How To Stop Judging Yourself Harshly With Fleet Maull

Welcome to the Social Confidence Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Macapinlac. Let's get into today's episode. Today we have Dr. Fleet Mall, who's a mindset and mindfulness teacher and the author of radical responsibility. Dr. Fleet, thank you so much for making time to be on the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Mike. Great to be here.

Absolutely. So, you know, I'm super excited to go through your book. You know, it's very relevant to my audience. And also you've got a pretty interesting story yourself. So before we dive into, into today's topic and my questions for you real quick, just tell the listeners who you are, what you do, and how did you get into what you do?

Well, I'll try to encapsulate that really quickly in a thumbnail sketch. But I'm a baby boomer and came of age in the 1960s. Kind of classic angry young man, family issues and so forth. So came of age with a big hole in my gut, tried to fill it up with anything I could and. And went headlong into the counterculture of that time. I was also always a spiritual seeker. And so before I could untangle all that, I found my way into a federal prison on drug trafficking charges. Along the way, I'd gotten a master's degree in Buddhist and Western psychology and been deeply practicing meditation and the Buddhist tradition. So when I got to prison, I had a lot of knowledge and skills and a strong meditation practice, and that only got stronger. Really dedicated my life to transforming myself for the 14 years I was in prison and came out about 23 years ago. And I've had nothing but opportunity ever since. But that really came from taking this approach of radical responsibility, of realizing I had to embrace 100% ownership responsibly, having gotten myself into that situation, what I was going to do with it and what my life would be if and when I got out. And that approach has stood me very well. And I've had a great life and continue to have a great life with a lot of joy, opportunity and so forth.

That's amazing. So I'm just curious, you know, like, obviously I've never been to prison, so. So I don't know what it's like. But, you know, I'm assuming going to prison is, you know, it's a shocking experience for you, right? You know, like, I'm assuming it wasn't very shocking experience.

And in fact, the night before my sentencing, I was convicted of the so called kingpin statute. I don't think I was a Kingpin or I wouldn't have gone. If they hadn't indicted me on that, I would have just pled guilty and put myself at the mercy of the court. But they did. And that carried a potentially a life with no parole sentence up to life anywhere from at that time, 10 years to life. And so the night of my sentencing, I was facing the possibility of life with no parole the next day, which mean I would never have gotten out of prison. In fact, I was given a 30 year sentence and I was 35 years old. So I thought I'd be 65 before I could get out what the paper said the next day. And so incredibly shocking, obviously, and really woke me up also. My son was 9 years old at the time, so I felt like I, you know, I was devastated over what I'd done to him. He was going to grow up without a dad. So all that was incredibly shocking. As it turned out, I was sentenced under the old law before 1987, so I got a lot of good time by staying out of trouble. So in fact, I had to serve 14 years. That 14 and a half years is what I ended up serving by managing to stay out of trouble. It was long enough. But it's also a very traumatizing environment, a very negative environment, a very dangerous, scary environment. And I was lucky. I went in with a lot of skills to take good care of myself. And it was still very challenging, but I worked hard at it and it ended up being a very transformational journey for me. For most people, they end up in prison and they actually come out worse.

Yeah, that was actually my question. You know, like, I'm assuming you, you know, going to prison obviously was very difficult for you, and I'm assuming you didn't received it well. Right. You know, like, I'm sure, like you had a lot of negative beliefs and interpretations about what's happening. Just like walk me through that journey. Like, how did you go from that victim mindset into taking responsibility for yourself?

Yeah, well, I was fortunate. I mean, I had my share of victim mindset stuff going on when I was young, like anybody. And I had even justified my involvement in drug smuggling by, you know, the whole world's hypocritical and feeling, you know, the government's corrupt, everybody's corrupt. You know, I had all this kind of us versus them thinking and. But at the same time, I also had my share of good values for my family. You know, they were kind of people that took care of business, that owned a family business. I wasn't like totally Immersed in a victim mindset. And also I'd add all this Buddhist training, which is the antithesis of a victim mindset. Right. So at any rate, when I got to prison, I realized that, you know, this was an incredibly negative environment where everybody's walking around with a big victim story. Even though society seeing them as the perpetrator, they feel victimized by society, by their lives. And in many cases, they have been victimized by their lives in their childhood. And that's how people end up getting into the criminal justice system. Right. The vast majority of prisoners have a lot of childhood negative experiences. Abuse, neglect, all kinds of things. But I realized this was an incredibly negative environment, and if I didn't really work hard at it, I could come out negative, bitter, broken, you know, and all these things. And I didn't even want to live that way while I was there. You know, unfortunately, I had already had a lot of training in the Buddhist tradition. I'd had a lot of training in psychology. So I knew what I was up against. And I knew, you know, I've got to take 100% ownership for having got myself here, because I had a lot. There are a lot of people I could have blamed if I wanted to. People that stubbed me in the back. The government, when they prosecute, they play hardball, they break all the rules, they break their own laws, do whatever it takes to convict you. I could have focused on all that. Wouldn't have done me a damn bit of good. So I said, no, I got to focus on. I got myself here. What am I going to do with it? To get myself through this and beyond this. And I chose to make that my total focus. And doing so allowed me to do a lot of good. While I was there, I created two national nonprofit organizations that catalyzed two national movements, the prison meditation movement and the prison hospice movement. And you're not supposed to be able to do that as a prisoner, but I really was able to do that by operating from this place of radical responsibility, radical ownership. Another way you can look at it, it's radical self empowerment. Really?

I love that. That's awesome. So I've got an interesting question for you here. You know, so the majority of the listeners of the podcast, you know, like, they're shy, they're introverted, they have technical jobs, right? And a lot of them grew up in an environment where academic success was their priority. You know, like, their parents really encourage them to go to school, get good grades, get a good job, and now they're in their late 20s. Right. And they're kind of stuck in this predicament where, you know, like, they want to veer off the path, so to speak. Right. Like, they want more for themselves than just career success. They want to start taking responsibility for their life. They want to put themselves out there, learn to be social. But then they're caught up mentally with the old paradigm. Right. You know, like the way their dad, like, was so hard on them or their mom, like said all these things about them and whatnot. And then for some reason, their limiting beliefs are holding them back from moving forward. Right. So what are your thoughts on that? Like, how do you overcome those limiting beliefs?

Yeah, well, I think there's a number of angles to take on it. One is it's really great to know we have them. Right? Because otherwise they just unconsciously drive how we show up in life. They drive our attitudes, beliefs, our feelings, emotions, and our behaviors. And that can be a completely unconscious process. So the first thing is to become aware that we do have all these limiting core beliefs and then to realize that they're untrue, that none of them are true, and they're really. That all beliefs are just stories, really. It's all narrative. It may be meaningful and our stories may have roots and real experiences, but it's still basically narrative. And it gets programmed into our brain and it really impacts us and can really limit us. Right? So first realizing what we're up against and then realizing that we do have to really learn about if someone is nerdy. Well, we can get nerdy about neurobiology and neuropsychology and self directed neuroplasticity. You know, we can read Dan Siegel, we can read Rick Hansen, we can read Fleet Mall and learn about how to rewire our own brain, right? We can learn about that very simple technologies that work. And a lot of it is grounded in the contemplative practices that originally came from Asia, right? From Buddhism and Taoism. And these meditation practices and self healing practices and breath work practices can help us develop more resilience, right? And heal all that stuff. I mean, there's ways in which we can become more embodied, use meditation and mindfulness to become really live more in our body and not so much up in our head, not so much out in the world, but really come into the body, learn to feel the body all the way down to the bones, and develop that internal resonance through mindfulness of body that we tap into this embodied presence that will actually heal our nervous system, it'll heal trauma, it allows all that the kinks and tangles in our nervous system to untangle themselves and actually allows our brain to rewire itself and we can pay attention to those negative corporates we can journal, we can listen to our self talk, listening to that self talk going on between our ears all the time and hearing all those self judgments, all those weights which I think I'm not enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not tall enough, I'm not handsome enough, I'm not rich enough, right? Or the world's a scary place and there's not enough love to go around. There's not enough of this to go around. There's not, you know, all that not enoughness, right? And we can just realize that that's not true. You know, we can listen to motivational tapes from a lot of great Tony Robbins or wherever, whoever we need to listen to to convince us that none of that is true. We are enough. We are all here for a reason. We're all here for a purpose. We all have the divine, the sacred in us and the world is full of abundance, right? So all that not enoughness, it's all a lie. And you know, we all, it's in the human condition because you know what's job one for any species? Survival, right? So our biology is set up for survival and so we have a lot of fear based survival based conditioning in us but as human beings we're also conscious, we can override that, right? But if we don't then. And what our culture has been full of because of something called the negativity bias, we've all had a lot of negativity and a lot of negative views of limiting core beliefs conditioned into us. We can decondition that, we can take responsibility for deconditioning ourselves. How do we do that? We develop some kind of self awareness practice like mindfulness meditation. We listen to powerful motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and other great coaches, Robin Sharma, people like that. You read books by people like my book and some of the others I mentioned. You know, we got to put new information, we got a lot of bad information we grew up with, it's in our nervous system. But we need to feed ourselves new information and also have a self reflective practice so we can be aware when these negative core beliefs are driving our life and we see that pushing us and it would go oh I see, that's just my limiting core belief doing that. Take a breath, let go of that, make a different choice. And every time we do that, we're boycotting the old patterns in our brain. And those neural networks get weaker. And every time we act on a new pattern, it develops new neural networks and they get stronger. And basically, we want to change that internal landscape in our brain and where we, instead of having limiting core beliefs, we want positive beliefs. We want beliefs about the abundance of life. We want beliefs about I am enough. And we want to live with that sense of possibility. Now, you can't just flip a switch and get there, but knowing that it's possible, anybody can do it. You know, I spent 14 and a half years in a maximum security prison, right? Wow. It's a horrible place. And I used all these practices to live in there. In a way, I was surrounded by all kinds of reasons to be miserable all day long and all kinds of people, both my fellow prisoners and the prison correctional officers making a great effort to keep me miserable. I refused to let them make me miserable. I lived in a pretty cheerful, joyful way. I had pain. The biggest pain for me while I was in prison was the fact that my son was growing up without his dad. And then I was separated from my family and my loved ones and my community. But apart from that, I really lived with a sense of positivity and cheerfulness because I worked at it. I retrained my brain. And when I came out of prison, instead of coming out broken or bitter, with a chip on my shoulder or a sense of entitlement, I came out with a positive attitude, ready to get to work and ready to create the life I wanted. And I've been doing that ever since. And all that came through retraining my own brain. And all the information's there today. You know, there's so many great teachers and so many great books available.

Hey, real quick. I just wanted to mention something. If you want to read detailed articles on how to develop your charisma, improve your conversation skills, and create quality connections with others, make sure you check out the blog by going to socialconfidencemastery.com all right, let's get back to the show.

I'd like to hit it from one other level here. So when we think about confidence, right? Having the confidence to step into life, to engage life, to create opportunities for ourselves, whether it's socially or professionally, in intimate relationships or friends or whatever it is to have the confidence to step into life and engage life. And there's two types of confidence. There's unconditional confidence, and then there's more kind of conditional relative confidence. Now they're both important. Now we develop kind of relative confidence mostly over what we're good at, right? Some of us were really good in mathematics. Some of us maybe are musically inclined. Some of us are athletic. Some of us are really gregarious. We make friends easily or something, whatever. We all have our abilities. Some these days, people call it your superpower, right? Or whatever your abilities are, right? So that's what we're good at, and that's where we feel confident. We tend to gravitate towards places where. Where we'll get, you know, positive affirmation for being good at that. So if we're an athletic, we're going to hang out with the jocks, right? If we're computer programmer, we're going to hang out with the other computer programmer nerds where we'll get a firm for our abilities there, right? So, you know, those are fine. And it's good to learn more. It's good to learn as much as we can, to develop as many skills as we can, to increase our skills. And there's so many trainings out there today. If you want to get better at creating relationships, there's a training for that. There's a training for everything out there today, right? If you want it now to be successful dating, there's great trainings out there for being successful in dating, right? There's trainings for everything. It's all available online. Developing all that confidence is important, but then it's also really important to develop what I call unconditional confidence. Because those relative forms of confidence are great, but they can disappear on us. You know, what if we have an injury, lose our job, or we get fired from our job or something terrible happen to us and we could no longer engage the skill that gives us the most confidence in life, right? Where would our confidence be then? Right? So we need to drop into our being and discover something that my first meditation teacher called basic goodness. Basic goodness. And that's developing the experiential confidence and faith that each of us is innately whole, good, pure. We're not broken, we don't need fixing. You know, we have all this internal goodness and wisdom. Not so much goodness, good versus bad, but just his overall wholeness. You know, life is not bad. I mean, the idea that life is somehow bad. I mean, life is all we know, right? Life is good, right? So. And we're part of life, so of course we're good. Now we get. We may have all this negative conditioning that we inherited from our family and the culture and whatever. You know, we could blame them, but then they would have to blame the grandparents, the great grand. It's a human condition, right? So we all got our share of it. It's up to each one of us to transform it. But below all that noise, below all that conditioning, we can drop into the depths of our being where we can experience a level of ourselves where we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we're not broken. We don't need fixing, that we are fundamentally okay. And that can even carry us through to the moment of our death and really keep us from being afraid of death, because we know there's some level in us that either doesn't die or if it does, it dissolves into the great universal, you know, and we touch into something that's beyond the limited self. It's beyond all the conditions. And, you know, the way we touch into that are various meditation practices that allow us to slow down, drop in and drop into the body, into the breath. And over time, we get deeper and deeper into our own being, and we realize, I'm okay. And, you know, we've always known that because despite all the lies we've heard growing up, you know, and we live in a highly consumerist culture where the whole marketing message is, you're not okay, but if you buy this, you might be okay for a moment, right? If you have the right car, the right clothes, you might be just cool enough, you know, to get a date until the next thing comes out. Then you won't be cool anymore, right? So the whole consumerist culture is built on this lie that we're not enough. And as children are bathed in that, the minute they start watching tv, right, you're not enough. So buy this. Buy this, right? So. But we've always known that's a lie. Some part of our being, way back then, our being has always known it's a lie. And then we heard things from our parents. Our parents were well intended, but they didn't understand how all this works. So they were trying to give us messaging that would get us to grow up and be successful. But they do it in such way, unintentionally, that we internalize a lot of messages of we're not okay or we'll only be okay if. Right? And some part of us has always known that's a lie. And by, through meditation, we can drop and experience that part of ourselves that knows that beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm fundamentally okay now. Do I want to thrive in life? Yeah. But when we get the fear out of the way, in the sense that we're broken out of the way, then we'll naturally start to thrive. Life thrives. It's more about getting rid of the obstacles. We all have our talents. We all have our superpowers. If we begin to dissolve the fear and the limiting core beliefs and touch into that place where I know I'm okay, I know I'm innately good, I know I'm talented. I know I have intelligence. I know I have innate wisdom, then we will just naturally start to thrive. We'll find our path in life, and we'll begin to thrive. Wow.

I feel like you just answered all the questions that I've got listed here. It's pretty amazing. I do have a question, though. In your book, you mentioned, you know, like, how to discover authentic relationships. Can you tell me more about that?

Yeah. So in the book Radical Responsibility, I make the distinction between what we call the drama zone.

Yeah.

And what I call the empowerment zone.

Yes.

And, you know, where we want to live as much as possible is in the empowerment zone. And down the drama zone is Stephen Carbon's drama triangle, with that triangulation between the victim mindset, the persecutor mindset, and the rescuer mindset, being a psychological rescuer, all that creates drama. And it's the basis of all melodrama, right? The hero, the villain, and the victim. Right. You know, the good guy, the bad guy, and the victim. You know, it's the heart of every melodrama, every cop show, every movie. Right. But it also plays out very destructively in our lives. Creates endless drama, destroys families, harms children. Plays out on the world stage is endless war. We have the war in Ukraine right now. That's all the dynamics of the drama triangle. Right? And when we're caught down there, the strategies we get into to not feel helpless, we get into blaming, blaming others instead of taking ownership, we get into justifying our own behaviors. We get into holding on to resentments, chewing on old feelings and hanging on to them like ammunition we can play later. And then we get hooked on being right. We'd rather be right than be in relationship. Right. So all that undermines real relationship. Now, you can buy lots of people that want to play down there in the drama zone be drama zone buddies. But that's not what we mean by authentic relationship. That's just people that are going to be stuck in that world of creating endless drama. Right. Well, how do we get out of there? We get out of there through what I call radical responsibility. By assuming responsibility for our own circumstances, no matter how bad a situation we're in. We can ask ourselves this One magical question, like I might feel completely helpless. I may be broke, I may not have a job or I have a job, my boss is a tyrant or I feel like I can't get a break, you know, the world's against me, the whole thing. And there's one question and that's the victim, mind you. I feel helpless, powerless. I'm blaming it on everybody but myself. I feel. Okay, here's the question. What can I do?

What can I do? We just stay with that question. That shifts me into the mindset of possibility, solution based thinking. There's always a million things we could do. There's a million ways we can approach any situation, A million ways we can approach any person. You know, if we have a boss, that's difficult, well, how we approach them, we're going to get a different result, right? We can approach and we can learn, we can get coaching, we can study, we can train ourselves. There's so many resources available today. So what can I do? What can I do that gets me back into the empowerment zone? And I shift from the victim mindset to what I call the co creative mindset. Like we can't control life, but we have a co creative relationship with life. There's a, what comes back has a lot to do with what we're putting out there. It's not necessarily linear or direct. You know, things happen. But we all know there's some relationship between who we're being and how we're being and what unfolds in our life. So we tend to focusing on what other people are doing. You know, if something happens, we might convince the whole world or maybe the whole world would agree. You know, it's 80% that person's fault. You know, and I feel vindicated. They agree it's all that person's fault or at least 80% that person. I feel vindicated. What did I do? I just gave all my power away. I'm upset, I'm angry, I'm upset. I'm not happy. It's their fault. Can I control them? No. Can I control you? No. I can't control you. We cannot control other people. So when we blame, it may feel very reasonable to do so. But we're giving our power away. The only place we have any real power is right here. And that's hard enough because we're up against all that conditioning. You know, we absorb this kids, but we can change that. And that's the only place we have any power. So we assume that ownership and then we have integrity. We keep our agreements with others. Right. We make clear agreements and we keep them. We have integrity. And then we learn to be open and real and genuine with others. So if you and I have a personal or professional relationship. Right. And I don't blame my stuff on you. I don't project my stuff onto you. I own my own stuff. Right. And if I keep my agreements with you and if I'm willing to be open, real and genuine with you, what does that create between you and I?

A great relationship and.

Well, yes, and. But before that, maybe it creates something that's the basis of authentic relationship. I keep my. I don't blame myself on you.

Well, there's trust.

There's trust, Absolutely. It creates trust, and trust is the ground of authentic relationship. So that's how we create trust. Right. And also, the more we get in touch with that inner part of ourselves that knows we're okay, we're not broken, we don't know fixing that basic goodness that radiates from us. And that's very attractive. Wow. We will attract people into it. People aren't attracted to the victim mindset. They say, well, you know, attracted to the victim mindset is either other victims or persecutors or psychological rescue. People that want to be in the drama zone. But the kind of people that we're going to have good lives with, an amazing life with, they're not attracted to that. So when we start to really develop greater confidence in our own goodness, that magnetizes people and opportunities and so forth, you know, it takes work, takes time. But there are so many resources in the world now today to train ourselves. Right. We can be listening to audio tapes all the time by really good motivational speakers. We can be reading books like mine and the others I mentioned, like Rick Hansen's work, Dan Siegel's work, Robin Sharma, other. There's so many great teachers. We can just feed ourselves that information and we will find ourselves beginning to change.

That's amazing. Wow. My last question, you know, like, just to tie everything together, how do you sustain the changes that you've made so you don't slip back into your old, you know, disempowering habits?

You need to keep up the work that got you there. Right. So I'm listening to powerful motivational stuff all the time. Yeah, I read all the time. I'm continually feeding myself positive transformational data into myself. I meditate for an hour every day. Right.

Wow.

I have a workout program. So I design my life. I live a life by design. I don't live a haphazard life. I don't just wake up in whatever mood I wake up in and then I just get pulled along by my email or whatever is happening. No, I wake up with a purpose and a vision and a plan. And my first two and a half hours of my day is completely scripted. What I do, you know, I wake up, I immediately do exercise in bed, a lot of stretching, yoga, check exercise. Then I get out and do more breath work and more exercise. Then I go take my shower. Then I go into my meditation room with my wife. We do an hour, sometimes an hour 20 minutes of meditation. Then I come down, I have a really nutritious breakfast and spend time with my wife. So I really feed myself really, really good. And good food, good supplements and so forth. And then time with my wife. And then I'm ready to start my day, right? And then I focus the first part of my day on the hard stuff, really creating new products and stuff that really take. I don't just get into email and start distracting myself with easy stuff. I focus. Because the morning is where you have the most commitment, the most energy, the most willpower, Right? So we have to think about how do we design our lives and learn about habit formation. I mean, so many great books on habits today. BJ Fogg's work, you know, tiny habits and the idea of habit stacking and the technology's all there. It's all there and it's all available. Books are cheap to get books, but even training courses, even the really great teachers that have training courses that you might have to pay something, a lot of that's available very inexpensively and they all offer stuff for free. So, you know, I mean, there's just so many resources if we want to train ourselves. For me, life is about training ourselves. It's about being in training till the moment we die. What are we training ourselves? We're training ourselves, become a fully actualized human being. And in the end, we're training ourselves to die. Well, you know, but to me, about being in training.

Wow, I love that.

Holy.

So I'd love to give you an opportunity right now to just talk more about your book. What's it about and who should get it.

Well, everything I've been talking about is in the book. The first chapter in the book is about discovering our innate goodness. The second chapter is about developing a mindfulness practice, a self awareness meditation, mindfulness practice. The third chapter is about developing emotional intelligence. Right? And then it goes into all the neuroscience, the habit formation stuff. It explains that whole distinction between the drama zone and the empowerment zone, all of that talk, you know, so it's all there. The book is really meant for anybody. It can be applied to your personal life, it can be applied to your business life, your professional life. It's there for anybody. People can find all about it. The book has its own website. It's radicalresponsibilitybook.com, radicalresponsibilitybook.com and there you can read about, you can get a free chapter, you can get the first chapter for free. And you can read all the bestselling authors who give an accolades to the book, people like Dan Siegel and Rick Hansen and others. So, and then right there you can order, if you want to order from Amazon, Barnes and whoever you want to order from, you can do it right there from the website Radical Responsibility book dot com.

Amazing. And for people who want to find out more about you personally and reach.

Out, go to my website, fleet mall.com to fleet mall.com and from there they can get to my courses on fleetdoll.com, you'll see a tab says courses. That'll take you to my other website, Heartbeat Institute. And you know, one of a very inexpensive course I have there is called Mindful Self Acceptance. That can be a great place to start and just developing a more positive relationship with ourselves.

I love that. That's amazing. Well, Dr. Fleet, holy, you gave so much incredible advice. Thank you so much for being so generous. And I'm sure our listeners got a lot of value as I have from this conversation and, and I encourage everyone who's tuned in right now to check out your book and find out more about you. So yeah, Dr. Fleet, thanks again for making time. I'm so glad we got connected and I'll talk to you very soon.

Yeah, thank you so much, Mike. And you know, if your audience are people who really learn to become like computer programmers or other kind of tech stuff, they had to work hard, they had to really learn a lot. Take that same willingness to learn and apply it to self development, to personal development. Same effort you took to become a programmer, put that into self development and your life will begin to unfold beautifully.

I love that. I totally agree. All right. Okay, talk to you soon. See ya.

Take care, Mike. Bye. Bye.

Would you like to watch more in depth videos that will help you have better people skills? If so, look up social confidence mastery on YouTube and subscribe to the channel. All right, that's it for me for now and I'll see you in the next episode.