Pod Insights Modern Wisdom Lessons In Listening From The Tattooist Of Auschwitz | Heather Morris | Modern Wisdom Podcast 227 About this episode Heather Morris is an author.
Heather's first book The Tattooist Of Auschwitz was a global phenomenon and the process of creating that work involved years and years of delicate, patient, attentive listening - a skill which many of us could benefit from learning.
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Transcript 10,717 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Here's the thing about him, he was a bit of a bugger about things. And his favourite phrase to me was, "Did I tell you about?" And every time he did that, I would just roll my eyes and go, "Go." And he'd start telling me something and I'd look at him and go, "No, you bugger, you haven't." And you know I've written the screenplay, you know, we've got a producer and director working on it. Now, he was saying that right up to two or three days before he died. He would continuously say, "Did I tell you about?" Because he'd suddenly remember something else. We'd want to embellish or enhance something that he'd read in the script. Who knows how much more he went to his grave with.
0:38 Chris Williamson? Many of the listeners will be familiar with your story. But can you tell us how you came to write The Tattooist of Auschwitz?
0:47 Speaker 00 Absolutely, because it's one of those crazy things that anyone in life can look for. And I guess the lesson here is when somebody asks you to do something, unless you've got a damn good reason for not doing it, then say yes. And I've learnt that particularly from what happened with me and Lully. Because I was having a, well, a coffee with a friend who I hadn't seen for many months. I'd been putting it off. And while we were casually having that cup of coffee one Sunday afternoon, she just casually said to me, "I have a friend whose mother has just died and his father has asked him to find somebody he can tell a story to. That person can't be Jewish. You're not Jewish. Do you want to meet him?"
1:30 Speaker 00 I said, "What's the story?" And she said, "I don't know." And I said, "Oh, okay then, I'd love to." So from having a cup of coffee and saying yes to that, and then saying yes to meeting a stranger, The Tattooist of Auschwitz came about.
1:42 Chris Williamson? So what happened next?
1:44 Speaker 00 Well, a week later, because that was a Sunday and I worked full time.
1:47 Chris Williamson? This was like 2004, was it?
1:50 Speaker 00 Three, no, the end of 2003.
1:54 Speaker 00 And yeah, well, a week later, the following Sunday, I knocked on the apartment door of Lali Sokoloff and he opened it and he had a doggy the side of him. One of them was, well, she was bigger than, about the size of an average small pony. And the other one was smaller than my cat. And he didn't even look at me, he just opened the door and muttered the word come. And he and the doggies turned around and disappeared. So I followed them in and he just walked into a room, a lounge dining room, and he just pointed to the table and went, "Sit", and pointed to a chair. So I sat. And he and the doggies disappeared again. I'm getting a little bit unnerved here, as you can imagine.
2:36 Speaker 00 But a few minutes later, all three of them reappeared, with Lali bringing me the first of many, many bad cups of coffee.
2:45 Chris Williamson? It didn't make a good coffee?
2:47 Speaker 00 Never. I was so grateful when our relationship got to the point where, you know, we were now friends and I could say to him, "Hey, how about we go out for coffee, anything?"
2:57 Chris Williamson? "Love of God, please stop making me your coffee." So what's the writing process like? Obviously, you have this very, very emotional story, I imagine, for him to try and get out. It's a long time ago. It took a long while for you to fully eke out the entire narrative, right?
3:17 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. You've got to remember, this is a man, you know, eighty-seven years of age, and he was grieving the loss of his wife and just wanted to be with her. He wanted to tell a story. And I didn't know for many, many weeks, months probably, whether or not there was actually a story there that could be strung out, because he kept going over the same thing. He would never finish a storyline or a vignette he was telling. And I knew from my work that when you're talking to people, elderly people in particular, and people who are traumatised. That the only thing you can do to hear their story is to listen. I had no pen and paper in front of me. I'm not writing anything down.
4:01 Speaker 00 I've got no recording device, nothing to distract them. And that was what I had to do. And that's why it sort of took those many, many weeks of me racing home and trying to frantically write down and phonetically writing these German words that I'd never heard of. I mean, when he keeps talking about himself being the Tatabella and I'm sitting there going, what the heck's a Tatabella? Until I could find some spelling resembling that word and translate it. So yes, it was a challenge.
4:30 Chris Williamson? You were working your memory quite hard then.
4:34 Speaker 00 Well, yes, but here's the thing, and you know, this is what plays out in the book that is being released tomorrow. And my, as far as I'm concerned, because tomorrow is going to be Thursday for me. And it was because where I worked and from past experiences, I knew that if you actively listen to somebody, you listen to them without thinking in your head, or what can I jump in and say here? What's my two bobs worth? How should I respond? But when you're doing that, you're actually not hearing everything that's being said. And so I did have my brain through my work trained to just actually be in the moment with people.
5:15 Chris Williamson? What was your work then before you were now obviously a famous novelist?
5:20 Speaker 00 Well, for 20 years I worked in the social work department at a major hospital here in Melbourne. So every day I was talking to patients, friends, relatives, carers of people who were there. And many of them woke up that morning not knowing that they were going to end up in an acute hospital or their family members didn't. So always through periods of tragedy and trauma. And under those circumstances, if you're going to help them in any way, even if you're not, you have to learn to listen and you don't write notes.
5:53 Chris Williamson? And I guess that paid dividends when it came to sitting down with someone. How lucid at 87 can you be? Was there a lot of listening to the same story over and over? Did you hear the same tale a few times? It's a shame, obviously, that you couldn't sit down and it was perfectly chronological. Here's what you need to know from start to finish. I imagine it bounced around a lot.
6:13 Speaker 00 There was none of that, quite the opposite. And you're quite right. He would start telling one story. And this is how I knew that there was so much more to be got from him because he'd start often to say something. And then he'd put his head down again and he'd shake his head and I could see him getting distressed, which told me that what he was now remembering and thinking about was very, very painful. And I never pushed him. I just had to wait till I saw an opening. And I decided that opening for me with him was to invite him home to meet my family. And how else can this man ever trust me if he doesn't know
6:54 Speaker 00 me? So by having him meet and get along with my husband and three adult children and openly flirt with the young adult daughter, which is speechless. It was absolute sod. But that's fine. That's how the lullaby of old started coming back by being introduced to this young sort of eighteen nineteen year old potty, as he called her. But yeah, and because they then shared secrets about me. And so he now had the goods on me. And in knowing about parts of my life, it gave him that freedom to now trust me and feel that he could talk to me. And that's when it all changed. And he now openly whipped
7:39 Speaker 00 in front of me and with me as he did recall and remember the evil and the horror and all those amazing storylines that he had survived.
7:50 Chris Williamson? It's an interesting point that being vulnerable to someone is one of the biggest bonding experiences that you can go through. A lot of the time, I think, especially when perhaps when I'm younger, especially if you're a guy, you presume that you bond over like shared masculinity, you know, kind of shared shared strength. Like you're courageous, I'm courageous, you're brave, I'm brave. But actually, what really, really forms of friendship is showing, telling someone something which in the wrong hands would be catastrophic to you, because it shows that you have faith and trust in them.
8:26 Speaker 00 Exactly, and he had to get to that point. As much as he wanted to tell his story, he was only ever going to tell a very clinical factual story if I hadn't have persevered and won over his friendship. And yes, somebody else may have written his story, and I love it when I talk to journalists and they go, "Well, that's not the approach I would have taken." I said, "I'm not sure you would have invested three years of your life in him." Not that I see it that way, quite the opposite. We were friends and after I got his story out down and I'd produced a draft of a screenplay, which is how I wrote it initially, and he was sort of reading that and improving that. We were just going out because he started living again,
9:10 Speaker 00 which I guess happens after you've lost your partner. He stopped saying, "I need to be with Gita", and he then was asking me to go out with him while he reconnected with the Jewish community that he'd pulled away from. And then all of a sudden, I found myself going out as his date and him introducing me as his girlfriend and sending me off to go and join the ladies. And we then had this amazing friendship of social occasions with anywhere between six to 200 members of the Jewish community, coffee shop gatherings, movies. Yeah, that became our life. And he had to joke with my husband, "She may be your wife, but she's my girlfriend, you know."
9:54 Speaker 00 And Steve were going, "Yeah, yeah, okay, you want her, you can have her."
9:57 Chris Williamson? That's great. When did he pass?
10:02 Speaker 00 On the 31st of October 2006, three years later.
10:06 Chris Williamson? Wow, so that was, I'm gonna guess you were, you needed all of that time, all of the remainder of his life really, to get the story out of him.
10:17 Speaker 00 Not really. See, here's the thing about him. He was a bit of a bugger about things. And his favourite phrase to me was, "Did I tell you about?" And every time he did that, I would just roll my eyes and go, "Go." And he'd start telling me something and I'd look at him and go, "No, you bugger, you haven't." And you know I've written the screenplay, you know, we've got a producer and director working on it. Now, he was saying that right up to two or three days before he died. He would continuously say, "Did I tell you about?" Because he'd suddenly remember something else. We'd want to embellish or enhance something that he'd read in the script. Yeah. Gosh, who knows how much more he went to his grave with.
11:02 Chris Williamson? Precisely. What do you think he would have thought if he saw the state of what happened in 2018 when the the novel came out?
11:12 Speaker 00 Well, you wouldn't be talking to me, you'd be talking to him. Because he would be wanting to be the person out there talking up his story. That's just who he was.
11:20 Chris Williamson? You reckon he'd be a good podcast guest?
11:23 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, absolutely. You wouldn't get a word in.
11:29 Speaker 00 But, look, he was utterly, utterly charming. And he got him talking, he didn't really shut up. And you might occasionally be able to go, "Can I just ask you this?" And he'd go, "Don't interrupt." But he would be loving it and he would want to be centre stage. And I'd be pushed into the background somewhere and he'd just drag me up as his girlfriend, not the writer of his story.
11:53 Chris Williamson? That's amazing. Final thing I wanted to touch on from this. Upon reading and doing a little bit of sort of extra research, the survivor guilt seems to be a real strong theme for everyone, all of the little survivor stories that I've come across. Can you talk a little bit about what you found during your discussions with him to do with the survivor guilt for the prisoners of Auschwitz? And I guess all of the other concentration camps?
12:19 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. And the many, many survivors I've spoken to, you know, the ones in Melbourne who he introduced me to. And I think Australia got the second or third largest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. And so I'm privileged to meet hundreds of them here. Not too many of them are still living. One very special lady still is. And they all exhibited what I would say, and I'm no clinician, I'm no expert here, but just through talking to them, that every single one of them had a degree of survivor guilt. How could they not? And talking to their family members, that that actually was always confirmed and borne out by talking to their children or their adult grandchildren.
13:02 Speaker 00 It was a matter of, um, did it stop you in living the best life you could? Now with Lali and Gita, it didn't stop them. Because the day they got married, they made a promise to each other that the only way that they could honour all of those people who did not survive was to have the best life they could. No good, he said, would come of us not having the best life we could. And so I met many others like him. And there's two particular ladies in Israel right now who I'm very, very attached to, who's going to be, they're going to be my next story, they're 94 and 96. And, um, yes, they did that same thing. They got on and had the best life they could.
13:47 Speaker 00 But then I also met so many who have struggled. And that survivor guilt, um, it's been proven that it actually can get passed down through genetics and to children and even to grandchildren. There's some fascinating research being done on that. And, and I've, yes, once again, I've seen children of these survivors, you know, now adults with children and grandchildren of their own, and even they know that they are carrying that trauma.
14:17 Chris Williamson? It's bizarre the way that this nature and nurture combines. Final thing, actually, I promise, we're going to go on to stories, I hope, which is a new book in a second. I'm going to guess you'll have read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
14:30 Speaker 00 Yes.
14:31 Chris Williamson? Yeah. What, was there anything upon reading that, which is, I guess, one of the other very famous insights into that world? Was there anything, um, extra that was illuminated? Everyone that's listening will know that I'm a massive fan of that book. Upon reading that, did you start to draw any threads that you hadn't before?
14:51 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. Same with our Primo Levi's book too, Night in particular. And yet, so the storylines are different but the same. And that's the whole thing about Holocaust survivors. I think we're only survivors from any kind of evil or horrific period in history. That even though I met survivors who said to me, a couple, we also met in Birkenau. And they each had their own version of their life there as well. And that's why I think I've been so delighted with how the Jewish community all around the world, from here to Europe, to South Africa, Canada, the States,
15:34 Speaker 00 how every person in that community, everyone's been touched, every Jewish person's been touched by the Holocaust. And they all want to say to me, thank you for recognizing that there's an individualism about surviving. That it is wonderful that historians and academics have told the story of the Holocaust for decades. But hearing just the one story, be it Victor's, be it Lully's, be it Silk's, whoever, you can relate to the one. And see the common threads and then their own individual survivor skills.
16:11 Chris Williamson? Are you familiar with some of the studies that have been done on how humans are affected by altruism requests? So there is a really unfortunate effect that everyone appears to fall prey to. If you are to show an advert for one particular, a UNICEF or a Support Africa Starving Children advert, and you have a single girl there, the impact, if you have the girl and her brother, or the girl and her family, or the girl and her village, decreases? So people donate less, the more, it's a little bit like, I guess, the, it's called
16:53 Chris Williamson? the witness, that witness effect where you all think that someone else is going to ring. I think it kind of starts to dissolve down the story. So you're totally correct. Obviously, the, the numbers of the, the Holocaust are absolutely astronomical and, and terrible. But it doesn't drive a learning point home in the same way that a single narrative does, because you can't, you can't learn to love four million, 10 million, 20 million people. But you can learn, you can learn to love one character, right?
17:24 Speaker 00 Absolutely. And look, it's been borne out to me a couple of times with regard to that. Here, here's a story that someone sent me a clipping from a newspaper in the States. And I think it's a few years old, but a gentleman in New York, a Jewish gentleman, he got obsessed with trying to work out what six million of something would look like. Because that's the, the figure that they say six million Jewish men, women, boys and girls died. And he started collecting paper clips. And he, well, he drove his wife out of the house, because he started making a pile in his living room. And he collected six million paper clips. And he apparently then looked at them, and he reached in, and
18:05 Speaker 00 he just plucked out one. And he said, this is the only one that matters. Because he could not comprehend or relate to that huge pile.
18:15 Chris Williamson? I think there's something for a lot of us to, to learn there about the, the fundamentals of human nature, especially if we want to have impact with people. A lot of the time, objective measures of success that you see Instagram followers, book sales, money, that sounds on the surface of things, great. But as you've identified there, and, and the studies that I've just brought up, show that doesn't impact in the same way as going very, very deep and narrow. So moving on to the next book, the new one, Stories of Hope, why have you, why have you written this? And how does it relate to your first novel?
18:52 Speaker 00 Well, after a year of Lali's book being out and travelling around, the people I was talking to are still coming to hear me talk. Yeah, this kind of still overwhelms me and I sort of struggle. You really want to come and hear me chat? You were here last year when I was here. And it's wonderful. But of course, so many people now have read the book. So when I'm now going and standing up in front of 100, 500, whatever number of people that are in the room with me, they actually want to hear me talk about the book. They want me to tell them about my time with Lali. They want to hear the bits about Lali that are not in the book.
19:30 Speaker 00 And so that was one reason. But the other main reason that Stories of Hope has come about was really from day one, virtually, of the book coming out, I have received thousands of emails from people all around the world. Now, these, I'm terrible. I've read a lot of books because I've been around a long time, and I have never written to an author. And so I'm feeling really bad about that. And I think maybe I should do that. So Michael Connelly and David Beldarchi, they're coming. However, they weren't just writing and thanking me for the book and saying
20:11 Speaker 00 how much they enjoyed it. So many of them were sharing something very deeply personal, painful, traumatic about their own lives, and saying that from reading about Lali and Gita and Selka, they found a sense of hope that they actually now could overcome or start to work towards overcoming this tragedy that was in their lives. And I'm talking about thousands of these, absolutely, thousands, Chris. And some of them are just incredible to know that somebody is going to attempt to continue carrying on after she had given up hope, having seen her
20:52 Speaker 00 brother being collateral damage in a drive-by shooting. A young man, second year of university, with everything to live for, why? Why did this happen to him? The couple who have been trying for years and years to have a baby and finally have a baby that then dies sixteen days later. This is the kind of letter and email I get. The fifty plus year old woman in Germany who had just found out her grandfather had been the engineer who had designed and built the gas chambers in Auschwitz and felt she had no right to continue to live with that being her background. So when you start getting these stories and, of course, I write back to the ones that are really, really personal.
21:36 Speaker 00 I have to unfortunately rely on my manager to write back to a lot of the others and say, here, this is Rachel, your letter, because I read them all, and respond. And so in talking about that, and then when Silke came out or was coming out, I was in Koszta in Slovakia doing some research for finishing off Silke's book. And I was there with my publisher from London, Margaret, a big drum, London, and we went to Koszta. And we'd spent a couple of days talking to these amazing friends and neighbours of Silke's and finding out now, once again, talking, listening, listening, hearing about this amazing woman. And a couple of days, I think it was maybe on day three, and that night, Margaret and
22:21 Speaker 00 I, we had dinner in the restaurant in the hotel and we had a drink of wine or two. And then somebody pointed out there was this downstairs bar. And so the two of us found ourselves wandering down into this dungeon of a bar in this, yeah, average hotel in Koszta. And we were over a few drinks. I think she said we'd progressed to the port at that stage, I'll get a bit vague there. But she started, we started, she started asking me about, she said, like, she'd been observing me, okay, because she's now was with me while I'm talking to people. And it's not the same, by the way, when you have to do it with translators too, your head's going in all directions. And she said, I was watching you listening, she said, it really is something else.
23:06 Speaker 00 She said, have you always been able to just listen and focus on the person talking to you? And I went, well, not really. I said, nobody listened to me at home when I was growing up. I said, oh, with the exception of this one person in my life, my great grandfather.
23:22 Speaker 00 And we started talking about that and I was just telling her and I write about it in my book, how this old man, who was well into his sort of eighties at that point, when I was ten, eleven, twelve years of age, how he taught me to listen. And he used that word, listen to me, listen to nothing, listen to yourself. And so I had several years with this amazing man. And from that, she said, oh, I think we can do something here. How about we take a little break from historical fiction and throw in stories of hope?
23:56 Chris Williamson? What's the outcome that you want people to get from stories of hope? If there was something that people would take away, like a single lesson, what would it be?
24:06 Speaker 00 That it's never too late to start listening. And how you do that is actually not that difficult. And I give a few clues, particularly for listening to your elders. And that was the other thing that so many people were saying to me, I wish I'd asked my dad or my granddad to tell me about his life. And I was hearing so much regret from people who had had an elderly person in their life that they'd never bothered to sit down and get their story from. And I think that's quite sad to have that regret. Look, I've got it too. I probably didn't listen to my dad or ask my dad enough to tell me about
24:45 Speaker 00 him. And so there was that. And the people who were saying to me, how can I get my grandfather, my mother, whatever, to talk to me? There was no double whammy thing.
24:58 Chris Williamson? I love this, I love this quote from the book, listen to your elders' advice, not because they are right, but because they have more experience of being wrong.
25:06 Speaker 00 Awesome. Exactly.
25:08 Chris Williamson? So good.
25:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, they've made the mistakes. You don't have to learn from them. And I think that's the other important thing. By the way, you do get to make your own mistakes. And that's something that as a parent, I rammed home to my kids. Now, I'm happy to talk to you and we'll chat about things, but you get to make your own mistakes. You're not going to lead your life off mine. And if you've read the book, you know that I too, made a very serious mistake only 12 months ago with my daughter and her newborn baby. And that just goes to show that, yeah, we all make mistakes. It's try and pick up on it quickly. And that could have had quite dire consequences. Yeah, it did actually for
25:52 Speaker 00 a period. And I'm very, very proud that she and her husband agreed for me to write this storyline. And I've already had a couple of interviewers like yourself, two women in particular who have said to me, you have no idea what reading that story about postnatal depression meant to me. I had a sister, I had a friend, similar thing, we didn't know how to cope.
26:20 Chris Williamson? The elders' point, I think, is really interesting, because in this new 21st century YouTube podcast of us that we're in, and obviously I'm contributing to that problem myself by providing this content.
26:35 Speaker 00 Back yourself up.
26:37 Chris Williamson? In the past, our evolutionary history, our elders would have been the ones who had acquired wisdom, right? They would have been the ones that we would have turned to. And I think that that's certainly been forgotten in the 21st century, because the gateway to information access, all of the friction's been removed. I can access anything I want instantly online. I don't need to go to my granddad. I don't need to go to the tribe leader, or the shaman, or whoever it might be. I don't have to go to them. And conversely, you have more liquid intelligence, a little bit younger, your crystallized intelligence continues to rise as you get older, but you, sorry, fluid intelligence peaks around about
27:19 Chris Williamson? 21. So you think, well, the quickest learners in the world are these chess grandmasters who are, you know, young age. So I should just focus on the rapid access and digesting of information at that young age, which kind of casts off the wisdom of the old. But as you've said there, you don't necessarily need to be taught how to do something. It's how not to do something which can be just as informative.
27:47 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. And most people would have an older person in their life, even if it's just a neighbour. They love talking. That's one thing I have learned, is that they're hungry for someone to listen to them. And I can't help but think that as we come out of the pandemic, that there have been so many elderly people who have been totally alone for months. I'm not asking everybody in the street to go and find their neighbour and sit down and chat to them, but you know, it wouldn't hurt you. And even if you don't learn something, you know you are giving back. Now, there is nothing more rewarding than actually giving. You don't have to be
28:30 Speaker 00 receiving even any wisdom, any advice. I kind of get a bit upset that some people just think that I'm just an ordinary person and I haven't had a remarkable life. Well, to me, there is no such person in existence. Everybody has got something about them that is remarkable because it's unique, it's them. But you just don't know it. And like Lali, he just kept, he would just say, but I was just an ordinary man. And I went, yeah, but you were living in a pretty extraordinary time.
29:05 Chris Williamson? That's the bizarre thing about all of our lives. We feel so mundane up close because it's just familiarity, right?
29:14 Speaker 00 Exactly. And that's not the, that's not the reality really. It may be yours because, and Hami, maybe this is why we jump to the next sort of chapter, or I don't know how many more it is, than listening to yourself and the importance of doing that. Because if you do learn to do that at a deeper level than you're probably doing now, because I don't think much, many of us listen to ourselves too well, unless you are into that kind of spiritualism that you do go and meditate and. That doesn't seem to be the norm amongst people I know. They're beating themselves up. They're not taking time out to just sit down and look at their own body, their own physiology.
29:57 Speaker 00 How am I reacting? Can I feel my blood pressure going up? They're not having that just internal, you know, conversation with themselves. It doesn't have to take long. It can be done quite quickly. Do it in the damn shower. That's enough. I know it's why I did a lot because here you're on your own.
30:16 Chris Williamson? Nothing else to do.
30:18 Speaker 00 There's nothing else to do. And the other place that can actually help you get into that state of being relaxed and content, I find, is a pet. That if you're hanging out with your dog, that dog's not asking anything of you. And I use the dogs of Lulies to help me when I was getting upset because the two dogs are always with us. And often when I was hearing something that was really starting to, you know, get me distressed and I didn't want to shut him up because he was on a roll, I could just reach down and I'd just stroke one of the dogs. Stroke one of the dogs. And so I, I think dogs and cats to a lesser degree because cats will only let you do it if they're in the mood.
31:01 Speaker 00 But try listening to yourself a bit more. Yeah.
31:07 Chris Williamson? I, I think a lot of people struggle with the fact that the inner monologue that they have is not very friendly. Um, the negative self-talk that we've accumulated throughout our lives. I put in my newsletter this week. There's a lyric from a song that I love called, "I wouldn't talk to a friend the way that I talk to myself." Um, and sadly, that's the way that a lot of people's inner monologues go. That the, if it was a friend or another human outside of you that was saying the things that you say to yourself, they'd be your worst enemy. And you can't turn that off. So it doesn't surprise me that people don't necessarily want to turn the volume down. And this is where you see individuals who can't bear to be alone, who are constantly need to be
31:52 Chris Williamson? with someone surrounded by a friend in a group, um, or substances, alcohol, drugs, whatever it might be. Because that silence starts to let them hear quieter voices that they really don't like the sound of.
32:08 Speaker 00 And if it really is that bad, then they need to sort of get someone who can help them with that. But just did they ever get to that point where they realise that they need some some help to to shut that voice up? And I also think that the whole notion, and you know, gosh, I'm using it, I'm talking about social media and and Facebook. And I remember when it first came out, hearing more friends of my children's boasting about how many friends they had on Facebook. And that whole notion of what is a friend? And a friend is not some person that you've never met, but you decided to say accept when they asked you to be their friend on Facebook. I think that's sort of can be, you know, very, very, well, it can
32:51 Speaker 00 be quite damaging for a lot of people to think that that's the only outlet they've got for a friend. And I suspect that things are going to be even tougher in the next few months as we come out of a COVID and the damage to the mental health of a lot of people. Already, we're seeing it here in Melbourne. It's quite significant. And just in the last 24 hours, the police have shot a man because he was having a mental health episode and charged them with a knife, and they had no choice. And even though we're in lockdown here in Melbourne, I mean, real lockdown, that curfew, can't leave home. If you do, it's for one hour maximum a day. And that is just going to take a terrible
33:33 Speaker 00 toll. I'm not sure that any book on stories of hope can make much of a difference. But yeah, all I can say is, if you've got a neighbour, and look, and this is the funny thing, and this is what we're seeing here in Melbourne. We went into lockdown, and during that first lockdown, everybody was out on the street, everybody was knocking on neighbours' doors, everybody was bonding together as a community. It was fabulous to see. And the papers and the media were full of all these beautiful stories of how we were putting together. And then we came out of it, and we got a little taste of freedom. And then things
34:16 Speaker 00 went pear shaped in Melbourne. And so we got locked down again, hard, even harder than before. But people are not responding the same. They go, no, no, no, I've been there, I've done that. I'm not, I want to do it again. And now we're having riots, we're having people taking it to the, to the police who are trying to enforce these very strict rules and laws that have come into the town. And very, very different to the first time. So we really only had one shot and we blew it.
34:44 Chris Williamson? I think that that's the, the major concern. You can probably get people to comply to some discomfort once, but getting them to go back and, and burn their hand a second time. You know, once you put it on the stove once, you can put it chalk it up as a, right, that's a lesson to be learned. But then being mandated to go do it again, it, it, it kind of doesn't surprise me. Going back to the book, we, we've talked about elders, but also there's some wisdom apparently in children. Now, I have not a massive amount of experience with elders, which I'm really sad about. Most of my grandparents have passed, which, which is a real shame. But I spend even less time around young children. There was a story that you pulled out from your own life. You said you didn't want to grow up to be like the female role models that you had in the 50s and 60s. Your relationship with your
35:28 Chris Williamson? mother and grandmother seems really distinct from the world that we see around us now. Could you tell us a bit about that and how that upbringing shaped you?
35:37 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. Well, there's two aspects to it. And one of us that, that I was growing up in a time when children were to be seen and not heard. And I was quite an observant little thing. I had four brothers. And so I was on the outer straightaway. The, the females in my family, my mother, my aunts and my grandmother, and we all lived in quite close proximity in rural New Zealand, they never ever spoke to me, except to yell at me, growl at me, or tell me to do something. There was never any conversation. Yeah, I've not really admitted this to anyone else, but my mother actually said to me so many, many times when I was growing up, that she was sorry that she had me, that she was sorry
36:20 Speaker 00 that she'd had a girl. To her, she could see no life other than the one that she thought and found herself trapped in. And that the boys were going to be fine because they could go away and then have a life. And, you know, that was a pretty tough thing to be told for, you know, all your impressionable years that someone's sorry that put you on this earth.
36:43 Speaker 00 And my grandmother, she was extreme even more. So yeah, I did not have that. Now, here's the thing about being a parent that I took on board. I looked at all the things that my parents had done to me and brought me up. Though my brothers and I say we weren't brought up, we were dragged up. And looked at the few things that I thought were okay. And then made sure that I would not duplicate as a parent all those behaviors that I thought hurt me and were not productive whatsoever. You know, my adult children accuse their father and I of now of not being tough enough on them. I mean, you just can't win.
37:27 Speaker 00 You're either too damn tough as a parent, or now I'm hearing from these adults in their 30s and 40s, "You weren't tough enough. You let us get away with too much." And I'm not going to let my kids do that. And I'll go, "Oh, well, you just take what you like from my parenting and reject the rest, because that's what we get to do." But yes, I think mother-daughter relationships are complex at the best of times. I'm really, really proud to say that I don't think mine is with my daughter. Because I worked bloody hard to make sure that she did not have any of that baggage that I carried, that did not transfer.
38:09 Speaker 00 In fact, the first words I said to her when she was about a minute old, and I held her and I looked at her and I said, "You will never be a victim." And to me, making sure that as a female, there was no victim mentality ever allowed to creep into any of her behavior or anything she said. And you can do that really subtly. She didn't know what I was doing. But the whole, anytime as a child, she said, "Oh, the boy..." Because she had two older brothers, of course, you know, "But the boys are doing it, why can't I?" "Is it because I'm a girl?" "No, it's because they are significantly older than you and they've heard that rite of passage."
38:51 Speaker 00 But yeah, when you listen to them, listen to kids, and what I'm enjoying now is listening to my grandkids, they are just delightful. And the whole notion which I talk about of listen to the little things, really listen to them when they say that their brothers whack them, yeah, empathise with her and say you'll talk to them, but hear them, let them know they've been heard, because you do not want them to become teenagers and then not talk to you. That's the worst time that they can suddenly say, well, she didn't listen to me all my life, why should I start telling her now my problems, when those problems now matter.
39:32 Chris Williamson? It's really bizarre, isn't it? Throughout the 1900s, parents focused everything they could on getting children to walk and talk for the first three years of life and then sit down and shut up for the next 15.
39:43 Speaker 00 Pretty much, pretty much. You did not have an opinion or a thought or even a feeling, which is very sad. There was just none of that. Well, look, I can only talk about me. And that's all I ever talk about in this book. And I think right up front, I make it really clear, guys, I have got no qualifications, but telling you anything, all I can do is tell you a bit about me. And that wasn't easy to do, can I say? I pretty much.
40:13 Chris Williamson? What did we say right back at the beginning about the importance of having the individual narrative? You know, having the single story that is the delivery mechanism. And it helps us, we live our lives in narratives, you know, like we can think that we're these logical creatures, but for all of our history, all of human history, stories were told through mythology, through archetypes. That is the beauty of the storytelling art form, which I think in a world where 15 second TikTok videos and even hour long podcasts, this still probably isn't like an entire night spent around the fire with the elders talking
40:54 Chris Williamson? these stories, et cetera, et cetera. There's probably still room to be moved on the on the ceiling of long form conversation. And yeah, allowing people to immerse themselves in stories like that, I think is is really important.
41:09 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely, it is. Is this show-censored?
41:13 Chris Williamson? Fire away.
41:14 Speaker 00 Okay. I love it when my publishers say to me, we think you've always been a storyteller. And I would say, well, that's not the words my family use. They called me a bullshit artist. Because I know that I did talk and want to tell stories. Nobody listened to them. But they just would keep me of talking a lot of bullshit. And living on a farm with cows, you know, that was the appropriate phrase, wasn't it?
41:44 Speaker 00 But yeah, because I actually love telling stories. And even if half of them are made up, isn't that part of the fun too? You can start out with a little pearl of a storyline and then you might not just embellish the hell out of it. And see where you can go with it if you've got somebody prepared to listen.
42:03 Chris Williamson? You were obviously a budding novelist, weren't you? So how can everyone that's listening now be a better listener when they leave this podcast?
42:12 Speaker 00 First of all, recognise the difference between listening to the person in front of you for the purpose of responding. Or are you actually wanting to hear what they've got to say? Because here's heads up, guys, if you're talking, you're actually not learning anything. You're just repeating something you already know. And to be able to distinguish between, oh, he's saying that and look, his body language is saying something as well. That there's more in the words and in the body. And once you start doing it, it's actually incredibly rewarding and it's not difficult. It can come quite easily. There will be times, of course, and the majority of times when you're in conversation, a conversation is different.
42:58 Speaker 00 That's a to and fro thing. That's not a really sharing of anything in the way that somebody's wanting to tell you something about themselves, that whole aspect of making yourself vulnerable that you mentioned. And if somebody does that to you, you get to feel really honoured and respect it for what it is.
43:23 Speaker 00 In terms of listening to other people, elders, what I've found often works is to find an object or something they've said and hone in on that. And if it's your grandmother and you've been visiting her for the last 25 years, every Sunday, and everyone's been there, you've never really sat down, go back and pick up something off her mantelpiece. You've been looking at it for all your life. Guaranteed, there's a reason that's sitting there. And if you ask about something, there's your in. So people are not going to just start talking to you for the hell of it. You have to find an in. The exception being kids. Kids are going to babble at you nonstop. You're going to have to just sort of pick out what's
44:07 Speaker 00 in there. Uh oh, maybe I need to stop what I'm doing and respond to that. And you're only going to do that 10% of the time, trust me. But you know what? 10% is better than none at all. And I think I mentioned in the book, watching my five-year-old grandson, yelling at his three-year-old sister, you're not listening. Rach, you listen to me. And I looked over and there was a little madam just turning it back on him because he's wanting to show her something and involve her in something. And she's not going to play ball. And he just was getting so upset until I went over there and I sat down. What's the problem? Rach, you won't listen to me. He's five. And that's the word he uses. You're
44:49 Speaker 00 not listening already. And so I turned Rachael around to make eye contact with her and just very simply said, do you not want to listen to Nathan right now? And she said, no. I said, do you think you might want to listen to him later? Might? Okay. Well, why don't we negotiate? When's a good time for Nathan to come and talk to you and you'll listen? As simple as that. 10 minutes later, she was listening.
45:14 Chris Williamson? Schedule slots in. If you could get the kids a, your manager, see if your manager's got a little bit of spare work capacity, maybe they can schedule in some time slots. What's your availability to speak? And what's your, and then they could put it on a calendar, share it on Google Calendar or something like that. And then they'll be fine. And that would be absolutely brilliant. Because that's how we did this. So it makes sense to me. You talked about how to listen when someone's going through or been through trauma. Is that a specialist type of listening?
45:43 Speaker 00 Well, yes and no. Once again, it's something very easy, but the other problem we have when we are listening or when we're having a conversation is that we're hardwired not to like silence. And when there's that person stops speaking, that the need to jump in and get rid of that silence is gosh, that's overpowering at times. Sometimes, and that's, that's the whole thing about listening to people in traumatic or tragic circumstances, they say something, and if you actually do just shut up for a little bit longer and just give them that room to formulate something else to say, you'll probably find that they do. And, and it's knowing when to actually then come in and ask another question, but more
46:27 Speaker 00 often than not, talking to people during that kind of time in their life, you're better off going for more silences and letting them come and fill that gap when they're ready, not because you're gone and pushed in. So that's the other trick. Embrace the silence.
46:45 Chris Williamson? I love that. I really do. And it's something, as an only child, talking was, being able to share was a rarity. And I think that cultivating that ability to sit with silence is something that really I've only developed in my adult life, only recently. But everyone that's listening knows that, right? Especially if you're not, you're not thinking sufficiently about the conversation that you're having, or maybe you're not feeling very confident around the other person, or just generally not too confident. And you, you feel like every second has to be filled with noise of some kind, because if you're not talking, maybe that's because you're not interesting, or maybe because it's because you don't have anything to say, or maybe they'll think that you're not interesting.
47:29 Chris Williamson? Oh my God, what if, what if it's, what if it's, and you just garble and, and sort of babble words out, which you don't need to do, because even on this, this show, which is being listened to by other people, you know, million people a month, listening to what is said on this. And some of the best episodes that have resonated with people, there's a guy called Daniel Schmachtenberger, who is a philosopher comes civilization engineer from LA. And some of the weights that he had during an episode I did with him were 20 seconds long, 20 seconds of pure silence in a podcast that was only an hour and a half. And he consistently was doing that.
48:12 Chris Williamson? And the people that enjoyed the episode really resonated with the silence. So that's, you know, from someone who is being fairly heavily rigorously critiqued online for the way that they converse, I can say that the conversations in which I've allowed the silence to sit the most have had the biggest impact. And that's in a very transactional relationship with people who can't even interject. They couldn't even contribute if they wanted to, because, you know, I'm not listening to them, listening to me. That was a real, that was a real insight, allowing Daniel to have his, he's a very considered speaker, and I knew that he was going to have these gaps. So, but I could even, even when that was happening, you have, it's like vomit.
48:56 Chris Williamson? It's like you have this sort of visceral response and your shoulders come up. Yeah, it's like you want to gasp for air. You want to say a thing, get the word out when it's quiet. And that's not, that's not necessarily always the best way to deliver or to allow a conversation to manifest.
49:12 Speaker 00 No, it absolutely isn't. And that's a great example. Wow, I love that.
49:18 Speaker 00 And the other thing too, is that if it is a conversation and you don't know the subject matter that well, you don't know what they're talking about, it's actually okay to say that. How often do we try and bullshit our way through something when we really don't know it? And I've learned that it's actually okay to say, oh, look, I'm sorry, I'm not up to speed with that. I don't know that. Admit it. You know, if anything, that may give that person you're talking to the right thing to tell you more, if you want to know more. But sometimes it pays to be honest.
49:54 Chris Williamson? You touched on something at the very beginning, saying if you're talking, you're not learning anything. And that is such a basic, obviously such a basic insight. Sometimes you synthesize ideas that already exist in your head while you're thinking or talking. But really, it's unless you're Einstein, working with like this unbelievable foundation. For the most part, it's actually best for your development to just hear what other people have. So the most selfish thing you can do from a personal development perspective is to selflessly listen.
50:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
50:32 Chris Williamson? And you'll allow that to imbibe whatever the other person's got to say.
50:37 Speaker 00 I can't own that that quote about if you're talking, you're not learning anything new. It was the Dalai Lama that said that, not me. I'm just pinching it and paraphrasing it. And yeah, and I think of one of the things I was talking about, I sort of said, you know, if you have to just shut up and listen. And the person talking to me said, I don't think the Dalai Lama would have used the words shut up. And I went, no, never mind. But yeah, it's my version of it.
51:01 Chris Williamson? It's what he meant.
51:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:04 Chris Williamson? There was a word that you used in the book that I haven't heard in years, earwiggling. And oh my God, like if that's not a way to make young children lose a love of listening, it's to give it this like
51:25 Chris Williamson? nasty kind of naughty terminology to it, which just makes kids feel like the, oh, I shouldn't, I shouldn't be doing that. It's even got its own term, like it's, it's literally the way that they learn. It's the way, the only way that they're going to be able to learn, apart from, you know, seeing what you do, hearing what you say is next.
51:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, you feel like you're a bad person. And you're not bad. Yeah, in retrospect, I think, and maybe I didn't want to listen to a lot of the conversations going on with my female family members. Because sadly, I think they were just gossiping. When I think about it now, the amount of information that I earwigged and overheard, the majority of it actually wasn't nice. It was gossip about other people, either in the family or in the village. But maybe that's just a small town syndrome.
52:21 Speaker 00 Come on, guys, take a look at me. It's pretty obvious that I did not grow up in the time of television. And everything I learnt had to come from radio, which I was only allowed to listen to on very small occasions because if the cricket was on, then my dad was listening to it.
52:37 Chris Williamson? I'd have no problem with the cricket being the primary source of information for children growing up. I think that there should be more cricket at all times. It's the England, the day that we're recording this is the third in the series of the. What's that?
52:54 Speaker 00 Is it's the one day or is that on?
52:55 Chris Williamson? It is, it is, that's tonight. It'll be your morning tomorrow, but my night tonight. So I've messaged my mate Sam Billings, who will be listening to this episode way, way, way in the future. Sammy boy, I need another hundred from you tonight, mate, if that's okay. Thank you, and that's good luck. Before we finish up, what have you learned during 2020? That's reframed some of the lessons that you pulled out of Stories of Hope. Is there anything else on top of what we've already talked about?
53:24 Speaker 00 It's just how, how much I've really learnt more about what the power of a book and the power of one person's story, and once again, I'm talking about Laddies, to affect people. And, you know, it got born home a couple of months ago by one of these amazing emails I've got. And I'm kind of happy to share it because to me, it just smacked me in the face. A 20 year old young man wrote to me, he lives in Milan in Italy. And, you know, Italy got hit and pummeled really, really bad, really early on. It was, you know, where it was all really going down. I'm talking about the pandemic, guys. And he wrote to me, oh gosh, it would have been, I think, in July.
54:06 Speaker 00 And he said to me that he lived in an apartment building in Milan with his parents and his sister. He hadn't left home for months, they weren't allowed out. And all around him, friends, family and neighbours were dying. He was hearing about these people he knew in his apartment building, family members outside, who were dying of Covid. And he had dinner one night with his parents and his sister. And he said, I told them, I've given up hope, we're never going to leave this apartment alive. His sister went to her room and came out with my book and gave it to him. He wrote to me forty eight hours later, telling me that he hadn't slept.
54:49 Speaker 00 He had read the book and he was now writing to tell me that not only his lullaby in Gita and silk is survival, given him the hope that he will get out of that apartment building, but he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to all those family, friends and neighbours who did not survive. That's from a twenty year old young man in Malam. So I just continue to be amazed and overwhelmed by the bravery of people being prepared to share.
55:25 Chris Williamson? I think it's a very,
55:30 Chris Williamson? a not a lost art form, but it's a certainly a missing, a missing piece of people's lives for them to read stories of suffering, resilience, overcoming discomfort. Because the lessons that you can learn from that, books like The Tattooist, Man's Search for Meaning, endurance about Sir Ernest Shackleton's voyage across the Antarctic. The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Ercart, have you read that?
56:02 Speaker 00 No, I haven't.
56:03 Chris Williamson? You will absolutely adore it. He was captured by the Japanese in World War II, one of the Scottish regiment, kept on a death ship, basically had dysentery for five years, built a bridge over the River Kwai, locked in a tin box in heat, then taken to another town, got knocked off his feet by the aftershock of the atomic blast from Nagasaki. Everything that could have happened to this guy went wrong and then kept quiet for 60 years. Very, very similar. I think you'll really, really enjoy it. But I mean, that is a sort of a more old story, but a recent one. Only yesterday, Tim Ferriss, guy that wrote The Four Hour Work Week and The Four Hour Chef and The Four Hour Body, this unbelievably well-known, multiple times New York Times bestselling author with
56:48 Chris Williamson? an amazing podcast and millions of newsletter subscribers, he released a podcast where he tells the story that came back to him during a DMT experience about five years ago. And it turns out that between the age of two and four, he was sexually molested as a child, as a baby, an infant. And he sits down with his friend who is also a trauma survivor. And this is Tim fucking Ferriss, right? This is the guy who has spent 450 podcast episodes, talking to the best
57:29 Chris Williamson? performers on the planet about abstract ideas. How can I utilize the idea of sleep to enhance my performance so I can get more done in my day? Or what's the best way to pulse alternate day fasting? Or whatever it might be, like, how can I have more sex? How can I do this, that and the other? But all of these are abstract ideas. And then Tim totally changes everything. There's no musical intro, there's no nothing else, there's no podcast sponsorship. And he says, look, like, this episode is incredibly personal, probably the most important thing I've ever done in nearly, you know, half a thousand episodes. Please, like, to my friends that are going to message me when they hear this, like, I accept that, please accept that I'm not going to necessarily
58:11 Chris Williamson? be able to reply, all this stuff. And it's just super heartfelt. Spent months working his way up to it. He tells about how he's written this book that was ready to be published after his parents died because he didn't want his parents to have to live with the guilt of knowing that they'd let this happen to him between the ages of two and four. So he's then had to go through all of this stuff. And I'm listening to this podcast and exactly the point that you're making there, which is a single person's story from Tim is so much more impactful than that. Even the abstract ideas, I'm a lover of knowledge, as is everyone that listens to this show. But Jesus Christ, like that delivery mechanism,
58:48 Chris Williamson? the way that he's able to utilise his own story and obviously the subtlety and the detail that you can only get from having lived something, not just learned it, is one hell of a way to get a point across. And I think that ties in with what you were just saying.
59:09 Speaker 00 Oh, look, thank you for referring me to that. I'm going to find that because I really do want to listen. And I'm going to throw one back at you. It's a book that you don't even know exists yet because I think it's coming out in January and it's called Nine Lessons for a Remarkable Life.
59:26 Chris Williamson? Who's it by?
59:28 Speaker 00 And it's written by a London journalist, Nadia Comani, where she's writing it with this 100 year old man who lives in Florida. His name is Benny or Benjamin. I struggle with pronouncing Eastern European names, but it's spelt F E R E N C Z. And this, this 100 year old man, Nadia, managed to, and a bit like me with Lully, she managed to persuade him, I need to tell your story. This man's story should be told in volumes. She writes it in under 200 pages.
1:00:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, the immigrant from Transylvania into New York, the upbringing in the 1920s in New York, putting himself through Harvard, really incredibly decorated World War II soldier in the American Army. But because he was a lawyer, the American Army got him to be one of the first prosecutors of the Nuremberg Trials. He subsequently was the person that instigated the International Crimes Court. Now, this man, he tells his story with such humour and beauty and simple. Every single word you can relate to, even though this is a man whose brilliance is
1:00:46 Speaker 00 off the scale and his life is anything but the most remarkable one that I've read in a long, long time. So look for a remarkable life. Yeah, Nine Lessons for a Remarkable Life, Nadia Kamani. I think she's with The Guardian or something.
1:01:01 Chris Williamson? I'll put it on the list. Stories of Hope will be linked in the show notes below, of course, available on Amazon. By the time this goes up, it will be available everywhere. Anywhere else that you want to send people any of the stuff that they should check out online?
1:01:14 Speaker 00 Oh, no, look, I think people, if you put in a word, just put in a word, Google it and let it take you wherever you go. I do that. I love that and get lost for hours, waste too much time. I meant to be researching my next book, but you know, I just find a word, that'll do. Look, just never stop learning, that's all I say, and listening.
1:01:35 Chris Williamson? I love it. Thank you so much for your time, Heather.
1:01:38 Speaker 00 Absolute pleasure.
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