Move Beyond Blame with Radical Responsibility with Fleet Maull • 238

And if this is your first time giving your mind a little love, I have a few goodies for you. First, don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And second, sign up for the morning Mind Love. Think of it like a weekday oracle from your highest self to help you start each day with a positive focus. Plus, you'll get two gifts absolutely free, a 30 minute binaural meditation and 30 days of journaling prompts to help you remember who you truly are. So join over 9,000 people and go to mindlove.com to sign up. Welcome to Mind Love episode 238. Today's episode is all about moving beyond blame with radical responsibility.

Most of us assume that our emotions, our feelings are caused by other people's situations outside of ourselves, right? And it seems pretty compelling. Somebody yells at us, I'm afraid. Or somebody does this and I'm upset, or somebody, you know. It seems like there's a direct causal relationship, but we need to really reflect on that more deeply. How do our emotions actually arise? Where do these arise from? They actually arise based on our perception of our needs being met or not.

Turn up your frequency with Mind Love bite sized brain hacks for seekers, dreamers and doers. It's time to give your mind a little love with your host, Melissa Monty.

If you're new to Mind Love, first I am so glad you're here. And second, don't forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Giving your mind a little love isn't just a one time thing, it's a way of life. Plus more subscribers helps me attract more amazing guests and gives you more opportunities to change your life. So don't forget to subscribe today. I'm so excited to share a review from Kali Bailey who says you'll be hooked. I stumbled across Melissa Monte's podcast Mind Love in 2019 while working. I was looking for something to bring me peace and ironically this podcast was a top recommendation in my podcast list on Pandora. After one episode I was hooked. I look forward to each episode and always have a notebook, pen and highlighter handy. Melissa is like the sister that we never had. I highly recommend this podcast. Thank you Kali. I am sending so much love to both you and your partner. So thank you for sharing your story. I did skip a small part just for sensitivity just in case. But just know that I am so thankful for both of you. And now let's get to the show. Let me ask you a question. Whose fault is it that you are the way you are or that you are where you are. If that kid in middle school wouldn't have called me fat, I bet I wouldn't have developed an eating disorder. If my high school guidance counselor would have given me the correct information, I bet I would have gotten into the college that I wanted to. And my life could have been dramatically different. If my ex hadn't turned out to be a covert criminal, I bet I wouldn't have hit such a deep rock bottom that took me so long to climb out of. If my parents understood investing or entrepreneurship, I bet I wouldn't have had to waste so much time figuring it all out myself. I would have been smarter, more successful, and probably prettier somehow. Okay, that all sounds a little ridiculous now, but for years I believed all of those things to be true. And even now, I could justify all of those statements with facts and feelings and probably get myself back to that place. And I would start to get angry or sad or vengeful or dejected. But here's the thing. I don't have a whole lot of personal power there. By placing other people at fault for where I am or who I am, I give all my power away. I'm telling myself over and over again that other people had the power to create my life and that I don't. I've had quite a few circumstances in my life that seemingly threw me off course, and each time it felt like a loss, a loss of the future that I had envisioned that is suddenly no longer available to me. And each time, it sucked pretty bad. Like a breakup where you suddenly realize the family, the house, the partner you've always envisioned is just not an option anymore. So you start from scratch. It feels like all the progress that you made before this big thing is just gone, and now you're back to square one. But here's what I've learned over the years. No one person or situation has ever or can ever thwart my highest path. And if I truly believe that, that means that any disruptions to my plans have been for my highest good. Maybe those events that seemed so terrible at the time are part of the universe conspiring to bump me onto a different timeline or to push me to develop strength or skills or compassion or understanding so that I can become a fuller version of who I am meant to be. The problem is, when you're right in the thick of it all, it can feel nearly impossible to trust that. We tend to get tunnel vision when things aren't going our way. We lose sight of the broader perspective of everything that happened. Until this point and everything that could happen after we see the problem and we see ourselves stuck in it. At this point in my life, enough things have gone wrong and I'm using air quotes here, that I have a neural pathway that I can often force myself onto to see the bigger picture. And I can say everything happens for a reason. This too shall pass. What's in this for me? I know that my limitations are all just perceptions. So instead of seeing them as roadblocks, I can choose to see what they're funneling me towards. Yeah, options may be taken away, but I can trust that if they're not available, they were never meant for me. Instead, the limitations are guideposts toward my highest purpose. But how do we get there? How do we finally move beyond blame so that the wider perspective is our default? That's what we're talking about today, and Our guest is Dr. Fleet Mall. He's a renowned growth mindset teacher who delivers training programs and seminars around the world, both in person and online through Heart Mind Institute. He's also a meditation teacher and he founded the Prison Mindfulness Institute and National Prison Hospice association, all while serving a 14 year mandatory minimum federal drug sentence from 1985 to 1999. He's all about taking radical responsibility for your life. Three key things we will learn are how to understand the defining moments that got you here without placing blame, how to find presence even when the present moment isn't where you want to be at all, and the link between radical responsibility and mindfulness based emotional intelligence.

Why choose a Sleep Number Smart bed?

Can I make my sight softer?

Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your sleep number setting J.D. power ranks sleep number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store and online. And now all mattresses are on sale, plus free home delivery during our Cyber Week sale limited time. For J.D. power 2025 award information, visit J.D. power.com awards. Check it out at a Sleep Number store or SleepNumber.com today.

The wait is over. Dive into Audible's most anticipated collection, the Best of 2025, featuring top audiobooks, podcasts and originals across all genres, our editors have carefully curated this year's must listens. From brilliant hidden gems to the buzziest new releases, every title in this collection has earned its spot. This is your go to for the absolute best in 2025 audio entertainment. Whether you love thrillers, romance or nonfiction, your next favorite listen Awaits. Discover why there's more to imagine when you listen@audible.com BestOfTheYear.

And now let's welcome Fleet Mall to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So what is your story? You went from prison to purpose, it seems. So fill us in on all that in between.

Well, it's kind of a long story.

I was, I'm a baby boomer and I came of age in the 60s and early 70s and so went through the whole counterculture era and kind of graduated from high school as a classic angry young man. A lot of different family stuff, family of origin and stuff. And at any rate, I was kind of inclined just to go headlong into the counterculture movement and the radical politics today, all the rest of it. And there was a lot of good stuff in there and a lot of crazy stuff. And I was always a spiritual seeker at the same time. And before I could untangle all that, I earned my way into a federal prison sentence for drug trafficking. Along the way I had been deeply training as a Buddhist practitioner and teacher and got a master's, a clinical, a master's degree in psychology at psychotherapy. It was. Usually master's degrees aren't really that clinical, but this is a three year clinical training program. So it's kind of a unique at the master's level. And so I had, I had a lot of training and I'd had kind of this split life where I was doing a lot of good stuff with my life. And I had this whole shadow part of my life that kind of originated from leaving the country in the early 70s to just get away from the drug scene. But also I just, you know, I was so caught up in the US versus something and just, you know, was so alienated from my own culture and so forth. When Nixon was reelected the second term, I just couldn't stand being in the country anymore. So I just started traveling. I was also looking for something real in my life to plug into. And I always had this idea that I would find that in South America somehow. And so I found myself living outside the country as an expat. And you know, I was been deeply involved in drug experimentation for quite a while. But I fell into small, small scale drug smuggling just as a way to kind of continue to live outside the system. And I knew that had to end. And I knew that there was a huge disconnect between that and my growing involvement in my Buddhist path. But before I could manage to untangle those two, I ended up earning my way into a substantial federal Prison sentence. And. But once I got locked up, that completely woke me up. And I was devastated over what I'd done to my son, who was nine years old at the time, was now going to grow up without a dad, and over what I'd done to myself, what I'd done to my family, my community, how I'd let my spiritual community, my spiritual teacher down, my family down. And I was originally sentenced to a 30 year no parole sentence. I was 35 and paper next day said I'd be 65 before I have any chance of release. So I pretty much thought my life as I knew it was over. As it turned out, I was sentenced under the old federal sentencing laws where they still had good time and they used to have parole, even though I had a no parole sentence. But I still had good times. So once I figured that all out, I figured out if I stayed out of trouble, I'd serve 18 and a half on 20 on 30. And then it took about three years for my appeal to go through the courts. And my appeal, they knocked off one charge. And so I reduced to 25. So then I knew I'd served 14 and a half if I stayed out of trouble. And I managed to stay out of trouble. And so that's what I did. I served 14 and a half years. But when I initially got locked up, I really thought 30 years was 30 years. But even, you know, of course, 14 and a half years, a long time. I think that would have. Even if I just gotten sentenced to 14 years, I think that would have been enough of a wake up call in and of itself. But because of all that, I just became radically dedicated to get all the negativity out of my life and take all the good things I've received and really do something valuable with my life and leave my son a better legacy than just his dad went to prison. And so I really started leading an incredibly intentional and disciplined life from the minute I went to prison. And that's just continued ever since.

That is so fascinating. I'm 37 right now, so I'm imagining like it would be right around this time in my life to receive that kind of sentence would be life shattering, really. I can actually relate on a very small level. In my early 20s, I got in a bad relationship. There's a whole lot of details to that story. But long story short, I ended up dating somebody who. I didn't know it in the beginning, but he was apparently the largest. He had created the largest burglary ring in the Coachella Valley. And I got arrested for his crimes. And so I was in jail having kind of similar wake up calls, but not nearly the amount of previous spiritual teaching or understanding because I was only, like I said, my early 20s. I was 22 at the time. How do you think that previous spiritual training changed your experience being inside that prison for so long?

Well, it was everything. I've been interviewed in the media quite a bit over the years about my experience. And you know, sometimes people say, well, it seems like prison really worked well for you, and it did. But I always have to say that for the vast majority of prisoners, it doesn't work well at all. It's a very debilitating experience. And most people come out of prison worse than they went in. Really, the vast majority of people come out of prison worse than they went in. And it was because I came in with all that background and training and I immediately recognized I was in an incredibly negative environment and a one that was just pervaded with victim mindsets. Like the minute you spoke with any, you'd meet a fellow prisoner and the kind of ritual was you go out and walk the track and exchange your victim stories. Right. You know, we think of prisoners as the persecutors, but almost universally people are locked up, they feel they've been victimized, they were over prosecuted, you know, they were victims of their Paul partners or their lawyers or whatever. And they, you know, of course they're being buried under a mountain of shame and guilt, so they just naturally armor up with bitterness, their victim story with anger, what have you, just as a way to survive. And, and actually most of them were severely victimized as children. That's how people end up in the criminal justice system for the most part. But at any rate, I realized I didn't want to come out of prison angry and bitter with a big victim story. I didn't even want to live that way while I was in prison. And I immediately realized that if I didn't do something to not end up in that place, if I wasn't really proactive about that, I would end up there because that's the world I was in. And I realized really the only way through that experience and out, if I had no surety that I'd survived my time, I was in a federal prison hospital. I was one of the regular inmates there, just helping run the place. And I ended up teaching school for 14 years. But other prisoners were working in food service or housekeeping or the welding shop or whatever. But they had about 300 of us who were what they call the work cadre. And everybody else was either a medical or psychiatric patient. So people were dying all around us. And. And then also there were some deaths by violence while I was there as well. So I had no surety that I would survive my prison time. But it became really clear to me that my ability to get through this and do anything positive with my time in prison, as well as any chance I'd have of creating a good life, a positive life for myself when I got out, was going to require that I embrace 100%, 200% responsibility for having got myself there and what I was going to do with it. So that's really where the radical responsibility model, the name of my book, was born. And, you know, and that, you know, I just relentlessly applied that approach to my life, which was grounded also in my Buddhist training and so forth. And I was able to accomplish a lot while I was there. And I've had nothing but opportunities since I got out.

I experienced the same thing with really having my own victim story. I sat in that victim story for years, and I could come up with every single reason as to why I was a victim. You know, like, I ended up in jail for somebody else's crime. And it's interesting because it took me a couple years, but when I started to actually own up to my side of that, how I ended up there, what I allowed the things I caught on to and made excuses for beforehand, that was actually when my life started to change. Even though I started to change different behaviors, I tried to change the way that I thought, but it seemed like every time I went back to that victim story, I just gave all of my power away. And so all of a sudden, there was not much I could do because I didn't make this choice. I didn't get here. And versus, yes, like I said, there were true points in that story, but it was all about that mindset of how I chose to look at myself and my life moving forward. But I'm curious. There are a lot of people that are victimized, and we hear about that in the prison system, especially with just the way racial inequality comes out, things like that. How do you talk to somebody who has legitimately been victimized to teach them this sort of teaching and make them realize really the power of it, because, like we said, some people really are victimized. So how do you get out of a victim mindset if that is your truth?

Well, you pointed to the most important thing to understand about the victim mindset, no matter how compelling our victim story is. Or how based in actual incidents it may be, we are giving our power away. To the extent that we align with and identify with our victim story, we in the end we give our power away because we cannot control other people or the world around us. And if we attribute causation for where we are and where we're going to go to anything outside of ourselves, we're giving that power over ourselves. Right? So that's the whole thing and that's the difficult thing. I mean in my trainings people get that very clearly because we teach it in a very experiential way. And what I ask people to look at is when they're in any kind of situation that they're unhappy about, it really could be the true. If I'm really happy about something and I'm convinced I'm happy because so and so did X, well I'm actually setting myself up for unhappiness because if so and so stops doing X now I'm going to be unhappy, right? So any way in which we externalize the causation of our feelings, we're really giving our power away. But generally we think of it mostly in situations where we're unhappy about something. So I always invite people to look into. Is there any way I can actually, if I get really radically honest anyway, I can see that I actually set myself up. I mean that actually caused it. I'm sorry, that actually caused it or contributed to it or is there some way I can see that I've been unconsciously promoting it. The idea from transactional analysis where we have these life scripts from our childhood and we just keep playing them out to prove they're true because it was the best way we could make sense of something. When we're two or three years old and they become like scripts of a player movie that are embedded in our consciousness, we just keep playing them out till we don't. So I do have some kind of unconscious way in which I set myself up. You know, all of the self sabotage stuff, you know, we reckon people getting that same dead end, the same abusive relationship or same dead end job again and again and again, you know there's something going on there. Or can I at least see, as you mentioned, that I allowed it. Maybe I just allowed myself into that situation because I wasn't paying attention. I didn't do my due diligence, I didn't get a clear agreement, I was being a lazy communicator or I was people pleasing or enabling. So there's a million ways we can see that we had some relationship to what happened to us. But even in the case where I get as radically honest as I can and I can't see I had any relationship to it whatsoever, and I could get 100 people who agreed, no, no, yeah, you're completely innocent. There's no way to tie any thread. Unless we're talking about past life, karma, and who knows about things like that, right? There's no thread of connection. Well, still, I'm going to embrace ownership and responsibility for that. Why? Because it's the only place I have any power. What am I going to own? I'm going to own my choices. What am I going to do with this now? Now, even when I'm really trying to look into to see if I had any threat of connection to how I ended up in a situation, I'm not doing that for the purpose of blame. Self blame. This has absolutely nothing to do with blaming ourselves, others or victims. It's for the purpose of learning. I can see, oh, I see how I got from point A to point C. I went from A to B to C. Well, next time I'll take a right turn instead of a left turn. I'll get a different result. But even in those situations where we see we had no connection at all, at the very least, I can own. Okay, what am I going to do with this now? Am I going to let it take me down and bury me in a victim mindset? Or am I going to find the most creative way I can respond to this to take my life forward? So you asked about people who, you know, really have been victimized in some way. And you know, this is not about going to someone who's been terribly victimized in some way and saying, you know, you need to get off your victim trip. Obviously not. That would be terrible. Right? When terrible things, really terrible things happen to people, they may need to have that validated. They may need a lot of support. They may do all kinds of things for their healing. And it may be almost unbelievably heroic for people to step out of that mindset when they've really experienced a really severe victimization. But people do and people have and people always have. And there's countless stories of people who've experienced the worst possible things you could imagine and they've stepped out of that. For example, Viktor Frankl, who wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning after his time in the death camp of Auschwitz and losing his whole family. But there's countless examples of people who've been able to do that. Now, of course, most of us go into that victim mindset around all kinds of little stuff that's going on all day long. And that's a place where we can practice, right? When we find ourselves in a victim mindset, a whole victim mindset loop in our head because somebody didn't show up for an appointment or somebody broke a date with us or, or the weather change or whatever. We can, that's the stuff we can work with, right? But I'll give you another example. When I go into prisons, right? So, and you brought that up with, and I mentioned before, that most people that end up in prison have been victimized in their childhoods, often very severely. So victims of physical, sexual or emotional abuse or just growing up under extreme poverty or racism and so forth. So when I go into prisons and before the pandemic, I continue to go into prisons, I continue to go in a lot and post pandemic, I hope I'll be able to start going back in. I actually even do some zoom sessions inside prisons now during the pandemic. But when I go into a prison, I want, I mostly visit men's prisons. I've done some work in female prisons. But I want the people I'm meeting with to get two things. One, I want them to get that. I get that they have been victimized, that many of them, you know, have had terrible, horrific childhoods, that many of them have been severely over prosecuted. I get the, the severe racial injustice in our, in our criminal justice system where, you know, people of color, especially black men and then next level Latino men, are vastly more likely to get arrested than their white counterparts. If they get arrested, they're more likely to get charged with a higher offense, they're much more likely to get convicted, and they're more likely to get a stiffer sentence, right? So all at every step of the way, deep racial injustice embedded in the system. So I want them to get that, I get all that. And I also want them to get that just seeing a fellow human being in prison breaks my heart, which it does. So I want them to get all that. And they get all that because that's who I am. And they get, I don't have to spell it all out, but some, you know, it comes out in how I interact with them or I, or, you know, some of it I may articulate directly, but they get it because that's who I am and that's what I really feel. The second thing I want them to get though is that their future, whatever life that they can create for themselves while they're still in prison. And when they get out of prison depends on one and one only thing. And that's the decisions they're making right now, the decisions they make today, the decisions they make tomorrow. And it's also the choices they make about even learning how to be able to make a decision rather than just being driven by your conditioning and your reactivity. It takes a lot of work to get to the place where we can actually consciously make decisions and step out of living in that mechanical reactivity and the interface between our childhood conditioning and the world around us. Right? And most of us think we're walking around being autonomous, free thinking, decision making, adults with free will. It'd be nice if it were true. But most of us are completely mechanical. And even those of us who've done a lot of consciousness work, there's still a lot of mechanicalness going on. You know, input A1 happens and we respond with response B2 just about every time, you know, so, you know, we're highly programmed conditioned beings and it takes work to step out of that. So being able to live a choice, which is about radical responsibility and recognizing our choices, we almost have, we have to earn that in a way, right? It takes, we have to earn that. So, you know, I want them to get that their future is completely up to them. And that's good news and bad news. The good news is they can do whatever they want. You know, I've been out of prison now for about 23 years. For 23 years I've been traveling the world teaching tremendous opportunities to add value. I have several businesses. I'm very successful. I have a wonderful life. I've experienced tremendous loss. Fortunately, I'm in a beautiful marriage now with my partner Sophie. My last partner died of cancer. My partner before that died of cancer. My spiritual teacher died many years ago. I've gone through a lot of loss. I lost my son two years ago. So, you know, life is going to keep bringing us tough stuff that if we, you know, live in that victim mindset will take us down. But I've been able to have an amazing life and it all comes out of that. So I really want them to get that. Here's the situation. I know there's a tremendous amount of injustice related to you being here. I know there's a lot of just personal origin of family pain and suffering that has to do with you being here. And where you're going to go is completely up to you. And that's the basic message I get across. And I Don't just get that across. In a way, it's up to you. So good luck, I say, and here's the tools you can use to start living from choice, to heal the trauma and to learn how to have enough presence of mind to start living from choice and deconstruct that victim mindset and start embracing a growth mindset, an empowerment mindset, a choice mindset.

I remember after I had received a felony on my record, well, it was actually sitting in that jail cell. I just remember feeling like, okay, my life is ruined. I can't press the reset button on this. I can't go back from this. Like, now this is gonna be with me on every rental application, job application, just everywhere. And that idea in itself was, like, heart wrenching. I couldn't imagine because I had had so much potential in my mind before. And there was a moment, it took me a while again, like I said, I had to get out of this victim puddle I was in. But I remember realizing that I could use the limitation of this as kind of a guidepost to steer me in a new direction. And what I mean by that is that once I realized, okay, well, I can't explain this on two lines of a job application, so what can I do instead? I can work for myself. And it was really like the slingshot toward entrepreneurship for me, and I started really studying digital marketing. And, I mean, that led to what I do now. And it reminds me of even when I became vegan, suddenly, like, ordering at restaurants was so much easier because I didn't have a hundred things to choose from. There was usually just one thing. And so I started to see it as almost a gift, like, okay, this takes away options so that I'm much more clear on what I do decide to do. But during that time in the victim mindset I had come up with, it was like, because I like the way you worded that. Unconsciously promoting a story. And I was unconsciously promoting the story that, like, I had nothing to do with this. And so I was making excuses for everything that I wasn't doing, and that included when I was trying to start my own business, really attaching to my ADD diagnosis. And I'm like, I can't do this because I'm too ADD to finish anything. But I know that the foundational premise of radical responsibility is that nothing is fundamentally wrong with you. Why is that so important to understand?

The foundational premise of radical responsibility is that nothing is fundamentally wrong with you. Why is that so important to understand?

Because embracing this radical level of Self honesty and responsibility and ownership and really being willing to look ourself in the mirror and really look closely, like what did I have to do with this? What was my contribution? How was I setting myself to really be willing to look deeply? And again, there might be some situations where you don't find anything, but again then saying, okay, well here I am in this situation that's completely unjust. I don't see anything to do with it. It's horrible and it's completely unfair. And do I want to stew in that or do I want to figure out what's the most creative way to respond to this? Right here I am in a really challenging situation. It sucks. But am I at a choice point? Do I let it take me down or do I just get bigger, stronger, more creative, more innovative here? Right? So it's just recognizing, continually recognizing there were always at a choice point. And we need to really train ourselves to really understand the victim mindset. So in my radical responsibility trainings, we do a lot of deeply experiential work and a lot of it is taking people deep into their victim experience. And their victim might get them to really get it, what it feels like, what it tastes like, what it feels like in the body, what their voice is like. So they really get it. And then when it starts to arise, go, oh, got it. Victim mindset shift. Oh, got it. Victim mindset shift, Right? So you really need to get to know the victim mindset and the growth mindset or the empowerment. They're like different universes and they feel different, smell different, taste different, our body posture is different, our voice is different, and we really need to do the work to really to get to know that thoroughly and then we can recognize it and make the shift. So to have the courage to do all that work, you need to get in touch with that place in ourselves where our own unconditional okayness is unmistakable to ourselves. Because otherwise trying to do that is just going to lead us into some kind of self blame, right? Because we don't understand the distinction between ownership and blame. But also we just don't have the kind of resilience to be able to be in that level of facing our part in things and not have that trigger us into feelings of unworthiness and self criticism and so forth. So we need to get in touch with that kind of level or dimension of our being where our unconditional, innate, basic goodness, wholeness, integrity is unmistakable. And all of the world's great contemplative traditions give us the means to do that or even in the modern world of secular mindfulness, properly done and no guarantee, but with good instruction and practice, various forms of mindfulness awareness meditation will drop us below all the noise, into the depth of our being where we know I'm okay, I know I'm okay. I may still have all this stuff up on the surface I'm still having to deal with and it hasn't gone away, but I know I'm okay. It's like if you imagine a storm tossed sea, right? Where if you're up on the topping storm dries, really scary and. But you drop about 20ft below the surface, it's completely calm, peaceful. So we need to drop and have some experience in that part of our being. And the more time we spend there, the more often we connect with that, the more it's going to give us that confidence in our own innate goodness and strength and resilience. And it's very experiential. The first chapter of my book is all about connecting with what I call, what my teacher called, my first spiritual teacher called basic goodness, innate unconditional goodness. The second chapter is about mindfulness and mind training, which is the means to get in touch with that. And then the third chapter is about emotional intelligence. So understanding all that before going into approaching living in a radically responsible way. And that depth of our being is very accessible to us, is there for all of us, and it's not, you know, you could, you could start through just, you know, being willing to entertain the possibility. Actually in the Radical Responsibility book I go through that, a kind of a thought experiment. Although in the original edition or the original draft, I had a much more elaborate thought experiment that there wasn't room for in the chapter. But I asked people, you know, there's basically three traditional views about this in human culture, across culturally, across time. One is the blank slate idea, tabula rasa, right? Where we're just a blank slate and based on whatever influences come to us, that's how we're going to end up. The other is the flawed nature of humanity, which primarily comes from Calvinist Protestant Christianity, which I believe is a perversion of the Christian faith and theology. But it really just talks about, you know, the flawed human beings are fundamentally flawed. And that became a dominant view here in our Western culture, right? And the idea is that absent some threat of some coercive force of shaming, incarceration, punishment, human beings will not behave well. In fact, we're basically dangerous, right? So we need to be shamed into good behavior. We need to be Threatened into good behavior. So that view became very dominant in the West. Then the third view is the view that no, we are innately good and whole and pure and that underneath all the noise, our being is not just a blank slate. It's actually as innate qualities and propensities towards compassion, caring, altruistic behavior, love and so forth. That that's innate in us. Now that third view has actually been, if you study, has been the dominant view. Cross culturally and historically. The tabula rasa view has had its place. The flawed nature of humanity view is really historically and cross culturally very much a minority view. But it did become the dominant view in the west and it shaped our whole culture. All of our institutions are, are fear and shame based. We have a culture that's dominated by shame and blame, right? And you know, just watch the news, look at politics, look at, you know, it's all about shame and blame. And you know, even the current efforts to create positive social transformation, in my view, are completely permeated with shame and blame tactics. And they don't help. And so we need that strength in order to be able to step into this level of radical honesty. Living from choice and really getting ourselves out of the victim mindsets. And that's what gives us that resilience and it gives us an unconditional confidence. Because in terms of confidence, most of us develop confidence in our competencies, which is great. You know, I develop confidence because I'm a good talker or I'm able to create relationship or I'm smart in math or smart in this. It's why I'm able to get this job. I'm a. You know, we all have our own, we can find our own talents, our own needs, the things we're good at, right? And it starts early on in school, right? The things we're good at. We may have to join a kind of little subculture where we find friends that are good at that. You know, if we're not the kind of kid that has the gregarious social skills to be among the, the in group, right. Or whatever, but we all find something to develop confidence in. And these are all great. However, they are conditional because any of those things can be undermined. We could have an illness that, that robs us of our ability to manifest that talent or that skill. So it's all well and good to have confidence in things that we're good at doing, but we need to have that underlying confidence that nothing can take away from us. Nothing. And that's unconditional confidence in our Innate, unconditional wholeness, integrity, basic goodness. And the way we get there is through various contemplative meditative practices that drop us beneath all the noise into the depth of our being.

Yeah, so much of this goes back to. I mean, all mindfulness is the power of presence. And I was thinking about it in your case or in talking to prison inmates, I almost think that presence would be something I'd resist if I was in a present, if I was in a prison. Like, a lot of times I'm like, okay, yes, everything feels like it's crashing down, but the wind's in my hair. I can feel the soft carpet beneath my feet. And then you're in a prison, and it's like, oh, I hear the guy hitting somebody over there. There's a toilet next to my head. Whatever. How do you teach that power of presence in a way that doesn't just make people realize how imprisoned they are?

Well, that circles back to your first question, you know, because I was very fortunate that I came into prison already deeply valuing presence. The majority of my fellow prisoners, it was really clear to me, were trying not to be present active. It's too painful to be present. So in general, prisoners will just get into a routine. I mean, there's a few that are just kind of acting out and they're crazy and they're always in trouble getting locked up and they're just out of. But most prisoners develop, especially if they're doing any length of time, they develop a routine and kind of just get numbed out by staying in that routine. You know, they work out the same time every day. They go to child, they go to a job, they do this, they do that, they do that. And nothing wrong with having routines and disciplines and so forth, but it's just like they get into this so they don't have. And, you know, a lot of prisoners sleep as much as they can. So, you know, most prisoners are trying not to be present. In fact, I remember hearing from a lot of guys over the years that would say, you know, I really don't like getting visits. You know, here they got a visit because you have a visit from your family, and it opens up your heart again, and you come back from that visit and you're miserable for several weeks. And so you can close up your heart again and get numbed out again. Right. So, you know, but for me, I knew I was going to be in prison for originally I thought 30 years, and, you know, it took me, you know, good six months before I being in prison. Before I figured out the good time and all that. So then I thought I was going to be in like 18 and a half years if I stayed out of trouble. And there was no guarantee of that because you can get in trouble for all kinds of little stuff. And they started taking away chunks of that good time and, you know, and then eventually after my appeal, then I knew it was X time. But regardless, this is a huge part of my life and I didn't just want to throw it away. Right. You know, and I was committed to a spiritual path. So this is grist for the mill. This is my opportunity to awaken. Right. So I wanted to be as present as I could and keep my heart as open as I, you know, despite the pain and the rawness. So I love getting visits. Not only it's nice to be connected with your family, but I didn't mind the fact that when I came and, you know, I come back to. And as much as I was doing not to get numbed out, not to get into routine, I would still notice every time I came out a visit, my heart was open in a way that it hadn't been the day before. Right. Because you just reconnect with that outside world and your loved ones and so forth. So. And much subtler for me at that point than it might have been for others. But nonetheless, I work really hard at being present, but the majority of prisoners are trying not to be present. And it makes sense. It's completely understandable. It's not. It doesn't serve them, but it makes complete sense that they do that because they don't see any other way. They don't have any conflict. They just, you know, everything good when you're in prison, for most people, everything good is outside, right? Everything in here sucks. You know, there isn't anything among my fellow prisoners, nobody in here has anything I could learn from all the programs. It's like the only thing good is getting out. You know, I get out, this part of my life doesn't count. Like, they call it downtime. And so they completely devalue that part of their life. And if you have a short sentence, you know, a few months or a couple years, you're like, yeah, I'm going to get out and put this behind me. But if you're serving significant time, like, we have a very limited amount of time on this planet as it is, so we're going to take a big chunk of it and say, doesn't make sense. But again, unless prisoners have been introduced to a kind of context, and the ability to be present and value that, they're going to tend to move in that direction of just numbing out, not being present.

So we've talked about not blaming other people obviously and really taking responsibility for how we got here. But one of the things that you teach is finding those defining moments that really led up to how you got there. And I think for a lot of people, those defining moments can come back to, well, you know, my dad wasn't present or my mom did this, or just different things where it can accidentally maybe take you back to that victim mindset. What's the purpose of finding those defining moments and how do you make sure that you don't get caught up into victimhood?

Well, it's everything we've been talking about. First of all, it's understanding. The radical responsibility model has nothing to do with blame. It's a beyond blame model. Right. It's not about blaming others, obviously. It's not about blaming ourselves, not even one iota. And it's not about blaming victims. Right. And when we're looking at defining moments, it's purely for the purpose of self understanding. And we don't necessarily even have to find those. You know, we can do all the work of transformation and living a choice and moving forward lives without ever actually finding, you know, a couple of specific defining moments in our life. But they can be helpful in terms of understanding. Now I lead a training that is one of the sources for radical responsibility, not the only one, but some of the ideas behind my radical responsibility model came for this training. It's called the event. And we use that term defining moments in that training. We're not the only other people use that term as well. But it's a very intense group process. We haven't done it since the pandemic started because there's no way you can do it online. The very intense group process where we take people deep into their family of wards and stuff and help them discover those defining moments and then help them change their relationship to it. Because very often defining moments embed in very self limiting ways because they happen to us at a very young in our lives when we're powerless. We can't run away, we can't fight back and you know, so we just survive somehow and then we make up a story about it. Right? And that can become one of those life scripts and it becomes a defining moment and it really colors how we live our lives. And it's all operating unconsciously. So discovering that, bringing it into consciousness and then having the ability either Sometimes we use, you know, kind of various types of, kind of psychodrama and things like that to reenact it. Right. So the person actually is able to actually run away or escape or is able to fight back. But even if we don't do that, just seeing it, then shifting our relationship to it, okay, that happened to this three year old or five year old or six year old. And that's really been driving my Life now for 40 years. And the story I made up as a five year old, which was the best story I could come up with when I was five or three or two to make sense of what was going on, I've been living my life from that story. Does that really make sense to do that? You know, how about looking back at what happened from an adult context and realizing, yeah, whatever happened, it was not my fault. Even if, you know, we're not, it's not our fault when stuff happens to us as an adult unless we create it. And still fault is not the question. It's just all about learning. But certainly when we're children, nothing is our fault. Right. But we can understand, okay, you know, where did this come from? Well, you know, if it was our parents or other adults in our life, this was somebody else's confusion or a bad day or a bad moment. You know, people aren't perfect and we can begin to understand that. Yeah, okay. We don't have to take this personally. Now. That's really hard when you're thinking back about stuff with your own mother, your own father, that stuff is so personal. But you can work to get to the place where you realize this really isn't personal. It's not. You know, none of us come through childhood unscathed. Our parents have their life karma and patterns and stuff, and they got what they got from their parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from their parents. I mean, if we want to blame somebody, we could blame our great, great, great, great, great, great, you know, who didn't deal with their problem and pass it on and nobody else has been able to do it. Well, okay, guess what? Now we received it and are we going to transform it or are we just going to pass it on to our own children and other people we influence. Right. So we can learn to depersonalize these things and realize it's all just the human condition, that there really is no one to blame. That doesn't mean people don't need to be held accountable for things. People do need to be held accountable when they're creating harm and we need to be held accountable. We need to hold ourselves accountable. We can do. We can actually create accountability without blame. Like if somebody's doing some abusive thing, they can be stopped. If need be, they can be arrested. They could even be put in prison, although I don't believe in putting people in prison unless they're really a danger to themselves or others. But all that could be done without blame. We could create a culture and a system that stops somebody because they're engaged in harmful behaviors and gets them into a situation where they're not going to, at least for now, not going to have the opportunity to harm others and support them in a way where they can possibly turn their lives around. And we can do all of that without demonizing them as some horrible, evil human being that did this horrible, evil act. But that's very hard for us to do because we have the society that's pervaded with shame and blame. Thinking.

That idea about not passing it down has been such a motivator for me. I have a 15 month old right now, and I have been steadily making changes to my life over the last. Over a decade now. But, man, this having a baby has highlighted the things that I was choosing to ignore. So it's definitely a catalyst for that. And I love the teaching point of nothing is personal, that one of the first books that I read that really shifted my thinking was Don Miguel Ruiz, the Four Agreements. And I just remember this little kind of parable in there about like, you know, you can go through a line of people and poke them all on the shoulder and then one jumps back and like lashes out at you. And it's not because you poked him, it's because he had a wound there. And so when we consider that with people, when they're acting out in a way that we don't understand, you don't know the wound that is underneath that. And so neither of you are to blame for that experience. But it's more about being aware that other people have different experiences, other people have different pains, and other people have different empowerment. But you said earlier that there were really three parts, and that first part is ownership, and then the second part is mindfulness, and then the third part is empathy. And I know that you often refer to radical responsibility as a training in mindfulness based emotional intelligence. So where does that part come in to really taking responsibility for your life?

Yeah, well, I find my colleague Daniel Goleman's map for emotional intelligence very helpful. So he has these four quadrants, so self Awareness, self management, social awareness, and then relationship management. So I'll talk about each of those a little bit. So self awareness is all the ways in which we can just become more aware of what makes us tick. So you know, just awareness, being wakeful, mindfulness, but also self understanding, understanding all my hot buttons, my emotional triggers, at least I realize that there. Maybe I don't understand how I got them yet, but I realize they're there and I can learn to manage them somewhat or maybe I develop a deeper understanding of how they got there. You know, the work of transforming our internal landscape to be one that's more loving, pervaded with self empathy and self compassion rather than self criticism and blame and you know, negativity and so forth. The ability to internalize, you know, rewards and agency rather than all rewards and agency being external. All that is that landscape of self awareness and how through self awareness we can transform our internal landscape. And so, you know, everything we're talking about has to do with that. Then, then self management or self regulation is our ability to actually regulate our own nervous system. And through doing so to regulate our own emotions, regulate our own behaviors, and really get in a self leadership position, get in the driver's seat of our own life through all kinds of self regulation tools and practices. And actually self awareness itself leads to self regulation, self management, because we just have these insights and understandings and we're better able to then self manage. But you know, all the, all the mindfulness practices, breath regulation, there's all kinds of posture voices, all kinds of ways in which we can regulate our own nervous system, the activation of the parasympathetic or sympathetic branches, the balance between the two, and so forth, forth and you know, in polyvagal terms, keeping our social engagement systems online, being in a responsive relational mode, instead of allowing ourselves to get pushed back into a reactive survival mode, a fear based reactive survival mode, or when we are recognizing that, be able to get ourselves back into the relational responsive mode with our social engagement systems online. And so that's all the inner work, the individual work. And then in terms of, you know, the larger context of our relationships, then you have social awareness, which is our ability to tune into what others are needing and feeling in a compassionate, empathic way. So we're getting much more information about the world around us. And then that naturally leads to being able to be more skillful with others, which is the fourth quadrant, relationship management. And all four of these, they reinforce each other diagonally, laterally, this way, that way, right? So they all reinforce force each other. And it's a great landscape for the work. It just gives us a map, you know, that of how the work I'm doing is going to help me shift my relationship with myself to be one that's more self empathic, self compassionate. It's going to allow me a relationship, shift my relationship to with others to one that's more empathic. And it's going to allow me to be more skillful in managing myself and more skillful in managing my interactions with others to lead to the best possible win win outcomes for myself and others. Right. So I think it's just a really helpful map to understand and work with. There's, there's a lot of different maps. They're all just maps. But I find that's a helpful one. You know, Dan Siegel's Window of Tolerance is also a helpful map to understand that, you know, there's that bandwidth of our experiences that we can handle kind of from our best self. And then there's all the things that will trigger us into shutting down or getting overactivated. Right. And then so how do we learn when we're getting triggered into disassociation or shutting down, how to recognize when we're getting too upregulated and overactivated and then having the skills to recognize it and then get ourselves back into that bandwidth, which is not our comfort zone. It can be things that are really uncomfortable, but it's where we can still be in that responsive relational mode. Again, what Polyvagal theory calls us having our social engagement systems online. So there's a lot of helpful maps like that that help us just understand the work and what we're doing in order to, you know, really step more and more into living a choice where, you know, we can't control the world around us and we can't absolutely control ourselves. You know, it's a, it's a, sometimes it's a challenge even to influence ourselves because of all of our past conditioning. But that's the only place we have any influence or any powers with ourselves. And to the extent that we are able to be a positive influence on the world around us, it's going to come out of that place of self leadership and ownership. It's not gonna come out of a place of blame.

Yeah, I think a lot of us have those big mistakes, or if you'd rather word it like just challenging experiences that we need to do this work through. But I find that I always have to come back to the work. You know, it's never really over and now nowadays, it's those little moments of like, this person made me mad. It's like, did they make me mad or did they just do something? And that was a trigger for me. And it's the work that needs to come back to myself. As always, it's really helpful to understand.

Most of us assume that our emotions, our feelings are caused by other people's situations outside of ourselves, right? And it seems pretty compelling. Somebody yells at us, I'm afraid, or somebody does this and I'm upset, or somebody, you know, it seems like there's a direct causal relationship, but we need to really reflect on that more deeply. How do our emotions actually arise? You know, what we think of as positive or more comfortable emotions like contentment and peace and happiness and joy and gladness and love and benevolence. How do those arise? How do what we think of as challenging emotions, or even negative emotions arrive, like anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, hate, you know, all these challenges or even sadness, disappointment. So where do these arise from? How do they actually arise? They actually arise based on our perception of our needs being met or not. Now, what do I mean by needs? Well, we all have the same universal human needs. We all have a need for connection and belonging and love. We have a need for self, agency, autonomy, our own space. We have a need for food, warmth and shelter. We have a need for respect. We have a need for creative expression. We have lots of needs and we all have these same needs. So when your needs are getting met for food, warm, shelter, for love and connection, relationship, for respect, creative. When your needs are being met, how do you feel?

Warm and fuzzy.

You have all the warm and fuzzy emotions, right? When you perceive your needs, you are being met. How about if you perceive your needs are being threatened or thwarted or blocked in some way, then how do you start feeling?

I usually feel resistance to whatever or.

Whoever is involved, or more even that. Frustrated, angry, upset, envious, jealous, hateful, you know, the whole furious, rageful, vengeful, the whole range of challenging, not so helpful emotions. Nothing wrong with them. It's just a. If we indulge them or get carried away by them, they often lead to not so great outcomes, right? They actually all have wisdom in them. If we're able to deconstruct them, the actual energy of all emotional energy has wisdom in it. So once we see that they're actually. They arise based on the perception of our needs being met or not. Once we see that, then we can ask ourselves the question, are my perceptions always accurate? Most of us will say no.

Maybe they're limited, they're accurate. Sometimes not so accurate other times, but at the very best, our perceptions about what's happening with a situation, what somebody else is doing, why they're doing it, or its impact on us or what have you. Our perceptions are a very limited analysis or assessment based on a very limited set of the available data. And our analysis is based full of assumptions, and our assumptions are based on our past conditioning. And all that is an unconscious process. So, you know, almost all of our perceptions are marginally accurate at best. And often they're complete misperceptions. Right. So I'm. Let's say I'm angry. You know, my boss, my coworker is doing something. I'm angry. Well, I'm really angry. I'm sure they them. I'm blaming. I'm angry. I mean, okay, what's going on? Okay, well, I'm angry. Okay, well, that's a good start. Not you're making me angry, but I'm angry. Yeah. Wow, I'm angry. Yeah. This feels very familiar, right? I always feel this way when I'm angry. It's my anger. Yeah. Okay, so why is my anger arising? Right? What's going on? Why am I feeling so angry? Well, because that's so and so. Well, what do you. What's going. Well, my need for, you know, my need for respect is not being met here. My need for financial security is not being met here. My need for input and decision making is not being met. My need for connection and all these needs. No wonder I'm so angry. Okay, well, are my perceptions of those true? Well, of course they're true. Well, really, you know, we can begin to drop in and we'll see. Well, maybe, yes, partially. And as we do this process, we're more. We're getting more distance away from the assumption that our anger is caused by some external event. And we're dropping into deep spaces of reflective awareness. And we may get to a point where we realize, well, at least that perception is at least 25% accurate. Or maybe one of our perceptions about a need not being met is accurate. Okay, what am I going to do with that? Well, is it that person's obligation to meet that need? Is that the only way I can get that need met? Right. All this takes us way away from that perspective of where you're pissing me off. And it actually puts us back into self agency. Because the bad news about this is I don't get to blame my feelings on other people and situations anymore. The good news is there's this whole landscape between external events and my feelings. And that internal landscape is something I have agency over. And that's the road to freedom. It's in that gap where all my freedom lies. As soon as, to whatever degree, I assume that my emotional states are being caused by people and situations up my side myself. As you mentioned before, we're giving our power away and we're putting other people in charge of our internal state. It may feel really compelling, but actually what we're doing is we're giving our power away because nobody can actually make us feel anything.

I love that. And really taking responsibility for what's happened, really who we are, it's not necessarily what's happened to us, but who we are and how we move forward is the only way to get that power back. And so I know that I have so much to work with from this information information this week. Thank you for all of the research and all the work that you're doing, especially in the in prison communities. For listeners that are interested in learning more about you and your book and possibly taking responsibility for where they are, where's the best place for them to connect with you?

And by the way, you know, taking that response, it may sound like heavy and like a burden. It's the doorway to freedom. It's where all the great stuff in life is. And it's actually an honor and a privilege to live in what I call the empowerment zone. And the world will start giving you tremendous opportunities because the world needs people that live in the empowerment zone rather than down in what I call the drama zone and the victim mindset. So people can start with my basic website, fleetmall.com they can learn a lot about my work there. Fleetmall.com if they want to learn in particular about the radical responsibility book, they can go to radicalresponsibilitybook.com and you can read all about the book. You can download a free chapter there. You can read all the testimonials from other bestselling authors. And if you want, you can purchase a book by clicking on Amazon, Barnes and Noble Indie Books, whoever you'd like to buy it through. So that's radical responsibilitybook.com my online courses and summits. Heartmind co, heartmind co. But they can also get there from fleetmall.com you just go to courses. So really you can find all this stuff through fleetmall.com then on the nonprofit side of my life with the prison work and everything, Prison Mindfulness Institute, which is prisonmindfulness.org is our work with at risk, incarcerated and returning youth and adults. And then mindfulpublicsafety.org is our work with all kinds of public safety professionals, first responders and then Engage Mindfulness Institute which is engaged mindfulness.org is the extensive training we do training mindfulness teachers and trauma informed neuroscience informed approaches to learning to share the practice of mindfulness or facilitate various mindfulness based interventions. You can find about most all my work except the nonprofit work through Fleet. I think even through fleetmall.com you can probably even find your way to those nonprofit sites.

All the links for this episode will be@mindlove.com 238. Your challenge for this week is to find one area where you're placing blame. So for some of you, that might mean something big that happened in your past that you've been holding onto, that you think, I wouldn't be stuck here if it wasn't for that, or I wouldn't have lost this if it wasn't for that. And I want you to remember that taking responsibility for this or removing your tendency to blame is never condoning something that happened to you. And like we said in the episode, it's never saying that you weren't victimized, but you get to choose if you stay in the energy of victim. That's what the whole thing's about. It's about taking your power back. So yeah, you might be right that something threw you off course that was out of your control. But you also never know if that was the path for you. You never know that if that event never happened and the timeline worked itself out, if it's all sunshine and rainbows over there and you can also never go back and change it. So like I said, the point of this is not to allow people to walk all over you or say that what they did is okay. It's about taking your power back right here, right now, and deciding what you're going to do with that, what meaning are you finding from it? Are you finding more evidence that you're a victim and that life happens to you and you have no control? Because guess what? If that's the evidence, evidence you're finding, that is the life that you are going to live. But if you find evidence as to how that moment created strength in you, created a lesson that you're going to hold with you forever, that created a version of yourself that you love even if you're not quite there yet. It could even be the trust, or starting with the hope for now that maybe at the end of this there is a version of you that you love. So the whole idea is about taking your power back and realizing that only you are responsible for where you go from here. And so you may as well take that responsibility by the reins right now so that you can start creating the life that you love now. For others, it might be the little moments. It might be the moments with your partner where you're like, you made me mad or why did you do this to me? And you can practice the same things in those moments, like taking a deep breath and saying, no one can make me mad. I feel triggered right now. Can I work on that trigger? Can I breathe through this? And again, it's not letting your partner or whoever else walk all over you. It's about finding new ways to communicate your needs. Because that is one of the ways that you take responsibility for your life. So practice. Maybe practice with the little things before you move on to the big things. Maybe just start with a journaling exercise to try to see some big event from a new perspective. Pretend that a future version of you came and saw you and said, hey, I need you to know that if you look at the grand scheme of your life, everything worked out for a reason that happened to get you to the most beautiful place that you can ever imagine. And so you're going into the journaling exercise trusting that voice choice what comes out. How do you then see the event if it was always for your highest good and just a disclaimer, check in with yourself about whatever situation that you're diving back into. I know that there are some super painful memories that for some people may trigger a traumatic memory or something that they're not quite ready for. So you know, if that's you, check in with yourself, see how you feel and let me know how it goes. Reach out to me on Instagram mindlove Melissa or leave a comment right on the show notes page@mindlove.com 238. If you'd like to support Mind Love, the best way to do that is by joining Mindlove Premium at mindlove.com premium or right in the Apple Podcasts app. You get a whole backlog of over 50 episodes that are exclusively for Premium members, plus meditations and other bonus content and some early release and ad free listening. You can also support one of my amazing sponsors and you can find all of those with their discount codes@mindlove.com sponsors. And finally you can leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you do, I will probably read your review on the show. And that's all for today. So thanks for giving your mind a little love today and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into your higher frequency with the Mind love. Head to mindlove.com for a free gift to keep your vibes up until next week.