Heroic Interview: Experience Life! with Pilar Gerasimo

You're listening to Experience Life, an optimal living interview with Pilar Gerasimo and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back. Today we are talking with Pilar Gerasimo, one of my favorite people in the world. Just an amazingly inspiring, passionate, brilliant and humble person who's so committed to making a difference in the world. She is the creator and editor in chief of the award winning Experience Life magazine that now reaches, what is it, 1 to 3 million people or something like that?

Pilar, nearly 3 million people.

3 million people. You are awesome. We love you. And I'm excited to chat today. Thanks for taking the time.

Thank you so much for having me. I love you, too. And really excited to be with you today.

Right on. Well, let's jump straight in. I want to talk about some of my favorite big ideas from your Refine youe Life class and then some of your fundamentals and all that good stuff. But let's start with a quote that I just love and when I shared it recently, as we just discussed, super popular, just really gets to the heart of it. So you say seeing your best self takes vision. Becoming your best self takes guts. I just love that. Tell me about that.

Thanks. Well, I found out a lot of that the hard way. I actually a vision for my own best life came to me pretty easily. And then when I started encountering my own resistance to doing the things that were going to take me in the direction of my own highest vision, I ran up against all my own fears and anxieties and limiting beliefs about what I could do and what I deserved and my anxiety about what other people would think if I did the things that were going to be necessary for me to move forward in my life in keeping with my highest vision. I think that's one of the great reasons that having a super compelling vision is worthwhile. If you're not excited enough about it and attached and passionate enough about it that you're willing to face those dragons and demons and brick walls, you won't get there. But I think that's really the whole point of personal development work and of living our lives in an optimal way. As we go after the goals and the visions that make us really excited, we have to get stronger and bigger and better along the way.

Awesome. And you talk a lot about how change works and you're passionate about describing how it works and how it doesn't work. And that's kind of one of the cornerstones, I would say, of your work, particularly with Refine youe Life. Can you describe to us how Change works, which involves some of the stuff you just described. But can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, well, I think fundamentally, you know, change we all we know, excuse me, that it's a process. I think what people don't often acknowledge is that it's a process of moving forward and stepping back and facing an obstacle and getting clobbered and realizing I'm going to have to develop new strengths and skills, new resources, new contacts, a new self perception most of the time. I mean, I really like some of James Prochaska's work around stages of change that, you know, describe. Change is progressing through distinct phases, you know, pre contemplation, where it's not really even an idea yet someone else may think it's a good idea for us to change and we don't really want to hear about it. Going to contemplation, where we start to really recognize this is something I might want to do, and we begin building sort of an internal neural network around it. Then comes preparation. And preparation is when you start going, wow, I guess I better get the right gear or information or sign up for something or look a book up online or start doing some research. And that leads to this action. The next phase is action when you actually start doing something about it. But at that point, and sometimes even a little bit before, it's really natural to run into these limitations, these limiting factors, internal or external. You know, it might be that the limiting factor is your partner or best friend isn't really comfortable with you making that change, or your boss doesn't like the idea of you becoming a specialist in something new. But they might be internal, you know, coming up against a lack of confidence or skill or simply just not knowing the right information or people. And when we run into those obstacles or hey, we just start to feel really uncomfortable with the fact that our life is changing and becoming unfamiliar, or we're becoming unfamiliar, or people are saying, I don't know you, you know, what's of you. It's really natural for people to fall back a little bit back into preparation or even into contemplation and go, wow, man, what just happened? I hit a brick wall or I set a goal and I failed. And I think that there's a magical place there where we encounter information about what needs to happen next, how we need to grow, how we are being confronted with the potential of getting bigger and better and stronger, perhaps in ways that will take us to a different goal or the same goal, but a different path or the same goal, same pat. But at A somewhat more moderated pace. I think that that's really facing the reality of how change happens from there. You know, if you get that right, you move into maintenance, you move into adoption or what they call sometimes termination, where it's like there's no going back. But ultimately, I believe that change is about growth. And conscious change in particular is about choosing to face up to what feel like sometimes insurmountable obstacles and being willing to. To be uncomfortable along the way.

And you talk a lot about, too, the idea of the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. You talk about it in the frame of the learner versus the judger as well. It seems like that if we had to identify one of the key mindsets we can adopt, that would certainly be near the top of the list, right?

It's huge. It's absolutely at the top of the list. And we include references to the growth mindset and to learner judger along the way, partially because you can't confront those obstacles effectively if what you do every time you hit one is like, I'm so stupid. Why am I so dumb? Why is everybody else in my way? If you're taking that approach, it's just so de energizing and you can get very distracted. The learner approach of like, what just happened and why was that so challenging? Or how did it go that I didn't end up doing what I said I'd do? That's this exploratory growth mindset that just produces so much more information and inspiration. And it also kind of points up, I guess, one of the other. Maybe it's a big idea or fundamental beliefs I have about change, that it's less about will than it is about willingness. A willingness to look at what's really happening, a willingness to face this stuff with courage. And I think questions, starting with questions is always the most powerful place to be. So, yeah, I think that's infused in almost everything, everything we do here at the magazine and that, I believe, about my own path of personal change.

Well, I think it'd be helpful actually to step back for a moment and for people who aren't familiar with the learner versus judger model or the growth mindset versus fixed mindset model. Can you unpack that for us a bit?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think I'll go with the learner judger because it's sort of what I present in my Refine youe Life. But I know you've done a lot of work around growth mindset too, and I think of them as somewhat fused. The learner judger idea is it's actually set out in a great thing called the learner judger map or the choice map. We have it available at the revolutionaryact.com website underneath our resources for healthy living, I think, or balanced living. But the idea is that at any given moment something happens to you in your life. You can go down one of two paths. So something triggers you or an event happens and you can go down a judger path, which typically starts with like, who screwed up? Whose fault is it that this thing happened to me? How the heck, what am I going to do in a kind of a negative way about who's going to pay? Or how am I going to get out of this looking like, you know, smelling like a rose? If you continue to follow this sort of judger mindset, everything becomes sort of small and narrow in your view and you really don't have an opportunity to resolve the problem or to look at the opportunity in the full, you know, blush of itself. The other path, the learner path, is questions like, okay, what happened here? You know what, what was my responsibility? What's my opportunity? What do I want to have happen now? What's this other person who's invol, what's going on for them? What do they care about? What's my role or responsibility in responding to that? And when you start to go down that road, there's some really interesting things that happen. Often possibility and positivity, which is all about growth. Mindset, again, it's like comes into play and you simply can see more opportunities and possibilities than you ever would have been able to otherwise. There also is this kind of receptivity to life happening. And instead of being in an entrenched struggle with your life, you can see like, okay, there's maybe some good things that come out of this. For me, this is true of things like job losses or ends of relationships or losses of large sums of money. The natural reaction is to go into like, oh crap mode. My life is bad. That's a judger map. Like things are going to be hard and difficult from now on and I'm going to have to really stress out. But if you look at the opportunities there, in many cases, even dramatic so called negative events open up new opportunities. They open up opportunities for conversations with people, sometimes very courageous conversations. They open up the possibility of vulnerability, of acknowledging, you know, this difficult thing has happened. And I'm a little bit at sea about it. Going out into the world with that point of view is always more productive and realizing that it's like, I can get better at this stuff. I may not have succeeded at this because I simply was not prepared. Well, how can I do this better going forward? That's the stuff that I think I've seen people's eyes, like, just open like saucers when they've realized their natural predisposition is a judge or mindset. It's just automatic. It's not something we think about. But when confronted with the other option, and this is true of, like, little kids can see this when they look at this map, they're like, this is a much more interesting way to go. And the last thing I'll say about that is that even if you naturally go down the judger path, that's okay. And it's really great to be able to notice that and go, oh, what just happened is that I went down the judger path and now what are my options? And the options there. Merrily Adams, who's the inventor of this choice map and learner judger kind of concept as it's presented within that tool, talks about switching lane, of moving from one path to the other and asking, how can I ask some learner questions about this? But her fundamental belief is that all of the powerful big aha's come out of asking the right questions, not about having the right answers necessarily.

Yeah, that's awesome. We'll make sure we link to that great graphic on being healthy is a revolutionary act. And again, just so powerful. Learner versus judge. We need to pay attention to how we're orienting to our lives. And again, we can talk about that. I like to joke for a weekend, but we'll pull back for a moment and kind of shift gears a bit and look at your model. You've developed a really cool model for refining your life. And you talk about everything from our values and our vision and our goals and action and the obstacles we're going to face. I just love your visual representation of the flower and all that good stuff as well that I imagine we'll be able to talk about now. But can you start with values that seem to be at the core of your work? Can you tell us about them, why they're important, how we gain more clarity on what our values are?

Yeah, well, I think the reason that they're really important is that they sort of dictate a lot of other choices, whether we're aware of them or not. And when we're aware of them, we tend to make choices that feel better to us, that prove to be more productive. And rewarding down the road. A lot of times, if we're not aware of our values, we'll set goals, for example, or pursue objectives that look good on paper or that please other people or that sync with our sort of external idea of what success might look like. The challenge is that I think Stephen Tutcovey talked about, you can climb the ladder only to find yourself at the top and realize that it's leaning against the wrong wall. And I think that that gets at the problem of values or the wonderful value of values. The thing about them that's interesting is that inevitably when people ask themselves like, okay, so what are my values there too? There are sort of societal ideals or expectations about what a good value is. Oh, it's, I have family. Family is a value for me. Or excellence is a value. We do an exercise in the Refine youe Life class to help people get at that a little bit more organically. Like, what really are the values that light them up and make them excited and open hearted and that. My favorite exercise for it is called Peak Experience. And it's really about looking at what are the one or two or three times in your life that you've been at your happiest, at your most right in yourself, or felt the most proud or the most deeply satisfied and at peace. And different people had different experiences. Obviously, when you start to unpack what that experience was, whether it was, you know, being at your graduation or watching your son ride a bike for the first time, or, you know, cooking a really amazing meal for some friends. Implicit and embedded in those experiences typically are some values that might be around fun or celebration. They might be around success and excellence. They might be around freedom. They might be around discovery and growth. When I did this exercise for myself, I discovered that learning and discovery were a really fundamental value for me, as was beauty. And I would never have said that beauty was a value. I mean, if someone had asked me, what are your core values? Beauty would never have come to my mind. But in a lot of experiences, I discovered that there was in fact, this component of aesthetic beauty, whether it was in nature or a museum, or looking at something that pleased me, or finding harmony in a social situation, all of those were expressions of beauty to me. These can be difficult to uncover. And so one of the things I like best about doing this in a group or a workshop is giving people an opportunity to uncover those. Once you know your values, then you can begin to establish a life vision that is syncing up with those values. There's no point in developing a life vision that takes you down a road that's fundamentally opposed to your values. But you'd be surprised how often that happens. Brian like people who like, they are really smart. They were great in school and so they were told they should go to law school and they went to law school because their dad was an attorney or their mom thought it was a good idea, or they had friends who were successful attorneys that they admired for who knows, maybe other reasons other than the fact that they were an attorney. They get all the way through law school and I know you have a story not unlike this yourself. Their heart wasn't in it. It didn't light them up. No amount of success on that career path was going to sync them with their values. In some cases, maybe it's being a different kind of attorney. They want to be an immigration attorney, not a corporate raider attorney or something like that. But it helps a lot to start on the front end and expect explore developing an ideal life vision for yourself or for your career, your relationships that's informed by those values. Just a much more satisfying, solid and effective way to go about doing it.

Yeah, that's awesome. And how do you compare them to, you know, the whole virtues in action, the via signature strengths test, the positive psychologists put together? Because as you describe that, I like to talk about the virtues and identifying them, I call them virtues rather than values. And that that's the underlying underneath the fundamentals even. This is who we are. The scientists tell us, let's embrace these virtues, put them into action consistently. Have you taken that test? Do you like that test? Do you have any thoughts on that?

No, I've taken so many tests, I wish I could remember exactly. I know I've taken that and I've taken signature strengths. And so for example, the last test that I took of this type, and I don't remember which one it was, came back with for me, like love of learning, curiosity, interest in the world, creativity, ingenuity and originality. Now when I go over my list of values that came out of my peak experience exercise, they map really well to that, you know, the discovery, growth and beauty, for example, which for me maps to creativity as well as interest in the world. And what I like to discover are things that please me. Naturally it makes sense. I think the great thing about the work that you do that I love so much is how you overlay these things on top of each other and that the vocabulary becomes less important than the notion or the tool set that you can sort of apply however you want. I think that they're actually very similar. I think values that are expressed become virtues. Values that you live become virtues. And to some extent, I think signature strengths are kind of the same way. We don't tend to develop very strong capacities in areas where we don't inherently have some intrinsic value placed on. It's exhausting, unfortunately. You can force it, and I think you can become highly, highly competent or very excellent and very efficient at doing something that's largely meaningless to you. But you can. You do it at enormous cost to your heart and your soul and I think even your cell tissue, that you have a sense of discrepancy that builds in your life. And I think that shows up often as a midlife crisis for people. So worth looking at all of it. But, yeah, no, I think that's a great connection.

That's awesome. Yeah. Then just kind of triangulating and really discovering, like, what does drive us, what is important to us, and use that as a center point from which everything else emanates. And then the next thing would be, okay, we have more clarity on our values. What's our vision for our life? What is the direction which we want to head? Can you talk to us about how to create a compelling vision for our lives?

Well, you know, I think that vision is one of those words that terrifies people because pride themselves on being visionaries. And that's all great, but I think most of us regular mortals confronted with, like, what's your vision? I mean, my mind went blank the first time somebody asked me that. And it took me getting really quiet, making it a little bit of a more concrete exercise for me. The answer to, like, what's my ideal vision for my, you know, my whole life and my career? But I could sort of envision ideal day. And I went through this process, and I did a blissitation for you guys about this guided meditation of walking through this imaginary ideal day and noticing clues within that ideal day, from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. How you'd like to spend your time and energy in what environments with whom you can answer a lot of questions. I think about kind of an ideal life vision that way. The other thing is sort of looking at the full expression of your own best gifts, the things that you are motivated to develop and do more of with yourself, and the things that come naturally to you that are, like, you know, zones of genius or real capacity that can often provide clues, too. Sometimes I. People also see in other people's lives elements that they just connect with. So Powerfully. And they go, yep, that's for me, someday I want that to be part of my life or part of my reality, or I want to contribute in the way I see that person contributing. Sometimes envy and jealousy can be really good clues to those kinds of liars that you aren't in touch with yet. So I think there's a lot of ways of going about doing it. But for me, imagining and processing an ideal day and noticing, kind of like with the peak experience idea of looking back in your past, this is looking into an idealized future and saying, what's going on there? You know, what's calling to me? What in my future is pulling me into a better place. When I did that exercise for the first time, I really connected with how important having meaningful work was for me and wanting to work with people in a collaborative environment and create something that the world needed, rather than, you know, just kind of having a space stamp, papers type job or move stuff from point A to point B type job. And I didn't really have a vocabulary for that or a name for the job. I didn't say, oh, I want to be editor in chief of a magazine, or I want to launch this thing called Revolutionary Act. But as I pursued the parts of my vision that I could understand, I got more information. And this is a really important point about vision that I talk about in the Refine youe Life course. At any given time, you can only see so far out ahead. That horizon line is going to be where it is, a mile ahead, five miles ahead, 10 miles ahead. Depending on the circumstances of your life, your job is really just to focus on as far as you can see right now. Moving toward that horizon line will then take you to the place where you can see much further out. When people are depleted or depressed or constrained in some way energetically or sometimes financially or relationally, they have a health problem. They may only be able to see the equivalent of four feet in front of them. And the vision is that I have a vision that I get up and I have breakfast in a peaceful place. Or my vision is that I get up and I have time to lie in my bed and read a book for half an hour. That's as far as I can see. I'm like, that's great. That's the place to go. Then that's the place to start. Working on goals and action plans is what can get you what you desire in that next four to five feet or block or mile or whatever it is. So I really encourage people going back to the learner. Judge your concept, don't judge your vision. Whatever comes up for you around that, whatever part of it you can see, is probably the perfect next step for you to take.

Yeah, I just love the way you represent that with the horizon. The horizon we see now as we approach that, we then have a new horizon. But we can overwhelm ourselves and we think we need to see around this horizon somehow and see so far into the future that we just become kind of dead in our tracks and just overwhelmed and just love that. So then bringing that down from the vision you just mentioned, kind of the goals and the action steps, tell us about how you approach or recommend us to approach our goals in action as we kind of move from our values to our vision. Well, how do you set goals? How do you set goals and action plans?

Yeah. I will say that goals for me were the hardest part of this process. For whatever reason, when I first started doing this work, I got really hung up on. I bought maybe 14, 15 different on goal setting, you know, and I read eastern versions and western versions and then I just sort of had to stop. I think what was hanging me up was this structure of it that, you know, you have to set a goal and then there are sort of subcategories of objectives and tactics and then there's to do lists and check ins about that. And I don't know why, but for me it didn't work very well. And I will say, knowing now what I know about personal development, the reason that there are as many tools as that there are is that there are so many different kinds of people and different things that work for different people. But for me, what worked was going back to something that I understood kind of in my bones, which was the life cycle of organic things. My mom had a farm. I grew up on a farm. I still live on a farm. And when I started thinking about goals, I'm like, what does it really mean to try to achieve a goal? It's like you're trying to grow something from a little seed into a full blown blooming plant. And that metaphor for me helped a lot. I started thinking about the seed as being this little kernel of a vision that I wanted to plant in my life and have grow. And then I started thinking about the goal for me, taking the form of this beautiful flower that was going to take shape as I nurtured it and tended it. And then I started getting kind of excited about that metaphor. And as I started drawing a flower that would represent my goal, I started going, oh, yeah, what the real payoff with the flower is beyond the process, of course, is when the thing blooms into its full expression of its most beautiful, lovely, floral self. And I started thinking about all the rewards of achieving the goal as being the petals of the flower, the sort of visible, tangible expression of that goal as an achievement, and realizing that, wow, I can connect with the payoff if I achieve this goal. Here are all the benefits I'm going to reap from that. Once I had that nailed down and that motivated me to do what I think for most people is the tough part, which is defining the goal very specifically, rather than thinking about it as I'm going to become a raving success. I always like to think about goals in terms of what am I willing to do to improve my life in this direction? How can I define this goal in a way that I'll know when it happened? How can I root it in time and space? There's a whole technology of goals I won't go into. But of course. But that's where people also get very bogged down, right? So for me, it was like, generally grok the vision and the form of the specific goal, how I'm going to achieve some element of that vision. How do I take action toward this big, amorphous idea of my ideal life? I don't know that there is an easy way to tell people how to do this. I'm a real big believer, though. Go after the goal that energizes you, that you feel capable of working on. Now, for some people, that's like the preparation work of, like, I'm going to have to clear my desk off, or I'm going to have to, you know, get a decent night's sleep before I can even begin this. Well, that's a good goal. That might be the place to start. Whatever the goal is, though, the part for me that proved challenging and that I had to get excited enough to do was then walking back and drawing the line between this vision seed I planted in the ground and this blooming, lovely flower head that I'd drawn halfway up the skyline line for me was the action plan. What am I going to do? What am I going to stop doing? How can I break those down into ever smaller pieces? And I kind of use the fractal idea of a stem and leaves to help me figure that out. We have, I think, worksheets that we make available free to people where they kind of go through the process of filling out a gold flower on their own. But I really emphasize, for people, it's an organic process. If it works for you, make it work for however it does. If it doesn't, go back to whatever approach works for you. The thing I like about this process is that I can put this gold flower up on my bulletin board and look at it and relate to it and see where I am. What have I done along that action plan? If my goals are kind of stalling out, I can also see like, yeah, that's because I haven't actually taken any of these steps that I identified. Some of those steps might be overcoming obstacles that are preventing me from moving forward. Some of those action plan steps might be I need to go out and acquire a piece of knowledge or gear or the resources that I need to take the next step financially. But it's very. For me, it's a very fun process. I do it on a regular basis and whenever I'm working consciously on a goal, which I would say at any given time, I have two or three going. Now when I first started, it was all I could do to manage one, and I still try two or three big ones going at a time. You just start to feel like it's too much. Your brain freezes out. Mine does anyway.

Yeah, that's great. And I just love the organic approach and us figuring out what works for us. It's easy to get stuck into this should routine of, well, this is how it should be done. But it doesn't really work for us. It doesn't serve us. Just that experimentation again, that learner mindset that allows us to really play with different models and modalities. And again, I just love yours. We'll link to the. We'll find those models of the flower and send that image out and give some worksheets as well to support people in bringing that to life. And of course, your class Refine youe Life. You go through this in detail. So great stuff. Well, so much more we can talk about. Let's go into Being Healthy is a Revolutionary Act. That's one of your newer creative projects. Tell us about that. What is that product about? And why is it true that that being healthy is a revolutionary act?

Oh, well, you know, the notion that being healthy is a revolutionary act is I think, an expression of an idea that I carried around for a long time and I think originally wrote it in an essay and a good friend and mentor of mine read it in the essay and said, this is a really interesting idea. Talk to me more about why you think this is true or what this means. And in the process of sort of Pouring out my heart about that, my perception, I realized that there was something there. The idea is that, okay, right now we live in a society where more than 50% of US adults are dealing with one or more chronic diseases. The vast majority of people end up at some point during the course of a year taking one or more prescription drugs on a daily basis. If you're an older person, you might be taking five or more. We eat these crazy amounts of processed foods that are made more available to us than healthy foods are. And then we end up with chronic problems like diabetes and obesity that cost a fortune. They can't be fixed by the medical system at all. And ultimately people go in this downward spiral where their lives become small and difficult and our healthcare costs are rising. So in a society that makes being unhealthy easier and more convenient and more promoted than being healthy, choose to be healthy. It really is a choice. It requires incredibly difficult choices, at least initially. Counterintuitive choices, somewhat controversial choices, unconventional choices. And, you know, I think we're at a place where as a culture, we're recognizing that the human and fiscal costs of chronic disease, of so many of our people being sick or depleted at the same time, it's just costing us too much. I mean, it's literally one of the greatest threats to global economic development that we're facing. Like Dr. Mark Hyman talks about $47 trillion being spent over the next 20 years globally on chronic disease. Almost inconceivable. But to me, the bigger issue is the human cost. While all those millions of people are getting sick and, you know, their families are suffering from watching them and having to take care of them while their job performance and their ability to contribute to their communities is suffering. We're all suffering. And it's not fun to live in a society where most people are at least a little bit sick most of the time. So all of this noodling sort of drew me into a frenzy of writing and thinking about. I ended up pending this little manifesto for thriving in a mixed up world. And that led to an article and this 101 revolutionary ways to be Healthy, which became a poster and then a mobile app. Now the mobile app has had, I don't know, 70,000 downloads, I think, and it's kind of become its own little mini movement. And I think of building communities with people like you and Kris Carr and Dr. Mark Hyman and Elena Brower and all of these cool people and doctors, Dr. David Ludwig at Harvard, that are just on the edge of this amazing transformation. Our society which my vision, I imagine what would it be like to live in a world where most people were healthy most of the time? I mean, can you fathom the amount of resources that it would fill up and what we could do together if we weren't nursing these chronic illnesses and injuries that are plaguing us and our children right now? The next generation of kids is predicted to live less long than their parents, in large part because of chronically bad diets and sedentary lifestyles. So I'm really excited about changing that. And revolutionaryact.com is sort of the home right now for gathering of these resources and we'll see what comes from it next. But I really like the idea that if we accept at face value the idea that we are living in an unhealthy society, then we can face with courage the reality that if we want to be healthy, we can do that, but we cannot go in lockstep with our society. It's going to mean making these kind of unconventional choices. And that takes not just courage, but community support and new information and resources. And again, you know, one of the reasons I just consider you such a fellow revolutionary, Brian, is that you and Alexandra are both passionate about assembling and accumulating and aggregating those resources, getting them out to people to make that job of revolutionary change a little easier, a little more fun, and a lot more rewarding.

So inspiring. So tell us the URL again.

It's revolutionaryact.com all one word. And people can find it too, through our magazine's website, which is experiencelife.com we always have links that go back and forth between the two. Right now, Revolutionary act is basically powered by Experience Life. We consider it sort of a public service and an advocacy arm of the magazine. You don't have to subscribe to or buy anything from the magazine to get there, but we leverage our journalistic resources and our technological resources to get that stuff out there and make it more available to to people. The app too, is a free app and it's really fun. It offers like a revolutionary act of the day that then links down to articles and other resources that can help people figure out how to how to pursue that act if it inspires them.

So cool and so inspiring. So how do you stay so plugged in and so inspired? We like to talk about fundamentals as part of optimal living 101. What would you consider some of your fundamentals you do on a daily, weekly basis to really stay plugged in?

Well, I love that you asked that question because I think it really kind of where the rubber meets the road. We all got to do some stuff, take care of our. I learned from my sister Andrea about the value of having a morning practice. My sister is a yoga teacher, and for her it was coming down to a very small, doable, daily commitment. Literally three deep breaths. She tried I'm going to do 30 minutes of yoga. I'm going to do 10 minutes of yoga. She kept getting kind of caught up in her own knickers. So she said, this is ridiculous. I'm going to make this so simple that I can't resist doing it. And she came up with a really beautiful three minute morning practice where she unrolls her mat, she lights some incense, she takes three deep breaths. And that's really the fulfillment of her commitment for the day. I sort of adjusted that for myself that I can do anything I want for three minutes, but I'll do something in the morning. Some mornings that's just staying in bed and really consciously gathering my personal energy and my thoughts. Some mornings it's getting up, lighting a candle and reading a medicine card or pulling another, like, Oracle card, or doing a piece of wisdom reading of just a page, you know, the meditation for the day. Sometimes it's getting up and rolling my mat and doing the three deep breaths and then some yoga if I feel inspired to do that. And many mornings, if the weather's nice, I go outside and I sit at a little table in my yard and I just listen to the birds. I think variety for me works better than any one single practice with meditation too. I really like moving it around. I know it helps some people to have just one thing that they do every day. I like being able to tell myself, you can do anything you want as long as you spend three minutes gathering yourself in a quiet way and focusing your energy and intention for the day. So that's a big fundamental for me. Another big one is having some kind of healthy breakfast that's based on whole foods. And that can be really challenging. But for me, I make this thing called a quick trick snack. Stack containers of like Tupperware glass storage containers that have shaved coconut and nuts and some seeds like chia seeds and a little bit of dried fruit. And I chop up an apple or I throw some berries in a bowl. I take a handful of each of those ingredients, throw them in the bowl, have almond milk or something on top of it, and that's a food source and an energy source and nutrition source that will take me through the middle of the day, no problem. When I Fail to do that, my day generally does not go. If I fail to do either one of those two things, my day almost always gets off on a slightly wrong track. The other fundamentals that I would share, it's a weird thing because they actually. A lot of the work I've done with Refine youe Life on a daily basis, I actually look at the Learner Judger map because I have it posted up on a bulletin board next to my refrigerator and I just look at it. I don't really do a whole lot more than look at it and just kind of remember that, but it's become fused into my neurology as the result of looking at it daily. And when I run into a problem in my life, I always go back and think about that, you know, what are my options at any given moment? Because that whole idea, the last of human freedoms, you know, is really to decide. This is Frankel, of course, to decide a response, you know, a conscious response. But we can always have some measure of choice about how we respond. And those are my big ones. Those are the ones that keep me sane. There's lots of other stuff I do. I train with a trainer and I do outdoor time. And I love the people I love and I get enough sleep. Sleep is huge. It's totally it. But almost all of those other things tend to happen very naturally when I'm doing the sort of morning practice, eating a decent breakfast, gathering my thoughts and intentions, and looking at how I want to approach the challenges in my life on a daily basis.

So brilliant. And I just love the small, doable practice and setting ourselves up for a win right with that small step. So the three minute practice, so empowering. And again, really appreciate you sharing and appreciate that you honor those fundamentals as consistently as you do so that you shine as brightly as you do. Let's wrap it up with your number one tip. If you had to give a number one tip to people looking to optimize their lives or whatever stage they're at in the journey, what would that be?

I think getting quiet before you make any big decisions is my number one tip. I think so much of what we do, we do in reaction and we do it in a reactive place. Whether you're deciding to change your life, make a conscious decision about taking your life in a different direction, or you want to change your health and fitness, I really think just taking a moment to get quiet before you do anything else. You know, the three, the centering, whatever it takes for you to get there. Because most of us suffer, really, from an excess of crazy energy that's running around doing stuff without our conscious choosing. And for me, right now, at this time in my life, I'm finding I usually have an answer somewhere inside of me if I can connect with it. But getting still enough to notice that, getting still enough that I can cultivate willingness to take the next step and really sense if something's right for me or not is my big number one tip.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Piwar Brian.

This is really fun.

Yeah. Look forward to talking soon. We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview. Please visit Bryan Johnson me for more.