Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Buddhist Executive Coach On: Professional Anxiety, Workplace Conflict, And The Power Of Mindfulness | Nolitha Tsengiwe About this episode How to be less stressed and more productive.
Nolitha Tsengiwe https://couragetolead.co.za/, a Dharma teacher and board member at Dharmagiri Retreat Center, in South Africa. She is also a graduate of Insight Meditation Society teacher training.
This episode is part of our monthlong Do Life Better https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/new-years-2025-do-life-better series.
In this episode we talk about:
How to weave mindfulness into your day without requiring a big formal sit How to have healthy conflict in the workplace Our attempts to explain the ineffable And much more
Related Episodes:
Do Life Better https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/new-years-2025-do-life-better Sanely Ambitious http://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/sanely-ambitious
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Full Shownotes: https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/nolitha-895 https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/phap-luu-889
Additional Resources:
Listen to Nolitha's talks on DharmaSeed https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/1195/
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? I love my job. I really do. And my job is probably my greatest source of stress. I suspect I'm not alone in this, at least in the latter part about how work is stressful. Whether you love or hate your job, work really can bring up some of our deepest and darkest issues. Today, I'm going to talk to somebody with some pretty unique qualifications. She's both an executive coach and a highly trained Dharma teacher. She has some incredibly helpful thoughts on how to weave mindfulness into your day without requiring some big, formal meditation session, although those are good, too. She argues, and I really agree with her on this, that this strategy can make you less hurried and more productive.
1:02 Dan Harris? We also talk about our often futile search for security through work, how mindfulness is not about replacing unpleasant experiences with pleasant experiences, but instead it's about learning to be okay with the unpleasant. And we talk about her strategies for managing something deeply unpleasant for many of us: workplace conflict. My guest is Nolitha Tsengiwe. She's a Dharma teacher and board member at Dharma Giri Retreat Center, which is located in South Africa. She's also a graduate of the Insight Meditation Society teacher training. This is part two of a series we're doing this week about professional success and work-life balance. If you missed Monday's episode on the science of burnout, go check it out. For anybody new to this show, we've done a lot of episodes on work, and we call this
1:47 Dan Harris? occasional series "Sane Ambitious." So I will drop a link in the show notes to a playlist of all of our prior episodes. Anyway, this work series we're doing this week is embedded in a larger, month-long series we're doing on the show during the month of January called "Do Life Better." Every week, we take a popular New Year's resolution, and we examine it from the angles of modern science and ancient wisdom, our signature mix. We started with fitness, and then we moved on to personal finances. This week, it's success and work-life balance. And next week, it's everyday addictions from food to booze to your phone. So it's a big series, and this week, we're doing kind of a series within the series. Anyway, enough out of me. We'll get started with Nolitha Tsengiwe right after this.
2:32 Dan Harris? Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Kitesworth works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world, supporting locally-led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence, and opportunity where it is needed most. On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder Alex Honold goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
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4:12 Dan Harris? Nolita Tsanguiwe, welcome to the show.
4:15 Speaker 03 Happy to be here, Dan.
4:17 Dan Harris? Extra credit to you for zooming in from an entirely different continent. Usually, our guests are coming from the United States of America, but you're coming from Johannesburg, South Africa. So, thank you for making the time. Really appreciate this. And I'm excited to talk to you because you come at this issue of work-life balance, of ambition, from a really interesting sort of set of perspectives. You're an executive coach, you're a psychologist, and you're a Dharma teacher. So, I guess I wanted to start with a very general question, which is, I'd be curious, before we talk about how you work with your clients, What kind of suffering have you noticed in your own mind as it relates to your own work life?
5:00 Speaker 03 Source of suffering is anxiety that seems for me to be the driver to do more and more and more. And it never gets to that place where it's enough. Now I can relax, I can pause. That is my main source of suffering in my own work life. Because I work with environments where that is the culture. There is this compulsion around efficiency.
5:39 Speaker 03 Do it right the first time, don't fail, don't make mistakes, do more and more.
5:48 Speaker 03 So the bottom line then actually is living from a place of anxiety.
5:57 Dan Harris? Yeah.
5:58 Speaker 03 It's exhausting at some point.
6:02 Speaker 03 I try to sleep, I'm still thinking about the client and what I need to deliver. It doesn't stop.
6:10 Speaker 03 The not switching off is a source of suffering. And I see this in my clients at this time of the year. So in South Africa, we close shop for about a month. December is an extended holiday time. So now we're in the middle of November. The levels of exhaustion are huge. Everybody is just trying to keep going until the end of the month. And then they go through their holidays.
6:53 Dan Harris? I was laughing and smiling a little bit when you started your answer, not because I thought it was silly, but because I saw so much of myself in that, like, the never-ending nature of it. Like, I make a to-do list and I think, the lie I tell myself over and over is that when I cross everything off this to-do list, I can finally relax.
7:12 Speaker 03 Ooh.
7:13 Dan Harris? But then there's a new fucking to-do list. You know, it just doesn't stop.
7:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, it doesn't stop. Until the body, perhaps, is what says no. In one way or the other, something goes wrong that then stops you. Actually, it's not something going wrong. It's something going exactly as how it should be because this body, this mind, is not meant to function like that. To just be driven by this anxiety, to do more, to do better, never fail, never make a mistake.
7:56 Speaker 03 That's part of the psychology. Even if this is unconscious, we're not saying that to ourselves. I will get there. When I get there, I will then relax. I will then rest.
8:12 Speaker 03 These human bodies are not structured, to be honest with you, for that. If it's not the body that breaks down, it's the mental health. Because to live just with that level of anxiety... And you can feel this in the atmosphere of the organization. I was just only yesterday working with a team and we were reflecting on the topic of alchemy, of conflict. Because that's also a source of suffering in the workplace,
8:53 Speaker 03 not to know how to be with conflict. So then, there is the work that you have to do. You're doing it most of the time. I think of two or three people.
9:10 Speaker 03 And then, another source of pain is relationship in the workplace. Not able to confront and be with conflict. Largely, conflict gets avoided. Until at some point, something just gives others an explosion. So it's interesting that the main tool in managing conflict is to be able to get your system regulated. Because the first question I was asking the participants,
9:54 Speaker 03 when you think about conflict, what comes to mind? Somebody was saying anxiety. I have an expectation that the outcome is really going to be bad. Somebody else was saying, I really get tight, contracted, there's a lot of tension when that word is brought, conflict. So we don't see conflict as natural, that it's going to be there. So that's the second place I see as a source of conflict. It's not the main thing. Too much to do, no time to just pause, allow for regulation of the nervous system.
10:39 Speaker 03 By the way, this is where the practice of mindfulness can be helpful. Even just learning to pause for a moment, rest and do nothing. And to teach that.
11:00 Speaker 03 It's hard for people who are driven by this compassion for efficiency. No mistakes, no failures.
11:16 Speaker 03 Not realistic until you help people really be able to see that. I was even impressed then with this group with their responses. Where a person says, oh, wow, I notice anxiety when you mention the word conflict. So already there is some awareness there that we can build on.
11:43 Speaker 03 Just to be aware of how I'm feeling in any moment. We are cultivating practice of mindfulness. Because sometimes mindfulness, we can think about as this thing that we need to make space for. Something I have to do maybe at the beginning of the day for fifteen or twenty minutes or at the end of the day. That's not how I see as being a practical way of getting organizations where people are always busy to practice mindfulness.
12:25 Speaker 03 So just even now, in this conversation, I notice for myself when we both pause.
12:33 Speaker 03 There's something really restful about that. That gives me an opportunity to connect with you.
12:42 Speaker 03 Just in that moment of connection, I can feel that there is some space to notice my thinking, to wait for the next question from you. It's a different conversation once we are able to pause.
13:02 Speaker 03 And if we can pause, then we can have what I would call a meaningful conversation that then uplifts me and prepares me for delivery. Meaningful conversation influences the results that we produce. A good quality result in what we do has a lot to do with the quality of the conversations I have because we deliver through conversations. So just a pause, as easy as that, can change the quality of our interaction.
13:47 Speaker 03 Right? So that delivery of results, it's also about relationship.
13:58 Dan Harris? Okay, so I've heard many things in what you've just said that I want to follow up on. Just to recap, the two main sources of suffering you see in your own mind and among your clients in the workplace are, first, this kind of never enoughness, always behind, always has to be perfect mentality, which is unsustainable. And the second is a lot of anxiety and awkwardness and reluctance and reticence around conflict. Let's come back to conflict and let me just start with the first thing, which is this anxiety linked to this sense of insufficiency. And I suspect that you view it through a Buddhist lens.
14:42 Dan Harris? What comes to mind as I'm listening to you talk is the Four Noble Truths. For people listening who don't know what that is, it was kind of the first pronouncement of the Buddha post Enlightenment. He kind of delivered a diagnosis of the human condition in the way that doctors at the time delivered their diagnoses, which was in these four-part messages. And so the first part was, "Life is suffering," which is kind of a misunderstood pronouncement. It really just means that life is going to be bumpy if you're clinging to things that won't last in a universe that is characterized by impermanence. The second of the Four Noble Truths is that the cause of this suffering is thirst, or clinging, or craving.
15:26 Dan Harris? And I think that's what I would imagine that's At the root of this anxiety that you honed in on when I asked you, what's the source of suffering in the workplace? Am I right about that?
15:38 Speaker 03 You're spot on. You're spot on. What I'm talking about here is this lack of enoughness of anything. Right? So if you pause then and actually observe the mind, when the mind moves, it moves towards wanting or not wanting. This is what the Buddha refers to as the source of suffering. This wanting thus doesn't stop. If you are not pausing, it just runs the show.
16:22 Speaker 03 There's always something that the mind wants or doesn't want, which the Buddha has called it the craving of the second noble truth. Lack, that's another way of putting it. I see it as this constant dissatisfaction that then drives the wanting. And believing that for my next project, once I accomplish this task, there will be a feeling of satisfaction. Maybe there is, but just for a moment.
17:02 Speaker 03 It doesn't last at all because that impulse for more is alive almost all the time, actually, if you are a good observer of the activity of the mind. So it can never be enough. And then you are a practitioner yourself. You understand, I would imagine, these teachings to some extent. There is nothing wrong with wanting. It's not bad. It's not evil.
17:40 Speaker 03 It is, though, a source of our suffering. So what we do with the practice of mindfulness is to observe, investigate this impulse towards something more and more. Desire feeds desire. That's why then we don't stop, right? Desire can never satisfy desire. It's not possible.
18:14 Dan Harris? I sometimes joke that I have this supernatural ability to know what is in the minds of my listeners, even though we're recording this months before the listeners will even hear it. And I suspect that what's going through the mind of many listeners right now is, okay, you guys are right. The Buddha was right. What do I do about it? You, Nolitha, have talked about mindfulness. Is that the answer? And what does it look like practically in my everyday life?
18:47 Speaker 03 To simplify this, then, we can say, just pause for a moment. Stop. Observe your thinking process. And the more you do that, you will notice that there's a sense of growing ease. Just pause. It's hard to do because we're habituated to continue to think and think. Nothing wrong with thinking. We function, we deliver, we get to results through thinking.
19:32 Speaker 03 Mindfulness just allows us to observe the mind thinking. And you can't observe the mind thinking by not stopping. This just stop. It's like taking a step back.
19:54 Speaker 03 And just observe. In that process of pausing and observing, we manage to disentangle ourselves from the content of the mind. And just out of that process of disentanglement, there can just be a moment of ease, some spaciousness, a sense of clarity, before I go on to the next thing. So pause, do nothing. It's difficult, right? And it requires patience. That's the other thing the Buddha
20:37 Speaker 03 is teaching us about patience. When we talk about mindfulness, we're training the mind in patience. So just by pausing then and notice, impatience is already the practice of mindfulness. So we've got to simplify what this is. It's so simple that the mind complicates it. When you hear me say, "Pause, stop", is that so difficult? Until you do it, you realize it's not.
21:18 Speaker 03 But if you're thinking about it, yeah, you're not going to experience what I am pointing you to. Try it out. Just pause. And sense just the beauty of that moment of ease that allows us therefore to think with more clarity. And when I work with people and support them, they can do this. And they can then taste the pleasure of pausing.
22:01 Speaker 03 Of course, on their own, it's hard to do. Because we are habituated not to pause, not to stop. So of course, this is hard in that sense. We're not gonna get it right for the longest time, maybe. But once we taste
22:24 Speaker 03 the blameless pleasure
22:28 Speaker 03 of a pause,
22:31 Speaker 03 we're likely
22:34 Speaker 03 to come back to it. So for the longest time in our practice and training,
22:41 Speaker 03 we're just
22:43 Speaker 03 coming back, starting again, whenever you can remember to pause in your day. Can you just pause?
22:52 Speaker 03 Right? Am I wrong then to say that the instructions for this are so simple? They don't change.
23:03 Speaker 03 It's just that it's hard to do because we are habituated differently.
23:10 Dan Harris? Yeah, one of the cliches I actually like, I'm not a huge fan of cliches, but one of the cliches I actually like about meditation is that it's or mindfulness or both, is that it's simple, but not easy.
23:26 Speaker 03 Right? And we like easy.
23:31 Speaker 03 We like easy. More and more, I notice how addicted we've become to easy and comfortable.
23:43 Speaker 03 You're right. The practice is not easy. Who says it has to be easy?
23:51 Speaker 03 Just because it's not easy, do we then give up? And then continue to live out of a sense of agitation, restlessness, anxiety? It's not sustainable to live that way. It doesn't support well-being.
24:15 Speaker 03 It doesn't matter how much we achieve in our lives in the workplace. It's not supportive of well-being if we continue to get to our accomplishments, get to results the way we're doing.
24:36 Speaker 03 Pausing doesn't stop hard work. Pausing does not stop you from achieving as much as you want to achieve.
24:48 Speaker 03 It's not going against that. So long also didn't we understand? Lasting satisfaction is not gonna come from completing this project. No, it's not.
25:07 Speaker 03 So where is it going to come from if we're really looking for well-being? We're looking for happiness, whether we're at home or whether we're in the workplace. Here's the way, just pause. I tell you then, if you do this in your day, just a few times, you can find a way of reminding yourself because you're going to forget anyway.
25:36 Speaker 03 But if you are able to put in place reminders and really just stop a few times in your day, like eight times in your day, I promise you by the end of the day, you won't feel as exhausted as you normally are.
25:56 Speaker 03 You'll get home and there'll still be energy to attend to your partner, to attend to children. You don't need to just collapse in your couch and I don't know what object helps people numb tiredness at the end of the day. Could be a glass of wine, it could be coffee. You don't need that when you have been finding ways of pausing in your day.
26:24 Speaker 03 So we can do this if we can see that well-being is not in things. It's not in getting to this and getting to that. Well-being can be any moment when I pause and just attend to what is happening here, which actually helps regulate the nervous system. When the nervous system is regulated, there's already a sense of okayness, satisfaction,
26:59 Speaker 03 so that I then go to my tasks, not out of a sense of desperation or lack, but out of enjoyment in doing what I do well anyway.
27:18 Speaker 03 So you can end up actually doing more. It doesn't mean do less.
27:23 Speaker 03 No. What I'm proposing here is mindfulness in the workplace of just pausing.
27:32 Speaker 03 Observe, okay, what's going on here? Then I can feel and sense that, oh, Nolitha, you're anxious. Oh, okay. Just that, to know that I'm anxious, allows for a change. So that perhaps I get to that meeting less agitated, less tense, because I really feel a sense of okayness, right? My well-being doesn't depend on how well that meeting is gonna go. My well-being depends on my ability to just be.
28:12 Dan Harris? Coming up, I challenge Nolitha in a very friendly way on the benefits of noticing. We talk about one of my favorite acronyms, RAIN, and we both engage in some interesting attempts to explain the ineffable.
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30:58 Dan Harris? Let me challenge you on that just a little bit in a friendly way. I was talking to a friend of mine just yesterday, and she is not a meditator, although she does yoga. And she was asking me some skeptical questions about the benefits of mindfulness. And I was saying something similar to what you said, which is, we can be aware of our anxiety in a way that allows the anxiety to be there, but not to own us as much, not to control us as much. And she said, and this is not an uncommon question that I get, and I'm curious to hear your answer. Well, I know I'm anxious, but that doesn't help. And so when you just said, can you pause when you're anxious? I'm hearing my friend Vanessa say, well,
31:41 Dan Harris? how is further acknowledging this problematic emotion gonna help me as I go into this meeting?
31:48 Speaker 03 That's such a good question. I'll tell you what, for me, that awareness of my experience helps me towards well-being is if I stop and notice I'm anxious, already that allows me a sense of ease. You've got to practice this to actually know what I'm talking about. Because when you're thinking about it, it doesn't make sense. And thinking and anxiety and worry, those things go together.
32:30 Speaker 03 Here, what we're proposing is pause, step back from the thinking, just notice what's happening here now. Because as soon as I notice I'm anxious, something about the noticing brings a sense of kindness.
32:57 Speaker 03 It's okay, you don't have to go on like this. You have a choice.
33:05 Speaker 03 Hmm. It's interesting, I was referring to you to the team I was working with yesterday. I had a call facilitator and she was asking me at the beginning of the session,
33:20 Speaker 03 "Nadisa, how are you feeling?" I had to pause and like, "Oh, I'm anxious." And I could tell she was surprised by my response and just like, "Why are you anxious?" And then I had to pause and think, "Hmm, I want a good outcome out of the day." It would really be great if we can create conditions here for this team to know that conflict is normal, just to normalize that and then know how to work with it. Okay. The conversation continued in another direction. When we took the break two hours after the first part
34:03 Speaker 03 of that conversation with the team on the alchemy of conflict, she says to me, "You know what, Noz?
34:15 Speaker 03 I could only know that I'm anxious because
34:22 Speaker 03 there's a sense of urgency. I release my anxiety through business."
34:30 Speaker 03 Had we not had that conversation at the beginning, where I was honest about how I feel, she wouldn't have had that awareness. But just out of that conversation where I was honest, because for me, then if I'm anxious, I'm anxious. I'm okay to admit to that. Because it's just a normal, natural feeling to be anxious, to be fearful, to worry. It doesn't reflect me, it doesn't say anything about me.
35:06 Speaker 03 It's just part of nature to have this whole range of emotions and feelings.
35:13 Speaker 03 So going back to your question, what does it do to know how you are feeling? It helps you.
35:25 Speaker 03 To notice what's going on so that you don't override your own experience. Instead, you come into a relationship with your experience.
35:37 Dan Harris? Here's what's coming to mind for me as I listen to you talk and I think about the question, this smart question from my very smart friend Vanessa about like, what good does it do for me to know I'm anxious? I know I'm anxious. That doesn't help. It really is in the way in which you know mindfulness. And this is my answer. So I'll throw this out for you to respond to mindfulness is a specific way of knowing what you're feeling that is different, I think, than what the culture might suggest about self-awareness. I think a lot of people think, oh, yeah, well, I know I'm pissed, but that doesn't help me to know I'm pissed because I'm still pissed. But mindfulness is a different kind of knowing. And one way to discuss that's coming to mind for me, there are lots of ways to discuss
36:20 Dan Harris? this, but right now what's coming to mind is this practice that's an acronym known as RAIN. So it's a four-part practice that I'm sure you're familiar with. I'll just say it for the listener. R is to recognize. Well, that's the part that's easy. I know I'm anxious. That's Vanessa's question. That's the first step to know. The second, A, is to allow it. Now, this is where it starts to get radical. Instead of, as you said before, Nolitha, instead of compartmentalizing or self-medicating or indulging, it's just like, ah, let me pause and let me just let this be here for a second. It gets even more radical with the I, which is investigate. Check it out. This feeling I'm calling anxiety,
37:05 Dan Harris? what is it really? What is this meteorological phenomenon I'm calling anxiety? Well, it's made up of component parts, a buzzing in my chest, maybe some heat around my forehead or ears, a starburst of a certain kind of thought. All right, let me check this out. Let me put this seemingly monolithic emotion through the cheese grater of mindfulness where I'm seeing that actually it's a bunch of changing components. And then the N.
37:33 Dan Harris? There are two ways that people use "N." One is non-identification, which you referenced before when you said, "This is just nature. I don't have to take this personally." One linguistic way to do this is, instead of saying to yourself, "I'm anxious," you can say, "There is anxiety." I got this from Joseph Goldstein, so that you're not claiming the anxiety is yours in some way. Now, other people use "N" to mean nurture, which I also like, which is, you can talk to yourself in a supportive way, like, "All right, Nolitha, yeah, you're feeling anxious, but you're good. You've been through this before. And in a worst-case scenario, you're still gonna be fine." So that's a very different way
38:14 Dan Harris? of acknowledging your emotion that makes the pause make sense. Okay, I said a lot of words there, but did those words make sense to you?
38:25 Speaker 03 Absolutely, absolutely. I think where people understand this differently, that word "recognized" can mean different things, right? Just because I know I am anxious, I love it when you said, "It's how I know." Because there's power in mindfulness, awareness. That's why people like J. Confort talk about loving awareness. My teacher, Kirisara, would say, "Awareness, that blessing." So there's a quality
39:07 Speaker 03 in the state of mind called awareness that has benevolence, that I don't even fully understand it myself.
39:19 Dan Harris? Me neither.
39:20 Speaker 03 Hmm. So this power, we can't fully understand about mind-knowing what is happening in the here and now. We're recognizing in that moment, not just our experience, but we're recognizing the knowing mind.
39:52 Speaker 03 Which is another step, you could call it in a complicated way, awareness of awareness.
39:59 Dan Harris? Yeah, yeah.
40:01 Speaker 03 But another way of putting that is the knowing mind, recognizing that
40:11 Speaker 03 and trusting and appreciating that as
40:20 Speaker 03 a place of safety
40:24 Speaker 03 and refuge. So I've used a few words there, this recognition.
40:32 Speaker 03 There is trust.
40:36 Speaker 03 Right? There's resting.
40:41 Speaker 03 And of course, you're gonna do this. You're not going to get it just by hearing these words. You're gonna try it out. It's by direct experience that honestly, this makes sense. Otherwise, it doesn't.
40:57 Dan Harris? Totally. Yes. I want to drill down on this mystery that you nodded towards
41:06 Dan Harris? of awareness being loving. Because you hear this a lot. I hear it a lot from Dharma teachers and I don't fully understand it either. And I'm not expecting you to fully explain it to me because it is a mystery. But it is so interesting and I want to signal before I go much further in this. I want to signal to the listener, look, as Nolitha said, this is stuff that's hard to understand just listening to people talk about or to read about. Like you kind of have to do the practice to start to get a toehold in this. And even for me, as somebody who's practiced for 15 years, I only understand this episodically. But let me do my best to put my words on the ineffable here. And this is connected to the N in rain of non-identification. Like we can know.
41:48 Dan Harris? Anxiety in a way in which we're like fully in it. We're standing under a waterfall and all the water is just dumping on top of our heads. We can also ask ourselves the very interesting question of what is knowing the anxiety? Then you step out of the water and you're actually looking at it for a few nanoseconds at a time from a nonjudgmental remove that we might call mindfulness. So there is this capacity we all have in our minds. This is hard to talk about, but there's this yawning chasm of pure knowing that exists in the mind. That is, when you start to look at it, it has this warmth to it.
42:32 Dan Harris? It has the awareness in itself is loving, maybe just because it's accepting and that is a form of love. I don't know, but okay, now I'm yammering. Am I making any sense to you? And what would you say in response or to build on it?
42:47 Speaker 03 You're making a lot of sense because language falls short here. It's an experience to feel this loving, holding quality. We can call it awareness, mindfulness, consciousness. The only way really we can know it, it's directly. It's not through listening to Nolitha or to Dan talk about it.
43:30 Speaker 03 Words, they just point us to something that is so life-giving, so beautiful, so nourishing. It meets the very need or drive.
43:51 Speaker 03 That brings us to even listen to a podcast like this. There's something already that is known that we want to listen to a conversation on mindfulness. I could call that a drive for wellbeing, a drive for
44:14 Speaker 03 being fully awake.
44:20 Speaker 03 So I'm not worried actually about people who are listening to this and say, I still don't get this. Of course you don't.
44:31 Speaker 03 But I know
44:34 Speaker 03 you have this drive for wellbeing
44:38 Speaker 03 that has made you curious and interested in this practice of mindfulness. That drive is not just going to disappear, it's going to be with you.
44:52 Speaker 03 We can sense then that there is more to life
44:58 Speaker 03 than just
45:01 Speaker 03 what we here see, touch.
45:08 Speaker 03 There's more.
45:10 Speaker 03 But what do we call that?
45:14 Speaker 03 Whatever name actually you call it doesn't matter because it's about trying it out.
45:22 Dan Harris? Coming up, we get granular on how to integrate the pause into the flow of your day. Nolitha talks about the single most important thing she learned from studying with Joseph Goldstein. And we talk about how to have healthy conflict in the workplace.
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47:13 Dan Harris? Okay, on that note of trying it out. Let me take us from the deep end of the pool to the very practical aspects of all of this. You have, in this conversation, very elegantly described the benefits of regular pausing during the workday. And so let's get very granular. What do you recommend to your clients about how to integrate pausing into the flow of our day?
47:48 Speaker 03 You need reminders at the beginning. If perhaps you can even set your watch after every hour. Or maybe after every conversation or interaction. You're going to find your way, what's going to help you to remember. Of course, it's helpful if you join a group at the beginning of the day. Even if to sit for 15 or 20 minutes. Many of those now are available online. That can then help you to remember in your day to pause.
48:29 Speaker 03 The challenge is in remembering.
48:35 Speaker 03 Because I know even if you've been to a retreat and really experienced the benefit of this practice, when you go back home, conditions are so different. You start to practice for a few days and then in no time it's gone.
48:56 Speaker 03 So here then you'd really have to find your own way of reminding yourself. Unless you have that, you're not going to go far with this.
49:11 Speaker 03 You will think about it, but you won't do it.
49:17 Speaker 03 So the key word is reminders. What helps you then in your own practice during the day? You said you've been doing this for 15 years already.
49:29 Dan Harris? Well, it's interesting. I can hear bird song behind you. And sometimes bird song is a good way to remind me to wake up. There's actually a book by Aldous Huxley called The Island, in which I believe the birds call out here and now. And that's always kind of stuck in my head. So I like to create little reminders because I completely agree with you. The easy part is listening to a podcast like this or reading a good book and hearing about the benefit of mindfulness. That is the easy part. The hard part is remembering to do the thing. And I want to normalize that. It's hard. And so we need to go to some lengths, many of us, to remember. So it can be about setting an alarm on your watch to do a minute of mindfulness every hour.
50:11 Dan Harris? If you're up for that, doing the work of creating an abiding habit. For me, I know that if I sit for some extended period of time in the morning, my day is going to go better. And I've really taught my nervous system over time that if I can get that in, it redounds to my benefit. And then little things, like idiosyncratic things for me, about hearing the birds will be a trigger to wake up. Another thing for me is I have a nine-year-old son. He wants to play catch a lot. And I love playing catch with him, but sometimes I don't feel like it. I always say yes. That is my policy. Unless there's a house on fire, I always say yes. And then I try to be as awake and aware as possible in the process of throwing and catching with him.
50:53 Dan Harris? And to bring to mind like my 80 year old self and think about how much money would my 80 year old self pay to be back in this moment, even though I don't feel like doing this right now. So just building these little things into my life to wake up. I'm also a big fan of tattoos. I only have one, but if, and this is again idiosyncratic, I'm not saying everybody needs to do this, but like, I think it's fair to go so far as to tattoo your body with reminders to wake up.
51:22 Speaker 03 Hmm. Interesting then. What's important in your response is acknowledging that I don't want to do this, actually. Did you hear yourself say that? The mind resists this. Right? For whatever reason, sometimes it may just be like, oh, it's a waste of time for me to just pause. It's hard to do this. Like for myself, I've been practicing just to sense from time to time, wherever I can remember, just sense my feet on the
52:06 Speaker 03 floor, because that brings me to the now. And when I can do that, I can pause. More and more, what I'm good at also is watching the mind. It's so interesting. Doing the four year teacher training under Joseph for four years, for me, that was his main teaching, because he was continuously saying, watch the mind. And because I had these international trips, 15 hours or more sometimes of traveling from Johannesburg to IMS, I would think,
52:48 Speaker 03 it's okay, you'll just watch the mind. But it has taken me long to understand that, no, that's not what you were doing, because I've gotten better at it. But I thought I was doing it.
53:04 Speaker 03 So we're so habituated not to be in the present moment. We're always leaning forward to the next thing. Even your friend, your yoga teacher, when you say, "Okay, if I say to myself, I'm anxious, how does that help me?" But hearing that, I'm thinking, uh-uh, you're not really being with what is happening in your system around anxiety. You're still thinking about it. If you were to slow yourself down and just be with what is happening, something changes. It doesn't even mean the anxiety is not there.
53:48 Speaker 03 It may just mean, oh, there's more of a holding capacity for this anxiety. Therefore, it doesn't control me. I can just continue with my day. So long I'm aware what's happening, when it's happening in my experience. In many ways, then, you can also summarize this teaching to say of mindfulness, being aware moment to moment of your immediate experience. Just that, notice when I say that, how far we are from that,
54:32 Speaker 03 because we just, in our thoughts, future, past, never really hear when life is happening, being with the immediacy of my experience. Even if it's anxiety or fear, just being with, it's being truly alive. There's something immediate, there's something juicy, enjoyable about that aliveness of immediacy. So this is available for us any moment.
55:09 Speaker 03 We can do it.
55:12 Speaker 03 Wouldn't it be a gift in your life just to be more alive? And how do you do that? Just pause, notice what's going on. That's the first principle in the practice of mindfulness for well-being. And then the next one, you can see, hmm, how am I with this experience? So that you can see if you are grasping at it by either pushing it away or you want more of.
55:46 Speaker 03 Because already there, we can see, how am I causing suffering?
55:54 Speaker 03 Going back to where we started then, suffering.
56:01 Speaker 03 There is suffering in life. And you can do something about it.
56:08 Speaker 03 You can pause and be aware and know for yourself. What is in this pausing?
56:18 Speaker 03 Pausing allows us to befriend this human experience as it is. It's in that process of befriending that whatever then you are experiencing, whether it's fear, anxiety, or joy, it's okay.
56:34 Speaker 03 It doesn't have to be otherwise.
56:38 Speaker 03 Right? Because sometimes we make this mistake, even for experienced practitioners, to think mindfulness is about replacing unpleasant experiences with the pleasant experiences.
56:53 Speaker 03 That's a misunderstanding. It's about being with
56:59 Speaker 03 the experience, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant. Just that awareness allows
57:09 Speaker 03 for letting be.
57:12 Speaker 03 Letting go of the suffering of craving.
57:22 Speaker 03 It doesn't really get more than that than actually this teaching.
57:29 Dan Harris? Yeah, it makes sense to me. And it's not just about befriending your experience and not being at war with reality. It's also about seeing that whatever experience you're having right now, anxiety, anger, whatever, it's impermanent. It's going to come and go if you can just sit with it patiently. That's a word you used earlier, patience. And you can then make decisions on the other side of the difficult emotion, which allows you to respond wisely instead of reacting blindly. And that's a game changer.
58:04 Speaker 03 Absolutely. Because your actions and their impact will be different.
58:16 Speaker 03 If we don't know our own experience in the moment, I'm angry. And then I act out of anger. I speak out of anger. There's a consequence to that.
58:30 Dan Harris? And that kind of brings me where I was hoping to go in our remaining moments as we're serenaded by your neighborhood birds. Earlier in our conversation, you talked about the fact that a big source of suffering in the workplace is this awkwardness and anxiety we feel around conflict. We don't want to deal with a hit. We'll sweep it under the carpet and then it festers and can blow up. I'm just curious, from a very practical standpoint, what do you advise your clients about how to have healthy conflict in the workplace?
59:00 Speaker 03 We have to normalize it first. Most of us have grown up in households where it's bad to be angry. So we have to first recognize.
59:14 Speaker 03 What's our own response or reaction to conflict? How do we think about conflict? Is conflict bad? Because the way we deal with conflict as adults, it's not unrelated to how conflict was managed in the household you grew up in. So that understanding is helpful for people to start with. Right? In most households, it was avoided. Because tension comes with anxiety and tension. That's why we want to avoid any unpleasant feeling.
59:56 Speaker 03 The instinct is really just to run away from it. Or in some household, it was acted out. Anger was acted out. Therefore, you realize, I'll never be angry because anger is bad. It hurts people. It harms people. So just that's the starting point. And what's our thinking around conflict?
1:00:21 Dan Harris? Just to do some self-examination around, what have I been taught, either explicitly or osmotically in my family of origin around conflict? And how am I bringing these attitudes, which are sometimes subconscious, into my work life?
1:00:35 Speaker 03 Yes, it has a lot to do with understanding also your behaviors. Sometimes to avoid conflict, we can become fixers, rescuers, or we become victims. Those are different ways that people deal with conflict, for example. So I have to first understand how I think about conflict. What do I do in a situation of conflict? Am I the person who withdraws
1:01:19 Speaker 03 and doesn't stay engaged? Am I confrontational? What's your style? You already have a way that you deal with conflict. So just to unpack and understand that it's a good place for increasing your own awareness around conflict.
1:01:40 Speaker 03 And then, of course, once you understand that better, there are certain tools that you can then use that can support you to engage conflict rather than avoid it.
1:01:54 Dan Harris? And so, once we've done that work, which is non-trivial, once we've done the work of understanding, like, what is our style in conflict? What are the practical tools we can employ next?
1:02:09 Speaker 03 There's a variety of tools. A practice that has become popular, it's the non-violent communication, where you follow a certain structure that allows you to identify and name what you're feeling and what you need. Because most of the time, we don't even know what our need is, which, when it's ignored, it's unmet, it can create dissatisfaction that can then lead to unresolved tension.
1:02:46 Speaker 03 So that's what's coming to my mind as one. Also, it's helpful to see when there's this tension,
1:02:58 Speaker 03 how am I engaging with it? I notice for myself, if I feel tension between myself and the other,
1:03:09 Speaker 03 it helps me to be compassionate to that experience of sometimes fear around conflict. There's always some kind of pain involved in conflict that if we were to recognize it
1:03:29 Speaker 03 and be compassionate towards ourselves around it, something there can soften. In that softening, it also allows me to be curious about what's going on with the other, what's driving a certain behavior that I may see as creating tension or conflict. So for me, the practice of empathy towards myself first allows for some settling that can then help me.
1:04:08 Speaker 03 Been curious about what's going on with the other, which in itself is a form of empathy. If I'm curious in what's going on with the other.
1:04:22 Dan Harris? So I'm hearing two specific tools there. One is first, as we've established, it is to do the inner work of figuring out what's your style in conflict. And once you've done a little bit of inner investigation on that score, there are a couple of tools. One is the popular practice of nonviolent communication. I've done some episodes on that and I'll drop some links in the show notes. But one of the key tools in nonviolent communication is being able to identify like, what are your needs in this situation? And to be able to state them clearly. And then the second tool you talked about is empathy or compassion, which, and I hear a two-step there that you're recommending is first have some empathy and compassion for yourself. You're in a difficult situation. It might be bringing up a lot for you.
1:05:08 Dan Harris? And then to use that externally to see that this other person who you might be reflexively vilifying in your mind, well, they've got their own background and conditioning that have led to their current behaviors that you're finding objectionable or suboptimal. And you don't have to condone it, but can you see it within the context of empathy and compassion?
1:05:32 Speaker 03 This is also a practice, Dan, that's not easy because we tend to be so attached to our own experience, our own views in a situation. So when I start by just acknowledging my emotions and bring kindness towards that, there's a softening that then allows me to be interested in what's going on with the other.
1:06:04 Speaker 03 So I don't see how we can resolve interpersonal conflict without some care.
1:06:13 Speaker 03 In relation to my own experience of hurt, or fear, or anger, and also care for the other.
1:06:21 Dan Harris? One other practical suggestion that you alluded to earlier, way earlier in this conversation, is just bringing pauses into conversations themselves, into conversations where there might be some conflict. If you cannot topple forward and rush to make all of your points, and instead of actually listening to the other person, you're just thinking about the shit that you're gonna say next. If you can just build some pauses into the conversation, that may allow for resolution to arise.
1:06:53 Speaker 03 So you can see there, you need to have already been practicing pausing to be able, in a situation where there is tension and heat, to remember to pause.
1:07:11 Speaker 03 Because in a conflict situation, the limbic brain just hijacks us for the unexpected. That's going to always happen in relationship.
1:07:22 Dan Harris? You used the term before, way earlier in our conversation, the alchemy of conflict. What is that referring to?
1:07:28 Speaker 03 Alchemy comes from chemistry, where you need heat to change metal to gold. So when we use that word, alchemy, it's acknowledging that it's a process to resolve conflict, and it comes with discomfort and heat.
1:07:56 Speaker 03 To what extent are we willing to sit in the fire of the heat of the discomfort of tension and conflict?
1:08:11 Speaker 03 It's not a pleasant experience. Therefore, that's why we run away from it. Oh, we fight, we go into a fight. It's unpleasant. We don't like the experience of being in conflict and tension.
1:08:28 Speaker 03 Right? So how are we going to support ourselves?
1:08:34 Speaker 03 Practice of mindfulness helps us to build capacity, to bear with difficulty, to bear with unpleasantness. This is another value that is so precious about the practice of mindfulness. Life has suffering. So we're building capacity to be with suffering, to bear with suffering. There's always going to be conflict, losses, some kind of pain or another in life. Pain doesn't come to an end because we practice.
1:09:17 Speaker 03 We practice to build this capacity to be with difficulty in life.
1:09:26 Dan Harris? Well said. What's coming to mind is something that our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein says. He has this little expression, "It's okay", by which he does not mean everything's fine. He means it's okay to feel whatever you're feeling. You will survive, no matter how unpleasant. And that's directly relevant to this conversation around bringing mindfulness to bear within conflict. For many of us, the feelings of anger or the feelings of upset or hurt or the anxiety around having to say a difficult thing, we don't want to sit with that. We have to feel a lot of aversion, but it's okay. Actually, you can sit with it, watch it come and go, watch it change.
1:10:07 Dan Harris? And then you can enter the fray in a saner way. It's a very powerful technology. And as we said at the beginning, it's both simple and not easy. Nolitha, we are really running up against the end of our time together, which has been great. I just want to ask two questions that I always ask at the end of interviews. The first, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we didn't get to?
1:10:32 Speaker 03 I feel satisfied that I could share.
1:10:39 Speaker 03 About my own experiences in relation to mindfulness in the workplace,
1:10:47 Speaker 03 mentioning these two sources of suffering and how to work with them. I'm good, I'm good. I just wanted to say to you about your last teaching
1:10:58 Speaker 03 that another way of saying the same thing you were saying is that it's okay not to be okay.
1:11:08 Dan Harris? Yeah, exactly. Being okay with not being okay is paradoxically the route to being okay.
1:11:15 Speaker 03 Oh, wow. There you are.
1:11:19 Dan Harris? Yeah, just sitting here talking to you, I feel suffused with okayness, which is I'm grateful to you for that. The last question I want to ask you is if people want to learn more from you or about you, do you have a website or is there a place where we can hear your Dharma talks? Where can we get more Nolitha if we want it?
1:11:36 Speaker 03 If www.couragetolead.co.za. That's the name of my leadership consulting company, Courage to Lead.
1:11:49 Dan Harris? And if we go to Dharma Seed, will we be able to hear your Dharma talks?
1:11:53 Speaker 03 I have a few talks when I've had opportunities to teach at IMS or Spur Club or IRC. There will be some talks by me in Dharma Seed.
1:12:10 Dan Harris? Okay, we'll put the Courage to Lead website in the show notes and we'll put some links to your Dharma talks. I suspect people are going to want to hear more from you. It has been an absolute pleasure to sit and talk to you and to listen to the South African bird serenade us. So just a big thank you from me to you.
1:12:27 Speaker 03 You're most welcome. I really enjoyed this myself. Thank you, Dan.
1:12:38 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Nolitha. As I mentioned earlier, this Sanely Ambitious thing is an occasional series we've been running for quite a while here on the show. If you dive into the show notes of this episode, you'll find a link to our past episodes in the Sanely Ambitious series. If you're a subscriber at danharris.com, you will already have in your inbox a cheat sheet for today's episode, which sums up the major points and also provides a full transcript if you want to go deeper. If you're a subscriber, you can dive into the chat and talk to me and one another about what you heard today. One last thing to say before I go. I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman
1:13:23 Dan Harris? is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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