have that sort of paternal pay it forward thing because it's still all about you.
Even the kids are about you. Even little Timmy's performance isn't about Timmy.
It's about how does this reflect on you? It's not about being there. That's narcissism.
Yeah, yeah, it is. And, you know, in many ways, that is a fucking powerful energy, again, and it will make you incredibly successful in the only way that we can all be judged, which is outwardly.
But I think, you know, whether it's Wilburian transcendent include or, you know, alchemizing it into something else, eventually, I mean, fuck it, you know, you can get through your entire life and sort of get to that stage. Perhaps we have a new president who has managed to do such.
But it'll carry you a very long way, but I'm not convinced that that's the energy that you want to be using for the entire time. I think it's a toxic fuel when used long-term.
And I think that there's sort of more holistic and interesting ways to get there, especially after you've burned the first couple of rocket boosters filled with that, like me, energy, and then, okay, well, what's next? I had my most satisfying experiences when I played hockey, when I didn't concern myself with my stats, or scoring goals, whatever it was, when I concerned myself with how can I be useful for this team, like when I made that switch, like, because sometimes I was playing with a lot of really good guys and I wasn't as good as them. And I was like, I have to figure out a way to be useful.
And I always found that those experiences to be the most satisfying because I was part of something. And sometimes you're appreciated, sometimes you're not, but you have this own internal appreciation.
So I think you're right. I think real maturity is understanding that particularly as a man, that spiritual fulfillment, psychological fulfillment comes from being of service, that you have to, you know, give your life to something bigger than yourself and, and serve that thing.
And I think, you know, culture is, we're very much lost in being famous and being successful and all the outward things you were talking about. But that's the switch that I'm trying to make.
Again, my ego gets involved. It's like, what about you, bro? What about what you want? But you also are less neur that way.
When you're not thinking about yourself, you have less anxiety because you're just focused on giving. Now, not in a way that you're betraying yourself, as we talked about earlier.
You have to be discerning. You have to take care of yourself.
But if you're oriented in that way, I think it's ultimately a lot more satisfying. Do you think that there'll ever be a way to communicate to people that becoming rich and successful is not going to fix your problems? No, I think you got to find out on your own.
I did. You are.
It's fucking wild. I've been fortunate enough to be around some of the highest status, richest people on the planet over the last few years since moving to America.
All of them have got problems. All of them are fucked up.
I was thinking, right, okay, well, if that's the trajectory that everybody wants to be on, and you know for a fact that the people that are there have still got maybe even more of the problems, they've got layers of expectation and resentment and uncertainty and pressure and scrutiny and all of this stuff piled on top of them and all of the shit that they had when they were still poor. Yeah.
And there's just no, I am yet, I'm yet to find an effective way to communicate that external validation will not fill an internal void. Yeah.
That's how most of us are oriented.'s what we see you know because they look so happy you know we get this curated version of celebrities or influencers but i you know i know the truth because i was there in hollywood i saw what's going on i was like these fucking people are crazy i couldn't believe it it was shocking to me how incredibly neurotic they were and wonderful people and brilliant and all of that, as you're experiencing. But it doesn't take away your problems.
It's one thing I appreciate about Ben Affleck. I mean, he talks about this wide out in the open.
He's just like, I hate being fucking famous. I can't do anything.
I have to live in this fucking box and none of my problems went away like i still am have to live with all my problems and maybe in some way it actually makes it harder because it certainly gives you it certainly gives you less sympathy right like at the very least yeah the people the people at the bottom that are miserable will get sympathy from everybody but the people at the top that are miserable just feel like, how bourgeois, how luxurious of a position to be in to have all of this.

Do you not know how many people would kill to have that?

If I was you, I wouldn't.

All of my problems, and you go, I think if they could get rid of their problems, they would too.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, nobody gives a shit about the problems of the rich and successful.

And that's a burden that you know you have to bear i feel fortunate that um i got a level of fame that wasn't crippling um you know i had one tv show and you know people knew me from it but it was it was a very popular show but it was small audience. So I, you was a small audience.
So I can walk down the street and all of that. I mean, I'm still going to get recognized on the regular, but it allowed me to continue to engage in life and it allowed me to make a career transition.
Because I went back and talked to a lot of my friends who are very famous and I told them what it was that I was doing. They're like, you got out? And I was so surprised.
But what do you mean I got out? They're like, man, good for you. You got out.
With a treatment like Alcatraz. Well, it is a kind of prison what you're famous because you can't really go anywhere and you can't make a transition.
Like you're stuck there. You can't go get a regular job because of the amount of transference that's, that's placed on you.
And so I was really surprised by their reaction. It was the first time that I realized that they, they did in fact, feel trapped.
And I felt fortunate that, that I still had the kind of freedom to be able to, to be able to walk away. Yeah.
it's fascinating. I remember, so I did a TV show.
I did a few TV shows in my 20s. One of them was Love Island, the first season in the UK, popular sort of reality TV dating thing.
And I always remember thinking at the time, like a little bit wistful. I half had the perspective that I knew that this was the right thing.
The first season was 10 times smaller than the second which was 10 times smaller than the third which was 10 times smaller than the fourth and then it kind of peaked and has now maybe flattened out but i always i always thought i wonder what it would have been like to have done one of the you know better known seasons we've come in at season two or season three or season four i could have pretty much picked any of them the casting directors would friend and um in retrospect i'm so fucking glad that it was the smallest one it was basically a full cost broadcast dress rehearsal for the rest of the uh series not even the seasons and uh i'm so glad because it meant like you say i was like beholden to nothing i came off nothing had changed no one no one cared but maybe accumulated a thousand followers on instagram so basically nothing had nothing had altered so it meant that i was unencumbered uh by but you're pretty you're pretty famous now i mean you must get recognized everywhere and i mean i remember when i saw you kuya like because i'd seen you uh you know on youtube and you know i there's a i have a projection onto you like i there's something that happens in relationship when you meet somebody who you've seen on the screen and so that that that must be happening for you all the time it is but the difference is it feels like people know me uh you know on a reality tv show where 24 hours is curated into 45 minutes nightly for seven weeks or something uh and you're

27 26 27 uh and you're still an adult infant i mean i largely still am but at least it feels

like when people come up to me they know me you know they come up and they ask stuff about my

life they they they understand what i genuinely care about right and i've not you know with at

least with the show this isn't that normie of a show if you're going to sit and listen to two

I'm going to sit and listen to two blokes prattle on for an hour about like the inner inner sort of machinations of of emotions and do we really need to be what's the difference between discernment and containment like you know it selects for a very particular type of person and i'm very glad that the kinds of people that I would want to go for a coffee with and what it basically has done, if I'm being honest, is it has outsourced friend finding for me on a sort of global scale. And the only people that come up are the ones that have been through the fire and brimstone of putting up with us talking about this like kind of niche weird psychology bullshit yeah uh i'm sure you know as it continues to go there'll be challenges and i was having this conversation only a couple of days ago like how do you know when enough exposure is enough and how do you then stop it from being too much and it's not really a train that you can sort of stop slowing down the rocket ship you can't just like pull some ejector button and be like right okay we'll stop it there like this is the perfect amount so i don't know uh and also you like what again what an opulent problem to have it's like a rich guy complaining about how hard it is to file his taxes um but it'll be an interesting challenge at the moment it's the perfect level people say hello once every 15 minutes when i'm on the street or a bit more often if i'm in a gym and uh sometimes i get free coffee you know like people have always got nice things to say it's brilliant but again that the the roller coaster continues to roll so we'll see what in a in a few years time.
Yeah. Well, I guess the, any kind of an anonymous life is, is essentially over for you.
Yeah. That's not something that I'd considered before.
Yeah. But you're right.
I mean, you want everybody to know your face. You want everybody to know your name and no one to know your face.
And I've managed to do probably close to the opposite. Like you look like that guy, that guy that does that thing.
I'm like, ah, right. Okay.
Yeah. You know the face and I have no idea of the name.
So yeah. It's the burden that comes with the gift.
It's the shadow. There's always a shadow.
There's always a price that we have to pay when we bring our gift fully to the world what was the moment for you when you kind of got to the uh i'm not sure that this is all it thing when you were in Hollywood? Um, I, I don't,

you know,

it's,

I,

I had,

I had this great year where I had this television show. I had two movies.
I was dating this very beautiful movie star. I had just bought this house.
I was redoing it. I mean, I had everything.
And it was upside everywhere that I looked. And I just had this deep feeling of dissatisfaction.
I wasn't really happy. I mean, I was gratified in a way and proud, but I wasn't satisfied.
And I didn't know what that was. I didn't have the consciousness at the time to realize this wasn't where I was supposed to be.
Although, you know, that had moments where it's, you know, I was on the set of friends, I remember, and doing a guest spot and, you know, sitting on the couch in the coffee shop and there are all the friends. And it's kind of a surreal moment.
It was early in my career. And at the time they were making $750,000 an episode.
And I'm just looking at them, taking all of that in. And I had this feeling, it's like, I don't want this.
And I didn't know what that was. I mean, it was a very clear thought.
And I was like, is that real? Or is that just some fear of success that I'm having? And it didn't really play out for another six or seven years. And then it wasn't until I found something that really lit me up.
And I realized that the thing that I was searching for in acting, I found in this somatic psychotherapy, like everything that I wanted was in that and the game that that was. And the container that it existed in was so exciting for me and creative.
And at that point, then it was really simple. I just started to move in the direction of what I was most interested in.
Isn't it crazy when people have an inkling, the sort of earliest murmurings of a realization, and you say, and about six or seven years later, I actually was able to commit to that thing. Yeah, man, it's a, part of me thinks, oh, wouldn't it be great if we sort of had the courage of our convictions and we were able to pull the pin and, and, and things would happen more quickly.
But then another part of me just thinks you can't, you can't realize things before you're ready to realize them in that way. No, I had to go through it.
I had to go through the process of letting go. I mean, my ego was incredibly attached.
I mean, I came up, you're an actor, you're trying to make it. You don't think you're going to make it.
Or maybe you have an intuition, but you don't know. And then you make it and you're working on television, you're getting lots of money and people are recognizing you.
I mean, you're just in this other world that so many people dream about. And your ego is just so elated.
So then to have a thought, like, I don't really want this. It's like, what? No, Hey, Hey, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.
This is like a dream come true. Um, so it took, yeah, it took a long time for me to detach my ego, detach my identity and all the, all the, you know, the validation that I was getting constantly.
it just you know it fuels you and i saw it i saw it with other people like um that i i saw that they were as we talked about earlier they were trapped there was no way out for them the amount of money that they were making the fame they had this is this is whether they liked it or not that was their, I think a question, a good question to ask and one that I think everybody can kind of, no matter what stage of success they're at, can think to themselves is, okay, how much would be enough?

Like, what would it be?

Would it be one gold medal?

Well, how many gold medalists get one and then they get gold medalist syndrome and they think that they need two?

Or would it be one Superbowl?

Because there's guys that have got pretty much enough

to fit on every finger on their hands.

Would it be an interesting psychological study

if you ask people what their ideal level of earning is?

And actually we can do this,

I guess the people that are listening can do this now.

So if you think to yourself,

what level of earning would you get to,

annual earning,

where you would think, yeah, that's it. Like that's, I mean, that's really it for me.
That number is almost definitely around about three times your annual income, regardless of what your annual income is. And it scales all the way up.
So if you're making a hundred grand a year, it's almost always about 300 grand a year. If you're making a million a year, it's almost always about 3 million a year.
If you're making 5 million a year, it's always always about 15 million a year. It's around about three times what you earn at the moment.
But it doesn't stop. It just keeps going.
So ask yourself the question, what would be enough? Because we're not designed to be happy. We're designed to try as hard as we can.

Right.

And that's the game.

The game is you will try harder.

You are a donkey with a stick on your back,

with a carrot attached at the front,

and every step that you take toward the carrot,

the carrot is going to move one step further away.

Well, the satisfaction is in the quest.

It's the climbing of the mountain that's most exciting. You get to the top, and how long do you spend at the top? A couple of minutes before you start climbing down and thinking about the next mountain you want to climb.
So I think it's hard to orient that way because we're so goal-oriented, but if you can stay present in the moment and realize that's how it is for me. When I look back at Hollywood, the fond memories, yes, I have fond memories about shooting scenes and meeting certain actors and really nailing something and then seeing it on the screen and feeling proud.
But actually, it was the early years in L.A. when I was driving around to auditions, three auditions a day, and all the kind of craziness of all of that.
Like that part of the movie is my favorite, looking on it so it was it was the journey the moment before i made it was the most exciting the thing that's wild is i want to get on to talking about presence but even in the nostalgia of thinking about that time your nostalgic memories will almost always be more enjoyable than the actual time themselves yeah morgan housel tells this really brilliant he's got an awesome awesome article about nostalgia everyone can look at it it's collaborative fund uh and it's i think it's called nostalgia or memories it came up a couple of weeks ago and he is talking to his wife now about um the golden years what he called the golden years i think they got together when they were maybe 23 or something. And they're living in Seattle or somewhere.
And they've just got their first apartment. They're living together.
And they had no obligations, no kids. And he's reminiscing.
He's talking to her about this now in their 40s. And he says, you remember that? That was the golden years.
We didn't have to wake up. We could lie in whenever we wanted.
We could eat whatever we wanted. We were able to do.
What a brilliant time that brilliant time that was. Apparently his wife turned to him and said, you were miserable.
Do you not remember? You hated it. You were constantly terrified you were going to lose your job.
We were living paycheck to paycheck. And he went a little bit deeper and realized, oh yeah, that was what was happening.
I was terrified, but my memory of that young kid was that all of the things he needed to be worried about or that he thought he should be worried about didn't come to pass.

So I have the wisdom, I have the perspective that he never needed to worry.

So all of the worries are forgotten and all of the highlights are retained.

But the felt experience day to day of that particular individual was concern and rumination and anxiety and threat display it was all of that stuff well he maybe felt alive you know and maybe that's what he's remembering i don't know if you saw that peter jackson movie forget the name of it but he he took all this world war one footage and and and remastered it so he put it in color and smoothed it out. Really interesting.
But the film starts with all these voiceovers from British soldiers. And they're obviously recording this when they were very old in their 80s probably.
And we all know that World War I is considered the most brutal war in history. Every single soldier essentially said, oh, that was the time of my life.
That was the great adventure. They loved it.
And you think, okay, maybe it's a lot of what you're saying. But they were alive and they were up against death.
And yeah, in the moment, there's all this horror. But there is something about, I mean, I don't know how you feel, but there was a part of me when I was a younger man that felt sad that I never got to experience war.
Me too. It's like, I want to know what that feels like.
And I'm never going to get to know that. And there's something that I think is lost.
And I'll certainly play it out in our lives in all kinds of different ways, but it's not the same. My life is not at stake.
I'm not walking into a situation where I could be killed or I have to kill and have to feel what that is. Yeah, there's some insane percentage.
I saw this stat the other day about the percentage of silent generation that had been in military service of boomers, of Gen X, of z and it's just all the way down it just gets you know precipitously lower um another thing that was thinking about you know when you're talking about the the wartime mode especially early on um i only realized this recently one of my friends said this to me uh i always sort of lament how busy things are and we've got all of this stuff to do and so on and so forth um we were walking into a gig having just finished recording a ton of episodes in a couple ton of days and I traveled to Australia and I come back and I was in the UK and just doing all this stuff and I was filming a vlog I was like dude it's you know it's it's gonna be a tough week it's gonna be it's gonna be tough going and he sort of fact-checked me and he's like what the fuck are you talking about man like you love this chaos and it was the first time you know how were you saying before a therapist is somebody that reflects you back to you I remember thinking yeah I do actually I do fucking love this chaos I do I love spinning 10 15 plates at once and seeing if I can keep them all going. But we have this story.
We kind of, especially around peace, at least for me, peace being something that I try to, I'm a big fan of, that any diversion from that is an aberration or it's something that should be fixed or it's wrong or it's broken. But there's certain things that are going to come along for the ride.
If you want to do things, some nights you're not going to get perfect sleep, right? Some nights you're going to have to stay up late. Some nights certain things are going to keep you awake.
You're going to have to miss social engagements. You're going to have to make sacrifices in the gym, et cetera, et cetera.
And I don't know, I feel like just accepting some of those things, not railing against them so much, not saying that these are personal curses bestowed just on you, unique problem that you have to deal with, unfair, a bug, not a feature. And you go, hey, what if kind of like gravity, I wish that gravity was just a bit lighter.
And he goes, well, guess what? Gravity is the exact weight that gravity is. It's a precise force that gravity is.
So you're just going to have to put up with it. Yeah, yeah.
Well, there's no light without dark. There's no peace without war.
So it's part of it. I personally love the chaos as well.

I mean, it's, I like it because it takes you out of control.

And you find out things about yourself when you go out of control.

And it can be exciting.

It can be scary.

But we can get addicted to it.

I think that can be an issue.

I've certainly suffered from that. And I have to find the balance of it.
But there's a lot of life in it. I think that can be an issue.
I've certainly suffered from that and I have to find the balance of it. But there's a lot of life in it.
And I think it's, I don't know, my feeling is I think it's important to go a little insane sometimes, right? We have to lose our mind. We have to lose ourselves.
There's a lot of different ways that we could do that. It can be in our work or through some kind of, you know, spiritual practice or, you know, running a marathon, these kinds of things.
But

I think it's, it's really important, particularly for men, um, to put yourself in situations where

you, you're, you face overwhelm, you know, you're at, you're at your edge and to not judge it. Um,

as you said, to accept everything that's happening in the moment. I mean, that's really,

that's what peace is. I think it's just the acceptance of what is and being okay with it.
You've mentioned the word presence a number of times. Sam Harris has been on this show, a number of different meditation teachers.
They have a conception of presence. What is it that you mean when you talk about being present? Well, I guess I'd talk about it through the framework of my work, and it goes back a little bit of what I was saying earlier about we repress, deny, shame, disassociate from certain aspects of ourself, feelings, impulses, desires, needs.
When we're children, we all do it.

And so in that place, we form a defense or maybe an idealized self-image or a mask, and that's sort of our operating system for the world. And we become identified with it, and it feels like who we are.
But very often, we hit a certain point in our life where things aren't working or we experience some frustration or dissatisfaction. We see patterns that are happening and they happen over and over again.
At a certain point, you realize, well, this must be me. There must be something going on in my unconscious that I have to confront because I'm creating this.
And so what you know that you're in that moment that you're not, you're not present, right? You're not present with some aspect of yourself. There's something in your unconscious that's guiding you.
And so the work for me is to help people feel what they had to repress, right? Feel the pain, feel the rage, feel the fear, like feel it like literally in their body, like liberate all those emotions that we hold on to that are stuck there and creating the cognitive distortions. And so it's, for me, presence is an embodied experience.
It's the willingness to feel everything inside of us. Like life happens and we have feelings and there's a certain tendency to want to control those feelings or manage those feelings.
And I think that there's a wisdom in that. But if you do that from a state of repression or fear, it doesn't work.
And so in the place where I'm not present, let's say with my wife, it's because there's something inside me that I don't want to face or feel. That's it.
So that's the frame that I put on it. And the question I ask is, well, what is it that you're unwilling to feel? Because it means that there's something in the present moment that scares you.

Now, it might be irrational.

It might not make sense to your conscious mind because you're a grown man, but it might be the fear of the child that's coming up in that moment. And so I work with presence through people's emotions, through people's feelings, and all the distortions that get created.
Does that make sense, what I'm saying? Yeah, it does. It does.
It does. Do we need to become stronger then, in a way, in order to be more present, more resilient, more powerful? Stronger, more vulnerable, I think, is really the the work it's it it because feeling feelings that scare us we're forced to be vulnerable what does vulnerable mean to me it just means openness and and truth right and so there's a strength that it requires in order to be vulnerable and that was a reframe that I had to make for myself because I had all of those typical masculine images about what strength meant.
And then I realized the, the strongest thing that I can do is to tell the truth and, and to reveal myself, like to, to be honest about what's actually going on inside me without shame. And again, you know, going back that creates all kinds of images.
I mean, can hear the men in your audience, you know, say, well, what are you supposed to feel all your feelings? And, uh, you know, well, it's not exactly that, but to be with them, to learn to be with, right. To learn, to build a container for them, to, to not be ashamed of anything, really um your light light and your dark.
Um, and I think it's, I think there's so much that so many ways that we avoid vulnerability. We avoid, and, and, you know, showing our shadow, we avoid showing our pain.
We avoid acknowledging our fear. And, and, and probably the deepest one for most people is we avoid feeling how much we love because there's nothing more vulnerable than letting your love, your passion, your light shine through.
Most people's major problem is they protect it because once you're all the way here with all of who you are, you're not in control anymore, right? Like you're, you're completely exposed. That's the only way to be fully present in the world is to be completely exposed.
And most people are unwilling to tolerate that level of vulnerability, myself included. That's all I'm working on, you know, like, because that restriction, I can see fractal out into all of the things in my life, right? It fractals out into my career, fractals out into the work and how I'm approaching it.
It fractals out into my relationship. So it really, for me, becomes about one thing.
It's like, can I risk exposing, revealing, maybe is a better word, all of who I am, the good, the bad, the ugly. I like the reframe around strength to show your vulnerabilities.
I think, I don't know, acknowledging your weaknesses is not the same to, it's not the same as surrendering to them. And the only way to overcome your limitations is to actually know what they are.
That's right. So I don't think, I don't know i i still haven't been able to sort of fully thread the needle with the whole men's distaste for showing vulnerability and openness and stuff like that because i don't think it's massively aspirational from really the guys even the guys do it.
I think there's still a sense of like fear and dick and concern and shame around it. And, um, I, I get the sense that in order for you to say something that a guy will want to go and do it,

it needs to be two things at once.

It needs to both understand the fact that they have difficulties and challenges,

but also not patronize them at the same time or make them feel weak. And that's a really difficult line to balance.

Yeah.

Unbelievably difficult.

Yeah.

Things are hard for you.

Thank you. really difficult line to balance.
Yeah. Unbelievably difficult.

Yeah. Things are hard for you and you can get through them.

And I understand and I can support you,

but you don't need the support,

but it's there in case you need it.

It's like,

you know,

you're permanently having to fucking caveat your way around the fragile

masculine ego.

Yeah.

Well,

you know,

it's,

it's,

it's great.

All you really, all people need is for their feelings to be validated i understand why you'd be scared that's usually enough i understand why your heart is broken like not get over it motherfucker there's another girl out there for you it's like and you know that's that's how i approach all of my sessions with people it's like they they have a story about what happened to them. I'm not necessarily validating their interpretation of events, but I'm validating their feeling, their experience of that event.
And because that's real for them. I mean, you can't argue with somebody's feelings.
And so once they feel seen and acknowledged in their feelings, I think that creates a kind of a safety and a resonance that then they can meet go meet the challenge or take responsibility but until that happens for a lot of people they're they get stuck in the feeling right and um they don't they can't move past it and they attach it to a story so i mean that that's it's and it's as simple as acknowledge your feelings within yourself. That's all you have to do.
I'm sad. That's it.
You're good, bro. You know, this girl broke up with me.
My heart is broken. It's like, that's fine.
You know, just acknowledge it within yourself and be with that for a second. Don't romanticize it.
Don't succumb to it. don't indulge it but be with it like of course your heart's gonna break i mean are you human if your heart's not gonna break i mean it's a beautiful thing to have a broken heart like let yourself be in that experience of it right and eventually you're gonna you're gonna move on from it or or whatever i'm filled with rage right now i want to fucking kill the world just be wherever you are with what it is you're feeling.
And if you presence that, if you let yourself be with that, what you'll find is that you'll move very quickly out of that into the next thing. Yeah.
Chris Bumstead's bodybuilder man, he talks about how if you don't feel the bad, you don't feel the good. So I kind of sort of think about emotions doing what people want to do is to be able to sort of slide them up and down a scale so i want i want this particular window of emotions but i just want them at the top end i want like all of these good ones here but i i don't think that that's the way that it works i had actually for the first time ever at the start of this year uh like really really sort of bad couple of days a really sad few days went through a breakup and it sucked and uh then found myself randomly laughing hysterically in the uber on the way to therapy like three days later i was like what the fuck am i? And that was the first time that I'd ever thought, oh, emotions really are a rollercoaster.
They actually are a rollercoaster. Yeah.
And after this huge emotional release, another one comes on the kind of the, what's the opposite end of this scale? It's sort of the, it's swung one way and then it swings back the other. Well, the illusion is we're stuck in it forever and because that that that was not to bring it back to the the therapy model but that was the child's experience like when you're a little child with your parents you are stuck in that situation you're stuck there forever so the feelings you have you have there feel like they're they're forever they're eternal that you can never get out of that situation.
And because that actually is in fact reality. It's not true anymore as an adult, but that fear that I'm going to be stuck in this is forever.
Like when I'm working with people, very often it's, you know, if I'm encouraging them to go into their rage or their sadness, whatever it is, very often the reaction is like, I feel if I go into this, it's never going to end. It's a bottomless pit and it's going to completely consume me.
And that's the illusion that they're living in. It's not that way at all.
Once they allow themselves to go there and express it and feel it and let it move through them, usually what happens is they feel lighter, obviously, but they come into more connection with themselves and then with other people because they're not carrying this around. They're not weighed down with this burden and using all of this energy, physical and psychic energy.
They're not using that to repress it anymore. So they're lighter, they're more here.
And I think that's, again, the work that I do is, it's so unique in that way because of the tools that we use. I mean, breath work is becoming really popular now, and I think that's, that's great.
But, uh, there's not really many places where you can go to really like get it all out, you know, to really like fucking express it like unbridled, whatever it is. I mean, that's always the invitation at my workshops.
Don't hold anything back. And people are like, what do you mean? I'm like, you don't have to hold anything back, anything at all.
In any moment, you can just let it come through. And obviously, there's certain rules and a container that we could create, but that is it's liberating in one sense.
It's like, oh, that sounds exciting, but it's also terrifying. And I'm there to challenge you when I feel like you're holding back like what is it you're holding back and why well i know why because you're afraid you know and if you didn't hold back what and they have all kinds of images about what's going to happen but you know on the other side of it they're just it's it's yeah they're free i love it david suckliff ladies and gentlemen david where should people go don't want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing uh go to my website

davidsutcliffe.com it's all there dude you're sick i really appreciate the uh energy that you

bring to this and uh we've got lots more to talk about so let's bring you back on soon

appreciate you man thank you for having me