#221: Julian Reeve: What Young People Can Learn Through Perfectionism Management

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode Welcome to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am feeling incredibly resilient today, just filled with energy. It's been raining. We've been spending some time holed up in this little island retreat we call our haven. It's kind of like a treehouse of sorts, and it's been cold and rainy. And I think my mood has of late just been tracking the weather. I don't know if you can relate to that at all, that the weather is such an indicator of maybe even sometimes what's going on internally with us. But I've certainly felt that way. And the sun is shining and I'm feeling just energized. I felt ecstatic this morning. I was sitting in meditation and really prayer and enjoying just a moment of being present and grateful. And I felt this just ecstatic energy about it being a beautiful new day, perfectly imperfect day as they all are. And we're going to talk about that today, about perfectionism and What does that mean? What does it look like for us as adults? And where does it sit with kids? I've got an incredible guest today, somebody that I've never met before. So this is actually a new meeting for me. I'm getting to meet him as you get to meet him. How exciting is that? That's trippy and surreal. And as our daughter Chelsea reminds me, it's not surreal, Dad. She says, it's so real. I have Julian Reeve with us today. I'm going to read a little bit about him. And then we're going to dive in as always. So wherever you are, maybe pull off to the side of the road and take a moment to just be present. And if you're on the treadmill figuratively or literally, you could step off for a couple of moments and just absorb some of this stuff. Julian Reeve is a former music director of the Broadway musical Hamilton, turned perfectionist contributor, speaker, author of Captain Perfection and The Secret of Self-Compassion. I could see it right there behind, right over Julian's right Shoulder, a self-help book for the young perfectionist. Julian, it's just such a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Welcome. Great to be here, Adam. Great to meet you, sir. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, a blast. I'm so excited about our conversation. When I realized that we were going to be chatting today, we created a little graphic that you can just sort of see over my shoulder there.

Great. Love it.

Isn't that cool? Right? Just put that into place.

Yeah. It's nice to see that again. It's been a minute.

It has been a minute, huh? We're going to talk about resilience today. I don't know that it's been such a mixed bag this year outside of the suffering in terms of loss of life, which we'll put aside for the moment because there's no— I don't have a way to reconcile that. I mean, look at some other sort of mixed bag of things that the pandemic has produced. Some people have gotten phenomenally wealthy. People have created new businesses out of thin air or pivoted their businesses into some other thing that has been a great blessing. I know our business pivoted to delivering the work that we do, which is primarily training speakers and public speaking ourselves. And when we went online, we thought, well, this will never be the same. It'll be a very poor facsimile of what we used to be able to do in person. And we were wrong. It was— it's actually quite, quite a bit more impactful. But Broadway and the performing arts, the live in-person performing arts, I don't know that we can say the same for what this year has been like for them. And so let's talk about that today as well, Julian. I am a massive fan of Hamilton. I've never seen a play 3 times. I mean, I fell in love with Broadway when my grandmother took me to see Sweeney Todd in— I mean, I must have been a couple of years into high school or something like that. When did you fall in love? Did you ever fall in love with Broadway? Are you in love with Broadway? I assume you are, but— I am. When did that happen,

Julian? Yeah, well, I, as you can probably hear from the accent, I didn't grow up here. I grew up in England.

Kansas. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Well, well done. You nailed that.

I'm good

with that. Um, yeah, yeah. I grew up in Cambridge, which is just outside London, England, and I grew up in a very musical household. Both of my parents were very able musicians as performers and academics. So I started playing the piano when I was 4. I was kind of always immersed in music, and my mother was the deputy head of music at King's Cambridge, which is a very well-to-do kind of school. And, you know, she was doing a lot of musicals around the time that I was growing up. So musicals very quickly became kind of language for me. I suppose I sort of fell in love with musicals probably around the age of 8 or 9, started performing them maybe when I was 10 or 11, and then did my first professional tour when I was 17. It was in my blood early.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. And I haven't thought about this, spoken about it in so long, but isn't Sweeney Todd an English British production? Isn't Angela Lansbury, who is the star of that—

Correct. Yeah, yeah. I last saw Sweeney Todd in New York with the amazing production with Jeremy and Sally Ann Triplett playing the leads. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's an incredible play. But yeah, it's been a crazy time for people in, in that industry, right? I mean, you know, we've all struggled. And no more so than people in the Broadway community. And by Broadway community, I mean, you know, Broadway itself, but also, you know, the touring community, which I was very much a part of. I kind of count myself slightly fortunate right now because I actually had to leave Hamilton in early 2019 through injury. And it was a forced— I wasn't expecting to leave the show. And so that was basically a forced transition that I wasn't expecting. So I've kind of been through a lot of what my colleagues colleagues have been through this year, but a year earlier. I suppose the only difference is that I knew that I wasn't going back to Broadway because actually it's proved to be a career-ending injury. But, you know, the idea of pivoting, the idea of being resilient, the idea of, you know, thinking outside the box and having to not only think differently, but, you know, consider things differently physically, You know, there are so, so many things to consider when we go through these big, big changes. But I'm really pleased that Broadway seems to be back on the rise. And, you know, they've pushed forward the opening, I think it's September 14th on Broadway, and perhaps even sooner on the road. I think Wicked is the first touring production to open in Dallas in mid-August. So, you know, things are slowly getting back to normal, which is amazing.

It is. And there's sort of a slowly getting back to normal is interesting, because I think People crave normalcy, right? We crave sort of control or at least some visibility for the future. But normal, I mean, it's an interesting thing because if we look to nature as an example, there's no normal, not really. Every day is completely different. There's no two that are the same. And things are constantly in a state of evolution. I think we hope for that because that expanding, that evolution is really what life requires anything other than any sort of contraction really involves things dying. You know, there's this entropy that, that's also involved. I'd love it if you, if you'd be willing to go there. For you to have a career-ending injury, and many people have had that, that kind of a pivot, as you said, is a forced pivot. And often we, we talk on this show about the, the pivots in life that we are designing Which was really the book Pivot I wrote was more about the designing of a pivot. But since I wrote that book, I've had a forced pivot or two myself. Career, in fact, one career forced pivot. So tell us a little bit about what that was like from a mental, emotional, physical, even spiritual standpoint.

Well, you know, if I had to sum it up in one word, it would be difficult. I thought you were

going to say painful.

Well, okay, same thing. Partly due to my career, but also partly due to who I am as a human being, I've pivoted a lot in my life. The career I've had, obviously, you go through the ups and downs, you know, you get a gig, and that gig's great for however many months the show runs. And then it's like, oh, okay, we're back to what are we doing now? Are we doing a bit of teaching to pay the bills? Oh, and there's the next job. Great. And then, you know, all of a sudden, you wake up 15 years later, it's like, okay, that I've kind of worked my way through that. I was never really comfortable with that degree of high and low. So I've always kind of sought other things. So I've owned production companies, I've managed record companies, I founded a a talent agency in London that's still going. I've had a bunch of kind of business interests to keep me going. So I think, you know, all of that was to say that when I was forced to pivot because of the injury, I think much of my life experience kind of helped with that. I think in hindsight, you know, much of my experience with pivoting is, is about acceptance. And you can't really move forward with any form of pivot successfully unless you've fully dealt with the issues. That we all have to deal with whenever a pivot occurs. It took a long time to get to that point. We're so quick, I think, in forced transition to put ourselves in a position where we demand answers. It's like all of a sudden our world gets turned upside down. We don't think that we're panicking, but actually we are. Inwardly, we are grappling around for answers, for anything that we can hold onto to keep head above water. Very often we make some quite bad decisions. It was very interesting. I caught myself in a car showroom about a week and a half after leaving Hamilton, just about to sign on the dotted line for this nice car. I was like, dude, what are you doing? Please just step away. It turns out that we didn't need that car at all. It was something that I thought I needed to do. It was all based on the reaction, the emotional reaction and the physical reaction of the upset that I'd been through. I think a lot of it is acceptance, but it's also being in tune with your authentic self and listening to what your body and mind is telling you. I often encourage people going through a forced pivot to allow time to be their friend. Time is very, very tricky because if we've been pushed off the treadmill and like I was, we were running at 100 miles an hour, That feels really weird. And a month not doing very much when you've been running at that pace can feel like 100 years. So, but leaning into that and breathing into— I'm a big fan of the phrase, allow the silence to provide the answers. It's allow— it's leaning into the space, it's leaning into the unknown to let the universe speak to you in ways that it's never spoken to you before because you've never allowed the space for it to do so.

And so noisy as well.

Right, exactly, exactly right. And, you know, it's, it's been so noisy on many, many levels, but, you know, leaning into that space, as scary as that is— and for perfectionists, it's super scary because we hate the unknown, right? It's like, oh no, what? No,

no, we're addicted to certainty. Yes,

exactly. You know, we cling on to certainty for, for dear life. That was a very big part of my journey. I'm very happy to be out the other side. Am I completely settled out the other side? No. Why? Well, it comes back down to what you were saying earlier. Every day is an evolution and every day provides the highs and lows. There's no constant. Reminding yourself that constant— it's amazing. I think that with the pandemic too, I think that people I wonder whether people will eventually, if they're not able to do so now, see the benefit in what they've been through. And what I mean by that is they were forced off the treadmill, right?

Yes, exactly.

And so they were forced into a place where it was like, okay, what do I do? And ultimately, they would have learned things about themselves that they didn't know before. And I'm really looking forward to— and I may even do some of this work myself, you know, 2 or 3 years down the road, meeting some very cool people that it wasn't about survival for them, as in they didn't go, okay, I have to earn X number of dollars a year, so therefore I have to pivot my business. But I leaned into the time to listen to actually what I really want to do. Maybe they were a stockbroker and now they own, I don't know, wellness suite in wherever. Who knows? But I'm interested in those stories and what space provided people for sure.

The forced pause.

Mm-hmm.

And how many people— and I'm just as curious as you about this, you're bringing it up— that there were people, are people who accept, at some point accepted the pause, accepted the fact that there was so much now beyond our control, that it's, it's a form of surrender, not resignation. Surrender in a very beautiful way to, to actually Be good with where we are, to be here now in this, to experience this, whatever this is, without wishing it was different, really.

Right. I mean, it's funny, isn't it, how I think, you know, much like perfectionism, strangely surrender is regarded— you know, immediately we conjure up negative connotations with surrender.

Right.

But as I believe with perfectionism, there are healthy aspects and there are unhealthy aspects. Same deal with surrender. I think there's healthy surrender. I absolutely believe that because, you know, what we can become in healthy surrender is really quite powerful.

Well, as you say, you're opening yourself up. We open ourselves up to so much. You know, space is creative. So what happens, you can't predict. And good that you can't, because it wouldn't be very creative if you could predict it, I suppose. So, so, but there is a level of having to let go of what you said earlier, this— maybe it's perfectionism or the needing, the, the craving, the having, the masturbation, as I think Dr. Ellis wrote about years and years ago, the must-know, must-have answers, must-have certainty, you know, like at all costs.

Yeah.

It seems to me like you've been a master of navigating uncertainty for a period, maybe for the entirety of your life. If I was to say you seem to master uncertainty, what would you attribute it to? And what can you say about that?

Well, I mean, thank you for the kind words. I don't know whether I've mastered anything, but I've certainly— I was born with relatively thick skin in terms of change, very thin skin in other ways. But I think it's interesting I learned about the power and the negative power of the word should in my early 30s. And that was game-changing for me. There have been several kind of game-changing moments in being able to pivot and all those things. No least Simon Sinek's great book, Start With Why. That's another good one. But the word should is so powerful. I should do this. I should do that. And I spent much of my life being able to pivot because I was driven by should. So actually, part of the reason why I say I don't think I've mastered anything is that actually it's very easy to be driven into pivots through unhealthy drivers. And I'm not saying that—

Including other people that should—

Absolutely right.

—generously give their shoulds.

Right. Right. I mean, no least parental expectation. The generation above us was very, very different than the one now. I was very lucky in the fact that my parents weren't very should-based, but that's just one example of how it can affect us. So I basically learned to— I can't remember the last time outside of this interview I said the word. I've managed to eradicate it from my vocabulary. Because it's unnecessary, actually. We don't need it. It's a word that actually just invites pressure and negativity and issue.

It also implies certainty, doesn't it?

Well, yes, absolutely.

The word itself is sort of saying, this is the way you do something, of course.

Yeah, you know, it's like,

well,

yeah, completely. And, you know, for perfectionists, that's a real challenge because of the all-or-nothing thinking. It's a big part of perfectionism is that perfectionists believe that there's only one way to do something because the fixed mindset keeps them in that zone. So they're not able to adopt a growth mindset because of their perfectionism. But in order to overcome their perfectionism or at least manage it better, they have to make that pivot from fixed to growth. And it's really interesting that should and that Expectation, the negative expectations, are just something I believe we don't need.

Is that what inspired you to write the book? I think it's probably a pretty decent segue into capital perfectionism.

Well, actually what inspired the book was— so I worked on the Broadway production of Hamilton as a rehearsal pianist for around a year. And then they asked me to take out the first national tour as the music director. And the first stop was San Francisco. I was 43 years old at the time. 3 months in, I had a heart attack. And that heart attack proved that my right coronary artery was 90% blocked. So we fixed me physically and we got back to the show. And then I jumped into some work with a psychologist. And we realized that actually the real root cause of the heart attack was my perfectionism. Why? Because the perfectionistic issues that I'd struggled with since I was probably 5 years old, had led me to make some, shall we say, some very interesting lifestyle choices in my 20s and 30s, which badly damaged my body to the point that I nearly died from it. So I dove into perfectionism in quite a serious way, not only for my own benefit, but I was just really interested in the subject. I ended up doing a TED Talk on it in 2019.

In Santa Barbara.

In Santa Barbara, absolutely. The wonderful team down there. It's a subject that I realized we've just started to talk about it more, which is great. There are now more self-help books available, which is great. That certainly wasn't the case when I was a child, mainly because perfectionism wasn't researched in any real depth until 1990. So if you were growing up before then, you were kind of screwed in terms of knowing what perfectionism was and how it affected you. But I realized looking around at the market that there was very little in the marketplace that actually introduced perfectionism to children, In a way that didn't overly simplify the subject, in my humble opinion. So ostensibly, I went about writing a book that I wish I'd read as a kid, because perhaps I might not have experienced the heart attack had I got these self-compassion techniques and learned more about my perfectionism earlier in life.

Let's talk a little bit more about self-compassion. I love it. It's on your wall behind you. Is self-compassion self-love? Is it a sort of an aspect of self-love?

So Dr. Kristin Neff is kind of the leading psychologist in self-compassion, and she breaks it down into 3 components: self-kindness, mindfulness, and common humanity. So self-kindness is basically where we learn to be warm and understanding to ourselves. Mindfulness is when we discover to observe thoughts and feelings as they arise, but not necessarily suppress, deny, or react to them. And then we have common humanity, which is basically the understanding that suffering and imperfection is all part of the human experience. So those 3 categories combined are a very powerful tool. And a lot of the reason why the core of my work is self-compassion is that it's proven to regulate the experience between maladaptive perfectionism and depression. There was a study in Australia in 2018 that proves that. So it's a very powerful weapon. And so the more we can encourage children to develop these techniques early, the more they start to recognize perfectionistic signs and behaviors and feelings, and the more they can manage those in healthier ways. And the reason why I think self-compassion is really so powerful outside of what I've already said is that a lot of the reason why I'm pursuing this as a career is that I'm desperate to start a new dialogue with perfectionism. Because I am living proof that there are positive aspects to it. And too often it's portrayed as being something that's simply negative, right?

Yes, it has been.

And, you know, I'm living proof that that isn't the case. There are many others like me. And the problem that we have in society right now is that we're not meeting perfectionists where they need to be met. So, for example, There are fabulous books, no least the first one that I ever read on the subject, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown. Incredible book. The reason why I picked it up is that I just suffered a heart attack and I needed to embrace imperfection to be healthier. Many perfectionists don't embrace imperfection because they value trying to be perfect. So we have to meet them where they want to be met. So what I try and do in my work is use all the same techniques that are in people like Brené's book, but actually promise to make perfectionists better by enhancing their perfectionistic abilities. In effect, I'm doing the same thing by dealing with all of the maladaptive issues, but I'm selling it differently. I'm marketing the subject differently so that people are inspired to come to the table. Because at the end of the day, they understand that their adaptive, their positive, their healthy perfectionism will be enhanced by dealing with some of the maladaptive traits and concerns.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new, but the The one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go Go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. What's the optimal age to begin to have this conversation with children?

That's a great question. I don't think it's ever too young.

I mean, kindergarten? Is it something that you think could become a part of early education curriculum?

I pitched the book starting at age 6 because that's, you know, in my experience, that's when children are starting to create enough awareness to be able to take, you know, a relatively deep subject like self-compassion and perfectionism But it's not to say that that wouldn't be applicable for younger children. I think much of it just determines on whether your child is displaying perfectionistic behaviors. And if they are, jumping in sooner rather than later is absolutely a great idea.

Yeah. I mean, there's a payoff for perfectionism. And I think you're— maybe if I'm reading you right, you're a poster child for some of that. That perfectionism, there's an ROI for it as well.

Right.

Is it fair to say that a lot of people who are perfectionistic don't believe they could be successful without their perfectionism?

Absolutely right. Completely. And so why would they pick up a book called The Gifts of Imperfection?

Exactly. Well, that— I mean, yes, I would think when we're in pain, as we said at the very beginning.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. We'll pick up books that— I was a lawyer for 18 years, and for 15 or so of those years, I was in not denial, I was just plain unaware.

Right? Absolutely right.

And then unawareness turned into some form of awareness, which turned into some form of pain, which then turned into denial.

There you go. Right. But at that point, you did something about it. But my—

I ended up in the hospital with a, with a sort of a faux version, we call it my faux, you know, faux heart attack.

Okay. All right.

Which was an anxiety attack. But, you know, but it got the point across.

Yes. You know, and I think that's really the challenge in What I'm trying to do is that I'm trying to reach perfectionists before the pain point. My work is about prevention, not cure. And everything surrounding perfectionism right now is about cure. It's not about prevention.

It's further down the stream.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the idea that— just very excited to have you on the show and be able to share this with people because at some age, which I would imagine on some level it's relative to the child, you know, for one it's easy to maybe introduce this at 5 or 6 and another it's 8 or 9 or whenever it is. But the conversation or even From a curriculum standpoint, being that we want kids to understand that succeeding has its benefits and of course you want to succeed, you want to do things well, a job worth doing well and all that sort of thing. But where it turns into proving yourself or proving your worth or being validated by that exclusively, it then starts to ingrain itself in other ways. Yeah. I mean, I just think self-compassion is the earlier you could help a human being understand that.

I love that you've mentioned self-worth. I actually believe that to be the root, the absolute root cause of perfectionism. I think that's absolutely where it all comes from. And there are so many things that we can do to empower our children to feel worthy. And when we do, it's amazing the knock-on effect that that has to perfectionism and to developing perfectionistic traits for sure.

Yeah. These are really complex topics. So I'm going to ask you a question that I know there isn't an absolute. I think part of what's interesting here is that words like should imply absolutes, imply certainty. And we know that the world just isn't that way. It's like we can observe it as something quite different. But for those folks who say the pendulum has swung So far in the direction of every child sort of getting an award and every child being sort of having no distinction between the job really well done and the job not so well done, that we're going to lose something in that leveling of the playing field to the point where there's no incentive or motive to go the extra yard, so to speak. I know that's a complex kind of a concept, but any thoughts on that?

I agree. I think it was important to go as far as we have done, but I do think that the pendulum needs to come back more into the middle. I'm not against reward when reward is earned. And I truly believe that we have a responsibility as human beings to try and be the best that we can be. Period. There's no way that I would've grown up with that type of thinking if I'd been spoon-fed and rewarded at every corner because I was, everything's fine. I'm just kind of bumbling along and I'm doing fine academically. I'm fine in sports. I'm fine. But we need, and this is a lot of the reason why I adopt this stance, we need people to be driven. We need perfectionists. Steve Jobs, where would we be without him? Apple was built on perfectionism.

Totally.

And so, you know, it's not to say that we need unhealthy perfectionism, but that, you know, we certainly don't need everyone to be so rewarded that they just feel accomplished by average.

So it's, it's sort of the idea of, again, you know, this is— these are these wonderful more Eastern philosophies and things to consider. Where's the middle? Where's the, where's the place that represents a middle, a place of center even, versus, you know, driven at all costs?

Yes, absolutely.

Versus not really driven at all, you know, go, oh, how wonderful. Interesting. Julian, how would you define resilience? Because there's no question that you have been a model of resilience. And I think we all are. I think we're all marvels and models of resilience in our own way. I'm always just curious how another person defines resilience and even what it looks like in terms of their daily routines, their rituals, because in the midst of great uncertainty, I think the one thing that we can really benefit from are the rituals that we have. As you said, you've been practicing uncertainty. You've been leveraging uncertainty and the power of, of that long before you had a forced exit from your work on Broadway, so, or with musicals. So how would you define resilience, and are there rituals that you've, you've created that just help you to be resilient, you know, even while things are getting wonky?

I simply kind of describe resilience as being able to be adaptive to change. By able, I mean fully able, as in fully capable. Now, what does that really look like? That's going to be different for everybody, sure. But I love what you've said about routine. A lot of my struggle out of Hamilton, for example, was I was in a very strict routine for 2 years. Breaking that routine and going into something different, it sounds crazy, But it takes a long time to kind of get your head around it. What do I do? I mean, ultimately, I think we're best placed to deal with any day that will be full of change, full of uncertainty, full of highs, full of lows on a footing of equilibrium and a solid grounding. And you, one, is in complete control of that. And so I'm still learning this because my perfectionism My perfectionism often wakes me up. It's like, okay, it's 5:30 AM, so we're going to walk the dog, we're going to have breakfast, then I need to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this. Now I know that I need to get up, walk the dog, have breakfast, breathe for 10 minutes, yoga for a minute, maybe a bit of a workout if I'm in the mood. But either way, it's getting the mind to a state Where you can be acceptant of whatever that first email says. I've learned this in my career at cost. We react to things in the moment, right? We can read the same email one way at 9:00 AM and completely differently at 12:00 PM, dependent on where we are in the world. I think it's a responsibility that if we want to be resilient and if we want to be able to navigate change successfully, To be as much in that equilibrium state where we're simply able to handle the curveballs as they're thrown. Not if they're thrown, when they're thrown. And that's what I try and do every day. Am I successful every day? No. Am I perfect in what I'm trying to achieve? Absolutely not. Do I sometimes not get it right? Do I sometimes go, oh, I don't need to do that today? And at some point during the day regret it every time I do it. So it's a constant learning thing. And I think that's a really important thing to remember too. I'm not entirely sure we ever master anything. So just getting better at something, particularly at what we're talking about with resilience, puts you in a really good spot to be able to handle those curveballs when they come.

I just love the use of the word equilibrium there. And Because someone else could very easily just replace that word with balance. And I'm not a fan of balance. We have a new book that's coming out this year called Change Proof, and it challenges the myth of balance, among other things. But equilibrium is a state of harmony. I mean, sometimes more often associated, I think, with the body chemicals and the way things interact. But, you know, again, to Eastern ways of thinking, it might be called the yin and yang. Right. But harmony or equilibrium is so important. And, and what you said about the first email, about how it is that you accept, that you put yourself in a place of acceptance, because we all know what that's like when you check your phone. And some people, that's the first thing they do. And I would imagine more, more than 90% of the people listening to this, perhaps they touch— they take their phone right out of the gate. They open up their eyes, they're Their phone is in their hand. And before you know it, your day is being started not by design, your design, but by the design of whoever it is that's either liked your posts or commented or the news that's flashing in front of you that's often so disturbing, or the email, as you said.

We're so influenced all the time, right, by external forces. And I don't think that we can be authentic Unless at some point, and this is why I'm such a fan of the start of the day, at some point cleansing ourselves of that influence so that we actually get to the truth of who we really are. So that any reply on an email is actually where we want it to come from rather than what we are inspired to write through external forces.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you understand your resilience. The workbook will help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. The waking ritual of all the The rituals that we have, and I think in many ways our lives are a product of our rituals, the things that you might even call habit.

Yep, absolutely.

So that initial waking ritual is vitally important. And what do you do when you open your eyes in the morning or begin to open your eyes in the morning? And the thoughts that you're entertaining there are like the seeds that you plant in the soil of your day. And so that became something that as you were transitioning from the daily— I can't even sort of fathom the craziness, the busyness, or just the intensity of working on a show like Hamilton. Not being there, your beginning of the day ritual must have been a very powerful tool for you to avoid kind of going sideways mentally.

Absolutely right. And just to give you an idea, I mean, so I left the show actually in Puerto Rico. So I took over, I took the production with Lin-Manuel Miranda playing Hamilton over to Puerto Rico. We did some amazing work. We raised $16 million for the arts over there, but it was intense. The level of expectation from all over the island was incredible. But you know, the media attention, etc., etc., etc. So to come from that to Okay, end of career. Now what do I do? Yes, you're absolutely right. Going right back to basics and leaning into the space, breathing into the space, and establishing new routines were kind of— those very quickly became my new sort of superpowers, if you like.

Yes. Now you're on the road a little in a different way, which is just beautiful. So the book is available. We'll say a couple more things as we wind down here, but We'll have full show notes for folks that want to find out more about Captain Perfection and want to buy this book for your child, a child you know, someone else's child, pick it up for every child you can think of. I would imagine as a parent and soon-to-be grandparent in a couple of months—

Congratulations, man. That's great.

I feel like it's going to be required reading.

Well, it's interesting. First off, congrats. That's amazing news. No, it's really interesting. The whole idea of Year of Self-Compassion. I've had many people say to me, I learned as much from this book as my child did. Thank you. And it's certainly not just a book for children. Just a quick synopsis of what it is and the power of it, I suppose. We introduce children to perfectionism and then to self-compassion. Then we read 3 stories where we follow 3 different children experience perfectionism in slightly different ways. Captain Perfection helps them out with that. Then we start to build your own self-compassion superpower. So we build your mindfulness superpower, we build your self-kindness superpower, we build your common humanity superpower. And then at the very end, there's a whole list of environments that are driven by perfectionism or behaviors. And so you can actually learn which of those superpowers you can use against certain thoughts and feelings as they arrive. So it's definitely a book you can keep coming back to. which is cool. But no, I've been very humbled by the response, actually. I think I've achieved what I set out to do, which was put something useful into a child's hands that will hopefully equip them for a long time to come. Now I've just got to get people to read it.

That's the joy of authorship. Right? For sure. I know that one well. But it is so true that so much of what is simple enough, or let's say distilled down to, or distilled to a level that a child can get it, is exactly the level of clarity that's required to reach us all. I think we convolute things, and, and then something that's convoluted might be interesting, but it's not terribly usable. Right. You know, I forget the, the gentleman that wrote And maybe, maybe you remember his name, that sort of everything I, I've needed to learn, I learned in, in kindergarten kind of thing,

right? Yeah, no, I, I don't know that. I

can't recall his name at the moment. It'll come to me. We'll put in the show notes. But it's just true. I mean, these things that we, we learned or could have learned early, early on in life are so powerful. And then of course there are things we learned and have forgotten as well.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, to the point of perfectionism in children, it can be a learned behavior and also genetic. So your child might be— if you are a perfectionist and your husband or wife is too, there's every chance that you have a perfectionistic child simply through genetics. If you aren't, it doesn't mean to say that your child won't be because they can learn that behavior. So, you know, part of the reason why I think parents say that they got so much out of this book as well as their child is that they understand that they play a really important role in whether their child is going to manage perfectionism successfully or not. And I think as much of that, what I always encourage parents to do is to get on their level. It's, you know, the more you can persuade your own child that you are imperfect on a daily basis, as well as when you were their age, you'll go a long way in them taking you off that pedestal. And stopping for, you know, striving for perfectionistic results because they're desperate for your love or for your attention. As I said earlier, it's all about that self-worth. It's empowering your children to be worthy.

So the modeling, the modeling is such a strong piece of it that even if the child is sort of grasping it, but what's being reinforced at home is the opposite of that. You know, the parent is never really sort of satisfied. You know, it's the dangling carrot. It's always just out of reach or whatever the case may be. case might be, that that's the stronger signal for what is the normal or the thing that we're striving for. I'm struck by that only because I know that in various points in my own life, I've just felt the need to tell our kids and one of our children in particular, as many of the mistakes I've made as I can think of, and I've made too many to count, so that's easy. But just to really always kind of come back to that. To sort of dispel any false belief that somehow or another that I'm not without a lot of material flaw, but that the world isn't also just sort of the way it is, perfectly imperfect.

Perfectly imperfect.

Yeah. What a good place to land this conversation, Julian. I've so appreciated having you with us. This has been a treat.

Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. Yeah. I had a lot of fun. Thank you.

I will remind everybody as we get to move on with our days, that everybody started their day the same way today. If you're listening to this, watching this, we all started by waking up. That's across the board. I know that, like, I know this is an actual fact. And that I also know is and was a blessing, was a gift, because there were people in the very moment when you were quote, waking up today who were not. People were taking their last breath at the moment you were taking your first conscious breath of the day. So there's something really important, I think, about the fact that we've been given this new day. And assuming it happens again for us tomorrow, which is my hope, prayer for all of us that that's the case, that you will find something when you do wake up to just be appreciative of and grateful for before you pick up your phone and check your email or check, you know, social media or whatever it might be, that you pause. As, as Julian reminded us earlier, pause. Take that pause, whether that pause is 10 seconds or 10 minutes or whatever it might be. And then as your feet touch the floor, perhaps think about something that you intend for your day. It was the thing I asked Julian just before we started the record, hit the record button. I asked him what he intended in our conversation. And he said, to have fun. That was it. Let's have fun. What a perfect intention. When I wake up and I put my feet on the floor every day, at least for the last 12 or so years now, my feet touch the floor and I say these words that are written on my hoodie, 4 simple words, I love my life. That is my intention for the day. And it is a powerful ritual and a seed that gets planted in the soil for this brand new day ahead. You get to choose how you start your day and what ritual you create around that. But we wish you just a lot of wonderful, beautiful days and appreciate your following what we're up to, supporting it in the way you do. And of course, if there's someone that you know that would benefit from hearing more about Julian and his message in the book, please share this episode. Of course, you can always leave us your feedback at adamarkel.com/podcast to do that. If you haven't subscribed, feel free to do that as well. And lastly, if you'd like to find out a little bit about your own level of resilience mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually even, you can go to resiliencerank.com. resiliencerank.com. It's entirely free. No offer there for you, just that you find out where you are ranking, where your score is in those 4 quadrants. And of course, we'll send you a bunch of resources to help you to create some of these new rituals and ways to develop even greater resilience. And as Julian said, greater acceptance, greater equilibrium, greater ability to just leverage the power of uncertainty even. It's been a pleasure, and we'll see you soon. Thanks so much.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. To get your own free resilience assessment, Go to rankmyresilience.com. Thank you.