Meeting and Befriending Your Inner Critic with Rosi Greenberg

Inner critic is doing its job so well. It means that its human is not going to take any risks, is not going to live into their most creative, wildest ideas because they're just trying to kind of be like everybody else. Or they're pressuring themselves so much that they're spending so much psychic energy on that rather than on actually living and just being in teams. That looks like burnout in our organizations. Exhaustion. It's really hard for teams and individuals to learn if we're all very, very scared of the repercussions of any slightly creative action, of not knowing. Inner critics hate when we don't know.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential, integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the best selling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode, we will share powerful insight, tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives, and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for happiness together. Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. In today's episode, I had the pleasure to sit down with Rosie Greenberg, author of Everyone Has a Meeting the Inner Critic and Rewriting the Rules. Rosie is a leadership development artist with over 15 years of experience and has a Master's in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. In this engaging conversation, Rosie shared her powerful insights on confronting the inner critic, something we all deal with. Rosie introduced us to our own critic named Sam, and unpacked how she earned to understand its origins and intent. While the inner critic often holds us back, Rosie emphasizes that it serves a purpose. She offered practical exercises such as drawing and role playing as your inner critic to help recognize and even befriend this part of ourselves. Most importantly, Rosie reminded us of the need to give ourselves permission to enjoy life rather than being constantly driven by the voice of the critic. Her expertise in leadership, creativity and empathy, alongside her work with thousands of leaders really shone through in this episode. Tune in for transformative strategies that can help you turn your inner critic into your biggest ally and unleash your full potential. Hi, Rosie. It's so lovely to have you on our Happiness Squad podcast, my dear friend.

Thank you so much, Ashish. I'm so happy and honored to be here with you.

Well, my friend, for those who are listening, Rosie and I met up two days ago at a coffee shop and she gave me her book, Everyone has a Sam. And we are going to be getting into that today on this podcast because I think it is so relevant. And I'll tell you, I was telling Rosie just before, you know, I met Rosie three years ago at Mobius's next practice institute. It's a wonderful community of practitioners, leadership practitioners and healers and just all kinds of magical beings who are all united towards making the world a better place. And I was right away taken away by how amazing. So Rosie draws and she has this amazing ability to capture what's going on in the room, right? So many, so much rich dialogues just onto this beautiful collabs that she puts together. She's way more than an artist. She has a master's from Harvard. She has a degree in anthropology, her bachelor's, she's worked around the world. And I was telling Rosie just before we got on this podcast that there is no person who could have handled this topic, this topic that we're going to discuss today, the topic of the inner critic in a way that resonates all the way from children. My son got a copy held of it this morning and literally I could see his facial expressions change four pages into the book, as if somehow the book was seeing him for the first time. And it touched me. I gave it to my wife and she was like immediately in love with it. So I think you're going to love it. And the only person I told Rosie, the only person that this book could have come out was her because she has this beautiful left brain, right brain, creative business, and just a beautiful heart. So, Rosie, thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing. I hope everybody here you have a new edition that just came out. So everybody here on this podcast, after listening to this, goes and gets a copy of this, but let's dig right into it.

Yeah. And thank you. I feel so seen by you seeing that this could have only come from me. And that really is my goal, is to have people feel seen through it. Like, yes, this is not just my story. It's a universal story of the narratives that we carry in our heads and hearts and how they can lead us in some Ways to good and in some ways, astray. And it feels like an honor to be able to bring this work and to see people deeply through this work.

Yeah. So tell me, my friend, what inspired you? Right. Obviously you've been doing this work for a while, but what inspired you to take the pen and actually write this book? Everyone has a Sam.

Well, I was actually just journaling that day. The book actually is my process of meeting my own Sam and going through. And it was actually my friend and mentor, Marshall Ganz, who I've studied with a lot of leadership work. We were walking around a lake one day, and he said, you know, why don't you draw Sam? What's his name? And why don't you draw him? And so that's in the book as well. But it was this bigger exploration, really, of the emotional elements of leadership. And how do we see the emotional elements and really sit with them in deeper ways.

Yeah. So tell our listeners, who is Sam, and how did you come up with this metaphor?

Sam is my inner critic. So he's a voice that tells me I'm wrong all the time, that I'm just not good enough, that I just can't do it right. There's something wrong. And I used to think that this was just true or just. It wasn't even a voice. It was just a sense of wrongness with me, which I think a lot of us can identify with. And it was through these conversations with Marshall, actually, that. That I started to see this as an external kind of entity or. Or as an entity within me. That wasn't true. Wasn't me. And Marshall, he said his wife had had migraines, and a doctor of hers had recommended that she name the migraines. And so she did that, and that really transformed her relationship with it. So he suggested I draw Sam, name him. I said, what's your name? I heard back, sam. And then I heard, that's a dumb name for an inner critic. It's a normal human name. And it was the first time I realized, hey, that's Sam telling me that's a dumb name. So it was this beautiful process of recognizing. But about a year later, I read something by Daniel Siegel, neurobiologist and psychologist, and he was writing about the inner critic system. And he writes that it scans alerts and motivates S A M. And so my mind was blown.

Wow. Scans alerts, motivates Sam. I asked Ashwin, by the way, he said, do you have a Sam? He said, yes. By the way, what's Sam's name and he said it's Sam. I think Sam. Sam's good. Sam's pretty good. Sam's a good name. So friends, if you have a Sam or not, I'm just going to read a couple of things from this beautiful 4th or page in Rosie's book. So I wonder if you've ever heard this as you're going about. I think this is. I'm just going to read the part where you're eating a sandwich. You should stop eating bread. You should make your own mayonnaise. Why don't you have nice plates you love? You're eating too many calories. You should have toasted it longer. Why did you toast it so long? You're so lazy for toasting it longer. You shouldn't take so long for lunch. Maybe you should have made soup. You're selfish. Why aren't you using this time more productively? What will you do about the book? You should have decided already. So think about any of these messages, any of these inner voices, if you hear them right or if you're a coach. You're so unprofessional. That was a dumb thing to say. You got this all wrong. This isn't even what I say. You're only in this for the money. You don't care about anything real. If any of these, if you're a coach, if your day to day you're going through resonate, just notice that maybe you have a Sam. Maybe it's called something else, right?

And I invite you to ask it what its name is. The only thing I suggest is don't name it after your parents because as tempting as that might be, it's your internalized representation of some of the things they say, it's not them themselves. So give it a little tweak. Not your parents name.

I love that. So talk a little bit, you know, talk a little bit Rosie, about the role this inner critic, you know, plays in our life. Is it always harmful or is it actually. Does it sometimes serve a useful purpose?

No, I think it definitely serves the spoiler alert, I guess in the end of the book I come to love Sam because these parts of us are really the parts that help us fit in to our early lives and our families, that help us scan the environment for really belonging, for what it takes to belong in a group or in a. In an environment and stay safe. So that might be stopping us from running across the street, it might be stopping our wildest creativity because the adults around us need us to be a little quieter. It might be that There were traumatic situations in people's lives that they wouldn't have survived if they didn't kind of shut a part of themselves off.

Yeah.

And so these parts of us are the parts that help kind of help us stay in line or shut parts of ourselves down to survive. So none of us would actually be here without this.

Yeah, I mean, they serve us right in many cases. You know, the reason we are where we are right now, they have played a big role in it. The trick, as you write in your book, is if we can become aware of it so they can. We can make sure we take the functional parts of them rather than the dysfunctional parts, Right?

Yes, exactly. We can give gratitude for what they're trying to tell us. Usually there's a message that they're trying to give us, and there's often some wisdom there. So if we can learn to ask, like, okay, what's true here? What's specific, what detailed, actual advice are you seeing? And go down to kind of the data level of what they're seeing without the conclusion, because they really scan, conclude, alert, motivate, and that spells scan. But if we can get to the data, what they're scanning, then we can decide how we want to move.

Yeah, I love that. So talk to me a little bit about how if we don't see it and learn to work with it, how they can really deter us from achieving our goals. And there was this one particular line here, Rosie, in your book again, that really, I was like. Right. Like, just literally, you know, you go like, they're lines, and that is just friends. There's a drawing. There's literally, you know, two sets of words, and then there's the third one. And Rosie's describing these critics, and she said, Sam came from a strong line of critics. Those critics worked for people you've never even heard of. That's how good they were. They were so good, they didn't even hear of these people. So. So say a little bit and talk a little bit about how these things can really hinder our. What. What is possible.

Yeah, I love that line, too, but it's really true. When an inner critic is doing its job so well, it means that it's human, is not gonna take any risks, is not going to live into their most creative, wildest ideas because they're just trying to kind of be like everybody else, or they're pressuring themselves so much to be creative or to be outstanding or to be excellent, that they're spending so much psychic energy on that rather than on Actually living and just being. And so this can really hold us back. And in teams, that looks like it starts to look like burnout in our organizations. Exhaustion, lack of risk taking, holding back innovation. It's really hard for teams and individuals to learn if we're all very, very scared of the repercussions of any slightly creative action of not knowing. Inner critics hate when we don't know.

Oh, my gosh, you have to not know. Right. And talk about the world we are living in today. Right. Where there is so much uncertainty. Most leaders feel they need to know, but the reality is we are moving in highly unknowable territories.

Exactly. Nobody knows the answers or we would have solved these problems already. Yeah. And I think a lot of the work that you're doing and that I'm doing is really helping us, helping people become a little bit more comfortable with the discomfort of complexity and the emotional resilience needed to thrive through complexity. And I think this is the inner critic piece is just one piece of that broader project.

Yeah. You know, this line brought to me this little story that I read and, you know, I read a lot and all kinds of texts. So as a reminder of this story, these two angels are having a conversation. Somebody's died on earth. And one of the angels says to the other angel today died the greatest general that was ever born on earth. And this other angel looks at him and says, I think you've got your facts wrong. That guy was just. He was nothing. He was just. He was just a little soldier. Like, he didn't do anything great. Nobody knows about him. Like, he just died, you know, he just died of old age. There's nothing. Right. What are you talking about? I think you're talking about somebody else. And it points to this fact. Right. He said, no, he didn't listen to his call. He heard the call and he didn't follow through. He didn't have the courage to step up when he could at. And I think he chose a path of comfort when he could have been the greatest. He had everything in him. Right. I think that really spoke to me. It really spoke to me of that. So how does one face. There's Sam. Rosie, how in your work with leaders and individuals, I know you do this work across schools. You do it with CEOs all over the place. How do you help people meet, truly meet and see? Just not hear, but see their Sam and befriend them?

Yeah. It's a beautiful process. We start with noticing, just, you know, we draw out the inner critic physically on A piece of paper. Folks who are listening can try this as well. And I tell them, draw your inner critic. And if the first thing that you hear when I say draw your inner critic is something along the lines of, I can't draw, that's the first thing you write because that's your inner critic, Right? So it's a very low bar to entry, but it's also you. Immediately the critic starts showing up in that process. So we work with it right there, right where it is starting to notice it. And as people are drawing their inner critic, they're starting to hear, oh, that's ugly, or your handwriting's not good enough, or whatever it is. And we're starting to write that in. So we're noticing. Once we notice, the next step is to understand its origins and its intent. Where did it come from in my life and why did it come? What was it trying to do for me? And that's where some really beautiful compassion and empathy can come in. And sometimes I have people role play from the critic's perspective, telling its own story and finding just this deep love for the person that it's working with. And then we get to this shift where we start to say, okay, I see what you intend and I'm going to understand what the wisdom is, taking the wisdom that is there and letting go of the rest. And that's where we ask, what are the details that you want me to know? What is true here and what's the wisdom? And that is kind, compassionate wisdom. And then we let go of any of the mean talk. And then we get to rewrite the rules for our own lives and the roles. We give the inner critic a new role. Sometimes it can become like the CEO of Safety Management. And often they like getting elevated cause they've been working so hard, shouting at us and not being listened to. So by treating it with this kind of empathy and respect, we can actually ease both of our burdens in the process.

Yeah, We hope you're enjoying this episode and would love your help in spreading awareness and furthering our mission to help a billion people Rewire for happiness. Please consider leaving us a review and sharing this podcast with others in your personal and professional life who you feel could benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend and spread positivity. Also check out Rewire, our proprietary offering to move you from knowing to doing. On the Happiness Squad website, www.happinesssquad.com Rewire uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to help you build happier habits in five minutes or less daily. Now back to the episode. Not being listened to, sometimes shunned. Like, we hate those parts of us, right? And yet we are, like, so powerless against them. You know, I was talking to my friend Ilya. He's called the Happiness Doctor of America. He's been literally called the Happiness Doctor. He and I recorded a show together for his new show that's coming out. I'll recommend you to go to his to do something together as well. He's coming out with a Happy hour with Dr. Elia on the Mental Health Television Network. But I was sharing with him. I shared your book. You know, he was the person I was meeting on Wednesday after our coffee together, do you recall? And I shared the book with him, and I was telling him about you, and he says, oh, yeah, I know, the inner critic. I've had so many people, and I asked them, my first question to them is, where are you? And like, literally, it's like, are you in the wheel driver's seat? Are you in the passenger seat? Some people say, are you in the back seat?

Even in the car?

Are you in the car, like, backseat? Or last, the funny. This is the funniest thing. Or are you locked up in the trunk? Right. And many people are like, I'm in the trunk. Like, I'm not even in the car. So he says, maybe step number one is just get to the back of the car, then maybe get to the side of the car. Right. So now you're a passenger on the side with the electric. And then very gently, we swap. Right? We swap. But I loved what you said. I think step number one is just recognizing starts with awareness. It starts with recognizing it. And also this really important part that you mentioned around the role it's played and how it's helped and what is it really trying to do here? It is not about rejecting. It is not about saying, I'm more. Right. Because there can be this superiority thing that come to as well. Like, I'm more. And I don't know about you, Rosie. My always experience is all those parts that I try and suppress only gain strength, go away.

Exactly. And we can also think of this as a kind of a process for broader change work within organizations. Yeah, same or imagine. Well, whenever there's a change process, there will be people who are resisting it. There will be these voices coming out with resistance. And so if we start to notice, huh, okay, what's here? We can do this with our own emotions as well. What's here? Just noticing and Then noticing, okay, where do these come from? What's the origin and what's the intent? People are not trying to resist change processes just to resist change. There is a deep intention there. Can we understand what they're trying to protect? What losses are they afraid might happen? If the change might go through, what are they trying to protect? Not just jobs or control, but identity as a. Often we're always doing reorganizations or changing data systems that we're using. And people get competent with a certain identity and role in something. And so they might be resisting something, holding on to something else that's very, very deep and important. And so once we can understand that, we can get specific, find the wisdom, just like we would with these inner voices in our heads, like, find what's the wisdom here and what are they alerting us to when we can have that compassionate, empathetic curiosity and then rewriting the rules and the roles, like, can there be something bigger that. Where we can hold both competing values at once?

Yeah.

So this process, I say, you know, we use it about the inner critic, but it's also very much a just how do we deal with the emotional elements of leadership and how do we deal with multiple parts within a system?

It is so true, right? It is so true. Most people who resist change don't resist change. They are mourning or holding on to a loss that comes with the change. Right. And that loss is so tied to the identity or the story of who they are and what has been done. And yeah, I think I can. I get so many change agents, so many change efforts, I think they fail because they don't. You know, it's also like, you know, I don't know if you found this in your work, Rosie. I often find people, they don't want to acknowledge the losses because it makes them uncomfortable. Even change agents, like, I don't want to talk about that. That's your own thing. Right. And how can you actually not?

Right. I was working with a large company. They had just done a re organization. They had let go of many, many of their senior people. And the people who remained were just in shock and scared to lose their own jobs as well. And, you know, we could come in and we could say things like, you know, we value that you're here and we're going to move forward together. There was a lot of talk about the future. It was great. And nobody just said, you know, gosh, some of your close friends were just let go. And it was confusing and it was scary, and there's fear about your own jobs and about risk taking here. And that's here, of course. And there's something just about acknowledging just the difficult, acknowledging the hurt that honors the humanity in all of these big logistical organizational decisions.

And so true. So true. So tell me, my friend, I'm curious about this is a beautiful organizational story. You did this work around schools, universities, like obviously with companies and individuals. Tell me a story. Tell me a couple of stories of people who've done this workshop with you. And something that really stands out as a big shift. I can just imagine. Amy helped me. Amy Friends, Amy Fox, Elizabeth Fox. She is the CEO of Mobius. In 2016, I had the pleasure of spending five days with her as part of a McKinsey retreat. I met I really for the first time saw and met my Sam. Like really saw it right. I always heard him right was like we always called it was the little bird on your shoulder always telling you right or a monkey or whatever you want to call it. But for the first time that week, I had a chance to face and really see how that voice had served me my whole life, but also was at the heart of so much suffering. And only that week that I start to move with it. So I know how big of an impact it had on me. And I'm curious about some of the stories of others who you've helped.

Rosie yeah. Oh, there's so many. The two that are coming to mind is a man stood up so brave in front of 300 people in one of my workshops and he said, I've just had this huge realization that I have become the Sam in my girlfriend's head and I'm going to talk to her different. And that's transformative in a relationship. I've had many parents think about what does this mean for the way I speak to my children? And not from a place of guilt or shame because of course, the relationships between parents and kids, just the specific child, the specific parent, there's going to be inner critic stuff that comes from that. That's no fault of anyone's, but just beginning to have awareness about how the interactions that we have together can either create or diminish the negative messaging. Create negative or positive messaging. So that's, that's one. And then I worked with a class of fourth graders, so I have a lot of organizational examples as well. But I worked with a class of fourth graders and the teacher, we called them inner meanies and the teacher had them all create. We drew the inner meanies and we created shields and like, what to do with the when you feel fear. And she created inner meaning school in the corner of the classroom. And they started using the language like wait a minute on the playground kind of is that your inner meaning coming out? Is it coming out as an outer meaning? And then the fourth grade class initiated the new. As they became fifth graders initiated the new incoming class with the book. So without even me there, kind of bringing in, bringing that in.

Wow.

Maybe one small organization was doing this with a coalition this, this town in Kansas, this amazing coalition for just well being within this town brought me in and there were librarians and home healthcare workers and doctors at the local clinic and recovery peer recovery specialists. Just a amazing group from across the town. And we did this whole workshop and everybody had this aha at the end about affirmations and really creating places within their organizations to celebrate one another. Because so often we're looking at what's ahead. We are overwhelmed by the to do lists by the next grant cycle, whatever it is. And just taking the time to acknowledge and affirm and care for one another has really transformed, I think the way that things feel within their work.

I think they're so beautiful. I think I want to highlight one thing, Rosie, that you just said, especially around the parent child relationship, right? And look, I'm not proud of my early parental kind of growing up because we always. I'm going to say two things. One, friends notice that when we are young, we are the giant for a child who's really. We are their source of survival. And they really think about we have a huge voice. So we all accidentally, consciously or unconsciously create SAMs. We all do for our children. Don't do that. If you ever said that to your child and especially as your child was about to put his finger into a electric socket is the best thing you could have ever done. But remember that that also has an effect. It's going to leave a shock, right? For the child. They're like, oh my God, they're learning something. But they also learn when dad or mom gets angry. I don't want that. That's also a message. So the reason I say this is we all early on from our parents pick things up. But I also want you to recognize, and I'm going to give this example comes to mind, even if by some miracle you said, you know what, I'm never going to do that. I'm going to keep my child away from any negative messaging that makes them develop a sam. Right? My son said, I said, when did you meet your sam? He said, kindergarten, when they Were asked to draw something, and another kid said to him, oh, my God, that is like the worst drawing ever. Right? So you can't avoid it, right? Even if you kept the kid at your home fully covered, Everybody spoke nicely. Never, never. No nothing. Right? They never met. They were the best. Always the best. You raised them up. And I'm reminded of the story of Siddhartha Buddha. I think his father tried to do that for him. He was kept in this beautiful princely palace. Everybody was young, all the best food, the most comforts all through his life. And even he stepped out and he saw this story that when he was grown up, left the castle, right? And he sees somebody who was dead. And he says, what's that? And he's like that everybody dies. Or the old man or the somebody who's suffering. So my point is, we'll all pass and create Sams for our children. So first of all, if you hear this and you're like, oh, my God, I created it. I'm horrible, just know that is your Sam telling you that.

Exactly, exactly.

You can't avoid it. Right? You can't avoid it. And by the way, Sams play an important role. Siddhartha, from all of his life of protection, decides to leave the princely ropes and decide not to become a king and go become an ascetic. Right. And then gone on to kind of teach so many others. So I'm not sure protecting children from all of this is good either. Right.

If it was even possible.

Not if even possible. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. If you don't do it, then somebody else will at some point. And so. But what is important is to actually help them understand. Understand the role of it so they can, from an early age, start to work with it.

Right. And I love what you're saying. For the parents out there, it is nearly impossible to raise another human. It's so difficult to keep a child safe and fed and oh, my gosh. And you're sleep deprived for like six years. So just. I think, of course you're right. It is Sam saying, oh, my gosh, I did a bad job. And then Brene Brown talks about the difference between guilt and shame and that, like, letting it be okay to just be like, wow, I could have done that better. Oh, well. And letting it just slide off rather than being like, oh, my gosh, I'm.

A terrible parent because of, I'm the worst ever. I'm the worst ever. Nobody does that. Right? I did it. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh, it's right. Just like letting. Letting Yourself off the hook for the times that you didn't do as well as you would have liked. And that being completely 100. Okay. Giving yourself permission to fuck up sometimes. Excuse my language, but. And then I think also, just like, knowing that, that. That we go through hardships and that is part of what creates our passions in the world. Like, I know you, Ashish, like, some of the difficulty that you went through in the past.

Yeah.

You know, 10 years was what created Happiness Squad and is doing all of this amazing work now. So it is sometimes out of our pain comes our magic.

Absolutely right.

Gold.

For anything to be gold, it has to be heated and reheated so all the impurities can burn away. Right. For wood to become flute, it has to be hollowed. There is not a lot that happens without the role of suffering and pain. Like, it's not that I'm saying you have to suffer to make it, but most of us, it's about how we make meaning from it. Without hard work, without effort, without the struggles. You know, it's just part of our evolution process. You know, it's how life wakes us and teaches us.

Exactly. I used to. People used to tell me, your mess is your message. And when I was in the depths of despair and depression. Oh, I hated that. I was like, there's no message here. I can't believe. And then, of course, I come, you know, a couple years later and I can see back on it, and of course, it becomes my message. But if you're in the active throes of just feeling like a mess, it's hard to hear sometimes. But I love that mess.

So, you know, you said, obviously one of the ways in which we can start to work through it. Right. Was drawing it. Are there other couple exercises that I think can be quite helpful in this process of witnessing befriending our SAMs.

Another fun one is having people stand behind their chair, act as their inner critic, or act as the risk manager, parts of their inner critic and talk about what might be at risk for this person in this chair to engage in this conversation or this meeting and get out all of the. You can have a real conversation about what's at stake, what's at risk in a team, and about the level of psychological safety. In that way, it's a little bit removed from somebody individually speaking for themselves. So that's a really interesting one. Like, I could stand behind my chair and say what might be at risk for Rosie to have this podcast conversation with Ashish right now.

So you're literally doing a Visualization of you're stepping into the role of the critic and talking to Rosie. Right. So like saying, okay, if you're sitting here, what is it? Then you just go and say it's A, B, C, D, E. And so you write it down.

You can write it down. Or I could, we could like you and I could both stand behind our chairs and say what might be at risk about us having this podcast conversation about Rosie and Ashish talking about them having this podcast conversation. Oh, well, they might say something stupid. Oh, well, you know, what about if they go into politics and it's some kind of. So we could kind of name the potential barriers to psychological safety there. So that's a really beautiful one. I also love doing a kind of the wise sage, the opposite of the inner critic. If you had a wise sage who was to whisper in your ear right now or to whisper to your younger self what they needed at that time, what would that wise sage say? What would they whisper to you? And we all have that ability to tune into that part and to offer those messages.

Yeah. Or your best friend, right? Your best friend, your biggest well wisher for you right now.

Exactly. And then one last fun one is just a permission slip. What's a permission slip? You want to write for yourself for your day today. So maybe if you're listening, just choose one thing. What's a permission slip? And I was, you know, I work with lots of groups and one woman, she was, she, this really touched me. She was like, I give myself permission to eat three whole meals a day. And that wasn't, that wasn't something she did because of her relationship with eating. And that was what she gave herself permission for. And it was just this beautiful moment of allowing. So it can be from that to like, I give myself permission to enjoy my life.

I love that. What are you giving yourself permission to do today?

What would yours be today?

My permission to me is going to be to enjoy this. This has been a big week because just enjoy this week evening with a nice cigar. Rosie, you're like the complete opposite. Like, that is what I'm going to do. I was like really battling this thing, but I think this conversation is like, I have two more calls and then I think I'm going to sit and enjoy a nice cigar in my garden and call it end of week on a really beautiful, beautiful note.

So often our critics don't let us just enjoy to relax and enjoy our life and like to have what we have. Like our havingness factor is low because our, this part of us tells us we need to keep working, we need to keep going for what's next. So this week, my permission is to enjoy this last week of August and to not think that I need to be hustling and trying to figure out what's next and all my work plans for the fall to just enjoy and.

Play ball if I want to. No surprise, Rosie, no surprise that I wish I'd let myself be happier and I wish I hadn't worked so hard are two of the most common regrets of the dying based on the work of Bronnie Ware. Right?

Exactly.

It's this inner critic, right? This notion. I also love this image where the Sam I love, by the way, when he said it's 95% of my head, and then it became like, way bigger where it was. Right. And you're like the small one. I think that happens to so many of us. I think we just constantly. We don't live the life we are meant to because we're just listening to this voice, my friend. This is so beautiful. This is. I mean, I can't even tell you, like, two days since I've seen this book, and I think I've literally flipped the pages four or five times out of the book.

Thank you. I'm touched. And, yeah, I hope that it's a message to us all to just, you know, start in small ways to live the life that we want to live. And whether that is taking five minutes to enjoy something that you might not have otherwise enjoyed, like, that's a great start. It doesn't have to be this major, major transition all of a sudden, but just having and enjoying what we. What we have and what we. Who we are and the amazingness of this life, even as there's struggle, of course, but that kind of bolsters us for the struggle.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thank you for this beautiful, heartful conversation, Rosie, sharing your wisdom, for doing this beautiful work that you're doing in the world. I know you and I are going to do lots of great things together. I want to bring your wisdom, I want to bring your playfulness, I want to bring your creativity. I want to bring your intelligence. All of that to those who listen to this podcast, who are part of our Happiness Squad community, to clients that we are serving. Because I think, friends, if we want to show up as our whole selves out there, and if we really want to as leaders, accept others as whole beings with all their perfections and imperfections, witnessing, befriending, and really getting skilled in working with your Sam is the first step. Thank you, my friend, for this beautiful conversation and for joining us.

Thank you. And thank you for all that you are doing and leading with happiness and flourishing in the workplace. It's so inspiring. Thank you.

My pleasure. That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us. Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.