Brad Stulberg on the Paradox of Achievement and Sustainable Success

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thanks welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. Achievement often comes at a cost. Angst, restlessness, frayed relationships, exhaustion and even substance abuse can be the unwanted side effects of an obsession with outward performance. While the high of occasional wins can keep you going for a bit, there's also a concomitant risk of playing into the always on never enough hustle culture that ultimately takes a serious toll. This is the arena that Brad Stulberg works in. Brad is an internationally known expert on human performance, well being and sustainable success. He holds a Master's degree in Public Health from the University of Michigan. He is the co author of the best selling Peak Performance and the Passion Paradox and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Wired, Forbes, Outside Magazine, and more. With Steve Magness, Brad co founded the Growth Equation, a multimedia platform dedicated to the art and science of success. In his performance coaching practice, he works with executives, entrepreneurs and physicians and he regularly speaks to large organizations on these topics as well. Today we'll be discussing his most recent book, the Practice of Groundedness, A transformative path to success that feeds, not crushes, your soul. Welcome to the show, Brad.

Hey Chris, it's great to be here.

Awesome. Well, listen, I'm a junkie for and fanboy of a lot of journalists and you're certainly on that deep bench and authors and I always like to, when I have them on the show, I like to start off with maybe learning about a little bit about their origin story of getting into writing. Could you maybe share a little bit about the shift from public health and how that maybe informs your approach to the writing that you do?

Yeah, you bet. Well, I always have loved the written word, really, dating back to high school. I was part of the school newspaper and that continued through my collegiate education. But like so many people, I figured that being a writer wasn't necessarily a job, or at least a job for me. So I decided to study public health and I went into healthcare and did a fair amount of policy work and epidemiology and some leadership coaching within healthcare. As you mentioned, I studied public health in graduate school at the University of Michigan and in whatever role I had, writing was always the core of it. So if I was advising clients, I wasn't the person working with the financial model for the healthcare system or covered lives. I was the person that was putting together the PowerPoint. If I was working with the government, I was the one writing the White paper. I had a short stint in the White House under Barack Obama and my job was always coming up with various talking points for big speeches coming out of the National Economic Council. So it was always related to writing. And one day, yeesh, over almost 15 years ago now, I wrote an op ed around health care, being very naive to how any of this works and it ended up being published of the major newspapers and from there people just asked me to write and I was thrilled. No one had ever asked me to write.

Yeah.

So I started writing more and more and more. And over time I've been able to craft a career writing about really the convergence of my interests, which is health, well being, and also the psychology of excellence. So those are the topics that I explore today.

That's great. Wow. It just seems kind of, you know, at the patchwork of that, of being kind of stitched together with the thread of, you know, journalism and the pleasure and pain. I know that oftentimes goes along with writing. That's fantastic. So I want to dig into groundedness, but before we do, I have to kind of tee this up with what some others have said about it. So. David Epstein, New York Times best selling author of Range, said, brad Stulberg has become the writer I turn to for examinations of success. The Practice of Groundedness is a perfect extension of what Brad has been building for years. It follows him from his essays and previous books, but is more ambitious, far reaching and impactful. Ryan Holiday said, brad Stulberg is one of my favorite writers about performance and success in all of its forms. Brad's work gets to the heart of the matter. Cal Newport said, the practice of groundedness is a crucial alternative to the large audience of those exhausted by the soulless exhortations to crush it and instead are looking for a deeper approach to building a successful life. Recently, Brad, I just have to do a shout out with this too. Not so much from a journalistic perspective per se, from the folks like Brian and Cal, et cetera, but you had what you aptly called a pinch me moment, when basically the greatest marathoner of all time, Eliud Kipchoge, who's also known not only as a great runner but a deep, deep thinker, was asked if he was reading anything for motivation or kind of where his head was at prior to setting the latest world record at Berlin. And he said, I was reading the Practice of Groundedness. It molds you as a human being. So tell us what that was like and let's start to get into the book.

Oh my gosh, that really was a pinch me moment. Talk about. I've long been a fan of Eliud Kipchoge, and someone sent me that and said, you're not going to believe this. And I didn't.

Yeah, come on, man.

You know, it's so funny. He's just such an exemplary person that really embodies the kind of excellence that the book is all about. So I am not surprised that he loved it, but I'm deeply surprised that it somehow made its way to him in Kenya and that it was a part of his preparation for the Berlin marathon maybe five months ago. It's a game that I like to play with my wife because there's a lot of seriousness around a book launch, and I try to keep it fun. The game is always, if random people could stumble upon your book, who would they be? And Ali Khashogi was in my list of the top five people that I put together five months ago, so.

Oh, man.

But pretty dang close.

That's so good. So was groundedness kind of like a progression from peak performance in the Passion Paradox, or what was the spur to get groundedness out?

Yeah, I'd say it was a reverse progression. So. I love mountains. There's a mountain on the COVID of the book. I think they're beautiful. And I also think that they're beautiful in a literary sense because there's so many metaphors. Metaphors that can be born out of them. And I like to think of peak performance. My first book is really what to do when you're at the peak of the mountain and everything is clicking. And this book is really about the foundation, the base of the mountain. And if there's not a solid foundation, if there's not a solid base, it doesn't matter what's happening on the peak. The mountain's not going to stand strong and tall over time, and particularly during rough periods of weather. And we're very much the same, whether as individuals or organizations, there's such a temptation to get focused on the bright and shiny objects and on what happens at the peak of the mountain. And at times, we can actually neglect our foundation. And when everything is going well, that's not always problematic. But when things are challenging, that becomes really problematic. Because if we haven't been tending to the foundation, it's not just a switch that you can flip and have it come back. So groundedness is really about just that. The ground, the foundation from which any kind of sustainable success, excellence, mastery can ensue.

I really like that you also. Somewhere in my research, I found that you said you almost entitled it Good Enough. Is that. Is that correct? Where?

What?

Why the shift? And where did good Enough come from?

Yeah, so Good Enough came, and it's a part of the book for sure. So Good Enough came from the mid 20th century psychoanalyst and philosopher D.W. winnicott. And he proposed that the best kind of parent is not the helicopter parent that's constantly intervening and trying to correct every misstep of their child. It's also not the negligent parent that turns away and lets their child do whatever the child wants to do. But the best kind of parent, according to Winnicott's model, is what he called the good enough parent. And the good enough parent, their job is to create a holding space for the child to unfold. And as a parent, when I first read that, that struck me as just so beautiful and has really become the parenting philosophy that me and my wife try to live by. But I started to think that philosophy can apply far beyond parenting. Imagine if we took that to all of the big projects in our lives and even our own unfolding. So instead of trying to always fix things and problem solve and immediately come in like the helicopter parent, what if we were good enough? What if we gave things a little bit more time and space to unfold? And again, this doesn't mean being negligent. Far from it. It doesn't mean not caring. It means releasing from the heavy weight of perfectionism and obsession in favor of good enough. And what the research shows so unequivocally is that even if you are concerned with being great, the best way to be great is to be good enough over and over and over again. And then suddenly one day you wake up and you're great. It was a competing title and it was a competing framework for the book. Ultimately, I found the imagery of the mountain was more powerful and resonant. But if folks read the book, they'll get to read in detail about the theory of good enough.

That's great. Yeah. And I remember that back from my early days in graduate school, too, and taking a look at that. And I agree. It really resonates in so many areas. And, you know, I don't know if we've been successful with it with our kids, but that's certainly kind of a. I don't know, a totem that I think my wife and I have kept. So one of the other things I like a lot about your book is that you integrate case studies. You've got, like, modern science and paralleling those kinds of things. You got Buddhism and Stoicism and Christianity and Taoism, whatnot. So what's your writing process for? Like, doing that kind of research and making sense out of such seemingly, you know, diverse data sets, but having such a good synthesis of it to come out in the book?

Well, I like to think of getting to truth with a capital T. And what I mean by that is, particularly in the softer sciences, so not human biology, where you can run experiments in labs and look at cells under a microscope. But in the messiness of the world, it can be hard to get to principles that we have confidence in that are going to hold for most people in most situations. So I try to take an approach of a three legged stool. And the first leg is modern empirical science. So what does the research say? What do studies say? Ideally, what do studies of studies, meta analyses say, big data sets. The second leg of that stool is ancient wisdom and history. So what patterns and themes have been true over time 100 years ago, 200 years ago, even millennia ago? What traditions are pointing to similar things? And then the third leg of that stool is day to day practice. So it can't just hold true in the undergraduate psychology lab. It can't just hold true in an ancient text or in a history book. But when I actually go out as a writer and report and talk to people that are living in today's world, what practices are they using, what's working for them, what's not? And in order for anything to make it into this book, it had to have all three legs of those stools. So it had to be supported by empirical, modern science, by ancient wisdom and history, and also by daily practice. And that really gave me confidence that the principles that I champion in the book, like I said, that they're going to be true with a capital T. And what I mean by that is applicable for most people in most situations. Are there exceptions? Yes. But I do believe that the principles of groundedness are quite universal.

I really like that. I think it maybe gets back to Cal Newport's point too, that he said that it's like the, you know, you see so many things. There's so many eye candy, clickbaity kinds of things about, you know, the hacks and speeding things up and all that. And there's just sort of like the, you know, taking a breath and the solidifying aspect of groundedness as a metaphor and as this kind of, you know, counterbalance to those things I think is so important. You also in the book have six principles of groundedness that you've developed, I presume, predicated on these, you know, the truth aspect. So could you maybe step us through those real quick? Or a highlight reel of what those six are and how they might play out in someone's life.

Yeah. So the first is this notion of accepting where you are to get where you want to go. And this is all about learning to see your situation clearly, whether you like your situation or not. One of the biggest pitfalls in individual life and organizational Life, even for entire societies reckoning with big problems is they don't want to face the reality of what's happening. They put on the rose tinted glasses and they might feel better in the short term, but as a result, they don't work on the thing that actually needs to be worked on. And in the long term, they suffer many false starts. So this first principle is to accept where you are. To get where you want to go, you have to see clearly and accept where you are. It doesn't mean you have to like it, but you have to accept it.

And again, with my psychology hat on, that's very therapeutic. That's, that's acceptance and commitment therapy, cbt. I mean, those are, you know, not necessarily foundational, but those are certainly components of, of that kind of aspect. So I totally get that.

Yeah. There's a beautiful quote from Carl Rogers, which is that it's only when I accept myself that I can begin to change. And I think that there's this. There's this paradox that the key to improvement is actually acceptance. So a lot of people think that if you want to get better and improve, you have to be really unhappy with yourself and you have to be frustrated and this and that, but actually you have a much better chance of sustainably improving if you accept yourself, because then any improvement is coming from a place of wholeness and confidence, not insecurity and fear.

That's great.

So acceptance isn't separate from improvement. It's part and parcel of it.

Beautiful.

The second principle is owning your energy and attention. So in today's world, there have been many academic papers and many books just about how insidious distractions are and constant novelty and stimulation. And it can result in this feeling like you're just being pushed and pulled and you don't even own your own attention. And we are our attention. Our attention is our life. So it's pretty ridiculous to think that we'd be okay basically giving our life away to the whirlwinds and the whims of the attention economy and of all these distractions. So the second principle is really about creating a practice around being present and becoming more mindful of what you spend your energy and attention on. Again, there's this paradox here. We think that we pay attention to what's important, but it's actually the opposite. What we pay attention to becomes important. So it's really, really important that we learn to direct our attention appropriately.

That's great. And you talk about, like having a BS list or a not to do list as well, too right.

Yeah. That's such a trap that people fall into, is they think they need to have to do lists. But I often find that a not to do list is even more effective because these are the things that in the book I call attention vampires. They just kind of zap our attention and they suck it away from us without us even knowing. So all kinds of practices in the book, but my favorite in this chapter is in fact the not to do list. And then also just the importance of scheduling undistracted blocks of time to do what's most important to you. And the calendar for so many people is like a moral document. I'm a big believer in behaviorism, so I think that our character is what we do and what's on our calendar is what we do. So we ought to treat our calendar as this really important document that's going to define who we are. And if you want to be a deep thinker, if you want to be the kind of person that does good, strong intellectual work or leadership work or relational work or. Well, then it ought to be on our calendar. Otherwise it's just not going to happen for so many people.

That's great. And the calendar kind of is also a metaphorical checkbook of the time that we have available for these kinds of things. I was reading that Stuart Brand had talked about, like, any kind of project worth doing is in his book, kind of like about five years. So if it's helping with a startup or some other kind of project or engineering or writing a book or doing a documentary or whatever, that if you're going to do a good job to it, it's going to take a, you know, specific amount of time and we all have a finite amount of that and then need to, you know, kind of distribute that and make those, make decisions on, you know, what's, what's really valuable and what's important. Because, you know, the, the checkbook runs out, the calendar is, is finite.

Exactly. And, and it, it runs out faster than we think, particularly if we're not paying attention.

Yeah.

So, yeah, this principle is really just about being present in setting up the conditions that allow you to be present for what matters most. The third principle is be patient to get there faster. And again, you can probably tell there's a theme emerging which is, I think that a lot of these truths are found in paradox. But we think that if we rush, rush, rush, then we'll attain our goals and happiness and contentment and all these things by checking, checking marks off of our bucket list and Attaining various, various accomplishments. But what ends up happening is we get sucked into this cycle of just running from one thing to the next. And it's a very unsettling feeling for a lot of people. And not only does it not feel good, but if we look at the empirical research on progress, what it finds is that the, the best route to a quote unquote overnight breakthrough is actually to go very slowly and consistently. And the Instagram worthy or the LinkedIn all nighter, the startup office, is there a time and place for those? Yes, perhaps, but that should be the exception, not the rule. And the things that look heroic tend to be the things that lead to burnout. Whereas the antihero path of just pounding the stone a little bit more every day, that's what's going to give us the chance at having the biggest gains. There's a study in this chapter that I cite that was published by researchers at mit, and they looked at when people in different fields have what they called hot streaks in their careers. So these are periods when everything is clicking, when folks are feeling really good and producing their best work. And they looked at researchers and intellectuals, they looked at creative and artists, and then they also looked at entrepreneurs and business people. So an enormous sample, over 200,000 people in this study, and what they found is that the hot streaks, regardless of the field, they all have one thing in common. And that one thing was they followed a period where there was little to no observable progress being made. So if that's not an endorsement of the need to be patient with the pursuits that matter to us, I don't know what is. The most profound example that has occurred since the book came out is the creation of MRNA vaccines. So if you look at how they've been covered in the media, they've been covered as a breakthrough or a scientific miracle, the likes of which we've never seen. What people don't know is that the primary researcher behind the MRNA technology, a woman named Catalyn Carico, she's been working on this for over 50 years. 5. 0.

Wow.

So imagine if she would have quit. Who knows where we'd be right now? Is that what the media and what the culture sees as a breakthrough, was hardly a breakthrough at all. It was 50 years in the making. And we see this with great athletes, we see this with startup companies, that it just appears as if they emerge out of nowhere, when in fact there have been tons and tons of failures and false starts and trials and tribulations before the success. So we might live in A quick fix culture. But the key to sustainable success, where you feel good and do good, is actually slowing things down, being patient.

And is that a component then of your process mindset that you talk about?

Yeah, the process mindset, exactly. So in a nutshell, my sense is many of your listeners are probably familiar with this topic just based on the things that interest you and your prior guests. So I'll gloss over it. Basically, we think, or there's a common misconception that we'll be happy and fulfilled when we achieve our goals. But what the research shows is that happiness in fulfillment doesn't come from achievement. Achievement is fleeting. It's ephemeral. We feel good for a day or two. Happiness and fulfillment come from enjoying the actual work that leads up to accomplishing those goals. So happiness and fulfillment are in the process of pursuing goals, not in their accomplishment. So what does this mean? It means that it's a really bad idea to go after goals that you don't think you're going to enjoy working toward, even if you think that that goal is going to make you somehow a complete, full, validated human being. It's a fool's errand. We know that accomplishing goals is not what leads to happiness. What leads to happiness is working on those goals in a way that feels meaningful and ideally with other people, a community of. So the way that I like to think about goal setting is that, yes, we should set big goals, but we should select those goals based on the processes that will follow to take them, because that's where we spend the vast majority of our life is in the process. You're only on the medal stand for a minute or two, but you're preparing for the Olympics for four years.

That's great.

You're only at NASDAQ ringing the IPO bell for 30 seconds. But the work of building a company can be a lifetime. The book published launch week. It's a week, right? How long does it take to write a book? Years. So again, we get so focused on the end goal instead of the process where the majority of our life is lived.

That's great. Okay, Number four.

Yeah. Number four is this notion of embracing vulnerability to build genuine strength and confidence. So Brene Brown, the researcher from the University of Houston, has done so much work linking authenticity and vulnerability to building trust and connection with other people. What groundedness adds to that conversation is that the more vulnerable we can be with ourselves, the more also that we come to trust ourselves. And the analogy I like to use is from a Greek myth about a very Terrifying God named Pan. And Pan lived just beyond the village boundary. And every once in a while, people would stumble into the realm of Pan. They would get lost, and when they saw Pan, they would be so scared, they'd become paralyzed and they try to escape and they would trip over rocks and vines and they died. So they were basically scared to death of Pan. Now, in the myth, there are a couple of very brave, courageous villagers that deliberately went to see Pan. And to those villagers, he bestowed upon them strength, kindness and compassion. In my interpretation of this myth, along with the interpretation of many other mythologists, is that Pan represents our fragilities and our vulnerabilities. And if we never explore them, if we try to repress them, if we try to cover them up, eventually we're going to stumble into them and they're going to completely uproot us. We're going to be unmoored, we're going to be the opposite, grounded. Whereas if we can go face those vulnerabilities and face those fears, sometimes alone, but sometimes with the help of friends, family, therapists, coaching other community members, well, then we get compassion, strength and kindness as a result. So if you don't know all of yourself, if there's a part that you're consciously trying to repress, but deep down inside you know it's there, well, then it gets really hard to trust all of yourself. Whereas if we can face our deepest vulnerabilities, we don't have to like them, but just accepting them, seeing them for what they are, ties to the prior principle of acceptance. Well, then we can be more confident because we're not hiding anything from ourselves. We really trust ourselves.

That's great. And again, the theme of paradox with these things, you know, they're not necessarily self evident, but as you unpack them, it's like, yeah, that makes perfect sense. I love the whole Pan mythology aspect. I wasn't familiar with that. I really like that. And then that kind of brings to then the fifth step about community, deep community. And looking at those aspects of kind of what you were just saying of the critical importance of that. So what's the Chelaine Flanagan effect?

So Chelain Flanagan is one of the best US Women's distance runners ever. And Chelain for quite a long time trained individually. And the reason behind this was she had very specific workouts and she was running very heavy mileage, and everything had to be individualized and dialed into a table. And Shlane had tons of success training that way. She's an Olympic medalist, a four time Olympian, but What she hadn't had was a win in a major marathon. And later in her career, Shalane decided to do something somewhat radical for her, which is she started training with a group. And sure enough, that meant that she did have to sacrifice some of that individual precision. When you're with other people, everything can't be how you want it. This is true in running, and this is true in life.

Yeah.

What she got out of it was all this extra energy and motivation and inspiration from having others around her in this otherwise solitary endeavor. In a few years, after training with the group, she ended up winning the New York City Marathon, becoming the first American to win the race in over 40 years.

Wow.

Wow.

Now, what's interesting is it wasn't just Elaine that improved, but all these other young women in her training group went on to have the best seasons of their lives.

Wow.

So the Shalane effect was coined by the New York Times. Is basically this community built around excellence. Shalane, the leader, raised every other athlete in that community up with her. And again, the paradox is, Chelaine, for 15 years, thought that the individualized training was going to be the key to achieving greatness because it could be so personalized, when, in fact, her greatness depended on dropping the weight of everything needing to be perfect and all about her workouts in training with a community of other people in a group.

That's great.

And I got to know Chalene quite well, and I've asked her what was going through her mind at the tough parts of that race. And she said that she was running for her community. How beautiful is that?

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Wow. So then I love that the final one, I think, kind of gets back to the title. Then move your body to ground your mind. Tell us about what that means.

Yeah. So the philosopher Descartes got a lot of things right and some things wrong. One of the things he got wrong is this separation between mind and body. Right. He said, I think therefore I am. The fact that we have thoughts makes us who we are. And the body is just this physical manifestation that our soul and our brain or our mind lives in. And we now know, thanks to a lot of fascinating, cutting edge empirical research, that the mind and body are not separate. They are a system. They are interwoven in every single facet. Movement, physical movement is one of the most important things you can do to ground your mind, your mental, psychological state. So we know all the physical health benefits of movement. But what we're now learning is that the number one way to stave off dementia and cognitive decline. It's not doing word search puzzles, it's not taking supplements in fish oil. It is moving your body regularly. So if that doesn't show the linkage, then nothing, right?

Yep.

There was just a huge study that was published a couple days before having this conversation where they looked at 250 theoretical ways to cure Alzheimer's based on what parts of our DNA get upregulated or not. And included in this were nutritional interventions, pharmaceutical interventions, and lifestyle interventions. The top three. The top three out of 250 all involved exercise. So if we want to have longevity not just in our body, but also in our ability to think creatively and have emotional control in our memory and our overall psychosocial health, then movement is absolutely crucial to that. And we unfortunately live in a society that's become so sedentary. And what I tried to do here by including movement in this book is shift. It's not just like quote unquote exercise that you go to the gym and you do so that you could have big muscles in the mirror or look skinny or whatever it is that you want. No, those aren't really why anyone should exercise. The reason to exercise is because it not only adds years to your life, but it adds life to those years by supporting mental health and cognition.

Yeah, I think there's a much greater appreciation of those kinds of things now, again, through the shared experiences that people had varied but shared in the context of COVID And it reminds me of like Peter Attia just goes on and on about his octogenarian, Olympic or decathlon and that aspect of health span, not just lifespan. Well, you can have all these, you know, third party biological interventions and things like that, but just the, the quality of life, not just the, the, the years added on. And again, you're right, it's, you know, any study that you look at, the consistent aspect of that is, you know, consistent, you know, type of exercise and, and that can vary, you know, depending upon the person's, you know, abilities and whatnot. But yeah, it's, it's a, a critical aspect. I totally agree. So, and maybe it's a smidge of a surprise in a book like this too. Maybe, maybe, maybe not. But then let's shift into part two of the book. So there you kind of get into the, very much the application, it's living a grounded life. And you then start to take the principles that you've brought to us in the first part of the book. But can you talk through like what the living a grounded Life might look like. Like, so that listeners can get an example and a feel for it before they grab your book.

Yeah. So it's really about trying to make practices out of these principles. So we can just go one by one quickly with some example practices. And in the conversation we'll probably see how they all support one another and are linked together. Okay, so the first notion of acceptance, seeing things clearly. One way to practice acceptance is that when you find yourself tensing up at a situation or resisting a situation, or you're just confronted with a challenging decision that feels quite ambiguous, you can step back and imagine that a close friend is in the exact same situation as you. And that close friend came to you and said, well, what should I do? What advice do you have for me? Me? And then give advice to that friend. And then of course, you have to follow that advice yourself. And this is called self distancing. And what the research shows is that we are much better at accepting things when we take our own self connection out of the picture. And by envisioning a friend in the same situation, we suddenly see it more clearly and we can be wiser with what to do. So acceptance can be as simple as when you find yourself kind of butting up against a wall. To imagine that you are counseling a close friend who is experiencing the same thing and then taking that advice yourself, whether it feels good or it doesn't. Presence. My favorite practice around presence. We already talked about making a not to do list. Another one that I really like is to try to separate the deep, meaningful activities that when you do them, you feel really fulfilled and whole. And at the end of the day, you just feel like, man, I can sleep well at and if I die tomorrow, it would suck, but it would kind of be okay because I'm on my game, I'm fulfilled versus activities where when you get caught up in them, you actually feel pretty empty and gross when you're done. And I say gross because that's the common experience that so many people share after a day spent spending too much time on Twitter, for instance. So make lists of both of these activities, and one is like junk food, and the other is like eating nourishing whole food. And then back to that calendar, that moral document. Don't just assume that you're going to eat the nourishing whole food. You have to schedule time for it, put it in your calendar so that when it comes up, you don't have an option to do something else. You do it. So, so much about presence, right? The principle we're talking about has been around the inside game, so becoming more mindful, paying attention to your breath, so on and so forth. And while that's all important and is included in the book, what I try to add to the conversation is also included in the book is that presence isn't just what's happening inside of us. It's also our environments, our surroundings, and the choices that we make. So it's really hard to be present in a casino. So many of us walk around on smartphones, which are like mini casinos, of our relevance in the world in our pockets. So the way to practice presence is really to look both inside and outside. So patience. One of my favorite practices is to stop one rep short. And this is a hard one I actually failed to do just this morning in my own strength. That would be hard. Athletes, they show so much restraint because they know that if they go too hard today, then they don't have enough energy to go tomorrow. And if they chronically go too hard, they get injured. And this applies not just to athletes, but to any kind of work, be it creative or intellectual or cognitive work. So it's this notion of right when you get to the edge and you could go a little bit more, force yourself to stop short so you can pick up in a rhythm tomorrow. When we talk about vulnerability, something that I'm a big believer of is going to the places that you don't want to go. And we all know what those are. And for a lot of people, it can be regret, it can be fear, particularly fear of our own mortality. And this doesn't mean that you should become existential philosopher and spend all, all day ruminating on death. It does mean that we shouldn't run away from these things. We should explore them in the right time, in the right place, with the right people. Community. The big practice here is to realize when your drive for optimization and efficiency is crowding that time for community. So so often we get sucked up in our work, whether it is not great or even if it is great, if it's phenomenal, meaningful work that gives our lives energy and we get into flow states nonetheless, when we're pursuing big projects, the first thing that gets left behind is community. And there are many practices in the book just to help, not leave it fully behind. Because again, when shit hits the fan, when we're really challenged, it's our community that's going to hold us up and support us.

That's good.

And then for movement, my favorite practice is the simplest and it's accessible to just about everyone. And that is to take daily walks. 30 minutes. The research shows that a brisk 30 minute walk gets you about 95% of the way there. Something that I love doing is walking meetings. So I'm going to do an interview that's not for a podcast but for a newspaper or something. I almost always walk during those.

Brilliant.

If I'm catching up with a friend or a family member. Always walking during those. Even at times, my coaching clients will do our sessions where we're both walking. So in addition to getting in that movement, the evidence shows that we tend to be more creative and think more clearly while we're walking. So I'm glad to see that walking meetings are becoming more of a thing, not just as a result of the book, but also in corporate America as well.

That's great. And you know, Colin O' Brady just has his new book out, the 12 Hour Walk and you know, hits on some of those kinds of, of issues as well too that, you know, it's interesting I. Thinking about the running and the Chalene Flanagan effect and the, you know, the groundedness and mountains and peaks and stuff. I used to, I. My. One of my goals was to do the seven Summits. And when I was much younger and kind of more in earnest and had some time to try and train for those, I sort of realized that it was a very selfish kind of thing. You know, it felt selfish to me that I'm up by myself, you know, the crack of dawn to go run before I went to work and to, you know, do this and do that. So then I thought, you know, how can I. What can I do to try and, you know, battle against that? And I guess maybe just, you know, kind of your point also about community because like when you are on a climb, you know, you're with an expedition team, you know, you're roped up together, you know, and you're really depending upon one another and helping each other, et cetera. But you know, I created this thing called Summits for Others. And so for every climb that I did, I would, you know, do it like to sponsor War Child or sponsors, sponsor some nonprofit or charity or something just to kind of get that other sense of community and whatever it was I was sponsoring to kind of give them some, you know, exposure that maybe they wouldn't to a group of people that they wouldn't have had, you know, exposure to in the past. So I think there's a lot of creative kinds of ways that we can start to stitch those things together as well. So I know we're getting you've got a hard stop. But I also just want to ask you, it's been a year about since groundedness has come out. What, what have you learned? Any, any changes, any augmentations to your thinking or what, what's, what's new with you since it's come out?

Yeah, I think that the, the biggest thing that I wish that I would have written about in the book that I didn't is just the societal implications of our lack of groundedness and what a more grounded society would look like. So the book is very focused on individuals and as any sociological thinker would tell you, societies are the combination of a bunch of individuals behaviors. But there's also this wider force field that then affects individuals and their behaviors. And man, since the books come out, I just unfortunately have realized time and time again how our whole society kind of is distracted and pushed this way and that and rushed and struggles to accept hard realities and isn't very vulnerable and doesn't like to talk about hard truths. I think that while groundedness probably has to start as an individual thing, I think that I wish that I would have taken a big swing and said, hey, here are some potential policy ideas for how to have a more grounded society and maybe I'll do that in the future. I've taken a stab at it in a couple of blog posts and whatnot, but part of the reason I hesitate is because I think that a lot of those things then tend to live in the ivory tower, whereas the individual behaviors probably have a better chance of actually getting changed. And if enough individuals change their behavior, then it exerts force back to the force field of society.

Yeah, well, you know, I read your piece in the Wall Street Journal last last November, I guess, about the principles for a better post pandemic unit. Those might be, you know, similar kinds of things if people take a look at the work that you guys do. Just also tip of the hat. I'm a big fan of not only, you know, your writing, but also the things that you provide in your blog and the growth equation. We'll put those links and whatnot in the show notes, but in those asp I mean, what do you see as best you can predict of people listening of taking these principles? Where are the challenges that are going to be the pushbacks for them? Is it just vary by individual? Some things may come a little easier than others? Or have you from people that have read your book and that you've had deeper discussions about it? What kinds of things have people come back with that say, hey, I need a little help with this, or maybe it comes up in the growth equation work that you do there.

Yeah. I think that it is a case of it depends and each. Each person is going to face their own challenges and their own sticking points. The biggest one, unsurprisingly, is just people trying to do too much too soon. So resolving to suddenly practice all five of these principles all day, every day. And that kind of goes against the ethos of groundedness.

Another paradox, Brad.

So, like, trying to be the most person ever. So, you know, I'd advise that you should shoot for about 60%. And if I can have 60% success on the things in this book over the course of a month, then that's a really good month. And I tend to feel better. If I even try to do 100%, I don't feel so good because then I'm obsessing and I'm taking perfection to something that inherently says that you don't want to be perfect, striving for perfection all the time. So to marry self discipline and hard work with self compassion and grace, and not to think about those two things as polar opposites, but to think about those two things working hand in hand because behavior change is hard. Trying to be grounded in a frantic and frenetic world is hard. And if you can't be kind to yourself along the way, particularly when you stumble and when you fail, well, then that's a recipe for burnout.

Yeah.

Here, here. I just saw, too, it's been kind of hitting the news wires about the surgeon general looking at toxic workplaces and the negative impact that that has on people's mental health and sort of like, you know, I was thinking for you with public health, what a, you know, what a voice to bring and light to shine into those kinds of areas, like here, here. That's. And me as a psychologist, like, that's fantastic to see that kind of acceptance and exposure and, hey, let's, you know, roll up our sleeves and. And take a look at doing it maybe by virtue of having more groundedness, not just in our lives, of our personal lives, but our work lives and our creative lives, et cetera, I think can make a big step in that direction.

I hope so.

So listen, Brad, thanks so much for being on the show. I've so looked forward to this. I very much enjoy. Again, big fan and shout out to the growth equation and your work and your writing for listeners that want to learn more.

Get your books, get onto your newsletter,

listen to your podcast to connect with you what are some of the best ways to do that? We'll put in the show notes.

Thanks. Well, I think the best way is if you have the inclination and the interest to pick up a copy of the book and read the Practice of Groundedness and if you prefer audio to listen to the book. It really is the place, as Dave so kindly said, where all my work has built up to thus far. And then for more of the day to day kind of tips and tricks and insights. I tend to be somewhat active on Twitter where I'm Stahlberg and then my LinkedIn is just my name Radstalberg.

Okay great. We will get those in the show notes. Well again Brad, thank you so much. Again just so much. Look forward to seeing the growth equation in your name in my inbox and stuff. I get so much from that and really encourage people that are listening to this episode to get involved as well too. They will will not be disappointed. You do great work my friend. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Doc.

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Assistant Producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien Executive Producer, Producer and Host Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website A lifeinfull for Show Notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile.

Thanks and until next time,