Heroic Interview: The Tools with Barry Michels

You're listening to the Tools, an Optimal.

Living interview with Barry Michaels and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I am thrilled to be chatting with Barry Michaels, who wrote the great book the Tools with Phil Stutts. And this is the first time I've done a kind of a two part series miniseries on one book. And I'm thrilled about it. Two days ago it will be yesterday when we released this chat. I had a wonderful chat with Phil, just lit me up. And if you haven't listened to that yet, check it out. That's kind of part one to this conversation. We talked about the high level idea of the tools and focused on the first tool in particular and danced around some really exciting ideas. Today I'm excited to talk with Barry about the other tools and some of my other favorite facets from the book. As I mentioned in that one, this is one of my favorite books I've ever read. It was hands down my favorite book of 2012, which is when I read it, I never read a book twice. Immediately, literally, I had never done it before this book. I got the Kindle. Then I bought the other hard copy and marked them both up, bought copies for our team so we can actually create a book club to walk through it. And I just think it translates the ideas of spirituality and psychotherapy into practice in such a profound way that I'm a huge advocate of it. And I'm thrilled to be talking with Barry. Barry's background, he got his BA from Harvard, a law degree from UC Berkeley, Bolt School of Law. I was joking with Barry before that, I dropped out of UC Berkeley Bolt School of Law. So we share that in common. And he has his master's from USC. He's been practicing psychotherapy in Los Angeles since 1986. Barry, thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, let's jump in. As we discussed, Phil and I chatted about the high level what is a tool? And that sort of thing. I would love for us just to jump in. And before we go through the tools, though, I'm actually just curious, what's your favorite tool?

That's a great question. It's probably like you, the reversal of desire. Because fundamentally I think my biggest problem is avoidance. It's hard for me to get myself to write. It's hard for me to get myself to make difficult phone calls. So for me, I just want to put myself in a mode where I'm always moving toward pain. I know that whenever I Do that. The more often I use that tool, the better my days are. I just feel more alive. I feel like I attract more opportunities into my life. I mean, interestingly, you talked about dropping out of Bold, and I went through Bold and then worked at a law firm for three years and then made what was probably one of the most painful decisions I've ever had to make, which was quitting law because it was really boring and I hated it. But on the other hand, it was so secure and so prestigious. And by the way, I had no idea what I was going to to do next. And I didn't know the reversal of desire at the time. But I do know that once I made that decision and got through the pain and the angst and the insecurity and all of my friends thinking I was out of my mind, and my parents saying, you've wasted all that money we spent on you and everything, once.

I made the decision and went through the pain, really, two things happened. The first is I just changed as a person. I became much more confident, much less avoidant. I just felt more independent, more myself, frankly. Because for the first time in my life, I was doing something I chose to do rather than something that, you know, my father had always wanted me to be an attorney. But even more mystical and amazing than that was the fact that as soon as I made the choice, things started to happen to me that couldn't have happened without that choice. And, you know, I know about the Secret and the law of attraction and everything else, but I had never really seen this in action before. In the first year after I quit law, I made the decision to become a psychotherapist. And it was pretty much out of the blue. When I was an attorney, if you told me I was going to end up being a psychotherapist, I would have laughed in your face. But from day one, it fit for me in a way that nothing had ever fit before. It just felt like this is what I was meant to do. That was year one. Year two, after I quit, I was at a psychotherapy conference that obviously I wouldn't have been at if I continued to be an attorney. And I met my wife, and we have two incredible kids and we've been married 30 years, and it just felt like kismet. And in year three, I met Phil Stutts, who has been just a treasure trove of information, goodwill, humor. He's my writing partner. I mean, really, one of my best friends in life. Now. I'm one of the most rational people you'll ever Meet. I'm an attorney, for Christ's sake. And I'm telling you, none of that could have happened on my own. I had to sort of throw myself into the river and let it guide me. And it guided me to people and opportunities that I just never would have found on my own. So there's something about the reversal of desire to me that is mystical. It synchronizes you with something much, much higher than you that helps determine your destiny in a positive way.

Wow. So much. There. There's a documentary called Finding Joe about Joseph Campbell's mythology around the hero's journey and whatnot. And I share a story. I happen to be in it. And I share a story about dropping out of Bolt. And I had no idea what I wanted to do other than to work with kids and to coach a Little league baseball team. And I was spinning and terrified. I had none of the skills. But the same thing that you just described happened to me when I made that leap. I wound up coaching Little league baseball team. Out of that, I had an Idea, this is 1998, that all the teams, all the Little league baseball teams, ayss soccer teams in the world would be on the web in a matter of time. And I was going to create the platform that would help them do that. People thought I was crazy. Did it. Won the business plan competition at UCLA, raised $5 million. We hired the law firm I would have wanted to work for before I would have graduated from law school. None of which ever could have been imagined. But there was some alignment with something bigger that Campbell described as those hidden helping hands. Right. The doors that appear where walls once appeared or were only appearing. It's just such a phenomenal thing. To connect it back to the tools. You talk a lot about higher forces. We didn't really get into that a whole lot directly with Phil. Can you describe to us that the power of higher forces?

Yes, and let me start with a caveat, because I don't want to turn people off with that term. Higher forces doesn't mean anything religious. It doesn't mean you have to believe in God. If you're an agnostic or an atheist, what it really means.

I'm going to step in too. I want to appreciate your. In the book, you're super analytical about it, you basically express your skepticism that there is a possibility of anything bigger than us. Right? In that sense. So, yes. Sorry to emphasize your.

I mean, that's a. That's another whole story, which is the story of my journey, which is I was the son of Two really committed atheists. I mean, so committed that really from about five or six years old on, they would drill me in the disproofs of God. So much so that I was so prepared to refute the existence of God that I actually inadvertently alienated some kids in my elementary school.

Hard to imagine that.

Yeah. Just trying to like prove that I knew the proofs, you know, But. But again, the term higher forces doesn't mean that you have to believe in anything that is antithetical to your belief system. What a higher force is, is something that comes from beyond your ego. So it could be a part of your unconscious that you've never used before. It could be a part of your brain that you've never used before. If you have a spiritual orientation, you can think of it as coming from universal spirit or God, if that's your inclination. It doesn't really matter what you call it. But everyone's experienced a higher force at some point or another, even if they haven't called it that. Sometimes it's lying out, camping under the stars on a beautiful night, and you just sense this feeling of oneness and wonder and like there's something out there bigger than you. Okay. Another example would be falling in love for the first time. And you have this rush of just heart opening affection and love and trust with an intensity that you've never really felt before. These are experiences where you're outside your normal, where you normally function in your psyche, which is we all function in our ego and our job. We think of our job as authors as writing in a way about tools that will connect people with that experience. That's it. That's just sort of our mission in life, is to give people ways to have those experiences in their lives. Because between the two of us, we have 60 years of experience in psychotherapy. And what we've seen is that the more people are connected to those things, the more they fulfill their potential and frankly, the happier they are.

I love it. Let's talk about. You mentioned that your favorite tool was going back to the first tool for a moment is moving toward pain. And you kind of referenced that you do this on a daily basis. Can you give us an example of how you do that?

Yeah. I hate confrontations. I just hate them. I grew up in a family that was like really emotionally violent and I just got scared and I would retreat to my room and it was a bad habit because I never really stood up for myself. So whenever I have to confront someone, even if it's a week from today, I use the reversal of desire every single time I think about the confrontation. So it's not. I don't just use it right before the actual phone call or face to face confrontation itself. I use it every time I think about the confrontation. And the reason that I do that is because what I've seen is that most thinking doesn't serve us well. It certainly doesn't serve us in moving toward pain. Most thinking is actually constructed in a way that rationalizes avoiding pain. And so I not only want to use the reversal of desire to get myself to confront someone, I actually want to use the reversal of desire to train my thoughts, retrain my thoughts in terms of. No, move toward it, move toward it, move toward it. And what I found is that if I'm moving toward pain in my thoughts as well as in my actions, I'm living a much different life. It's a much more fulfilling life. I get much more done, frankly, just on a simple level, because there's no friction, there's nothing holding back.

And then what would have been pain literally sets you free and creates that same energy which is neutral in its source. Right. Is transmuted, muted into a positive excitement and enthusiasm for the challenge. Right?

Exactly. And that's also part of. I can't remember if we actually wrote about this in the book. I think we did. It's called the Secret of Pain, which is that, see, we all think of pain as absolute. Like if I leave a 10 pound weight on my couch, it's going to weigh 10 pounds tomorrow. We think of pain in those absolute constant terms, like, pain is just a certain amount of pain and it's never going to change. But the truth is pain is relative. And pain is relative to something very specific, which is the direction that you're moving in. When you move away from pain, which is what we all tend to do, pain gets bigger. Because think about it. Every time you move away from pain, every time you avoid pain, you're really telling yourself, without necessarily putting it into words, you're telling yourself, it's going to kill me, I got to avoid it, it's too big for me, I can't handle it. And in that way, pain gets bigger. It turns into one of those nightmarish figures, who's just chasing you, you know, kind of thing. The opposite is also true. When you're moving toward pain, particularly when you're moving toward it all the time, pain actually diminishes. I have the honor to treat some of the most productive people in the world. They do more before Breakfast than you and I, Brian, do in three months. They're just constantly moving toward pain. And the irony is they actually have less pain in their lives because they're just not afraid of it.

Inspiring. So the thing you go through is bring it on. So you feel the pain. You isolate the emotion, remove the emotion. Just isolate the experience of feeling that pain. Tell us how you do it. What's the quick pass through? How you currently practice that?

I do it in three steps. There's actually a preface to it. The preface is I feel the pain. So let's say I have a confrontation. Let's say I have to confront Phil tomorrow. Okay? I'm thinking about it today. I'm worried about it. The first thing I do is I create all of those ugly feelings that you get when you have to confront someone. There's some worry, there's anxiety. There's also probably some anger inside. There's defensiveness. There's, you know, that's that ugly constellation of feelings. I take all those feelings and I put them in a black pain cloud front of me. Alright? Now that's the preface to the tool. Then I use the tool on that cloud. And the first step of the tool is, instead of avoiding it, I say bring it on. And I say that really intensely and I move right into the cloud. Now again, why am I saying bring it on when it's pain? I'm saying bring it on because that pain cloud has stopped me from fulfilling my potential my entire life. It has stopped me from expressing myself in ways that I need to express myself. It's held me back. So bring it on means, damn it, I'm not gonna let this thing stop me anymore. Now I'm inside of the cloud and I'm still moving forward. And the second step is I scream silently to myself, I love pain. Now, this is not a statement of masochism. Love in this sense just means I am completely one with this pain. I am merged with it. I am inside of it. Because the truth is, to get through something, you actually have to become one with it. And then, and only then, can you let go of it. Which leads to step three, which is the cloud, with no effort of mine, just spits me out. It's just I'm propelled forward into a realm of pure light. And I say to myself silently, pain sets me free. And there's usually a soaring feeling like I'm very light and free and I've moved through it. I've passed through that trial, you know, kind of thing. Now it took me probably about two or three minutes to describe that I've used the tool so many times that I do all of that in about five seconds, which is an advantage because it means that I can use the tool three or four times in a row if it doesn't work the first time, which sometimes it doesn't. I'm so avoidant that sometimes I'll use it once, and I still feel like avoiding it, and I'll just use it as many times as I have to. I don't care. I'm committed to it, which is a.

Huge part of the practice. Right. Is that. And Phil and I talked about this yesterday, the idea that we want to be exonerated from having to do the work. And that couldn't be further from, I think he called it the three rules of the universe.

Exactly.

Good luck with that.

Exactly. Exactly. Life is painful. Life has uncertainty in it, and life requires ceaseless effort, and there is no exoneration from that. It doesn't mean that life isn't also joyful and pleasurable, but you can't get rid of those three qualities. And because you can't get rid of those three qualities, there's no exoneration. Which means once you accept that this takes work, things, weirdly enough, actually get much, much easier because you just accept it. Okay, I have to use it five times. That's fine. I'll use it 10 times if that's what it takes.

So that's kind of the secret of work, right? The secret of pain is that it diminishes as you move toward it and expands as you move away from it. The paradox of the work is the more willing you are to do the work, the less effortful it becomes. Right?

That's exactly right. That's well said. Yeah.

So exciting. Again, of course, we can talk for a weekend on any one of these tools. Let's pick another one. What's your next favorite one?

My next favorite one is probably Inner Authority, because I love the whole concept of the shadow and I love working with the shadow. The Inner Authority tool is just one of many, many ways to work with your shadow. But let me just introduce the subject by saying that one of the fastest ways to destroy your peace of mind and sabotage your potential is to turn against yourself. And we do this constantly. If I were the devil, my weapon of choice would be I'm that voice in your head saying, you're ugly. No one wants to be with you. You've never done anything original. Look at the way those people are looking at you. They know the truth about you. Why would I do this? Because how you see yourself, your self image, it affects everything. Everything. It affects your belief in your potential, your willingness to take emotional risks, creative risks, and ultimately it affects how fulfilling life is. So, you know, one of the most immediate effects that seeing yourself in a negative light has is on self expression. Because when you express yourself, you expose yourself to other people. You know, you're an open book when you're expressing yourself. And this is why public speaking is the number one. I mean, it's the funniest thing, but in most surveys, death is number two. Public speaking is number one. You know, there's that great Seinfeld joke. He says that means that at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy. It's crazy.

That's funny.

But this has to do with your shadow. And should I go into that?

Please, yes. This is, this is phenomenal.

So look, there isn't a single person listening to us who hasn't had the experience of trying to express themselves and losing confidence. It might have been, you know, you're attracted to somebody, but you just can't get yourself to go up to them. Or you're already in a relationship, but you want to say something that's more real or more vulnerable and you can't get yourself to say it. Or you're just in a job interview and you can feel people evaluating you and it stiffens you and makes you wooden. And you know, you can do better, but you can't get yourself to do better. The tool that we're talking about now, which is called inner authority, is designed to give you confidence right in those moments, right when you need it. And it works because it harnesses the self expressive power of something that Carl Jung, who was this great Swiss psychiatrist, he called this your shadow. Now the shadow is just a gigantic subject. We probably should do 15 podcasts on the shadow.

Scratch the surface.

It's unbelievable. It's, it's so complex. But the simplest way to explain the shadow is this. It's a separate self, like an alter ego, and it's living inside of you. And for your entire life it has borne the brunt of your self hatred and self criticism. So remember that negative voice I brought up earlier? You're ugly. No one wants to be with you. You've never done anything original. That's your voice. But who are you talking to? You're talking to your shadow. Now what does that have to do with self expression? Well, naturally you're ashamed of your Shadow, you criticize it every moment of every day. You sor. You certainly don't want other people to see it. And that makes it impossible to express yourself to other people with any confidence. Because the moment you get in front of other people, you're terrified that they'll see this horrible, hateful part of you. Which means that instead of focusing on what you want to say and saying it with confidence, instead you're going to be scrutinizing the people you're talking to to see whether or not they've caught a glimpse of that Quasimodo inside of you. You'll be so focused on what they think of you, you won't possibly be able to express yourself with any confidence or even spontaneity. What the tool does is it solves this problem by teaching you always to stay bonded and connected with your shadow. See, once there's an unbreakable bond between you and your shadow, guess what? You no longer give a crap what anyone else thinks of you. So you're free to express yourself spontaneously and confidently. And that's what being in a flow state really means. It means I am so utterly and completely one with myself that the words are just flowing out of me.

I love it. And I'm imagining, as I did when I read the book, that version of me, which you have a great process to help us identify that in the same way that you created that cloud in front of us with the pain. Can you walk us through a little bit of how we materialize that shadow self and then connect with it?

Yeah. Usually the best way to connect with your shadow is to imagine yourself in front of people who judge you harshly. So that could be your parents, it could be your kids. Certainly if you have a teenager, you've got a good person to practice on. Because teenagers, they're almost like programmed to find your flaws and point them out to you in the most obnoxious way they can. But it could be an audience of a thousand people, it didn't really matter what it is. But imagine yourself standing in front of that audience feeling insecure. And then what you want to do is put your consciousness in the audience looking at you. And remember, they're judging you. They're seeing every flaw, everything that's wrong with you, everything you feel insecure about. And you're looking now at yourself through the eyes of this hyper critical audience. Now what you're going to see is some version of yourself, only a whole lot worse. It might be overweight, or it might not just be physically flawed. You might See the insecurity or the fear, or you might see the stupidity or the inarticulateness or whatever it is. But whatever you're seeing, that's your shadow.

So we could pause right now and I'll do that. A very worthy exercise. We're obviously not going to crystallize it in the first pass. I created a 4 foot 11 version of me as a freshman in high school, the smallest kid in the school, literally, and all the things that go with that. And as you just described it, I was able to unpack some more wonderful qualities that we can throw into that mix. And then the exciting thing is that when we own that and integrate, that is when we actually claim our power.

Right exactly now. So think about it. There are really only two things to do with the shadow when you're in front of other people. The first and obviously the most popular is hide it. Put it in a closet and hide it. You never want anyone else to see this part of you, and that's natural. It's understandable that people do that. But it creates a huge problem because the moment you hide your shadow, you're going to start to scrutinize the audience to see whether or not they've caught a glimpse of it. And you become more concerned with whether or not they see your shadow than what you have to say. The only other alternative is prior to saying anything to the audience, you take that shadow out of hiding and you say to it, I love you, I was born with you, I'm going to die with you. And frankly, I don't give a damn what they think of us. I will never betray you, never go against you. At that moment, I stop caring what the audience thinks of me. I can speak completely freely. And I'm such a huge believer in this, Brian, that I actually have told my patients is I keep my shadow at my side in every single session with every patient. Not so much because I feel insecure as a therapist, but because, frankly, there are a lot of times where I have no idea what to say. And at those moments, I kind of psychically turn to my shadow and say, I don't want to say, can you think of the neighbor? And every single time a guy comes up with shit that I never would have thought of, it's astonishing to me.

That is so good. So there's an example of how you do it. Can you walk us through the process like you did for the first tool?

Yes. So I've taught you how to form an image of your shadow before I walk you through the tool. Do you mind if I first also walk you through how to bond with your shadow?

I, of course, would appreciate you doing that.

Yeah. Because most, you know, when we give workshops on this, most people get the idea of it, okay, I have to make friends with my shadow. I have to bond with my shadow. But the moment they actually try to, it's like, oh, God, I can't stand that guy. All I want to do is get rid of them, you know, kind of thing. So how do you bond with this thing that you kind of trained yourself to hate and be embarrassed of for most of your life? Well, I'm not saying it's simple, but there's. But there's a really good trick to this, which is look at your life from your shadow's point of view. It hasn't been very good living inside of you. If you can imagine what it's like to be that five foot figure. It hasn't been happy. You've constantly blamed him for everything that's gone wrong. You've constantly put him down. You constantly hide him when other people are around. You know, kind of like your poor white trash relation, you know, you don't, you don't want your rich friends to see him kind of thing. It's been constant rejection and humiliation. Now, if you know what that's like, and most of us know what it feels like to be judged unfairly and to be rejected and to be reviled unfairly, you know what the shadow feels toward you, which is basically hurt. And that's important because if you can start to empathize with the pain that you've caused the shadow. What I've found is that the shadow is very forgiving and it immediately bonds with you, but it needs to know that you understand. I f ed this up very early in my life and I'm really sorry and I love you. And from this point on, it changes. And then I find that you create a kind of an unbreakable bond with the shadow where no one can really come between you. So the reason I wanted to explain that is because that bond is part of the tool. So the tool has three steps to it. And you can use the tool when you. Whenever you get insecure for any reason, but in particular, when you're about to express yourself in some way to an audience. And by the way, audience can mean one person who you find is judgmental and who you want to impress or to like, or it could be a thousand people or anything in between. And the tool has three steps. The first step is you simply see the shadow off to one side and he's facing you. The second step is you bond with the shadow. You create that feeling of, it's you and me. I don't care what they think. All I care about is our bond. It's almost like the audience doesn't even exist. And then in the third step together, you and your shadow turn to face the audience. And in one voice, you silently command the audience to listen. And this is not a request, it's a command. And it represents the confidence that the two of you, you and your shadow, feel facing an audience and taking up space, taking your authority, saying what it is you have to say. Now, one tip I have is don't try that tool the first time a moment before you're about to speak to a thousand people, because it won't work. You've got to build up slowly.

Practice with your neighbor.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly, Phil. I'm so shy that Phil's joke about this is that I started using the inner authority on my pet dog. And it's not a bad idea to start on very simple little things so that you get so good at the tool and so that the relationship with the shadow becomes so real to you that you can use it in front of anyone at any time.

That's great. Is this another tool that you use? I'm not sure what the proper word is, but before the event. So you mentioned that let's say you have something going on tomorrow or in a week, and every time you think about it, you do the reversal of desire. If you think about. You use it in advance, I guess.

Absolutely. Phil and I do a lot of public speaking. We just finished a seminar at Omega. It's an institute in Rhinebeck Institute, New York. And we. For about a month or two prior to the. To the speaking gig, I just. Phil and I both used the tool every single time we thought about it and every time we practiced it.

That's cool. I'm excited. I'm already seeing as you were doing that I've got a little kind of pre shot routine that I do before an interview like this or before I do one of my videos or even when I'm. When I'm writing, there's a level of, you know, just a continuity to my practice. So I'm excited to kind of weave this in. And again, these tools are so powerful because they don't require a ton of time. It's a. It's a couple of seconds to feel that energy, connect to the higher force and let that force Move through us in ways that. That allow us to shine that in ways we wouldn't otherwise do.

Right, exactly. I'll tell you one of the most. Do you mind if I.

Yes, please.

Another example of it, one of the most dramatic examples, probably the most dramatic example in my life of this was when our book came out in 2012. We immediately got a lot of publicities, a lot of publicity, and we got on probably half dozen TV shows. I had never been on tv. I'm a relatively shy person, and for some reason I can't remember exactly what happened, but I had to go on the first TV show by myself without film. So extra stress. I'll never forget this. I was sitting in the green room, which I now understand why they call it the green room. And I'm just like so nervous, and this production assistant walks by and says, okay, we got about, you know, one minute. And oh, by the way, did anybody tell you this is live? Which means you can't edit anything out. Okay? So now I'm not just terrified, I'm frozen. I can't remember a damn thing. I couldn't remember the name of the book practically. The only thing I could remember was my shadow. And I used the tool over and over and over and over again for the next minute. And it was shocking to me. I actually aced the. It actually went really well. It was surprising. But that's how terrifying self expression can be.

That's so cool when we allow it to cascade, right? And that integration of the parts in us that we're most terrified to show to others is where our power, our most extraordinary power exists. Right? I kind of imagine literally like a knuckle bump. I think it's going to be part of my routine of just, we've got this, you know, like, let's do this and that.

To me, what you just said is one of the most profound parts of life, which is that nothing is ever truly dark. In fact, the most profoundly fallen parts of ourselves that we regard as discardable or trash or, you know, even worse, poison, you know, whatever, those are actually the keys to wholeness. Because if you can love those parts of you, you can love everything so good.

And even when I did this exercise when I was reading the book and after, and as I've played with it since, there were a lot of the traditional shy, nervous dad would say certain things, I mean, just the accumulated debris, if you will, of living. I had touched on it. But what really came clear as you were describing it today, is ambition of my own disassociated sense of ambition, kind of that is it light or is it dark? And just to be able to see that and say, that's all of me. Just bring it in and let it come through, rather than make that something I need to hide or dampen or tweak in some way to make it more acceptable. Right?

Yes, exactly. You said something else that I think is really crucial, which is we all think of these value judgments as absolute. Like, I know that's a bad part of me, that I was short or that I was insecure or that I was sad or that, you know, I was whatever. But when you start to love everything in yourself and you let go of your value judgments, you begin to find that these parts of you have strengths that you never tapped into before. Entitlement is a really good example. In other words, in a lot of families, entitlement is inconvenient for parents because kids feel entitled to things and they can't have them. And as a parent, I know you have to say no to your kids, and it's good. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But as an adult, very often what we have to work on is sort of re. Enlivening the part of ourselves that is. That feels entitled to more. Like a bigger life, a better life, doing more interesting things, and the willingness.

To go for it. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So, again, weekend discussion there we've gone over, and I appreciate your time, and I know we've got a hard stop coming up. I would love to hear your discussion and thoughts on intensity. When Phil and I chatted, we just touched on intensity and urgency. He shared the story of a basketball player in his career as a collegiate athlete coming off the bench and how hard he played and the responding to the rebound and the ricochet. And some athletes go for it and others don't on that sprint back to defense. But he suggested that I ask you to describe your passion for intensity. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. It really started very early on when I was a kid. And I don't know what it was, but I looked a lot at the adults around me, and what I observed was that it. It looked like they were kind of sleepwalking. Like, I knew. I mean, I couldn't put into words. I knew that I was really alive. I had so much energy. And they didn't look alive. They looked a little like zombies to me. And I'm not putting my parents down or anyone in my neighborhood down. It just seemed like all adults Even my teachers seemed like. Like they pared down their energy. Almost like they were just kind of sleepwalking through life. And as I grew up, I began to recognize that there was a tendency in myself to just sort of sleepwalk through life. You know, when you do the same thing for 30 years, it's hard to keep up that kind of intensity. And, you know, I began to think about that, and weirdly enough, something that seems unrelated, which is death. And I began to believe that the only way we could justify living in that pared down, unintense state is if on some unconscious level, we believe we have all the time in the world. In other words, to put it the other way around, if you know that there is a hard stop to life, that you are going to die, then this moment really matters. It really matters because it's never coming back again. And what that means is you have to bring all of the intensity you can to whatever it is you're doing in this moment. And it doesn't matter whether it's profound or prosaic routine or new, your obligation as an individual is to bring as much life force to it as you possibly can. And, you know, the more I started to live that way, the more fulfilling, even trivial things started to become. Like, I always hate balancing my checkbook. I mean, now you can do it with QuickBooks. But that was something I always resisted doing. And I thought to myself, well, let's treat this the most prosaic thing I can think of, as if it really mattered, you know, and let's do this with as much intensity. Let's try to squeeze some juice out of this. And weirdly enough, what I found is that it's always possible to do that. Now. Most people live the opposite way. They're always thinking, whatever I'm doing now, it doesn't matter. I'm waiting to get to the thing that matters. And then very often that thing is disappointing, or the excitement from it, although it's real, is fleeting. I believe in living the other way around, which is whatever it is I'm doing, I want to do it to the max, to the fullest extent I can. And really what I. What I start to feel is that when I do that is that there is a life force that is independent of me and I'm channeling it into the world. And I do find that people respond to it. You know, they don't. They like the idea that someone is there 100%, they're nowhere else.

This is amazing. We talked about this, Phil, and I just A little bit on Entheos, enthusiasm. And the kind of parent company that. That owns all the stuff that we do here is called Entheos. And just that idea of this is our ultimate responsibility and opportunity is to connect to that life force and to let it shine through us as consistently and powerfully as we possibly can. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which, again, is what your tools are all about. We covered. We covered. I just got a little blip as well, because talking about intensity, that's another disassociated part of my own identity. I think a lot of us have that, who are really passionate about these things is tone it down. Right? Tone that down a little bit.

Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

Intensity is a big part of coming back to life. And we're gonna book two. A lot of book two is going to be about intensity. You know, let me. Can I say one other thing about it, please? You know, this is. I don't mean to be overly critical of the profession of psychology or psychiatry, but this is one thing that I think psychology really got wrong. In its early years, there was an attempt to propagate what they called therapeutic neutrality. Therapeutic neutrality means that the shrink listens to your problems and murmurs empathically and maybe gives you a suggestion here or there, but never really gives you the intensity of their own feelings or their own existence. And I regard therapeutic neutrality as almost like a crime, in a sense. To me, it's like Swiss neutrality during World War II. Because when a person is coming to you and they're in pain and they're battling with demons and they're losing that battle, which they automatically are if they're coming to a shrink, because it's hard to come to a complete stranger and talk about your life, you know, and admit that you don't know what to do. Therapeutic neutrality in the face of that, to me, is criminal. What the patient needs from you is intensity, is, we're gonna do this together. You are gonna feel me behind you. Even if I don't know the exact answer, which Phil and I often do, fortunately. But even if I don't, I'm going to find the answer with you. We're going to work together. It's the kind of intensity you would want your kid's soccer coach to have, because you'd want him to instill every player with intensity, even in the practices, not just for winning, not just for games, but every single move in every single practice should be intended, stilled with intensity. And so I often, as a therapist, I think probably sound much more like a soccer coach. Than a traditional therapist. But I think it's such an important part of psychotherapy because otherwise, the patient feels alone.

So good. So this is our second book we get to look forward to. Tell us about that.

This book is going to be about an inner enemy. It's sort of like the devil inside of you. And I don't want to give away the name of it, but it's going to be four new tools that are specifically designed to combat this enemy. And the way it relates to intensity is one of the most powerful weapons you have against the enemy is the intensity that you get when you feel it sabotaging you. This isn't an intellectual thing, like identifying in some sort of abstraction, abstract sense how you sabotage yourself. It's about actually feeling a sabotaging force inside of you and then feeling what you really should feel if somebody were systematically sabotaging you, which is rage, determination, resolve, like you'd feel if you were a soldier in a war. And you gotta win. Yep.

Can't wait. Well, we're gonna come back, I hope, and do another one of these chats as you roll out that new book. When does it come out?

It comes out in 2016.

Okay. So look forward to that and so appreciate you and your intensity and your commitment to living an extraordinary life and giving back to the world in such profound ways. So thank you, Brian.

I have to say, you are a great interviewer because I've done a lot of interviews, and your intensity and just your heart, which is huge, brings out the best in people, and I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you. The fun has just begun. All right. All right. This is Brian with a little P.S. we wrapped up that interview, and I forgot to let you know that you can go to the toolsbook.com thetoolsbook.com Barry tells us that they send out periodic emails to their followers with stories, new ways to use the tools, other inspiring messages. To sign up, go to TheToolsBook.com and at the very bottom of the page, you'll see where you can join their mailing list. It's a real treasure trove of information you can't get anywhere else. This is good stuff. I highly recommend it. I hope you enjoyed this chat and the chat with Phil and everything else we've done related to the tools. And I can't wait to connect with both of them again for their next book. All right, have another awesome day. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview.

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