Heroic Interview: The Practicing Mind with Thomas Sterner

You're listening to the Practicing Mind. An Optimal Living interview with Thomas Stirner and Bryan Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Tom Sterner who wrote the great book the Practicing Mind, subtitled bringing discipline and focus into your life. We talk a lot in our work together about practicing and focusing on the process vis a vis the product. And this book is an extraordinary look at how to develop the skills to show up with presence in a very active way. And I'm excited to chat with Tom about his ideas. He has a fascinating background, spending 25 years as a concert piano technician and rebuilder. And I'll just read a little bit from your bio. Tom Preparing instruments for the finest world class concert pianists and symphony musicians enabled him to witness firsthand the level of art afforded to those with a disciplined mind. An accomplished musician himself, Tom lives in Delaware, happily engaged to composing music, writing inspirational self help books, and publishing audiobooks through Mountain Sage Publishing. Tom, loved your book, as we've discussed and I appreciate you taking the time to chat today.

Oh, thanks Brian. It's great to be here.

Well, let's start from the top. The Practicing mind. Can you tell us about what it means to have a practicing mind?

Yes. From my perspective, a practicing mind is a mind that is absorbed in the process of achieving as opposed to getting to a specific place where the goal is actually achieved, if you want to use that word. I think that in our culture, as George Leonard mentions in his book Mastery, we're in a culture that's anti mastery. We have a culture which all day long we're being infused with this idea that we need to be someplace other than we are. We have to have whatever it is that we're after and we have to wherever we are, we can't be happy with wherever we are. We're always tutored to feel a sense of incompleteness and the feeling of I can't be happy in this moment with what I'm doing. The only reason I'm doing what I'm doing is so I can get over there. And it's a very unhealthy mindset and it's something that drives the media marketing for sure. If you look at all the commercials, everything is designed to make us feel like we're lacking and we have to get someplace other than where we are. And that process of getting to where we feel like we need to be is this nuisance that we have to go through in order to feel, to get rid of this feeling of being incomplete. And I think that, you know, what's important to realize is that when you set a goal to accomplish anything, the minute you become attached to it, you know what you're doing is you're saying to yourself that the goal is out there and I'm here. And now I have to feel this struggle between now and when I get to this point where I reach the goal. And that's a very unhealthy mindset. And it really takes away the experience of the joy of becoming, which is what we all are, are infinite in our ability to expand. And we're designed to be that way. And instead of utilizing that to bring this joy into our life, we end up using it as something that makes us feel like we're struggling and fighting because we're always trying to get we. Because we can expand infinitely. That can either be something that makes you feel very comfortable and something that makes you feel bliss and joyful because you're never going to run out of the ability to expand, or it can make you feel overwhelmed. And that feeling, I think is really fostered by the culture. So we need to work at being more aware of that. And so to me, that is what the practicing mind is. It's a mind that understands that everything that we do, everything that we learn is through repetition, with intention. And as long as we're absorbed in that process, then we're always happy in this moment.

I love it. And I love your connection to George Leonard's mastery. I love his description of society is in an all out war. He says right against mastery, everything is a constant climax. I love the way he describes that. You watch a commercial and literally a split second they're at work tearing off the suits and heading to the beach. He says it's not the content that's so bad, it's the tone, the feeling tone where there's never any plateau, right? It's all one climax after another.

That's true. And the thing is that all of the things that we achieve instantly have a very short shelf life for gratification. You know, when we look back in our life, the things that we work at over time, that's. It's actually that process is what gives us a sense of accomplishment. Anything that's very easy doesn't give us that sense of accomplishment. And I think the problem for us is that we're not paying attention to that. You know, we can look at, we can look at back through our lives and there's always been stuff that we had to have you know, whether it was the first car, the prom dress that, you know, the job, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. And we always have this feeling of, once I get that, then everything's going to be great. But we get that, and that feeling doesn't go away. It just moves to the next thing. And I think it's. We're not being taught to pay attention to that and to see that that's a paradigm that needs to be busted. It's a paradigm that doesn't work, and it's proven, proven that it doesn't work over and over again. And we need to start becoming more aware of that so that we can break out of that and see this. This joy in the process. You know, a side note, Brian, that's kind of humorous or at least intriguing to me was that when the practicing mind. I got contacted by a Japanese publishing company that wanted to translate the practicing mind into Japanese. And what they said to me was that because a lot of what's in the practicing mind is it's based in sports psychology and peak performance, but really also in Zen mind and a lot of Eastern thought. And what they said to me was the reason they wanted to translate the book into Japanese was because even though the ideas were the core fundamentals of the Japanese society, they had become so westernized that they wanted to get back to that, but they needed to hear it from a Western perspective because they didn't relate to the Eastern perspective anymore. I just thought that that was fascinating.

Yeah, that is cool. Well, let's talk about some of those aspects and how we can apply them to our lives today. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the observer. You describe it in such a powerful way. And again, when I was first introduced to the Witness and the observer, it was such an abstract concept that, you know, it got to the point where I can. I became aware of what that was. But I really appreciate the way you articulated it and why it's so important to cultivate that perspective as we develop a practicing mind. Can you describe that for us?

Yes. The observer really is closely related to what I call in the book, self awareness. I mean, self awareness is that I am not my thoughts. I am the one that experiences my thoughts. And some of those thoughts I generate, and some of those thoughts are just randomly generated by my mind. And I think it's important for people to understand that your mind is a thought machine. That's what it was designed to do. And it's a problem solver. And it's the reason we don't live in caves because it's always looking for a bone that you want. It's always looking for something to solve. And, and if you don't give it something, and this is one of the things that's talked about greatly in sports psychology, if you don't give it something to think about, it'll go out and find something on its own. So as you talked about, I know you've talked about meditation, meditation is the one thing that cultivates the observer because through the process of observing your thoughts, you become very separated from your thoughts. And it's, it's something that you can't stop from happening. And you, you don't have to try to make it happen. And it really doesn't matter whether you try or not. It's going to happen anyway as, just as a natural result of meditation. I should say that in the context of this discussion, we're really talking about either a breath based meditation where you sit quietly and watch your body breathe, we could go into that more if you wanted, or I think you've probably done that on other shows, but. Or a mantra based meditation, which personally, I think for Western people, many times it's easier because it gives your mind a little bit of a bone to chew on by saying a short phrase, two or three words, the phrase itself, from my perspective, doesn't really matter. But by doing that, what happens is that when you sit down and you sit quietly, and I say those too, because though guided meditations have many positive values, the problem with them in this situation is that they're asking you to think and they're saying, visualize this and now do this, now do this. And so your mind has to think to do that, which is generating thoughts. And that's exactly what we don't want to have happen when we're trying to become more of the observer. And as you meditate, you know what happens is you sit down and anybody that's ever meditated knows only takes 30 to 60 seconds or so. You're watching your breath and the next thing your mind says is, you know, this is boring. It's too easy to do. I want to go over here and then it just takes off over there. And it's, it always takes you with it. And usually you don't know it's done.

That you can get to 30 or 60 seconds more likely.

Well, and so then after that happens, you will reach a point where you will wake up, your observer will wake up and say, hey, wait a minute, you know, you're you're not doing what you said you're going to do. You're not watching your breath, you're not saying your mantra. You're down at the hardware store to get back to watching your breath and then you'll pull yourself back. And this is just a cycle that repeats and repeats and repeats. And there are, you know, I tell people that there's no such thing as a bad meditation. Many people get frustrated when they try to meditate because once again, they're not thinking about the process of meditation. They're thinking, I'm going to master meditation. And I, you know, my, my analogy of that is you have to look at meditation and all of this practicing mind stuff that we're talking about, it's like exercise. You don't master exercise. It's just exercise is a part of a healthy lifestyle. So you don't get to a point in exercising. We go, you know, where you say, you know what, I've gotten it, so I don't need to exercise for the rest of my life. It doesn't work that way. It's. Exercise is just a part of maintenance for your physical body. And this is a part of maintenance and expansion, you know, for your, your spiritual side and your, your mental side. So it's very important that you do this and that you understand that there will be days when your observer will be more upfront and will be more, you know, will have more power. And there will be other days where it's, it's more in the background. But as my jazz piano teacher used to say to me, you want you. The reason you practice is so that on your worst day your playing is acceptable. So in this situation here, the reason we meditate every day, even when it's a difficult day, is because we're raising that level of how upfront our observer is on any given day. So if we can do that, then we'll, what happens is, you know, we give ourselves when anytime the observer is in control, then we have the privilege of choice. If the observer is not in control, then we're basically just reacting to the thoughts that our mind is generating and the emotional responses that come with those thoughts. And that's really what we're after. We're after gaining the privilege of choice in how we process our day, which.

Requires the awareness, which requires the true self and that observer perspective so much in there. I want to rewind a little bit to the earlier part where you describe the difference between kind of a breath based or mantra based meditation and a guided meditation. Because this Is a point I bring to the work I do on meditation where I think those things are great to elicit the relaxation response and to, you know, support the immune system, et cetera. But when we wanted to cultivate the true observer perspective, it's as if we're bringing that observer version of us to the gym, which requires us to not be passive but to be actively engaged in focusing on the mantra. Right, Correct. So I love that.

And what you're doing is you're, you're, you're strengthening your, your willpower. But you know, basically, and in terms of your ability to stay focused on your, your breath or your mantra, you're raising your awareness of what will happen is you will begin to catch your mind as it takes off with less effort and sooner in the cycle. And you know, I have told people that, you know, when they say, well, I had a bad, you know, bad at meditation and I say, why is that? Because I'm always chasing my mind. Well, actually that could be argued that that's a good meditation because it's more repetitions. What it means is that you're aware that your mind is taking off. If, you know, if you're not, if you, if you said, I meditated for half an hour and I, my, my mind only went away one time. Well now that's not the case. You just weren't aware of it. So the point is, is that every time you catch yourself, when your mind takes off, every time you catch yourself, that's the observer opening its eyes. And it's in that instance, that's where the juice is, that's where you expand, is in that little blip of a second there where you go up. I'm not watching my breath. I've just woken up and the observer has come to the front and then you pull yourself back in and once again the observer, I think every one of those repetitions strengthens the observer within you. And that's really what we're after.

That's such a cool reframe. So not only do we not want to judge our meditations period, but if we're going to, we at least want to do so rationally and realize that if skills are developed through repetition, then what we may perceive to be our worst meditation may in fact be our best because we chased it around. It's as if we just had a good interval training workout on the track. Right?

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's just a matter of interpretation. But that comes from. See, that comes. We're back into that anti mastery thing. See, it's like, well, if I'm chasing my mind a lot, then I'm not good at this. You know. See, no, that isn't the case at all. The best monks in the world that sit there for eight hours, you know, there's, they're doing the same thing, you know, nobody. This is the process. It's a relationship of the mind and the observer. It's, it's the thing that goes back and forth. The problem is that for most people the mind is in control 98% of the time. And, and there. And because of that, they have no observer. Their observer is just way in the background and they're just reacting to the thoughts that their mind is having. And the irony is that the more your observer becomes aware, the more your observer is aware of when it's not aware. And so that's the paradox. But I think that that's done, that we're designed that way on purpose because we need to be able to separate from that judgment process. And we can't do that initially, you know, we tend to be very judgmental, but as our observer becomes more in front, then we're able to, you know, it doesn't bother us as much as when we become more aware that our mind is taking off because we're at the same time aware that we are in a process of changing that. If that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. And I want to take that into the next idea because I was just, just thinking about how I wanted you to describe the instructor's awareness. And I think that, that you just, it was a perfect segue because the non judgmental we tend to get emotional about whether we're performing with mastery or not. And if we're not, it's a binary thing. Right. I'm just going to give up because I'm not good at this and get frustrated, etc. Versus you talk about cultivating the observer and then also imagining being an instructor who knows precisely what they want their student to do. And when they don't do it, they don't get emotional about it, they just guide them back to the process. Can you talk to us about that?

Yes. I think, you know, that's how I, I learned that with myself as I was going through all of this stuff, was I, I was trying to develop a mind that was, was more analytical and less judgmental because I realized that the judgmental portion really had nothing to do with moving forward. And there's a microsecond, you know, when you, when you make a judgment, there's a Microsecond before that, where you've analyzed, you can't. You can't judge anything you haven't analyzed. And then as soon as you analyze it, it immediately drops into this centrifuge, you know, where it's spun out, and you're comparing it to other things that have happened in life. And then you're deciding, this is good, this is bad. This makes me happy, this makes me sad. And there's all these things that go on, and there's these emotional responses from that, and none of that has anything to do with accomplishing your goal, moving forward with your skill development, whatever it is that you're trying to. So for me, I would think back about that really came. That concept came from, you know, all the music study I did. And I remembered that, you know, my instructor, you know, he would say to me, look, when you're working on, like, say, a jazz improvisation line, he said, sometimes you have trepidation pushing the key down. He said, hit the wrong key. He said, hit it with conviction. He said, don't judge, you know, the outcome. He said, just know that you're moving forward this. And feel confident in it. And so I. He never got upset with me, and his voice was never raised. And he only. What he did show is excitement for, you know, for me staying in the process. If I. If he could see, if I practice and if I practice, it didn't matter if I played the part really well. It was the fact that I had practiced really well that he got excited about. So I think that this is one of the things that we have to do with ourselves is once again, we have a tendency. What. You know, why do we judge ourselves, you know, and get emotional about this stuff? Well, we're back to the. You know, we don't want to put. We don't want to be in this plateau thing. We think we should be here all the time. And an interesting thing about that perspective is a story that I've told many times as I had someone that I was coaching, and they called up and they had had a. They had changed jobs in midlife. And this person wanted to do something completely unrelated to what she had been doing for years. So she. I asked her what the problem was, and she said, well, I've been doing this. Learning this new skill for six months, and I'm not. I'm not as good as I should be. And I said, well, how good should you be? And there was just this silence. And she said, well, I don't really know. And I said, well, if you don't know how good you should be, how do you know you're not better than you should be for somebody who's been in it for six months? And she, again, there was this silence. She said, well, I never really thought of it like that. I said, well, let me ask you this. If you could do. If you had your skill level that you have today, six months ago when you started, would you have felt that you were good? And she said, oh, absolutely. I said, so it's not that your skill level isn't increasing, it's your perspective of how good you can be is changing. I said, isn't that always going to be happening? And so it was like this epiphany for her, just these common sense questions. But the point is, is that she kept judging her, you know, her movement forward, because she had this preconceived idea of where, when it went, this point, she was going to get to, where she was going to feel, as we said earlier, like, oh, I've got there. I'm there now. Now I'm good. And she completely missed the point that you're never. We're infinite. That's what we are, is we're infinite. And once you understand that, then you stop feeling like, I have to get some now. I have to be here now. I have to be doing what I'm here now. That's the most perfect moment. That's what I'm expanding at the highest level. Because all of my energy, all of my thought energy, all of my emotion, everything is right here with me right now, doing what I'm doing.

Wow. And we can celebrate with excitement.

Absolutely.

This is it. I mean, there's nothing. This is real. Literally, it. I'm never. Just to restate that. The awareness that we're never going to get there allows us to appreciate where we are and paradoxically accelerates the process of getting to that next point, knowing it won't be the final point. Right? Just the prelude to the next opportunity to grow. Can you tell us about the flower's perfection? Because I think that ties in so perfectly here, the fact that each stage of the flower's unfolding is in itself perfect.

The Flower was actually an essay I wrote back in my early 20s. I was living alone, and I was doing a lot of music, composing and writing, and I had this flower that I was trying to grow, and it was in the window and I was looking at it. And so then I had this idea for this essay. And so I thought about at what point initially I was feeling this impatience for this flower to get a move on here. I was thinking about when I was a child, my father had made this thing for me for school, for this science experiment, or he took two plates of glass and taped them together with dirt in them. The glass were about an inch apart, and put a seed in there so you could watch it grow. So I'm looking at this plant, and I'm thinking, at what point in this. This flower's life has this flower reached perfection? Is it, you know, when it's first put in the ground as a seed? Or is it when it first pokes its head through the soil? Or is it. When it blooms? Or is it the perfection of it returning back to this state that is integrated with the earth? And when I looked at. When I stepped back and looked at that, I thought, well, it's always perfect at being where it is at that particular moment when it's a seed. It's perfect for being a seed. It's not supposed to be in bloom, then it's supposed to be a seed. And then the whole process of germinating where it knows where the sun is, even though it's never seen it, and no matter what position you put it in, in the soil, it figures that out, and it moves forward and forward and moves up and up, you know, looking for the sun. And then it pokes its head through things that. That, to me, is just an unbelievable miracle. So. But then it's still. There's really nothing that beautiful about it in terms of physicality. It's, you know, it has its. Just its greenness, and then it grows and grows, and then eventually, boom, it reaches this state of full bloom, which most people would say, well, that's when it's perfect. But no, that's just another stage in this flower's life. And each second of that seed, through germinating, through full bloom, and then the way that it can, at the end of its life, it just moves back. And if you watch flowers, when they die, eventually they're just gone, and the whole process is perfect. So that was when I realized that it was a good analogy or a metaphor, I guess I should say, for this whole concept of we're always in the process. And when we're in the process and we're not fighting the process, we can realize and appreciate our perfection. We know where we are in whatever it is that we're trying to do is we are right where we should be for that amount of time. And the gift of that is to learn to be more aware you can't have that appreciation if you can't be the observer. The observer sees that naturally, it doesn't need to be someplace else because it's very content to be where it's at. And also, as we develop the observer, we develop the shield. The shield is that we're bombarded all day long with media that is driven by the concept of, you're not perfect. Right now, perfect is out here. It's driving this car, it's having this house, it's having this job, it's this vacation. It's all these things that you don't have right now, and you need to get them. The paradox or the irony in that is that we're all participating in it. I mean, everybody is like, everybody's trying to make more money so they can buy more stuff. And, you know, so everybody's participating in this system that makes everybody feel incomplete so we can all have more money so we can buy more stuff instead of realizing how perfect life is in every second.

Amen. And beautifully stated. And it applies. Joseph Campbell came to mind, as you were describing, that in that the good life is one hero's journey after another. So that idea that in our lives we're going to have the seed, the sprouting, the blooming, the going back to Earth, not only in a macro sense, in our overall lives, but in each thing that we engage in. And as you said in the beginning, simply being aware of that process, that there is no point that's more perfect than another and no completion to the process, is in itself liberating. Right?

It is liberating. And it's. I think you. When you can get to that perspective, you realize that true perfection is limitless. It has to be. Perfection has to be infinite because anything else is a number, you know, and that number is a limit. So it. You know, there's no place when, if you can get there, it's not perfect. You know, it's. That's always a limitation. So I think that what we do is we misinterpret that. That opportunity or the reality of that that is part of our universe. We misinterpret that as almost a burden instead of realizing that true perfection is the ability to infinitely expand. And if we can infinitely expand, then wherever we are is where we should be for that particular moment. And it's perfect because that's where we're supposed to be for. And I should say that one of the big things that we do wrong when we start, we need goals. We obviously need goals. Otherwise we would just be like a sailboat with no rudder, you know, just kind of blowing around on the lake. We need to have an idea of. It's good to have an idea of, you know, what do I want to accomplish, where do I want to head? And that's why I say it should be used as a rudder, but it should not be used as a judgment of what you have left to accomplish. It should just be used as a rudder. And. And when we set goals and I have to, you know, my observer steps up and says, hey, Tom, you know, you need to read your book again. But one of the things I do that everybody does is when we come up with a goal, we immediately assign a timeframe to it. And it's usually done sub, you know, unconsciously. But, you know, we set this time frame up in our mind, and then we begin to judge our progress based on where we feel we are in that timeline, even though the timeline may be completely, and usually is completely inaccurate. So an example of that would be to say, I want to lose 30 pounds. That should take two weeks. Well, see, that's an absurd. Everybody could see that that's absurd. But we do that on many different levels. So what ends up happening? Well, you start this dietary program, you start exercising, you completely change your lifestyle. So you're living this healthy lifestyle, and maybe in two weeks you've lost six or seven pounds, which is really phenomenal, but you're going to. I've only lost six or seven pounds. I'm not successful. I'm not very good at this. All this judgment starts to come in. But what is fueling that is a very inaccurate idea of how awareness of. Actually, there's no data in it. You know, how long should it take if somebody says, no, you're way ahead of where you should be. You should have only lost £4 at this point. You know, well, then we feel completely different, but nothing's changed. We've still only lost six pounds. It's our perspective and this information, and I think that that's really important because many things that we do in life, we don't instantly have access to that kind of data. And I went through that when I originally wrote the Practicing Mine. When I sold the piano service business, I decided that I wanted to spend the second half of my life doing something where I felt like I was impacting more people. I sold this business that I had for 30 years, and I was the top of the heap. I had two and a half, three years of workbook for the rebuilding shop. I was I had all the concert work sewed up. I was working in four states, I was working 80 hour weeks and I walked away from that and I thought, I'm going to write this book. And I wrote it and I thought, well, let me see, I'll write the book, I'll get a website and everybody will come and life will be great. And that didn't happen. You know, I wrote the book and I got the website, but nobody knew who I was and nobody knew what the book was about. And I would sell two books a week. And I thought, this is not good because I'm daunting my money. And eventually I ended up actually going back into the concert industry and working as a roadie at times just to bring cash flow. And I had kids that were going into college and stuff and I had to make money. And it eventually, you know, it is take. Eventually it got bigger and bigger and bigger and then it got taken over by a major publisher and then it got a second edition published and as you and I were talking before the broadcast and now it's in like seven languages and it's still getting bigger and bigger. But I had, it's right where it's supposed to be, but I had this preconceived idea that, well, it should take, you know, six months at the most. And it was totally unrealistic. And even though the book was moving and it was the flower, it was perfect at being where it should be at that particular time. I was judging that and creating all this emotion inside of myself. And so I've had to review this, believe me, it's. And that's the thing too, I should say is that if you, if you get into this and you say, you know what, when I'm good at the practicing mind, then I'm going to be happy. You're right, you're right back in the thing that we're trying to get away from. If you go, no, I'm, you know, I'm aware that I can expand differently and I'm going to work at being in the process and some days I'll be better at it than others. And as long as I'm aware and I keep pulling myself back, then it's perfect practice. And I have the practice in mind.

So much in there as well. And I love this kind of unrealistic expectations and how easily we can slip into that. And I love your humility of. It's time to reread the book, Tom. Yeah. So talk to us about the. As we look at the relationship between goals and process. Right. And obviously we need to set goals. I had a similar kind conversation with Tom Morris, a kind of public philosopher who taught at Notre Dame. And he talked about Aristotle and being teleological and we need that target. But then being so focused on, you say our number one desire needs to be to stay focused on the work. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what that means and how we go about doing it? How you go about doing it and recommend we go about doing it?

Well, one thing is you have to develop this present moment awareness. You have to. You can't be in the present moment and work at it if you're not aware when you're not. So that, that jumps back to we need to meditate. And if you don't like meditation, call it thought awareness training. It doesn't really match, it's a label. But you need to be aware of what your mind is doing. Because when your mind takes you out of the present moment, if you're not aware of it, then you're just basically going along for the ride and experiencing all the emotions that go along with that ride. So the very first thing I always come back to is you can't accomplish anything that we're talking about here if you don't have this observer mindset. So you have to work at that every day and realize that that's like exercise. It's just part of developing a mind that has a choice. For you to have a choice, you have to know what your mind is doing. What I do to cultivate a present moment process oriented thing is, there's a couple things you can do. One is when you're aware that your mind is running out into the future or into the past, is to look at the. Whatever activity you're doing is to try to do it very slowly. It's very difficult to do something slow in our culture today because it rails against everything that our culture is asking you to do. We're finding that our minds, through the studies, our minds are evolving so that they're able to function at higher speeds. And these calculations, with all the texting and this constant input, our minds, there's more thinking going involved and there's more noise going in our heads. And so our minds are having to process more constantly and our mind is adapting to that. But what our mind is losing and atrophying is this ability to stop that and rail it into focus on what am I doing right now? And people say this all the time, they have trouble paying attention to what they're doing right now because they're. They're trying to do too much in a day. And their mind is always going, well, look, since you're working on that, since you're physically working on that, I'm going to run out and start on this other stuff so we can kind of get ahead of things. And so your mind is very tempted to do that. So you have to get this awareness that that's happened and realize that that's one of the reasons to meditate is because we have to kind of counteract this thing that is. Is happening with us. And if you try to do something slow, it's very difficult because it's just like you can walk across the room, you can brush your teeth. And while you're brushing your teeth, if we use that, if you're brushing your teeth, you can be thinking about everything. But if you try to brush your teeth really slow, it's very difficult to do and think about other things because it's like. It's like a new thing. You know, when we learn a new skill, it takes all of our attention. After we learn the skill, it becomes second nature to us. And that's when we begin to drift away from being involved and engrossed in the process of executing the skill. So that's why I say that, like, when I brush my teeth in the morning, I try to be very mindful of what I'm doing and I slow myself down. If I find I'm, you know, making a sandwich in the kitchen and I'm not paying attention to what I do I'm doing and I catch myself, then I will make myself be very deliberate. Like when I take the mayonnaise out of the refrigerator and I walk over and set it on the counter very slowly, and I will turn the lid very slowly, and I. It will put. Put the lid on the counter in just such a way and very deliberate. When I take the knife and how much mayonnaise I put on there and how much. How I spread it on the bread. So that's very evenly. It's not being obsessive. It's saying to my mind, no, I'm in control. And we are going to be back in the present moment here. So slowness to me is a very helpful tool. And you have access to it all the time. The other thing is to break things down into small parts, which is what the four S's are. Because, you know, our mind can focus on, you know, when we try to do too much at one time, then the mind is. It's just kind of overloaded. And it's one of the things that we've learned in acquiring skills, physical hand eye coordination skills. You know, the brain can learn anything, and it actually learns the fastest when you stop trying to do everything in one pass, such as a golf swing. So it's counterintuitive because if you said to somebody, and I used to do this when I worked heavily on my golf swing, you know, if you like, you grip the club. Okay, well, if you grip the club, just grip the club. Let go of the club. Grip the club. Let go of the club. Most people say, oh, my. Crying out loud, that's going to take forever. And you're not swinging the club. And I want to. I want to get good at swinging the club. Well, yeah, but if you do this so many times, then your brain goes. It just habitualizes it and it goes, okay, I got that. Move on. And it's really more productive to be that way to break things down into small increments. And to do that, you have to focus on these little increments when you're doing it, because it takes. It takes attention to be able to break something down as opposed to just working on it when you're kind of half conscious at it. So those are two things that, that I try to do in terms of keeping myself present, moment oriented.

So good. Slowing, slowing down and chunking it. And that's tied to your transforming the mundane into magic that we talk about in.

Yes.

In the video that I did of. I just love that. And you use the example of mowing the lawn and doing it as masterfully as you can and being fully present, not even trying to enjoy it. Right. But just.

No, that's right.

Engaged in it.

That's right. The object is to be engaged in it. The actual. What happens is this magic, you know, because we're. We're so unaccustomed to being in the present moment in our culture today. And when you do that, all of the mind chatter drops away and people don't realize how active their mind is. You know, thousands and thousands of thoughts that are going on all the time, and each thought is begetting another thought. You know, I need to go to the grocery store. You know what? I need ice cream. Maybe I shouldn't be eating so much ice cream. You know, when was the last time I had blood work? It's just kind of. It's. The brain just keeps going and going and going, and you're. You're experiencing all these little emotional hits, you know, when you do that and when you pull your mind into the present moment and just fully engage it in what you're doing, all that drops away. And it's amazing when your mind starts to quiet down that you can experience this sense of bliss. And what do we mean by bliss? Just happy for no reason at all. Just. You just feel happy. You feel lighthearted and happy. When was the last time most people felt that way, you know, well, it's there for you if you just, you know, take the time and the effort to. To put into that. And that's the whole reason for doing this because. Because it's right there in front of us, this feeling that we keep chasing after with all the stuff we're trying to buy and everything else. If we would just be involved fully and fully engaged in what we're doing right now.

I love it. What have we not talked about that you feel like we should address?

Probably the doc, you know, the do observe correct. Which is when I used to. When I was studying golf a lot. You know, one of the things that the guy stress was he wanted me to make a lot of swings without a golf ball. And the reason was because you become very distracted by the flight of the ball. So, you know, you step up and you say, well, I'm going to practice taking the club back like this. And. And then what happens is you, you know, you go, okay, and you do that and hit the ball, and the ball goes off to the right, and you go, why did that happen? Well, now you're starting to try to correct that instead of. Of doing this process of taking the club away and habitualizing, you know, that particular behavior. So I always use the analogy of a guy shooting foul shots because I think it's very easy for people to visualize that. So the guy steps up to the foul line, he looks at the hoop. Putting the ball through the hoop is what he's trying to accomplish. That's his goal. And so the goal feeds back to his. To him. He gets all his brains getting all this data, and he. He does this shot. Now, he doesn't sit there and think about, cock my wrist this way and do all that. He just lets the target feedback on him. He takes his shot, and that's the do part. And then he observes the shot unfold. He watches the ball go towards the hoop, and then he looks to see what it does. As in his best part of his observation, it goes through the hoop. It's too soft, too hard, too left, too right. And then he corrects and he does it again. That's perfect. Practice in motion. And it's perfect just the same for that as it is. If you've got a behavior in yourself that you want to change, or say there's a reaction to a certain person or a certain situation that you want to change, it's the same thing you. The first thing you have to do is you have to know what it is. What's your target? You know, well, when this person comes in and is annoying, I want to be separate and I want to be my observer, and I don't want that person to have that power. All right, well, now you set up your, your goal when that person comes in, you know, you do, you know, you don't let them annoy you. And then you observe how you're reacting to them and then you make corrections. You know, if you get in there and you go, you know, I really do good today if I did worse. Just like the basketball guy, if he misses the first shot and he sits there and slams the ball and says, I can't believe I missed that. And then none of that has anything to do with making the ball go through the hoop on the next shot. It just gets in his way because it creates all this internal dialogue and this emotional waste that's going on, and he loses focus and feels bad, and there's all this extraneous stuff that starts to happen. So I tell people, you know, it's very important to understand with everything that you're trying to do. A meditation practice. I want to meditate every day. Okay, so you meditate four days, and then, you know, you just really had a bad day at work or something's really troubling you and you just. I just, just can't bring myself to meditate. Well, actually, that would be the best time to meditate. But if you miss the meditation, you don't beat yourself up on it. You just observe. I miss the meditation. I bring myself back to it. I want to have a practicing mind. Okay, so you work at having a practicing mind. You know, some days, as I said, you're going to be better at it than others. It's the awareness of what you. Of this moment and trying to be in this moment. That's what you're after. And as long as you're able to self correct, then you have the practicing mind and you're perfect. I was talking to some department heads at a college one time, and this guy, the president of the university, had made everybody read the book because they were in this situation where they had a five year plan and they had because of differences in funding. And he called me and said, look, the problem is that these people were on a five year plan. He said, but I, I there we're in the first year and they're worried about what's going to happen in the fourth year. He said, so I'd like you to come and talk to the people about applying this stuff. Well, in the Q and A session afterwards, this guy spoke up and he said, you know, I've been married for many years and I had my wife and I, you know, there was always a problem with me paying attention to her when she was talking to me. And of course that got snickers out of everybody. And he said, but seriously, he said, you know, I just was, was not attentive and engaged in our conversations. And he said, so after I read your book, he said, I started really becoming engaged in the conversations and I thought this is really cool, I'm actually doing this and this is completely different than the way I used to be. And he said, but then one day we're riding in the car and she mentions this professor at this university. And he said, of Kentucky, this was down in Kentucky. And he said that shouldered my mind into this professor over there at the University of Kentucky that I needed to talk to. And I started composing this email in my head. And he, I don't know, maybe 60 seconds went by and I woke up and realized I don't know what she just said for the last 60 seconds. He said, I brought myself back to the conversation. He said, but it looks like I'm not very good at this. And I said, you're really missing the big picture here. You've become self correcting. You know, for years you weren't paying attention and when you weren't paying attention, you weren't even aware that you were paying, you weren't paying attention. Now you are paying attention and it only took you 60 seconds to self correct and bring yourself back. I said, that's you have empowered yourself. You've woken up the observer and now that observer is just going to keep becoming stronger and stronger and more and more who you are, who you are anchored in and you will have that conscious choice ability. And so I think it's, you know, this is, it's really important to understand this stuff because otherwise it's learning to expand this in your life becomes the struggle instead of this joy.

I love it. I just had this awareness as you were describing that that the verb practicing is a very active word. It's not the perfect mind or the practice mind as if it's done once and for all. This is the process. And to celebrate the moment we bring ourselves back as the essence of the practice is where the joy exists and where the mastery exists, right?

Absolutely. And that's when have full power because then your, your ability to expand becomes limitless. Where you're, it always is. But you have some control over that, you know, because you're learning to direct your mind and you're learning to be unaffected by the circumstances around you. And you know, that to me is extremely freeing. And you know, we ought to be teaching this to children. You know, my daughter, one of my daughters is, is a kindergarten teacher. And what they're finding is that these, if we think we're impatient, well, you go down to the next generation and I mean because they're raised on so much media and everything is so instantaneous, it's a real struggle and it's something that's starting to be documented that they have absolutely zero patients because that's basically the world that they're growing up with.

Yeah, it's amazing. We have a three year old son and one of our practices is no screening. So I'm in very much a focused hermit mode and I turn on my iPhone once a week these days. Used to be on it all the time in front of it. And one of the things we wanted to model was not that we don't have a TV and we don't spend a lot of time online and just cultivating his attention. And obviously he's going to engage in media, in technology and there are such wonderful things about it. But we made the decision that the greatest thing we can do for him is to cultivate his awareness and his attention and not paper cut it to death by the overstimulation and all the things we talked about. George Leonard's comment on the assault on mastery. Well, my goodness, that starts with every cartoon that needs to be watched X hours a day, right?

Absolutely. And that's great to hear, Brian, that you're doing that. That's really fantastic. I mean, I've tried to work with my kids and the only downside of writing the practicing mind is if I ever fall off the wagon and they go get a copy of the book and hand it to me, you're just.

Being, you know, instructor awareness. Right.

You need to reread chapter six, dad.

That's so good. This is fantastic. Once again, thank you for the time and the insightful tour through your work. So recommend the book and everything else you're up to. I like to kind of of wrap up our chats with one question, which is if you could share one piece of advice with someone who is passionate about optimizing their lives, and it might be something we talked about in this conversation already or something outside of it, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

Well, I think we don't need. Certainly a meditation practice would be one thing, but I think that you've talked about that in many of your discussions. And so we don't really need to bring that up. But I think the other thing is that is to realize that this becoming, expanding in this is in itself being in the process. Learning to be in the process is. It's the same thing that we talked about. There's an awareness of when you're in the process and awareness of when you're not in the process, and learning to be be in the process more and more is what we're after. And there are days when, as I've just joked, I mean, there's days where I'm not very good at the book I wrote. And I admit that. But it doesn't trouble me because I. I realize that that's part of the process. You know, the. Because I don't expect to be able to do it all the time. I expect to have days when I'm better at it than others. But there's always a joy in coming back. You know, we are re corralling myself back and recommitting to that. It's not so much committing because I'm always committed to it. I just understand. I don't have this expectation that I should be here at this point. I've been working at this for 25 years. I should be here at this point. I don't know where. Where I'm at is where I should be. And I think when you begin to realize that and you stop trying to get someplace else, that's when you really can learn to enjoy this moment and being in this moment and understanding that the whole thing I said of you, your perfection is the ability to infinitely expand. And if you just understand that one thing, it's the ability to infinitely expand. And so this idea that I'm going to get someplace where I feel like everything is okay, you're already there. You just have to pay attention to that.

Perfection is the ability to infinitely expand. So good. Just to bring us back to the beginning as well. George Leonard, he has a line in mastery where he says something along the lines of the true master falls so in love with the process that for every mile they take toward their goal, they hope that it gets two miles further away. I think that's.

That is so.

He is.

That writing is so profound. I just think it's. And. And I actually didn't discover that book until about a year ago. I think it's interesting that he wrote that. I looked up the very first copy publication was in the early 90s, and that's when I was actually writing the Practicing Mind was in the early 90s. I think it's. There's a mindset, there's an awakening that is happening in our culture because we're learning very slowly that the system of, first of all, multitasking doesn't exist. As we think, you know, our brain. We think we're just doing five things at once, and we're not. Our brain's constantly starting and stopping on each task. And that's one of the reasons why we feel so exhausted from, quote, multitasking. But we've also found that it doesn't work. I mean, I actually had a conversation with a guy on a train where he was telling me that their company had realized that this constantly pushing people to do more and more and more in a day was counterproductive. It was stressing people out. They were taking the stress home and then getting. Getting the home stressed out and then bringing that stress back to work. It was this vicious cycle. And the reason we got into discussion was because he was talking about the Practicing Mind, and he just said, you know, we're using that. We realized that we just need a totally new model. What we're doing is not working. And I think that that's really huge that you're starting to see this in corporations where they're starting to look at this and say, you know, what we're doing is it's just not working. And we need. There has to be a better way to increase productivity without burning out the employees. And I just think if you just talk about meditation 25 years ago, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Just everything we've talked about today, we wouldn't be having this conversation now. It's not out of the ordinary. So I think that there's an awakening that's happening. I think it's very good.

I agree. And I appreciate your role in helping catalyze that and really appreciate you sharing your wisdom today. Where can people best find you and everything else you're up to?

Well, they can find right now is an exciting time because the practicing mind.com has been up for years. But I founded the Practicing Mind Institute the end of last year and we have been working for, well, for all of this year on the concepts that are going to be in it. And we're, we've gotten a little bit behind due to circumstances that weren't in my control. But the site, the Practice In Mind Institute site will be launching, I'm sure before the end of October and there will be all sorts of neat stuff. I'm going to have some online courses for different areas. One, the first one to be released will be for musicians just because that one was the easiest for me to do. But there will be online courses, courses for other things. But there's also going to be a membership thing where, you know, people can join that. And we'll be having this type of discussion, but they'll be more direct. There'll be video discussions, but I'll have, you know, people will be writing questions and stuff like that to me and then we'll just basically be answering them on a weekly basis. And plus I had, as I mentioned to you early on, I had a radio show. I handpicked the best shows from that which have been in archives for a few years now. And they're going to have access to all those recordings. There's going to be a whole bunch of stuff. But the practicing mindinstitute.com is going to be live very shortly and that will be great. But like I said, the people can always email me Tom at the Practicing Mind or just go on the Practicing Mind site and fill out the contact form and I read every email that comes in.

That's great. So the practicingmind.com and then the practicing mind institute.com coming soon. But if you can go to the site and I imagine you have a newsletter they can sign up for and get notified when the new site comes out.

Yes, they have. There's a newsletter. If you get the newsletter, you can get a free cop the first chapter download of the book. You can also get one of the radio shows I did with I dialogue with another person specifically about different types of meditation, how they're done and all that sort of stuff. You get that free download. What will be coming on the Practicing Mind Institute site will be I took like the top questions that are usually asked me in interviews and I did a talk back on them and you'll be able to get that as a free download too. So there's a number of things that will be up very shortly.

Sounds fantastic and sounds like you're at perfect progress. Exactly where you should be.

I am, Brian. That's right. I am. Everything is as it should be. But that's another thing. I mean, you know, that was another situation where this website was supposed to be up by the second week of June at the very latest. And, you know, stuff happened with the development team, you know, where they had some health problems with the family and stuff like that, and it just. Things got behind and, you know, you have to be able to say, you can again. I can sit there and say, you know, I can become all stressed out over it. Well, this should be here. We should be here at this point. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And. And none of that has anything to do with the reality of the moment. And everything is where it's supposed to be. And there have been some things that have come out of that. The longer time that would not have happened if things had gone, quote, according to schedule. So everything is on schedule. It just. We get these preconceived ideas of what the schedule is, and then we begin to judge our progress against that. So I'm constantly, you know, I don't want to say relearning because I already know it, but I'm reminding myself of this. And every time I do, I always have this feeling of relief, like, yep, yep, this stuff works.

Sounds like you're practicing it.

I am practicing it. Repetition with intention.

So good. True perfection. The ability to infinitely expand. Tom, I appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you, Brian.

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