Overwhelmed? Over-Scheduled? Burnt Out? Here's the Antidote. | Diana Hill

How to focus your "genius energy" on what matters most. Diana Hill, Ph. D https://drdianahill.com/. is a clinical psychologist, international trainer, podcast host, and a leading expert on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—a revolutionary approach to psychology that is changing our understanding of mental health. She is the author of four books including I Know I Should Exercise, But… https://www.amazon.com/Know-Should-Exercise-But-Reasons-ebook/dp/B0D1F4DB8Q/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. PHdKHMqScGFumTtGBwsYZNoBivUkcEDmp0iatQW4WeFf24uYPIkjq6vo_NRwv9azbrZ_RIm0MgiUbxP61QssBuNdpv6IrITZKpVYDklJSS0N5kOi9hENYKihCtMrgwfHwS2dikxfzDlrrWLnrj4dE9f7EBM0M4Po6knEFx8bBT0. IwkKYJi1XEcbPBZtmjBNpSppGjHa2GUzSuSVWgoT2yc&dib_tag=se&hvadid=777879846669&hvdev=c&hvexpln=0&hvlocphy=9198314&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=2806715497332273871--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=2806715497332273871&hvtargid=kwd-2384208313585&hydadcr=1745_13793563&keywords=i+know+i+should+exercise+but&mcid=3399d82b72ae3cbca90643e483294955&qid=1762371246&sr=8-1, The Self-Compassion Daily Journal https://www.amazon.com/Self-Compassion-Daily-Journal-Acceptance-Commitment/dp/164848249X?ref_=saga_ast_ss_dsk_dp, ACT Daily Journal https://www.amazon.com/ACT-Daily-Journal-Acceptance-Commitment-ebook/dp/B08LKGRDBY?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1, and her latest, Wise Effort https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.amazon.com/Wise-Effort-Genius-Energy-Matters/dp/164963336X__;!! LQC6Cpwp!oLpOF72svjHzcMqzhzxQfkEeGZiaWumMDzB2X4hH0x-GmXZjSiJMtdgp4pmPzlHh0EH1TDTGsf4BzIg0pQYn$. In this episode we talk about: The concept of "Wise Effort" ( aligning your energy and actions with your core values) The practice of diffusing your thoughts Three things that get in the way of "Wise Effort" The role of radical acceptance How to spot "energy depletors" A practice she calls  "Yes, yes, thank you, thank you" And much more Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Tickets are now on sale for a special live taping of the 10% Happier Podcast with guest Pete Holmes! Join us on November 18th in NYC for this benefit show, with all proceeds supporting the New York Insight Meditation Center. Grab your tickets here https://www.nyimc.org/event/great-cosmic-joke/! Tickets are now available for an intimate live event with Dan on November 23rd as part of the Troutbeck Luminary Series. Join the conversation, participate in a guided meditation, and ask your questions during the Q&A. Click here https://troutbeck.com/culture/luminaries-series-conversation-meditation-with-dan-harris-2025/ to buy your ticket! To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris Thanks to our sponsors: AT&T: Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. Visit att.com/guarantee http://att.com/guarantee for details. Function: Our first 1000 listeners get a $100 credit toward their membership. Visit www.functionhealth.com/Happier http://www.functionhealth.com/Happier or use the gift code Happier100 at signup to own your health.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:45Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? Even after all of my years of meditation and other forms of personal development or self-care, or whatever you want to call it, even after all the years of work I've done on myself, one of the things I still struggle with, and I still feel shame about the fact that I still struggle with, is being overwhelmed, overloaded, over-scheduled, and then as a consequence, getting tired, burnt out, and snippy. I've known forever that this is a problem, this is a pattern, and I still repeat it. So I was very happy when I found out that I was going to have a chance to interview for today's episode, somebody who has put an enormous amount of thought into how to work with this problem.

• 1:29Dan Harris?

  Diana Hale, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and author. She's written many books. In this interview, we're focusing on her latest book, which is called Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most. We talk about the concept of wise effort, which is basically aligning your energy and your actions with your core values. She'll unpack all of that. We also talk about the practice of diffusing your thoughts. Three things that get in the way of wise effort, including being stuck in your story, avoiding discomfort, and holding on too tightly. The role of radical acceptance: how to spot energy depleters in your world. A practice she calls "Yes, Yes, Thank You, Thank You," and much more. Just to say, before we dive in here, as you may know, wise effort is a key plank

• 2:14Dan Harris?

  in the Eightfold Path, which is the Buddha's recipe for a good life. Our Teacher of the Month over on danharris.com, Dr. Christiana Wolf, has crafted a custom-guided meditation to go with this episode that is designed to help you cultivate wise effort in your meditation practice and in the rest of your life. These custom meditations are available to subscribers over at danharris.com. If you sign up, you'll also get invites to our weekly live meditation and Q and A sessions. Christiana will be leading the next one on Wednesday, November 12th at 4:00 Eastern. We usually do these on Tuesdays at 4:00, but this Tuesday is a holiday in the US, so we're doing it on Wednesday. Also, a reminder, we're doing these lives on Zoom now instead of Substack.

• 2:58Dan Harris?

  Finally, if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got two events coming up. I'll be doing a live taping of this podcast in New York City on November 18th. It's going to be a conversation with the comedian Pete Holmes, who's not only very funny, but he's got a long and deep spiritual practice. This event will be a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. And then coming up on November 23rd, I'll do an intimate little meditation and Q and A sesh at a lovely little hotel in the Hudson Valley called Trout Beck. There are links to both events in the show notes. Okay, we'll get started with Diana Hill right after this.

• 3:33Speaker 02

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• 4:01Speaker 03

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• 4:35Dan Harris?

  Diana Hill, welcome to the show.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

• 4:39Dan Harris?

  Glad you're here. All right, let me start with a very basic question. What do you mean by wise effort?

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Well, I think the listeners could just answer that themselves. They can think about their day or their week when they were not engaging in wise effort and when they were engaging in wise effort. So there's just the basic understanding of how we use our energy, our effort, and when is it aligned with our values? And when it's out of alignment with our values and what that feels like in our body and the impact of that in our lives. But wise effort comes from the Eightfold Path. It's one of the steps to enlightenment in Buddhism, and that's where I originally heard the word wise effort, or sometimes it's called right effort. And then I've thought about it more over the years in terms of clinical psychology and energy use, the times when

• 5:29Speaker 04

  we're putting a lot of effort into something and it's draining us, and then times when we're putting a lot of effort into something and it's regenerating us. And there's a difference there. There's a wisdom there. So I see wise effort as using your energy in ways that align with your values, that are regenerative, that are using your strengths, and that give to others and as well give back to you.

• 5:57Dan Harris?

  It's really interesting to think about what you just said. It is possible to work at the same level of intensity on either the same project or two different projects, and in some instances be in a state of flow, or you know, complete absorption, or having a great time, feeling terrific, or feeling like you're being dragged by a motorboat by your head through a pond. And it's sometimes hard for me personally to figure out when I'm gonna feel the former or the latter.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  I run a sangha on Tuesday mornings and we pass the mic around and asked this morning, what is it that you're dreading about today? It was an interesting hodgepodge. So, one person said, I'm dreading going to my dad's house to clean out. My dad died and I have to go clean out some of his stuff. And then another one said, I'm dreading taking my dog for a walk. And another person said, she's a professor, I'm dreading all the papers that I have to read. And last night I was dreading taking my, I had to go to Macy's to buy my kid a suit. I was dreading it, right? What is it about all of those experiences that in one situation you could be dreading,

• 7:12Speaker 04

  but in another setting, you could be so grateful to have the opportunity to have a kid, that you could buy them a suit? Or the experience of going and cleaning out your father's home, which is very difficult, it's very painful, but there's also something really beautiful in that. And I think that the quality, the way that we're approaching it, how we're relating to our experience, impacts so much of our well-being in it. And it's not the experience itself, it's our relationship with it, which is a lot of what sort of my interest is in, you know, all the interest in why's effort, but also things like psychological flexibility, how we're relating to our experiences that we could either experience dread, or we could experience freedom in them, or even gratitude,

• 7:57Speaker 04

  potentially.

• 7:58Dan Harris?

  I had this experience that is still with me in a big way. I was on a meditation retreat in 2018, and at the end of the retreat, I was just, for context, in a particularly busy part of my life where I had a more than full-time job at ABC News and was also the co-founder of a meditation app, the host of this podcast, the author of ongoing books and giving a lot of speeches, and like, I was doing way too much. And at the end of the retreat, I turned my phone on and looked at my calendar and I was like, I don't want to do 75% of this shit. And it really woke me up and began after that, serially divesting myself of professional responsibilities.

• 8:39Dan Harris?

  And yet, you know, still to this day, sometimes I open up my calendar, like today, and it wasn't like there was any one thing that I was dreading, it was just too many things, not enough variety, too much Zoom or whatever. For busy people in the world, this is a real problem.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Right. I work with executives quite a bit and there's that classic rocks in a jar metaphor. Like, we have a jar, which is how much time we have, how much space we have in our day. And then you are choosing which rocks you're putting in. And oftentimes what people are doing is they're not only are putting rocks in the jar based on, not on their values, but based on what they think they should be putting in that jar. But then they're filling in every single space between those rocks with sand, or little tiny rocks. So there's no room to breathe, there's no margins to be in your life. You're just going through the motions of the rocks in the jar. And that's what you were describing, you know, like I had all these things. Each one of those alone might have been a nice thing that you could enjoy.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  I also make the argument that sometimes we're in situations where we don't have a choice. Like, we have to put all these rocks in the jar because these are all the things that we need to do in our day. And there is a way in which we could approach them and approach our experience so that it feels more alive, it feels more aligned. And that has a lot to do with our showing up in our values, showing up as the type of person we want to be. So the example of taking my son to go get a suit at Macy's at 8:45 at night. It's like my worst nightmare, right? But it's also an opportunity to be with my son. I mean, I have a teenager, I rarely get to see him. How would I want to show up at Macy's? Do I want to grumble through it? Do I want to rush through it? Do I want to get in and out? Or do I want to say, this is it, this is life?

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Sometimes it's things that we don't want to do that we need to do. And we can approach it from a position of, I guess, radical acceptance, but also from being the type of person you want to be. What are your character strengths? What are your values and intentions in this moment? I think that's the wisest form of effort when we do it that way. There's a, I think, a tendency to think about Our solution is to take things off of our schedule, which I think is a great solution if you have that privilege. But some people don't have that privilege.

• 11:02Dan Harris?

  That's a great point. Yes. When I made the decision to, as I said before, like serially divest, I did it from a place of, I don't love the word privilege. So it feels a little like, as I sometimes joke, the type of shit you say in a senior seminar at Vassar. Nonetheless, it was, you know, luck advantage, privilege. So yeah, so we want to talk about solving these problems, no matter where you are on the food chain. Before we get into that, because I want to walk through the sort of editorial or intellectual backbone of your book. And we're going to get super practical, including a deep dive on a word that you've mentioned several times already, which is values. Before we get into that, though, you are a practitioner of something called ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

• 11:47Dan Harris?

  And the ideas of ACT are shot through the book. And so I thought maybe, unless you think it's a bad idea, that maybe we would start by a brief overview of ACT and then we could walk through the book. How does that sound?

• 12:00Speaker 04

  It sounds great. Yeah. ACT is the foundation of a lot of what I write about, how I live, how I practice as a clinical psychologist and how I train therapists. I also incorporate a lot of contemplative practice and wisdom to it. But ACT, it's pronounced one word. It's been around for 40 years. It was developed by Stephen Hayes and Kelly Wilson and many, many, many others. And it has a strong research base. And it's sort of like the next evolution of cognitive behavioral therapies. A lot of people have heard about CBT. And it was sort of described as the third wave therapies. It came along around the same time as mindfulness-based stress reduction and dialectical behavior therapy.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  People may have heard some of those, DBT, MBCT. The difference between these types of therapies compared to something like traditional cognitive behavioral therapy is that it's not about getting rid of anything. So in ACT, our goal is not to get rid of symptoms even. Our goal is not to change your thoughts. Our goal is not to get rid of any inner experiences. The goal is really to help you become more psychologically flexible with everything that arises in your life and orient your energy towards what you care about most. So in ACT, we'll say things like, you hurt where you care.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  You can identify, actually, if you think about something that's bothering you the most right now, the thing that's on your mind that wakes you up in the middle of the night, that tells you a lot about what you care about. And then it becomes a big arrow to point you to where you may want to use your energy. So there's six core processes in ACT, and they have to do with how you are getting more flexible with your attention, getting more flexible with your behavior, like having a large repertoire of flexibility around our behavior. We get more flexible with our sense of self. We get more flexible with our feelings, our emotions, and we get flexible with our motivation, our values.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  So these six core processes, they're like six sides of a Rubik's Cube that work together to develop your flexibility, your ability to show up in the world how you want to show up, even with all the inner obstacles that are in the way. And when they've researched psychological flexibility, they've found that this core skill, this core set of skills, is useful for everything from anxiety and substance use to psychosis. But they're also using it with Olympic athletes and leaders. They're using it with war refugees. It's the World Health Organization is using it in Syria. So it's used with so many different aspects of living.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  And the reason why is because psychological flexibility may be sort of like the most important skill that you could ever have to adapt to life's challenges and to open up your life if you're feeling stuck or stagnant, these core processes.

• 15:09Dan Harris?

  That's super interesting and a great summary. Just want to make sure there aren't any dangling questions in the mind of the audience. You did reference CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy. Not everybody knows what that is. I'll do my best to say a little bit about what it is and how it's different from ACT. And then you'll jump in and correct me because I will inevitably make a lot of errors. But my understanding is CBT involves a lot of cognitive reframing, sort of like working with in a warmly challenging way with your thoughts, challenging some of the stories you've been telling yourself your whole life, that the culture may be telling you about how you are and how the world is and how you're supposed to be.

• 15:48Dan Harris?

  And it sounds like ACT is a little bit more starting from a position of not being at war with reality, accepting, but then of course, not being resigned, not being passive, developing a kind of psychological flexibility that allows you to engage with more sophistication and suppleness. How am I doing?

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I was trained in cognitive behavioral therapy when I was in graduate school. My supervisor gave me a sheet with a piece of paper on it that I would look at before working with a client. Sometimes I'd even pass to my client, I would say things like, are you overgeneralizing here? Are you catastrophizing? You know, and many situations, yes, I'm totally overgeneral, I'm totally catastrophizing. But every once in a while, you'd get to a client's thinking patterns and they're kind of true. You know, like they're kind of accurate. They're super not helpful. Like maybe I'm stumbling over my words a little bit when I'm giving a talk.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  And then all of a sudden, my mind gets really hooked by the fact that I'm stumbling over my words. And all I can think about is I'm stumbling over my words. And stumbling over my words becomes the biggest thing in my mind possible. You could imagine like writing, you're stumbling over your words on the palms of your hands and then covering your face and that's all you see. You may be stumbling over your words, maybe true, but it's not helpful. So with ACT, we get into the practice of something called diffusion, diffusing fronts, stepping back from our thinking, which requires us to notice that we're thinking in the first place. But then notice that my hands are over my eyes and with my hands over my eyes, I'm stumbling over my words. How well can I see Dan? Not so well.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  How well could I see my kids or how well could I focus on my work if maybe what's in front of my hands are something like I have cancer? Right? Sometimes it's true. So with a little bit of a nuance there is we're not labeling thoughts as you're overgeneralizing or what percentage of this is accurate or not accurate. We're asking about helpfulness and ACT is all about workability. This is wise effort, like how much effort are you putting into controlling your thoughts? Or trying to avoid like, don't think about that thing? And is that effort preventing you from actually being in the very thing that you care about?

• 18:24Speaker 04

  So we diffuse from our thoughts, we step back from them and there's all sorts of different exercises that I would do with a client to diffuse from their thoughts. You know, I may say like, Dan, what's a thought that you've been having thoughts this whole time I'm talking? I know you have every single person that's listening has been having thoughts. What's a thought that you had in this last little bit since I was talking?

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Useful or not useful?

• 18:47Dan Harris?

  This is not necessarily a thought that I had in the last 30 seconds, but a very common thought, which goes back to the beginning of this conversation is I'm working too hard, too much. I'm out here preaching the gospel of equanimity and I'm loading my schedule with too much bullshit.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Right? So I could imagine there's some situations where that's a helpful thought to have.

• 19:13Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  Are you working too hard? Are you working too much? Are you overloading your schedule? I can also imagine that that thought is unhelpful to you from time to time. When is it unhelpful?

• 19:24Dan Harris?

  When I'm trying to focus on listening to you and advocating for the listener, which I consider to be my job as the host of the show, making sure things are clear and we're getting to actionable advice. If I'm stuck in a useless shame and self-flagellation spiral, I'm doing what you described earlier of having my hands over my eyes.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Right. And it's blocking you from your values, which I just heard in your description. Because I, as a ACT therapist, I'm always listening for values. Your values are about helping me be able to communicate actionable steps. Right? If you're thinking about, oh, you know, the self shame spiral, you can't act on that. So you're not connecting with others. There's sort of this self-absorption that can happen when we're caught up in our thoughts. And it also prevents you from maybe in the time that you are actually working, producing the work that you care about, that you want to produce. So when we're caught up in our thoughts, and this is just one component of ACT,

• 20:26Speaker 04

  when we're caught up in the thoughts, what we need to do is just first notice that we're caught up in our thoughts. And we don't actually have to change them. I won't even argue with you, Dan, about that. I wouldn't even argue with it because the nature of arguing with you is that you could argue the other side, you could argue both sides. And as soon as you are arguing with me about your thoughts, you're in your thoughts and you're not here. So the more effective approach is to notice you're caught up in your thoughts and then get out of your head and into your heart and ask yourself what matters. How do I want to show up even with this thought? And that thought can be here, but I don't have to let it run the show. It can just sort of be in the background or it can be like a sticky note on my table. I can look down at it from time to time.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  And then I look back at Diana and what I'm doing. And that's psychological flexibility.

• 21:16Dan Harris?

  I have this perhaps too glib line that I like that's coming to mind in this context, which is the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. And I think that's what we're talking about here. If you're not so owned by your thoughts, you can see reality in a much clearer way.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  Uh huh. Sometimes the view is better when you pull your head out of your ass, but sometimes the view is quite painful. You have your head in your ass for a reason.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  I'm serious.

• 21:45Dan Harris?

  Yeah, no, no, I'm laughing. I believe you.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  I mean, I work with people that have their head in their asses for a reason. They're working all day long. Why? Because their marriage is a complete bore.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  They're working all day long. Why? Because they don't want to face that they're getting older. They're actually not doing the work that they wish that they were doing. So a huge component of why we put our head in our ass is because we are sometimes experientially avoiding what's here. And the view that's here is not a good view. Sometimes we're avoiding the discomfort of just stillness or allowing ourselves to see the view, which is a whole nother aspect of why people work, work, work, work.

• 22:31Dan Harris?

  I totally agree with everything you're saying. And I would build on it to say that some people have their head up their ass because they very justifiably don't want to deal with trauma. Dissociation, as you know, as a therapist, unlike me, I'm trained in nothing. Dissociation is a huge aspect of, and an adaptive aspect of, at least at the beginning of, trauma. Kind of, we're in a bit of a definitional thing here because when I say the view is better, I just think, in my own experience, my nervous system,

• 23:01Dan Harris?

  even if I'm looking at what is hard to face. Side note, as you know, as somebody who's practiced some Dharma, one of the translations of dukkha, the word dukkha in the ancient language of Pali, which we currently often translate as suffering. But one of the original translations is hard to face. But I actually think that if you're looking at things, even if they're unpleasant, it's better than the constant effort that is required for compartmentalization, for dissociation, for the paddling we have to do in order to avoid. There's a relief when we can just look at things squarely. I agree or disagree with all of that yammering I just did.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  I agree with it fully. And what I write about in Wise Effort is that there's three things that misdirect our efforts. And these could be three things that are contributing. You could check in with yourself, Dan, on this of like, why am I working more than I want to be working or doing more than I want to be doing? The first is the thoughts thing. So we're stuck in a story. And we inherit stories from our parents. I remember my bedroom was right up against my dad's office. And so I would hear him, he was an attorney, and I'd hear him typing at night. It just sort of was like, oh, that's what you do at night, right? To be successful. You type until midnight, you know, on the typewriter of all things, right?

• 24:29Speaker 04

  And then I'd wake up in the morning and I would see the like, bags of food that he ate while typing at night. And he smoked a pipe. This was very like 90s. He smoked a pipe, you know, like the pipe and all the things that were the signs of that. Right? So we're stuck in a story.

• 24:43Dan Harris?

  Wait, you think pipes were 90s? I feel like pipes were 50s.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Oh, well, no, but there was like a resurgence among the hippies, like they started smoking pipes. Like he had like a beard, he smoked a pipe, he was doing S, he was, you know, so it was cool.

• 24:57Dan Harris?

  I'm getting a picture. Though you're painting a nice picture. I like it.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  So we have stories about what it means to be successful or productive, or maybe we have stories about our worth being really inherently linked to our productivity, which is a very common one, you know? Rupi Kaur's poem, productivity anxiety, you know, I have this anxiety that I need to be working all the time to prove myself. That can misdirect our effort because we're just letting the story, the expectation about ourselves, drive us. But there's two other things that can misdirect our effort as well. So besides being stuck in the story, we also may be doing things because we're avoiding discomfort. We're avoiding feeling something that we don't want to feel. And that will push us around in all sorts of ways.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  As long as you are avoiding discomfort, what ends up happening is you end up doing things that to avoid that discomfort that caused secondary problems. Even if it's just as simple as I'm picking up my phone because I don't want to deal with the silence with the boringness of my partner, right? I mentioned boring partners. That in itself will erode your relationship even more. You also, you know, all the other things that we see in clinical psychology, I mean, in terms of like avoiding discomfort by getting back in bed when you're depressed, avoiding discomfort of social anxiety by not going to the party, avoiding discomfort of your trauma by never talking about it and sealing it up, right?

• 26:24Speaker 04

  We know those types of experiential avoidance are at the roots of much of our psychological suffering. So we're avoiding discomfort. And then the third thing that can misdirect our energy and our efforts. Which is a newer one in psychology, but an ancient one in contemplative practice is holding on too tight. Experiential attachment. We don't want things to change. We're afraid of the uncertainty and unknown. We feel so much more comfortable when we're in control. As you know, the nature of everything is impermanent. So the more that you hold on to things that are changing, the more rope burn you will experience in life. And that can totally misdirect our efforts. I don't want my kid to grow up, or I don't want to move to a different job.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  And avoiding change, trying to hold on to change, holding on too tight, will lead you to engage in very unwise efforts. So those three things, stuck in a story, avoiding discomfort, holding too tight.

• 27:20Dan Harris?

  Yeah, as you're saying those things, I'm just like, yeah, got it. Check. I relate to all of them. Coming up, Diana Hill talks about three key tools for cultivating wise effort, how to channel what she calls your genius energy, and how to put your values to work.

• 27:50Speaker 05

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• 28:21Dan Harris?

  You have done a great job of kind of thus far in the interview, not only of like putting up with my annoying questions, but you've also done a great job of describing the problem. Your book, primarily however, dwells on the solutions. And so I'm going to pivot in that direction if you're cool with it.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:36Dan Harris?

  You recommend that we...

• 28:40Dan Harris?

  And now this is back to the idea of wise effort, that if we're interested in wise effort, we engage with three tasks. Task number one is to get curious. Can you say a little bit about why that's important?

• 28:52Speaker 04

  Curiosity is the foundation of everything. So even just getting curious and asking yourself, "Am I stuck in a story?" is an intervention in itself. Sometimes you don't even need to answer that question. Just ask yourself, "Am I stuck in a story here?" That little opening of curiosity about what's keeping you stuck can help you get unstuck, right? Curiosity. And the nature of curiosity is that it doesn't have judgment associated with it. There's that interest curiosity that Jed Brewer talks about, which is one question leads to the next question, which leads to the next question, which is very different from how we often approach our problems and ourselves when we're stuck, which is more of a space of judgmental criticism, like we're trying to get to some answer. So curiosity

• 29:34Speaker 04

  has an openness to it. I was just talking with Jonathan Schooler, who's at UCSB, and he's one of our, he's an incredible researcher in the area of mind wandering and curiosity. And he studies openness. We all know that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, that Killingsworth classic study. But he's studying how a wandering mind is a creative, curious mind. And then we actually need a little bit more mind wandering and openness of the mind, and awareness of when our mind is wandering and open, in order to solve some of our problems. I mean, most of our problems are solved on our hikes and our runs and our walking of dogs, and when we have a little bit more space. So we get curious about the places

• 30:16Speaker 04

  we're stuck. We get curious about what our strengths are. And we get curious about our values. And the curiosity about our values is that part where we drop from our head down into our heart. I am actually curious about what you really want. What is important to you? Asking ourselves that on a regular basis with a curious, open mind, and you'll see what shows up and what comes to you. And that can help direct you to the next step, which is opening up. And the final step, which is focusing your energy.

• 30:50Dan Harris?

  We will dwell upon opening up and focusing your energy in hearty ways eventually, but let's just stay with this getting curious because you mentioned a few things, more than a few things that are worth following up there. I believe you just now said something about getting curious about what your strengths are. The term you use in the book is your genius energy. So maybe describe that and why it's so important to tune into it.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  I'm treading lightly into the concept of genius energy because people have a strong reaction when you use the word genius. When I talk about genius energy, I'm talking about what makes you you. The unique strengths to like Dan, I mean, all of your listeners could think about. What is Dan's genius? What is it about him? It's like this like interesting combination of humility and curiosity, average guy feel, but not average guy feel, you know, like there's like this unique aspect to you. And when I look at it from sort of the psychology of that, I see our genius energy

• 31:55Speaker 04

  as a combination of our personality patterns, both, you know, our temperament that we're born with, but that's also shaped by our life experience. Our genius is our interests, what gets us into flow. Like when you were in flow in the past week, what were you doing? What were you interested in? Our genius also has to do with our emotional intelligence. This isn't Stanford Banae IQ genius. There's a tremendous amount of research around emotional intelligence, the importance of that. Our character strengths, that comes from Martin Seligman's work in positive psychology. Humility is a character strength. You would probably score high on humility, Dan. And our genius is our abilities, things that just come easy to us that do not come easy to others.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  There's certain things that you do that are just like, yeah, I just can do that. For me, it's, public speaking is pretty easy.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  For whatever reason, maybe it's because my dad was an attorney and he did a lot of his like prep in our living room. And so I was just was always comfortable with, you know, that sort of like acting out. But for other people, public speaking is like their worst nightmare. But there's something from that other person that public speaking is their worst nightmare. That's really, really hard for me. So our abilities and our strengths. And when you put those together, you get sort of a the genus aqua that what makes you you. And what can happen is that genius energy, we want to get curious about that. And then we want to use that. We want to apply that with our values. And when you do that, when you get the combination of your genius and your values, and you have a little wisdom in there, then all of a sudden, the world opens up and your plate

• 33:29Speaker 04

  gets too full because you're doing, you're doing all these great things that are just a flow of energy. There can be some, you know, other things that happen, like your genius can become your problem as well.

• 33:41Dan Harris?

  People have a negative reaction, you said, to genius energy, I imagine, because most people at least are humble enough that they don't want to call themselves geniuses. But I suspect the way I heard it, I know I'm not a genius, and yet I did not have a negative response to genius energy, largely because I heard it as like, everybody has their own special genius. And that, I think, is what you're talking about here.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, everyone has many geniuses. The field of psychology has shifted quite a lot more recently. There's even a new word in psychology called ideonomics, the study of the individual, the study of the individual in context, right? Because so much of psychology has been about categorizing people, you know, that whole diagnostic system is about putting people in boxes. But when you start to look at those boxes, you'll find that there's way more variation and diversity within a box of depression, or a box of anxiety, right? Then there is, you know, similarities amongst those people. So we need to start looking at

• 34:46Speaker 04

  people at the individual level. And part of that is looking at their, their geniuses, their strengths, what makes them uniquely them, and how we can honor that in people. When I, I used to run a treatment center for eating disorders. And what's fascinating about an individual with anorexia is that they are often doing everything society has told them to do to be successful. They're just doing it like at the nth degree. They're the Olympians of striving.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  I'd like sit across from them and I'd get really deeply curious. What if they took that energy that they were using, you know, to run 10 miles up a hill a day or perfect their tiny little bar that they eat? What if they were to take that energy, that persistence? And they were to take that persistence and they were to use it towards their own recovery, or maybe even towards something else that they care about? You could turn that genius around instead of it being something that's problematic for them. So for in every human, there are strengths, there's abilities, there's interests, there's emotional intelligence that is unique to them that they can utilize. And that's the study of eternomics, the study of the individual in context.

• 36:02Dan Harris?

  How do we prevent our special genius from becoming a problem?

• 36:09Speaker 04

  Has your, do you mind if I, I put genius qualities on you, Dan? Do you, would you agree that humility and curiosity are some of your geniuses? Would you add to the list?

• 36:18Dan Harris?

  Well, my wife and I quibble with the humility part.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:22Dan Harris?

  Yeah, but sure. I honestly, I haven't really thought it through, which I think is a problem. But yeah, if off the top of my head, those sound pretty good.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Okay, let's think it through a tiny bit more and then we'll talk about how it becomes a problem. When people asked you for help, like friends call you and they need help from you, what do they ask for?

• 36:40Dan Harris?

  This just happened to me two nights ago. I was on the phone with an old colleague who was asking me for help. And two things became clear to me quickly. One, he didn't have a clear sense of what he was asking for and that he actually knew the answer already. What he really wanted, although was probably not able to articulate it, was somebody to listen with patience and warm curiosity and help him arrive at the thing he already knew.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  So would you say that's one of your geniuses? To be able to listen to somebody with patience and curiosity and help them arrive to what they already know?

• 37:16Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I think that's a recent skill. It was in me, but it was papered over with a lot of Anchorman energy.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, right, right, right. And these develop over time. Here's a question for you. Does that patience and curiosity, can you ever think of a time when your curiosity and patience backfired on you? Maybe you didn't use it where you needed to use it, you didn't offer it to yourself, or you were just being so patient and curious and? That problem kept on. Like I need a little more action. Needed you to step in.

• 37:50Dan Harris?

  It's funny, and this may be annoying because it might derail where you're trying to go. I cannot actually think of an example of what you're saying, but I can think of an example where some of my character deficits impede my patience and warmth. Mainly anxiety, self-centered anxiety, often centered around career, status, finances, bullshit like that gets in the way of what I think I'm most happy doing.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. You describe those as character deficits, your anxiety?

• 38:28Dan Harris?

  Yeah, probably. That was too harsh.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Here's my guess, is that your anxiety could use a little bit of your patience.

• 38:35Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  And your anxiety could use a little bit of you trusting that you can come to an answer, and come to a conclusion, you're gonna be okay, in the way that you offered that to another person. So sometimes what our genius qualities, we are really good at offering them to other people, but we're not as great as offering them to ourselves. And I picked up on the character deficit thing because that's just loaded with judgment, and that is not a curious way of talking about anxiety. If I ever had a client come into my office and they said that they were anxious, and I said, "That is a character deficit."

• 39:12Speaker 04

  They would not come back.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  I'd be a pretty crappy therapist. So I don't see anxiety as a character deficit. I actually see anxiety, the things that we are anxious about are the things that we care about. And you're not anxious about things that you don't care about. And so if you can identify, "Oh, this is something that I care about, and this is how my body and mind tends to react to that care." It makes up scary stories about it. It has a physiological reaction to it. Then we don't see it as a deficit, but we see it as like, "Okay, then how can I help out my body and my mind so that I can take care of this thing that I care about?" Which is a different way of relating to it, and that would be a curious question to ask of yourself.

• 39:56Dan Harris?

  No, that's very helpful. Did I derail your ability, however, to talk about how our genius can become our problem?

• 40:04Speaker 04

  No, our genus becomes our problem when it's either overused, underused. So in your case, I would say it's being underused towards yourself.

• 40:12Dan Harris?

  Interesting.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Or it's misdirected. Some of the genuses that I've discovered in myself are things like emotional sensitivity. I was a kid at Thanksgiving that knew who was drinking, who was arguing. I knew the whole scene, right? I was super sensitive to everything that was happening at the dinner table. And that would end up becoming my problem because I was so overwhelmed. I was so sensitive to everything. I was like, I didn't have emotional skin, right? I mean, I didn't have skin protecting me from everything. I was so porous that that genus became my problem. I was able to redirect it. You know, it's really good if you're in a group therapy setting to be able to feel what everyone's feeling in that setting, but not at a dinner table.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  And I also had to turn some of that emotional sensitivity towards my inner world, not just to the outer world. So learning how to work with your genus through your values, through wisdom, and sort of like if you could think about your genus energy is like a flow of river. And you can be the wise guide, right? You can have to be the banks that help that flow in directions that matter to you.

• 41:24Dan Harris?

  How do values, which is a word you've used a lot in this conversation? How do values fit into this discussion?

• 41:33Speaker 04

  So I think of values as the how we use our genius and the compass in which we direct it. Values is really the cornerstone of act, going back to act again. It's what sets act apart from a lot of therapies in that we spend a lot of time clarifying values. And this is different from, you know, I'll work with organizations and they'll have their values and their mission statement on their website, or they'll have it on the bulletin board. But what I see values as is there are more like verbs and adverbs of how you are showing up in your day. If someone were videotaping you, Dan, throughout this, not just this interview. Yeah, this all gets videotaped.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  What happens in the 10 minutes before and the 10 minutes after?

• 42:22Speaker 04

  And in that 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after, is that how you want to be? If that were, we were put some descriptors there on the 10 minutes before this interview, when I was just in, I have a kid home from school right now. How I interacted with him. Does that align with how I want to be? Was I present? I want to be a present parent. I want to be a kind parent. I want to be a fun parent. Was I present, kind and fun? So I see values, if you think about, remember the Stephen Covey book of the seven habits of highly successful people?

• 42:56Dan Harris?

  I never read it, but I know it. Yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I picked it up at like a garage sale like 10 years ago. This is how old it is. He talks about putting your ladder against a wall. If you're climbing ladders in life and be careful what wall you put it against. I would add to that is like, when you're climbing that ladder, how are you climbing? Are you stepping on people? Are you harming yourself? If someone were watching you climb, would they say, wow, this person really values adventure? Or this person really values humor? Or this person values creativity? Or this person really values focus? Or this person really values humility? And sometimes our values match onto our genius energy. But sometimes they don't.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  There's things that I value that I am not a genius at and I have to work at. I really value risk-taking and I really value courage, but that has not come easily to me at all. And so I use the values to help guide my genius. And values end up being at the end of your life. I mean, they are what bring you vitality, but they're also can be huge motivators to do hard things in life.

• 44:09Dan Harris?

  This word values has come up in several podcasts this fall. So I'm going to ask you the question I've asked others, which is, the word can sound a little anodyne or boring. It's also been weaponized in particular by folks on the right, you know, family values. I'm thinking back to the, my early days as a reporter. How do we figure out what our values are and then put them to work in our lives?

• 44:34Speaker 04

  There's a couple of different ways that I'd work with a client on this. Here's a fun one. What do you regret? Daniel Pink has that book, Power of Regret. In his American Regret Project, he identified these like four primary forms of regret. You know, we have foundational regrets. I regret not wearing sunscreen and all those tanning beds I did in college. And the things that accumulate all over time, right? We have connection regrets. The moments where we didn't look up from our phone. Or somebody was sharing something painful about their life and we just turned it back on ourselves. Right? We didn't connect. We have boldness regrets.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  The times that we didn't step up and say something, we didn't protect somebody. We didn't put ourselves out there in some way. And then we have moral regrets. The ways in which we've harmed ourselves or others. If you were to go down those four types of regrets. And spend a little time on them, you'd have to open up to some uncomfortable feelings. And it's not get consumed by your regrets. But actually ask yourself, why do I regret this? Then you will have a to do list for the next year of ways in which you could act in this world. Right? I could start taking care of my skin. I could start, you know, being present when I'm engaging with somebody because I regret. Whatever, somebody, a client that I work with, their past marriage. That they had all those connection moments that they regret that they didn't connect around.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  So your regrets can tell you about what you value. And they can actually then give you some action steps. That you can live out because I said before, I see values as verbs and adverbs. They're how we live our life. They're action we can take in the here and now. They're not some kind of moral thing out there. They're not a should. They are unique to you. They're chosen by you. So when I work with clients, it's not about my values, it's about their chosen values. What are you here to work on? Not what I want you, I want you to work on your drinking. What are you here to work on? You know, because that is unique to them. And that will be, if you can identify.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  Your own personal intrinsic values, then you will have, and there's a good amount of research on this, you will have something that you can turn to that will always be there. I've done a lot of work in the area of exercise and health behavior change. If you bank your exercise on some extrinsic goal, like weight loss, or how your body looks in a mirror, or whether or not you can walk faster or run faster than you could last week, or last year, or 10 years ago, that will come and go. But if you have an inner, deeper reason that you care about, then that will be an intrinsic motivator that is always there, that you can always draw upon. It's like a deep, deep, deep well.

• 47:27Dan Harris?

  Okay, that's very helpful. Resetting a bit, we talked about how in your book, Wise Effort, there are three tasks you recommend, so we can move from unwise striving to wise effort. The first was getting curious, specifically around your strengths, AKA genius energy, how the genius energy can become perversely a source of your problems, and then the role of values in terms of how you want to move through the world. The second task, which is going to be built upon the first, is opening up. What do you mean by opening up in this context?

• 48:06Speaker 04

  Well, I talk about a number of different ways that we can open up, we can open up our minds, we can open up to feeling, we can open up our sense of self, and then we can open up to change. And I see all of those as necessary to engage in wiser efforts. Right? So, opening up our mind, if we go back to, you know, being stuck in a story, I go to Plum Village in the summers, and we take our kids. And when we were there a couple of years ago, I think it was the 40th anniversary of Plum Village, and there was these big banners that were, Plum Village is Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery that he developed

• 48:50Speaker 04

  over 40 years ago. And it's in southern France, and there was these big banners along our walking meditation. And one of them that was, as we were walking along in our walking meditation, was just the simple gata, "Are you sure?"

• 49:05Speaker 04

  It was so helpful to me because we were doing this silent walking meditation. It's like 700 people and my kids are there. And they were two adolescent boys. And you try and bring two adolescent boys in a silent walking meditation and they're like punching each other and like, you know, causing all this disruption. And I'm in my head about like, oh, I have to control my kids. And then you look up at the sign and it just says, are you sure? Are you sure? So we open our minds, like, open our minds. Are you sure? And that can help direct us towards wiser efforts, opening our minds. But then opening up to feeling is really linked to the values that I talked about before. I said, we have to look at our regrets to be able to figure out what we care about.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  And that requires opening up to and being able to be with uncomfortable feelings. Or maybe you want to change something that's going to be uncomfortable. And that's going to require feeling something. And the avoidance of the feeling is what's keeping you stuck in the thing that you don't like. So we have to open up to feeling and then opening up our sense of self to that wiser self so that we can change.

• 50:10Dan Harris?

  What do you mean by opening up to your wiser self? And how would we even do that?

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Last time you made, you needed to make an important decision. How did you contact your wiser self? A wiser self, like not just your head, not the pros and cons. We all want to do the pros and cons list. That's useless. Pros and cons list, you know? Because you could just list pros and cons all day long. How did you get to something bigger, something deeper than a pros and cons list?

• 50:39Dan Harris?

  Honestly, often I, if I have a big decision, I talk to smarter people than me. So like Joseph Goldstein, who's a great meditation teacher, helps me make many decisions. I don't always listen to him talk about regrets. My wife, my brother. My CEO, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one way in which I open up to my wiser self, because if you think of the self as unbound by this particular meat sack that we're walking around in, that the self is dialogic in dialogue with the surround. And well, part of that is like, who are you engaged with? So that's one way for me.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Thich Nhat Hanh talked about our, our second bodies. When he used to take the monastics through the airport, he'd assign everyone a second body. So the monks would go around and be like, okay, is your second body in the bathroom? How are they doing? Do they need, do they leave their suitcase somewhere? You know? So our wise self, our self with a capital S, is more than just our small, little self that's right in the pros and cons list, right? And sometimes our wise self, we can access it through leaning on and having conversations with wise people. And even just being in their presence, there's that whole like neuroception that happens where you're in the presence of a calm, wise, stable human, and you're just receiving that energy. Our wise self, a lot of times

• 52:03Speaker 04

  people, when I ask that question, when I ask this question of clients, they'll say like, oh, I go up to the top of this mountain, or I go to the ocean, or I go sit under a tree. Anne Lamott has this great line. She said, if you want to start any kind of creative writing project, start with, there was a tree. And sometimes I'll assign that, like, I'll work with groups and I'll have just one person sit in front of the other person and just give them this prompt, there was a tree. And to talk about it. And what shows up when you start talking about this tree? Dan, there was a tree. What would you say?

• 52:37Dan Harris?

  I literally went right to a tree that was in my childhood backyard that we hung a tire swing from. Yeah, that's, that's what I went to.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And how does that tree represent wisdom to you? What did it offer you?

• 52:50Dan Harris?

  I don't know.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  What did it offer you when you went to that tree with that tire swing? Was it like a literal tire? We had like the tire, like my dad brought home from like the shop.

• 52:58Dan Harris?

  An actual tire.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  An actual tire. I know. There's like spiders in the whole part, you know?

• 53:02Dan Harris?

  Yeah, disgusting.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's disgusting. Yeah. But why did you go to that tree?

• 53:07Dan Harris?

  I mean, I don't know that I can give you any poetic answer. It was like, it was a good tree to hang a tire from, and you should avoid it if you're sledding.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Well, you should have waited. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there was a tree. Maybe it was a stable, is like a source of stability there. It was like, it's like a tree.

• 53:22Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 53:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, some people have memory and people have all sorts of memories of nature as grounding forces. That's a source of wisdom. Some people find wisdom in their ancestors, people who have passed. They find wisdom in just greater belief in something bigger that's here. Wisdom of the body. You know, we've all had the experience of our body saying no, or our body saying yes, and we override our whole body no, and we say yes, and we override our whole body yes, and we say no. Your body has a tremendous amount of wisdom. So, how do we get to this wiser self? It's through all of that. It's through all of that. Or maybe through meditation, right? Opening through the back of the heart and expanding

• 54:05Speaker 04

  into open, awake awareness, right? Just the love, the field of love that is here. That's a wiser self. When we practice with that and we start to welcome that more into our life, that can help guide us in our decision-making, in what we say yes to, and what rocks we put in our jar, or what rocks we don't put in our jar, or maybe how we can allow ourself to be in the space between the rocks, and how we are going to choose to use our energy, our most precious resource, like this chi within us, our prana, whatever you want to call it, that genius energy.

• 54:40Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Diana talks about how to open yourself up to change, the role of radical acceptance, how and where to focus your energy, how to spot what she calls energy depleters, and a walking meditation practice that she calls yes, yes, thank you, thank you.

• 55:01Speaker 06

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• 55:32Dan Harris?

  So just to reset again, we're talking about these three tasks that you recommend in order to move from unwise striving to wise effort. And the second task is to open up. And we've been talking about how to open your mind, open up to your feelings, open up to your wise self. And then the final thing you recommend within opening up is opening up to change. Can you just say a little bit more about what you mean by that specifically and how it's done?

• 55:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, my brother-in-law is a roboticist. So he designs self-driving planes and segways and the robots that go into mines like in Afghanistan. I was having a conversation with him once and he said the most important thing that he ever programmed into a robot was the get unstuck button. And the get unstuck button, when it's deployed, what it does is everything possible in his repertoire. So it'll do like a backflip, it'll jump up and down, it'll crawl down real low, it will spin around in circles, it'll go backwards as fast as it can. And guess what it does? It gets the robot unstuck. And so, open up to change.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  What we know about human behavior is that we have a tendency to do the same thing, just harder, until the point that we're so sick of doing the same thing harder, that then we give up. And you can think about this in terms of your exercise program, or stuck spot that you're in with your teenager, or your partner, or your parent, any kind of health behavior. So getting unstuck and opening up to change, the first part of that is variability. This is at the foundation of evolution. We need variation in order to evolve. So we practice getting unstuck, we practice opening up, we practice wise effort by doing things that are different than the way that we always do them. And then, we start to identify what works.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  What is helpful? What is reinforcing of your values? What uses your genius well? And then we work towards retaining that, reinforcing it, doing it again. And that is how we open up to change. It's the principles of behavioral psychology. But it's also just sort of like being effective in the world is that most of the time when clients are coming in to work with me, it's because they are either doing the same thing, just harder, or they've given up altogether. And we need to open up to change, trying something different, a different dance move, a different outfit. I had the same hairstyle that I had when I was like 17. Right? Why? Because it's uncomfortable to change. I'm like, I know this one works for me.

• 58:12Speaker 04

  But if I ever would go brunette and short, what would happen? What would happen? Hair grows. It wouldn't be the end of the world.

• 58:19Dan Harris?

  One of the things you talk about in this section of the book is radical acceptance. And so I'd be curious to hear you say more about that. And with an eye toward dealing with what I imagine you hear all the time, dealing with the resistance that some people have to acceptance because they hear it as resignation or passivity.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, sometimes I won't even use that word with a client because they associate acceptance with like, you just need to accept your mother in law. Or you just need to accept that you have a health condition. And radical acceptance does not start with the words you just. Right? What we're talking about here with radical acceptance is, can you open to? Can you allow for? Can you welcome? Many of us associate the words radical acceptance with Tara Brock. I first heard them from Marsha Linehan, who's the founder of dialectical behavior therapy. And I was working in the, in DBT, I was working in a mental health center for folks that were chronically suicidal. And we're doing a lot of cutting behavior.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  And one of the early skills that we would teach people is radical acceptance. Can you open to and be with this intense experience that you are having right now without trying to make it go away? Can you ride it like a wave? Can you notice that it, whatever it is, your craving, your desire to cut, your desire to escape this conversation, your desire for this to end, you don't want it to be in here anymore? And can you get on the wave and watch it rise, rise, rise? It gets to a point where you're like, I can't handle this anymore. I'm going to die of this craving, or I'm going to die of embarrassment, or I'm going to die of anxiety.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  It's like peaking, gets to this point where you just, I can't do it anymore, right? No one's ever died of embarrassment. No one's ever died of a craving. No one's ever died of anxiety. But they've died of some of the things that they've tried to do to get rid of that. So we practice riding it. We practice, we practice, we practice, and then we notice it most of the time comes back down again. And that is riding the wave of acceptance. So when we're talking about acceptance, or when I'm talking about acceptance, I'm talking about acceptance of the sensations and inner experiences that you are having, which is different from saying, I'm approving of someone else's behavior, or I'm approving of the situation outside of me.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  I don't approve of a whole lot of things, but in order to make the changes that I need to make, I need to accept my inner experience to be able to move towards even making a change around something that I don't approve of in the outer world.

• 1:01:10Dan Harris?

  Yes, it's like radical acceptance, as I understand it, well, it's many things, but in particular, when you're talking about pushing back against the concern that it leads to resignation, it's like, no, no, you just need to, as they say in AA, the first step is admitting it. The first step is to see things clearly so that you can, from an embrace of reality, from a sane acknowledgement of how things are, take the right steps.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Climate change is a perfect example. So I'm part of this, you had Alyssa Apple on, talked about, she's a really good friend of mine. She has this whole expertise and telomeres and stress. And she also is a complete badass researcher. And she has initiated this 10 UC campus-wide research project to train undergraduates across all 10 UC campuses in resilient skills. Because our college students are facing the reality of a whole slew of problems that

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  they did not create, but that they are going to have to face. And in order to move out into the world, they need to both radically accept the reality of what's happening, have climate grief, have anger, have anxiety, all the things that are difficult to have. How do you accept the reality of what's happened to our climate and then take action? This project that I'm part of with Alyssa, I'm part of the UC campus part of it, we do a lot of work around radical acceptance, being with discomfort, taking care of ourselves. And then we also do a lot of work around climate action. And they do all sorts of fascinating, like interesting projects that

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  are unique to them. Talk about genius energy, college students, they create all sorts of really unique and impactful things that channel their energy of climate grief into positive action as a result of this course. And then they, you know, Alyssa's doing all sorts of research, outcome studies on it and its impact. And we're trying to scale it bigger and bigger so it can reach lots of students. Because if there's one consensus amongst climate people is that we might have already passed that little tipping point that they've been warning us about. And now, the best thing we can do is radically accept, so that we can deal with it.

• 1:03:41Dan Harris?

  Okay, let's turn to the third task in your book, which is focusing your energy. I'll put it the same way I have every time. What do you mean by that term, focusing your energy? And how do we do it?

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  Well, focusing your energy is identifying what matters to you in this moment and putting the right amount of effort and energy into that. Sometimes that's dialing back. Sometimes that's adding more. If you think about a camera that focuses, sometimes focusing means we need to expand our aperture. We need like a broader view. Sometimes we need to narrow in our view. And it's the wisdom that helps us decide that. Like a camera operator has experience and wisdom that decides that. So for me, last night, I couldn't sleep. There could be a lot of different ways in which I could focus my energy when I'm not sleeping.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  I could focus on, oh, I'm having an interview with Dan Harris tomorrow and I should go through my notes because I can't sleep. Or I could worry about something that's related to my kids. Or I could worry about not sleeping, right? Those would all be unwise use of my energy. And actually, what I ended up doing is like, this is the classic thing that I always, it's like my go-to now. Because I had variation and it worked. I tried the get unstuck button and this worked for me. If it doesn't work for me at some other point, I'll do something different. Is I went outside. We had a really big full moon right now. And I went outside and I looked at the full moon and I was barefoot and I could feel the hard concrete under my feet. And it was kind of cold. And I looked at the moon.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  I felt that there concrete under my feet and I just like did a little moon bath. And then I went back inside. It's a great use of my energy. It took a little bit of activation energy to get me out of bed, you know? But it was taking up a lot of energy for me to be in my head. So I see that as that's a wise effort move. I mean, kind of wild, but that to me is wisdom combined with genius energy, which is my emotional sensitivity, knowing what I need.

• 1:05:49Dan Harris?

  I love it. I say that as a fellow insomniac. In this section of the book, you talk about focusing your energy as it relates to at least four different areas: relationships, your body, your work, and creativity. Let's just work through these if you're cool with it. One of the things, when you're talking about relationships specifically, is you use this phrase, and you used part of this phrase earlier, so it will sound familiar to close listeners, but use this phrase, "defuse from depleters." So can you hold forth on that concept, please?

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  I think everyone can think about positive energizers, people that when you are around them, you feel their positive energy, you are energized by them. It could even be like your barista. And energy depleters. I know you have some, Dan. People that suck the energy out of you. And oftentimes, we think that the solution to that is just cut them out. But sometimes, they're like connected to, you know, like, but wait, I'm married to this person and you're related to them, so I can't really cut you out. You keep on having to show up. And if I were to do that, it might, you know, be problematic. Right? So how do I defuse from them? How do I notice the thoughts in my mind that are unhelpful?

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  We use that example of your hands in front of your face. Well, when you're around that depleter, you may be around them with a whole lot of story that you are putting in front of your face that are preventing you from actually being present for yourself. So that is one way we can defuse from depleters, is actually look at our own minds and our own thoughts and how we are adding on. And usually, when you add on a story, you can think about a depleter right now. I won't make you name any names. Do you have one?

• 1:07:37Dan Harris?

  My cat Toby is coming to mind. He's a total depleter. All he does is beg for food, and he's 25 pounds, and he wants to sit on me, and it's uncomfortable. So let's go Toby.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. Toby's a safe one. So Toby is a depleter in your life. When Toby is begging for food, what is a story, that's an unhelpful story, that goes on in your head about Toby that makes it worse?

• 1:08:03Dan Harris?

  This fucking cat is monomaniacal and a total pain in the ass. Can I give him to a neighbor?

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  Okay, so you have that story in your head about this fucking cat is mononocle, whatever horrible, can I give him to a neighbor? And when you are stuck in that story, where does your attention go?

• 1:08:22Dan Harris?

  Away from what I'm trying to do in the moment, which is usually work, which is what he has interrupted.

• 1:08:26Speaker 04

  Right, so it's depleting you even more from your work. What do you do behaviorally? If I saw you, would you be like, oh, your fucking cat? Would you be like giving him an elbow? Would you be?

• 1:08:36Dan Harris?

  Usually I'm ushering him out of my office and closing the door. Sometimes he will jump up and dig his claws into me when I'm ignoring him and hang. And as I mentioned, 25 pounds, that's incredibly painful.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  It's a big cat.

• 1:08:51Dan Harris?

  So at that point I might yell.

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, so your attention goes to things other than your work. Your behavior goes to trying to usher him out the door. And what do you prioritize?

• 1:09:02Dan Harris?

  I am prioritizing in those moments, my own comfort and focus over his comfort and happiness.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  So those three questions come from the work of Elise Loehnen and Courtney Smith, who wrote Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. And they have a lot to do with how your energy gets pulled off track by de-energizers, especially when you are stuck in a story. And so I'd like to follow it up with three more questions that have to do with where you actually want to put your energy. What would be wise effort in this situation? And the first question is, where do you want to be placing your attention?

• 1:09:36Dan Harris?

  If I was watching that moment from the perspective of my 85 year old self, if I lived that long, I think I would hope that I could just take 90 seconds and give the cat what he needs, which is food and maybe some hugs, and then go back to my work rather than being so monomaniacal myself and thinking that my work should take precedence over every other living being in the house.

• 1:10:04Speaker 04

  Okay. So you want to pay attention to 90 seconds worth of your cat? And then the rest of the time back to your work?

• 1:10:13Dan Harris?

  Or whatever it is I'm doing. Yes.

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  Or whatever you're doing. The behavior you want to do is like, I'll give you some of this, but not all of me.

• 1:10:19Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Speaker 04

  And what do you want to prioritize?

• 1:10:22Dan Harris?

  Well, this is a values question, right?

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:25Dan Harris?

  It's hard to come up with a non annoying or cheesy word here, but I want to prioritize. I use this word in a very broad sense, love. You know, just giving a shit, being kind. And this kind of goes back to the view being better when you pull your head out of your ass. Being stuck on my own to do list and priorities, which are important, of course, but you can't get so focused on that. And can't lard that list up so much that you have no bandwidth left for the other beating hearts in the neighborhood.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  Right. You want to prioritize love and you loaded that word love with all these other words like this is cheesy and this is.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  We got to just own the love and like get over ourselves that it's cheesy. There's a reason why love is central to so many songs and central, you know, even though it's cheesy and it's trite, it's the truth. So prioritizing love in that situation. And when you get really clear, okay, I've got this depleting cat. I got a depleting in law. I got a depleting workmate. I got a depleting kid. I got a whatever it is, a depleting person in front of me in line at the grocery store. When you are in unwise effort, you are prioritizing things, you are behaving in ways. And you are focusing your attention on things that are unhelpful to you and them.

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  And when you're engaging in wiser efforts, you're connecting with your deeper values, how you want to show up. And all of a sudden you can reclaim a little bit of your energy back. You're diffusing from some of the thoughts that are pulling you off track. And you get to reclaim that energy and love. If you want something that's energizing, invest in love. That's better than any workout plan you can find on the planet. Love will energize you instantly, instantly. It's like if you're a parent or a partner of somebody, you know how love can motivate you to do all sorts of things. And you can feel alive and love for your cat, you know, your 80 year old self, sure. Who will have had many cats. But Toby will be the memorable one.

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  You know, so you gotta, you gotta give a little love.

• 1:12:36Dan Harris?

  Well said. There's so much in this book, I did not get nearly through my list of questions, but in our remaining time, let me just kind of at random pick one. We have been in this section of our conversation, talking about the third task in your book, which is focus your energy. We just talked a little bit about how to do that within the context of relationships. You also talk about how to do it within the context of your body. And you have a little mantra that you recommend that I don't actually know what it means, but I'm curious. Yes, yes, thank you, thank you.

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a little walking meditation. I think I learned it at Plum Village, but it's a very simple walking meditation where you take one step, yes, another step, yes, another step, thank you, and another step, thank you. With that, you can also take a breath. And it's beneficial for lots of different reasons. And we think about why is effort in the body? Oftentimes, we're relating to our body, not from a yes stance or a thank you stance. We're relating it, relating to it from like a control stance or disconnected. So it gets you back into your body, having gratitude for your body, savoring this one body that we have.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  Pretty much every function that you have right now, your ability to write, your ability to look at me and see me, your ability to hear me, if you can hear, you will not have at some point. And if you are walking, maybe you're not walking, maybe you're wheeling a chair, and maybe you could say, yes, yes, thank you, thank you. If you're lying in a bed and you don't have that capacity and you're, you have the capacity to breathe. But everything that we have with our body, we will lose. Part of this book I wrote in Jack Cornfield's little hut. So he has a little hut at Spirit Rock and I was.

• 1:14:27Speaker 04

  Pulling my hair out, writing this book with two kids at home and a schedule of too much stuff. And Trudy Goodman, who's my second body, we would write together, we'd pull up our Zoom. I have like, strong self criticism when I'm writing. And at one point, I was like, I'm just really struggling, Trudy. And she said, go up to Jack's cootie. It's called the cootie. Go up to his hut. I went up there, did a lot of walking meditation, a lot of quiet, and wrote some of this book. And discovered again, like, the place that I often have to come back to over and over again, with wise effort, which is gratitude, being present. Yes,

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  yes, thank you, thank you. And in his little hut, he had the little piece of paper, besides, like, all the cool books that he had, this little tiny piece of paper that had the five remembrances on him of everything we love, we will lose. You know, I think that's a good reminder with wise effort in the body, that everything we love, we will lose. And maybe we treat our body a little bit differently.

• 1:15:28Dan Harris?

  Let me just add some detail on a few things Diana just said. Jack Kornfield, for people who don't know him, is this legendary meditation teacher. He's married to Trudy Goodman, herself a legendary meditation teacher. And Jack was the prime mover behind the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County in California. All of those were mentioned by Diana. You also mentioned the five remembrances. These are these five things that the Buddha recommended, we call to mind every day. Thanks to somebody I suspect you know, Vinnie Ferraro, great meditation teacher, who I interviewed earlier this year, I started doing those five remembrances twice a day. And they are, as you nodded toward, this body is of the nature

• 1:16:11Dan Harris?

  to die, this body is of the nature to get sick, this body is of the nature to get older, we will ultimately lose everything and everyone we hold dear. And fifth, this is where, as Vinnie says, the Buddha pulls out the knife, like, we do have one true possession, and that's our actions. Those are our actions. And so, to me, all of those point right toward wise effort, giving us the wisdom to make the right decisions based on the non-negotiable truth of change. Am I hunting in the right direction here, according to you?

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  Yes, I think the Buddha was also a behaviorist. At his heart, engage Buddhism and behavior, that actions are our only belongings. Wise effort is about how we act, how we choose to act, where we choose to put our energy, knowing that everything, including our cat, is impermanent in our bodies, in our relationships, in our planet. And how are we going to act on it?

• 1:17:08Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and this is kind of another radical acceptance thing. Like, you want to see clearly the often painful truth of the matter, which is we're all going to die, everybody we know is going to die. Not as a source of hypervigilance, or the type of clinging that, as you said earlier, can give you rope burn, but as a wise acknowledgement of the truth that can then help us make wise decisions in that light.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:38Speaker 04

  It'll help you choose, knowing that, how you spend your time today. What you choose to add to your list today, or choose to say no to on your list today. If you repeat that to yourself twice a day. One caveat, I don't recommend it for folks that are severely depressed or suicidal. I'm giving that assignment. They are highly aware of that. I give actually another assignment around focusing on savoring what is good that is here, savoring your accomplishments, savoring good people in your life, savoring the kind person at the grocery store, the positive energizers, the warm sun on your skin, the tree outside

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  your window, you know, so it's a little bit of a different attentional focus and attentional flexibility if you're feeling particularly down.

• 1:18:29Dan Harris?

  That seems smart. Two final questions, which I ask habitually. I'm a little worried about this first one, which is, is there something that you were hoping we would get to that we didn't? There are a lot of things we didn't get to, but is there something burning in you right now that we really should cover and have failed to cover?

• 1:18:49Speaker 04

  Is there something that you hope to get to that we didn't, Dan?

• 1:18:51Dan Harris?

  There's a lot of stuff in here about how to do wise effort in community. That's something I'm interested in. There's a lot of stuff in here about wise effort as it pertains to creativity, so.

• 1:19:02Dan Harris?

  I feel badly that we didn't get to it, but again, people can read the book.

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:19:08Dan Harris?

  Which leads me to the final question, which is, can you remind everybody of the name of the book and anything else you've put out into the universe that we should know about?

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  The book is called Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most. You can learn more about me at wiseeffort.com. I have a lot of resources there. I have a lot in the arena of ACT, if you want to take deeper dives into ACT. A lot in the arena of training therapists and coaches. I have many different efforts that I put out into the world, but they all sort of under this bigger umbrella of Wise Effort.

• 1:19:40Dan Harris?

  Been a huge pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

• 1:19:44Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:19:48Dan Harris?

  Thank you to Diana Hill. Great to talk to her. Don't forget, there's a guided meditation that comes with this episode. It's all about how to cultivate wise effort in your meditation practice and in your life. Our next live guided meditation session is coming up on the 12th, which is a Wednesday. We usually do these on Tuesdays, but the next one is on Wednesday. The 11th is a holiday in the US. Kristiana Wolf, our Teacher of the Month, will be featured on the next live session. And if you want to meditate with me in person, don't forget the two events I've got coming up. One on the 18th in New York City with Pete Holmes, the great comedian, and then a solo event I'll be doing up at the Hotel Trukbeck later in the month. Links to both in the show notes.

• 1:20:33Dan Harris?

  Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

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