Creativity and a learning mindset are essential to succeed. Learn how these innovators put
these skills to use to become the best in their fields. Welcome to Innovators
to Know. Brought to you by Idemas. It's a pleasure for me to
welcome Gretchen Ruben to our show today. She's a friend and a driving force
behind the book group we've belonged to for twenty years. She's one of today's
most influential and thought provoking observers of happiness and human nature. The specific niche
she's carved out is breaking down abstract, complex ideas into comprehensible nuggets and,
more importantly, practical strategies for individuals to implement to increase their self awareness and
improve their lives. Gretchen most often uses herself as the guinea pig, and
her authenticity and self knowledge make her content compelling to her many many readers,
and Gretchen's been interviewed by Oprah, eating dinner with Nobel Prize winning researcher Daniel
Kahneman, walked arm in arm with the Dalai Lama, had her work reported
on in a medical journal, being written up in the New Yorker, and
being announcer on Jeopardy, which is probably the most interesting thing. Definitely,
that was the biggest excitement of all for sure. So Gretchen, welcome,
Thank you for joining us today. So happy to be talking to So.
You've written several best selling books, The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and
The Four Tendencies in the Past. Your newest book is Life in Five Senses.
Tell us what made you focus on the senses and decide to write about
it. Well, it was right near here where we're talking right now.
I had a bad case of pink eye, so I had to go to
the eye doctor. Yeah, I just walked nearby, and as I was
leaving, he said to me very casually, like as if he were saying,
oh, be sure to wear some or drink it up water. He
said, be sure to come back for your regular checkup, because, as
you know, you're more at risk of losing your vision. And I was
what, I don't know, I don't know that. What are you talking
about? He said, Oh, yeah, you're extremely nearsighted, and that
means you're more at risk of losing your vision so through a detached retina.
So if that starts to happen, we want to catch it right away.
Yeah, and I have a friend who lost some of his vision to it
attached retina, so that felt like a very real possibility to me. So
I go out onto the street, and I'm looking at this beautiful New York
City city scape all around me and thinking how precious it is. But also
I didn't notice anything on my way over. I was like stuck in my
head, lost in my own thoughts. I didn't notice one thing. And
often, you know, we don't know how much we appreciate something until we
lose it, or we fear that we might lose it. And so I
was taking this all in and then in an instant, it was like every
knob in my brain got jammed up to eleven and I could see every detail
with perfect clarity. I could hear every sound on a separate track. I
could smell every smell in New York City, which is very small and lots
of different bloods, of different smells, um, and you know what your
neighbors are getting up to. And my whole walk home was just this sort
of transcendent, almost psychedelic experience when I'm just feeling all these sensations just overwhelming
me, and I realized, like, this is happening all the time.
There's nothing special about this. It's just that I'm paying attention, and usually
I don't. Yeah, and I have been studying happiness for a long time,
as you mentioned, and I had had a sense that there was something
missing, that there was a puzzle piece that I hadn't identified, and that
walk home really showed me this was the missing piece. This was the way
that I could connect to the world and to other people and to myself through
kind of this intense connection with my five senses. That's u. I'm so
glad you describe that experience because I think so many of us walk through our
lives, especially near city. You know, we're sort of almost bread to
believe that busyness and packing as many things into one day as possible, it's
sort of a prerequisite, right, and it desensitizes you to all of the
everyday stimuli around us that we should be in fact taking it. Yeah,
you're so busy ticking through your to do list that you just you don't even
notice the blossoms on the trees. Yeah, yeah, so true. Remember,
So we're going to take a quick look at this short video clip in
which you talk about how you felt your brain was just driving the car that
was your body. Let's take a quick look. A few years ago,
I had an epiphany. I've done countless things that made my life happier,
and yet too often I felt stuck in my head, disconnected from the world
and other people, and also from myself. I've been treating my body like
the harror my brain was driving. In my book Life and Five Senses,
I describe how I discovered that by tuning into my five senses, I could
transform my everyday life by paying true attention to the richness of the physical world
around me. Through the lens of my research and adventures, I explore how
our senses can help us cheer up, calm down, live in the moment,
give us more pleasure, more energy, deep in our connections, and
even allow us to touch the transcendent and catch up. Will never taste the
same again. So Gretchen, tell us a little bit about this feeling of
disconnection from your body. I mean, there's so much now that's been research
written, more and more talked about in all sorts of ways about the mind
body connection, and that feeling of disconnection is common for a lot of people.
How do we come back to that and how did you navigate that?
What's interesting. I think a lot of people do think that they want to
reum they want to appreciate the moment, they want to get back in their
own body. And I think it's because of two things that sort of point
in opposite directions. I think, on the one hand, reality can feel
sort of drained and flat because we're doing things through screens or like you know,
um, so we're not we're not engaging, we're not picking up smells,
we're not we're not so much of it is flattened. But then on
the other hand, sometimes things feel hyper processed or overly saturated, like a
snack food that hits every bliss point and it just or you go to a
movie and you see more details than you could see in a week, and
you hear this music that's very emotional and stirring, but there's no smells,
there's no air currents, And so I think people are trying to get back
into balance like they want to like. I think that's why things that are
immersive are so popular, because anybody, anytimes something's build as immersive, it's
like sign me up. That sounds amazing totally, and because I think it
is that people are trying to get back into their bodies and anything that sort
of helps you remember to just like experience your body, it's just very energizing.
So I did it by sort of systematically going through the five senses,
which I don't think is the way that most people would want to do it.
But I was so curious and just really wanted to learn more. So
I did it by going through all five senses and looking for adventures or experiments.
You know, the more you know, the more you notice. I
tried to really learn a lot more, a lot of different things. For
you, How did you structure that exercise for yourself, because in a sense,
you created a plan and sort of a mechanism to experience have different experiences
involving each of the five senses, right, A lot of which you talk
about in your book. Right. Yeah, It always for me starts with
research. So the first thing I do when I get interested in a subjects,
I got the library and get a giant stack of books. So part
of it was just sort of understanding. But the more that I would research,
the more I would think, like, oh, I really want to
learn more about this, or I want to try this, or I need
to test this, and so it's sort of through the research or often they
would mention things like one thing that's funny. This is fun to just do.
You know, it takes one second. So you know how with two
eyes we have three dimensional vision, and with two ears we are able to
locate things in space because we're comparing, so our two nostrils also pick up
slightly different smells so that we have a richer smell. So you can do
this. You can just like take something that has a strong smell and test
it on one side and then the other and you can. And that's the
kind of thing. I would read about it and I'd be like, I've
got to try that for myself. Where's a jar of capers and I mean
to sniff it up. So a lot of times, just by learning about
it, it made me think of things that I wanted to do. I
read about Flavor University, which is this two day free course you can take
in Jadeva, Illinois, and it's all about flavor and I was like,
can I just email them and go? And it turns out you can't.
Yeah. They're like they're like, we're not sure that this is something that
you'd be interested in, and I was like, well, I think so,
so if you'll have me account and stuff, I went fantastic, Yeah,
I love that story. So, Qutchen, you also host the podcast
Happier, and you've built a Happier app in fact, which helps people track
their habits really and it's been super popular with your followers. Tell us how
you realized the Happiness Project needed to go beyond the book and be made accessible
to people in the various ways that you've now made it accessible. I mean
it's such a you know, many writers write books. Many of those books
do extremely well. Few writers, I think, are able to take their
research and insights and turn it into this effectively practical tool for everyday living.
Right. Well, it's interesting because because I think I am always interested in
thinking understanding the abstract ideas. But then what could the average person do starting
tomorrow without spending a lot of time, energy, your money? So like,
how would you make I'm kind of the Benjamin Franklin side of the Happiness
studies, and so with Better than Before it is my book about how people
can make or break habits, And so I did a lot of thinking about
the different tools that worked the best for people, and why because I've the
sport Tendencies personality framework on that divides people into upholders, questioners, obligers,
and rebels and which people can take gretchenba dot com slash quiz to find out
what they are. But the kind of tool that you use effectively really depends
on what tenancy you are, Like that that can really make you much more
efficient in figuring out how to approach that an important habit change. And I
just wanted to help people make that match because I get so frustrating when people.
I'm like, I've been talking to you for five minutes, and I
know why this isn't working for you, Like you're just It's not that you're
lazy or you can't make yourself a priority or you can follow through. It's
that you haven't picked the right tool for you. And my sister calls me
a happiness bully, which is true, you wouldn't be happy, yeah and
so and so if I think there's a way for you to be happier,
I get pretty insistent. And so the app is something where it helps you
figure out your tendency and then it suggests it's like, you can use any
tool. Anybody can use any tool. But I'm just saying, if I
know you're an obliger, I know that this kind of tool is probably going
to help you more. Or if you're a rebel, I'm not going to
suggest this kind of tool for you because often rebels don't have good, good
success with that tool. But then there's also like I have, like I
love quotations, I love doing yourself better questions. I think that can also
help us to become happier and to change our habits if we really like are
you a morning person or a night person? A lot of people try to
form their habits and ignore that. I'm like, if you're a night person,
you're you're not going to get up early and work on your novel for
two hours from six to eight am. I'm just that's not gonna work for
you. Yeah, And it's not that it's not a good idea. I
can do that. I'm a morning person, yeah, but for a person,
it's just but I think sometimes people just want to skip that stage.
They want it the best way. They wrote the silver bullet. They want
the silver bullet. They want like the most scientifically proven way and I'm like,
such a thing can't exist because people are so different. Yeah, it's
I always say to people, what's the best way to cook an egg?
Yeah, and they said, well, it depends on how you like your
eggs, or they say, I don't even like eggs, right right,
nobody can tell you the best way to cook an egg. Yeah, because
it depends on how you like your eggs. Yeah, as you've done this
would have been what have been some of your learnings as a as a you
know, effectively it is having built this business around this concept. What are
the learnings that you've had from that? Well? I think the biggest learning
is what we were just talking about, is that there's no one right way.
And when I started out with the Happiness Project, when I wrote,
when I started that book, I really believed that I could figure it out
and present it. It's sort of like, if I could just present it
clearly enough, everyone can read the book, everyone can figure it out.
Okay, Now, if I thought about it, I might have said,
well, people have been thinking about this for thousands of years. If somebody
could just figured it out, probably it would have been figured out, you
know, before this. And that's one reason why I'm skeptical when people are
like, oh my gosh, incredible new finding and what is there an incredible
because it's probably wrong, but but just understanding how often the opposite things can
work for people. Okay, good example. Some people will say to you,
if you want to make a change, what you have to do is
small incremental change. Ye little, you know, step by step, floss
one tooth, do one yoga pose, run for five minutes, and that's
the way you've been. And there's all these reasons why that's true, except
that some people get very bored with that. They want to go bigger but
go home. They want bold, radical challenge, yeah, or they lose
it gist. So why would I say to that person, No, no,
no, you're setting yourself up for failure just because that wouldn't work for
me. So I think again, it's like it's like ext or if something
doesn't work for you, like a lot of times with and I'm sure you
see this in the coaching world. Some people there they feel like they shouldn't
have to have accountability. Yeah, they're like, it's kind of like training
wheels, Like some people just need accountability. Lots of people need accountability.
There is absolutely nothing wrong. That's what you need get yourself, what you
need to achieve your aims for yourself. Some people resist that. They don't
want anybody looking with their shoulder, they don't want anybody checking in with them.
If you tell them to do something, they're going to resist. That's
the oblige of rubble in my framework. Yeah, and that's fine too.
It's like, we don't have to change ourselves, and we certainly don't have
to change other people, but we have to think about what works for us
and not to me has been the thing that just do. And then with
the five senses, how we all live in such a different sensory environments.
I mean, it's genetics, it's upbringing, it's expectations. But like you
can't smell your home the way I guess smells it. You're so accustomed to
it you don't even smell it. Yeah, where somebody walking next to you
could have an overwhelming smell of lilies or air freshen or dogs or whatever.
Um, probably dogs is what the smells. I mean, you don't know.
And it kind of made me pronix. I was like the house,
I'm like doc, because I wouldn't my apartment wouldn't. I got to go
away for months before I would be able to tell or something. Or we're
in New York City, a big siren can go by, we probably wouldn't
even notice, Yeah, because our brain doesn't flag sirens absolutely, whereas for
someone else in LA they don't hear helicopters. Yeah, no, that's so
true. I think, you know, in coaching we see this all the
time, right. I think the personality types, as you've said, really
matter, and as a result, their level of self awareness. I mean,
some people can have like almost too much self awareness to the point where
they're super self conscious. Right, And equally you can get the opposite where
there's zero self awareness and all the states in between, and and coaching,
you know, is adaptive to that personality type effectively. Right, It's like,
how is this person going to understand what we're trying to tell them in
the most most acceptable way possible. And the words really matter? The words
matter. That is another thing that surprised me, because I'm like, what
does it matter? The aim is the aim, But it's so it's really,
do you practice piano or do you play piano? I mean it really
or just the metaphor that you choose. So when I wrote the Happiness Project,
several people said to me, we can't call it the Happiness project because
a project sounds like homework. Nobody wants to do a happiness project. And
I thought, well, that's odd because to me, a project holds fun.
To me, it sounds exciting. Um. But then a lot of
people want to use the journey metaphor. I don't like the journey metaphor,
maybe because I'm not well, yeah, I don't know why, but to
me that it's not a compelling metaphor. But many people love. And so
again it's like, it's not that one is. We don't need to argue
about whose metaphor is right. Um, it's but it's that the words matter.
Well, this is reframing too, like this is the classic do I
have to or do I get to? Yeah? Really matters, It really
really makes a big difference, totally. Yeah, as we know from our
experiences with our children, Yes, no, it's so true. So having
known you as long as I have, Gretchen, it's hard for me to
imagine you ever feeling blocked. That said, however, prolific any of us
is. The feeling of being blocked is very real right, whether that's in
work or in writing, or as a parent or whatever, and it's super
frustrating. Let's take a quick look at this clip in which you describe some
of the strategies that you use to overcome the block. I discovered that we
can use our hands to help our minds to think. Here's an example.
For years, on my computer, I kept a list of my indirect directions,
short somewhat mysterious creative prompts that I consulted whenever I felt stuck, like
skip the boring parts and break the frame. I loved these indirect directions,
but it bothered me the this was just a document that could vanish or be
forgotten. When I was home visiting my parents, I came across my father's
ancient rolodex. I loved it, and it hit me I could buy a
new rolodex for my creative prompts to choose at random whenever I felt stuck.
I copied my indirect directions onto the cards. First task, I needed a
better name for this tool, which I was calling by the boring name of
Rolodex of ideas at random. I pulled at a card find a fresh metaphor.
After a few weeks of thinking I was inspired news machine. Putting an
idea in my hands helped put an idea in my head. So question,
how did you start doing these creative exercises and what's the importance in your view
of it? You know, sort of focusing actively on exercising the creative parts
of our brain rather than the sort of more what i'll call the more routine
ones where we just kind of do the things that we need to do on
a daily basis. It's so energizing to do something that's creative. And I
think the word creative can can feel scary to people, and people will say,
like, I'm not creative. My mother, who's one of the most
creative people I know, she's always like, oh, I'm not creative.
I just copy. I'm like, that is creative, Like what is it?
All the great artists copy? Yeah, And I think, you know,
just tapping into something even like trying to have a funny intro to your
annual report or doing a holiday newsletter for your family, like they're all like
trying to figure out a way to make a birthday present for someone. There's
all kinds of ways to be creative, and it just it's so energizing,
and I think part of it is the atmosphere of growth. It's seeing yourself
do something and create something, build something, um, put something into the
world that doesn't already exist. Part of it also, for many people's beautiful
tools. Yeah, like it's so fun to use beautiful tools. Yeah,
whether that's beautiful ingredients or or beautiful Like I love markers. You can believe
have any markers we have in our house, It's like, I have way
more markers stickers. I'm really there's this point renaissance of stickers, of self
intire I mean, there's just like there's just a playfulness that comes right.
It's right on the food thinks. Somebody told me, they're like, you
should buy any food because I was saying how expensive some ingredient was. He
said, always buy anything you want in the grocery store because it's always cheaper
to cook yourself that you eat out. And I thought, Okay, that's
good. That's permission to buy whatever you want. Um. But woodworking,
knitting, entertaining, all these things can make it. I'm decorating from the
holidays. These are all outlets that can be so pleasing and so energizing.
And part of what they do is they connect us with our senses because we're
using our hands and we're looking, and there's often sounds involved. Why have
we as a society, do you think come to define creativity as you know,
some grand piece of output, like I wrote an essay or a book
or different painting or whatever it is. It is how most people what you're
describing about your mother, it is how most of us tend to view creativity.
We don't think of it, and in that we all manifest it in
our daily lives in different ways. I think that is an excellent question,
and I think we should lead a movement to identify as creative things that I
would say are more or like are more immature, that are just not professional.
I do worry about that sometimes with like, like with music in particular,
like you read about the old days, it was like it was very
common for people to get together and sing, or you'd be in a village
and there'd be one person who's like really good at playing the piano or the
guitar, and they would do it. They weren't professional, but they were
just really good as sort of an ordinary person, and there was a lot
of pleasure and a lot of community and of community and a lot of and
like a person who wasn't good enough to be, you know, on the
national stage could still get recognition and an audience and stuff. And now that
we have all this, you know, super professional artistic output. I worry
that then people they don't it's not exercised as much and people don't participate in
it as much. Um. But there's so many ways in just part of
ordinary life that you are using your creative um, your career. I mean
even something as funny is like um, working on life in five sents has
made me much more appreciative of things like cosmetics or like what color. I
never paint my nails, but people have a lot of color, like picking
their nails and they'll do every nail there's like a love. Or like the
way a man will be dressed like all monochrome, but then have like a
really bright sock and it's like this is where I'm having my fun. I
worry about men not wearing times because that used to be a thing that guys
really had a motive self expression. Well yeah, it was like it was
really fun at least like my husband, my father, like the men in
my life. They really kind of had they like their picking a time,
and now they don't. It's it's sort of like this, you know,
the album cover, it's just gone away as something that people know. That's
something that was like a creative form. That's that's going away. So but
then there are all these other new creative forms. You see, see what
people can You can make a movie with your phone. Yeah, you can
do an extraordinary presentation just you know, with free tools. So um,
but people need to do it, you know, people need to do it.
I think that's so exciting. That's uh the important point. I think
in ways small and every day, rather than like trying to dream up some
grand project that that may or may not happen absolutely yeah yeah no. Um.
Sometimes people sort of have this idea that, yeah, that it has
to be so outstanding or so excellent or it's not worth doing it. Yeah,
anything worth doing is worth doing badly for sure. A great I want
to shift is a little bit now, Qutchen. Um, you know,
we obviously spend a lot of our time thinking about coaching, coaching various individuals.
Um, what role is coaching played in your life? I have never
coached or been coached. Okay, And what about mentors who have been key
mentors? Had a mentor? You've never had a mentor, I don't think
so, Okay, so this is the first because nobody ever got So what
do you consider to be a mentor? I mean, I've had bosses,
but I haven't anybody who liked took a long term Yeah, that's what I
mean, a long term mentorest in your career, and that's never been the
case. Fair enough, there are there sort of a couple of people that
you think have been particularly key at various points during your revolution. Funnily enough,
I think the people who are most influential to me, or other writers
whose work has really influenced me. Um, And this I don't mean.
I know that this memory is false because I've tried to do the chronology,
so I know that this memory is false. And yet it's a very powerful
memory. So there you go. When I when I was still working as
a lawyer, and I was thinking about and I was having an idea for
what eventually became my first book. But I had I had been an English
major, I'd always read a huge, huge amount, But I didn't understand
how I never even occurred to me to become a writer, because I didn't
know how I would enter the writing world, because I thought people either wrote
like novels or plays or poems, or they were academic writers, or they
were journalists. And I didn't want to do I knew I didn't want to
do any of those things. But in my memory, I walked into the
bookstore and saw the book cod The Story of the World to the Eyes of
a Fish by Mark Kurlansky something like that, and it just blew my mind.
And I was like, this is a whole different way to do that
fiction, you know. And so there have been different books where I have
been like, oh my gosh, there's a book called Jackie under my Skin
by Wayne custom Bomb. Again I was like, this is a whole different
way that a person could approach biography or um, you know. I read
the Pillow Book of say Shaunagun and I was like, okay, you can
just pull pieces apart. I don't know. So I think those are the
biggest influences are me. Are things that I read makes sense? Act your
final question as we as we wind up, you talked in this clip,
let's take a quick look then as people say, well, you have to.
You have to appreciate the moment, live in the moment. The moment
is all we have. That's true. But a life that has that takes
no consideration for the future is not a good life. And a life where
you don't reflect on the past is also not a good life. And so
how do we think about the present, the future in the past in the
right way, Because there's it's sort of they all have to be weighed against
each other. Well, the one I think about the most is like,
sometimes the solution to a problem or an obstacle or a situation is to zoom
wagh in, to look at it super close, just the immediate thing in
front of you, and sometimes have to zoom way and see it from a
distance, see it, you know, in light of what's happened before and
what will happen after. And you might need to do one one minute and
literally the next minute and the next situation do the exact opposite of what was
just supposed to be this universal problem solving technique about the relationship the past,
present, and future have to one another. So many of the influences surrounding
our teenagers and young adults keep sort of telling them carp DM right, live
in the moment, your mother of two young women, how have you tried
to frame this for them? On the one hand, live in the moment.
On the one hand, we're such an outcome of our past experiences,
and it's so important to look to the future because without it, there's it's
hard to define that sort of a place where going to or moving towards.
Right, tell us a little bit about that. I think that's very true
because people will say, well, the most important thing to live in the
moment, it's you know, it's the only thing that we have. But
a life where you only think about the present moment would not be a good
life because you have to do things in the present that will set yourself,
set yourself up for you know. But in the future, yeah, whether
that maybe you're you're doing something that you don't want to do, or you're
not doing something that you would prefer to do. So I think with my
daughters, I just but what I do not do with my daughters is trying
to steer them in any direction because I think I don't know what the future
really is going to look like, like certainly like the future of work.
So I would never say to one of my daughters, like this is a
good this is a good path or a bad path because I don't know.
Yeah, and probably they will have careers in things that don't even exist right
now, which is you know, how many people do we know are in
careers that didn't exist ten years ago, fifteen years ago, or how many
people do we know who have changed careers, you know, four or five
times over the course of their working lives. I think was unheard of our
parents generation, absolutely absolutely, And so with them, I'm much more about
like skills, like is this a skill or like I have a daughter who's
sort of like new in the order place, and I was like, everything,
this is great because you're going to learn so many new skills. Everything's
new to you. That's the advantage of being at the beginning, Like there's
no waste because everything is new. Everything is like positive because you're learning,
even if it's really boring you like or you think it's you think you don't
want to do it. I'm like, well, that's something that you know
about yourself. Like some people are very attracted to scrappy, and I want
one thing you've learned about yourself is you want to be in a very well
managed place. You don't like scrappy, you know. She went to submates,
she said, do you guys have an organization chart? And they said,
oh, if we had an organization chart, we wouldn't be in this
situation. Like, and she's like, I would like to be in a
place that has an organ or could even imagine having an organizational chart. But
that's not everybody. So now she knows something about herself. So part of
it is I do think the one thing that we can do as a parent
is out to them what their own strengths are. Yeah, Like one of
my daughters is very resourceful, and I myself, I'm not resourceful, so
I admire it in other people. But I don't think she knew that about
herself until I said, like, you're showing me that you're very very resourceful,
so that you have you And I think coaches can do the same thing.
They can they can because they have a little bit more perspective. They
can illuminate strengths you might be taking for granted. It's very easy chose to
take our own strengths for granted or think, well everybody, like everybody likes
to get up in front of an audience and talk and like are you kidding
or they don't. Yeah, So I think that's one thing they're trying.
Yeah. I think understanding our strengths is it happens with time, right,
and experience, and for young people, developing an awareness of those strengths,
both so that they understand that they are real strengths and they can lean into
them, but also so that they don't just over index on them, right
and then kind of constantly go to those strengths and ignore other other aspects of
that they need to need to go down. Is so key because we live
in a world of sort of these kind of you know, sound by d
moments, right, of these super oversimplified phrases of like lean into your strengths
or pursue your passion or whatever, and they're sort of meaningless because, as
with everything, it's never just one thing or another. It's it's a much
more complex sort of amalgam of different things, right that have to be taken
into consideration. And that's why I think a lot of times somebody on the
outside can help you see it, because since they're not all emotionally caught up
with all the things, they can kind of say like, oh, well,
it sounds like you have a pattern of this, or I see you
light up when you talk about that, or you always are trying to get
out of doing that. Is there a way you can just like drop that
from your set of responsibilities? I think sometimes sometimes sometimes it's hard for us
to see ourselves clearly. I think that's one of the great challenges our lives.
Yeah, I mean, one of the phrases we use a lot is
this idea of coaching providing you with a balcony onto yourself as you can find
me sort of step outside and kind of look at yourself in terms of your
behaviors and how someone else is seeing it. Yes, and that kind of
one hundred thousand foot view is just so important. Well, a funny story
along those lines is I do high intensity weight training, and my trainers said
to me, he said, the same people are always late, and the
same people are always on time. He said, the people who are later
always like, oh, I'm always on time, except you know this,
one day I had a bad traffic or like today there was really bad weather,
And he said that sounds right, except that people who are always on
time are always on time. Yeah, and they're in the traffic and they're
in the weather, and so sometimes I think a coach is sort of like,
yeah, you're telling me it's the traffic and the weather, but not
really. But maybe maybe maybe we can figure out a way so that you
can still get there on time totally even if there's a bad traffic in weather.
I thought that was just such a great small example of how it makes
sense, perfect sense from the inside, but from the outside they're seeing a
very different pattern because they're on the balcony. Yes, exactly, well said
any last words of advice, Gretchen as we wrap up for our audience on
thinking about their curiosity, creativity, their learning mindset, One thing I would
say is just be interested in what you're interested in. I think sometimes people
have a lot of ideas about what they should be interested and or can be
very judgmental, and I think if you're not doing what you're truly interested in,
you sort of can't maintain it. And so, you know, I
think an amazing thing is to become a minor expert in something that you're truly
interested in. I mean, get interested in the life of Dolly Parton,
get interested in, you know, Central Park, whatever, something that you're
truly interested in and just because it's interesting to somebody else doesn't mean it's interesting
to you. And it can be such a source of energy. And if
you can incorporate the five senses, I think it's even more exciting and energizing.
So maybe it's like all the work obtain a turner, you know,
like I'm gonna listen to all her music and learn about it. I went
through this thing with the Beatles. I watched that Get Back documentary and it
becomes so fascinated by the Beatles and it was so fun. It didn't last
that long, but while lasted, I had a great time learning about the
Beatles. Well, it's both the enjoyment and the learning always and the sense
of growth and the sense of growth and self efficacy that you come from,
like mastering something that you don't know. Yeah, it is. It's fascinating
how many people you know want to only do things that are useful or sort
of part of the program. And so many of the greatest learning moments happen
when you do precisely those things that are off the path or you didn't think
of, or you got dragged into by accident or with reluctance or whatever,
you know. I remember I went to a panel of comedy writers and somebody
said from the audience, how do you get a job writing comedy? And
one of the panelists said, you do what you love and then your friends
hire you. And I thought that was really good because it's like, if
you're doing something that's part of just like what you want to do, that
you do for fun, then you'll make connections and you'll be moving forward,
whereas if you're always fighting against your nature, Like that's one of the reasons
I love laws. It was like, these people love law. Yeah,
they talk about law morning and at night. They were reading law generals for
fun on the weekend. That's not me. Yeah, I can't bring that
level of engagement. So where can I find that level of engagement? Because
it's right for them, it's just not right for me. Yeah. Wonderful.
Thank you so much, Scratch, Thank you. I so enjoyed it.
Thank you, Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave
us a review. Find your Ideal Coach at www dot videamax dot com.
Special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen