Interview: Coming Alive with Barry Michels

Hey, this is Brian with a quick note before we jump into today's show. If you haven't signed up for the Optymyze Premium membership yet, A, what are you waiting for? And B, you can now get the first 30 days of optimizing for free. Just cruise on over to Optimize me and sign up. Over 10,000 people now start their days with Optymyze so they can actualize their potential, including best selling authors, leading entrepreneurs, and even NCAA championship teams. Two of them. So again, 30 days of free optimizing at Optimize Me. If you're already a member, thanks for your support. Now for the show, You're listening to Optymyze with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Barry Michaels. Barry wrote the Tools with Phil Stutz and if you followed my work at all, you know that I am a huge fan of the Tools and Barry and Phil's work. I almost, I'm almost self conscious about how much I talk about your work, Barry. It's so good and it's just so powerful. One of my favorite books ever and I've been eagerly awaiting Barry and Phil's new book which just came out. It's called Coming Alive. The subtitle to that book is four tools to defeat your inner enemy, ignite creative expression and unleash your soul's potential. Now, the way that I kind of think of Coming Alive, the first book, the Tools, had five primary tools which help us deal with some of the most common challenges we all face. It's fantastic. This book from my vantage point is kind of like an advanced course on how to deal with the really underlying issue that we'll talk about today that's getting in the way of us living it, as you say, our soul's potential. It's a, as I playfully said in my Amazon review, it's a challenging book. You know, we're talking about some significant power that's there. It's not going away that we need to get really good at defeating, as you say very explicitly in the subtitle. So anyway, Coming Alive, these four tools. Phenomenal. Highly recommended. Appreciate you taking the time both to be on this chat today and just over the last X decades. I'm also looking over your shoulder at the University of California Berkeley diploma, I think. So I thank you for having the.

Courage to step away from a successful law practice into your soul's potential.

Barry and Phil have been doing this work for a combined 70 years. And they bring this wisdom to us in this book. So, again, thank you, Barry. Thrilled to have you here. Excited to chat.

Thanks so much for having me, Brian. I really appreciate it.

All right, so let's start at the top here. Coming Alive. Why is the book named Coming Alive?

Oscar Wilde, the Irish novelist, said essentially that most people don't really live, they just exist. So Phil and I, between the two of us, have seen thousands of patients. They're all from different walks of life. They all have different presenting problems, but every single one of them has one thing in common, which is they all sense that they could be living a much more joyful life where they're more confident, they feel more adventurous, and everything that they do feels more meaningful. So our mission in the book is to give you the tools that you need to be truly alive and to really fulfill your potential. That's why we called it that.

Fantastic. So there's two facets that I want to talk about before we get into some of the tools and some of the big ideas I loved in regard to that. The first is life force. That kind of inevitable, spoken about across all cultures, across all time. Energy that's there. Can you talk to us about that and how you see it vis a vis coming alive?

Yeah. It's difficult to define the life force in words. It's actually easier to explain it by referring people back to experiences they've had with it. One of the most profound experiences I ever had was just at the birth of both of my children. I just felt awed by the miracle of life. I felt inspired to become the best father that I could possibly be. You know, your heart breaks open with a level of love that you've never experienced. But if you don't have kids, you might have experienced this. Camping out under the stars, where you felt part of something greater than yourself and expanded and filled up inside like you could do almost anything. I actually also experienced the life force in the writing of the book. You know, over and over again. I would get stuck, frustrated, like I couldn't find the right words to express what I was trying to say. And then sometimes a day later, sometimes a week later, I'd be doing something completely different, like listening to music, or I would be in the shower, and suddenly the answer would come to me. That was my life force. It's an endlessly creative and inspiring force that enables you to become who you're meant to be.

So let's go to the what gets in the way. So we all have this life Force, it's latent within us.

Why?

I'm assuming I know where we're going to go on this, but what gets in the way of that being expressed on a more consistent, you know, grounded, yet full expression way? What's going on?

Well, if you only had the life force, everybody would fulfill their potential. But the truth is, if you look around you, there aren't too many people who wake up every morning jazzed about their day and are able to maintain that enthusiasm, inspiration throughout an entire day, let alone an entire life. So why isn't it automatic? It isn't automatic because you actually have to fight for your life force. And the fight is very specifically against an inner enemy. And the inner enemy is this part of every human being that uses your worst habits against you. Maybe for one person, it gets them to procrastinate on the things that they really wish they could be doing. Maybe for another person, they don't procrastinate. They're able to start something and get it launched. But then something bad happens. They experience a defeat or a setback and they just get demoralized and give up. Now, we call this inner enemy part X, and we call it part X for two reasons. We call it X because it essentially X's out your potential. It's constantly trying to undermine you. And we call it part X because it's important to realize it's only part of you. There are other parts of you that can identify it, label it, put it out in front of you and decide not to give into it. We always have the free will to say no to part X. And when we do, our life force has space within which to flourish inside of us.

I love it. And then I also like the fact that it's a part of all of us. So it's not something wrong with me or with you or with the individual who's listening. This is an inherent part of the human experience. And that idea of kind of the Kristen Neff, Brene Brown common humanity. And you share a great story. You brought me out of retirement to do a philosopher's note on coming alive. I had taken the last, I don't.

Know how many months off and I'm like, this is too good of a book not to do a note on it. I really want to capture it and, and to be able to use this.

As a way to share the wisdom and encourage people to get the book. But I didn't actually share the story that you shared kind of midway through the book about Martin Luther King and the challenges he Faced, you know, and you do. And I feel the life force even as I start to describe that, you know, of just that, the redefinition of what it means to be a hero, that it isn't about being perfect. It isn't like the people we admire, like a Martin Luther King or whoever else we admire, was on a constant state of connection to this life force and never let up. They, too, had these battles. Can you share a little bit about that and then we can talk more about all the different things from there?

Yeah, I'm happy to. Because we tend to, in our society, set up icons, heroic people who, when we examine the outer aspects of their life, really just seem to not have any sort of inner conflict or inner resistance. In other words, we think of them as not having a part X. But the truth is, Martin Luther King had a lot of issues internally. He had a lifelong problem with depression, and he really struggled with a sense of hopelessness inside and for good reasons. Toward the end of his life, the FBI was actively trying to get him to commit suicide. They were bugging his phones. They were infiltrating his movement. And his own movement of nonviolent protest against racial inequality was really beginning to fracture. The black establishment thought that he was moving too quickly, and the younger radical blacks felt like he was too conservative, that he should adopt more activist, more physical, violent, muscular tactics. And he really began to feel his movement, you know, kind of fracturing and falling apart. And yet, somehow he was consistently able to overcome his own sense of hopelessness and depression and be there for the movement and for his people. I mean, the night before he was assassinated, he gave a speech that is. You know, I wish I could repeat it word for word, but it is probably one of the most inspiring messages of hope that I have ever heard. He says, I may not get to the mountaintop with you. Somehow he is prescient about his own death because he was killed the next day. And he said, but that's okay with me now. I mean, I would love to live a long life, but if I don't, you will get to the promised land without me. And I know that our people will become equal, you know, kind of thing. And that ability to be resilient inside himself inspired millions of people to then, you know, stand up and be counted in their own lives. It's an incredible story.

Yeah. And you told it incredibly well now. And in the book, in that you obviously excerpted his speech the night before he was killed, basically saying that longevity has its place. But I've Just decided, I'm going to commit myself to God's will and I'm not afraid of any man anymore. And this is what I see. And we're gonna get there. I might not get there with you, but we as a people will get there. And just unbelievably inspiring. And then again, you shared a story of he couldn't even get himself. My understanding of the story was he couldn't even get himself out of the hotel room to take a flight from wherever it was, wherever he was going, he was that depressed. And then a year later he was giving this speech that was that inspiring. So I think that embrace of the fact that this is an inherent part of the human experience. And as you guys make the point throughout the book, the more you dare to risk and to push, the more you're going to experience this, you're never going to get to a place where you're exonerated. And in fact, the more courageous you're.

Willing to live, by definition, the greater your challenges. So then let's just get good at.

Alchemizing them and moving forward. I'm wondering if we can.

Let me just say. Let me. Can I just add something to that? Because it's a very, very important point. The look, I've been identifying and working against my part x for over 30 years now. So I know part X intimately. You know, it is truly an inner enemy that I have studied and known. And what I see is a cycle where I will surge ahead, I'll conquer part X. I'll do things that I've never done before. And then part X, discovering that it's losing its grip over me, hits back and. And pushes me back a little bit, and I have to surge forward once again. Now, the good news is it's two steps forward, one step back. So there are net gains. I mean, I'm just so much better off now than I was when I was 30 years old. But there is this back and forth movement. You are never free of your part X. It's almost like it senses when you're making progress and hits you even harder so that you then have to hit it even harder. It's a fight to the death in a certain way. But the good news is it releases life forces that make life so meaningful and so worth living. You really feel. I hate to use these words because they sound so trite, but you feel ennobled in this struggle instead of simply defeated by it.

Amazing. And so much there that we can talk about, and you guys do talk about in the book so well that each time that you face this pardex head on and you're willing to use a tool, tool or whatever other practices you're using, but in this context, the tool consciously, deliberately using that energy that would have dissipated your energy, when you redirect it into this positive construction and construct, it gives you its energy. And then when I was reading the book, one of the things I liked, you guys have those beautiful loops where when you go into that zone of oh, no, and then you come out of it, you come out a little higher. And I've always looked at it in Joseph Campbell's idea that the great life is one hero's journey after another. So you experience the entrance into the force of the unknown, and it's really dark and it's scary and you got the dragons, etc. But you're doing it from a spiraling up higher place of consciousness with hopefully a little more grace than the last time. And so what I got out of the book so much was that then when you see that, then you want to accelerate the opportunities to confront problems because you get a little bit stronger each time. And then part X to your point, becomes in some ways, if not your friend, a green light toward your potential. Right?

Yes, let's lean in there.

Yes. I have never failed in my life doing the things that I sense. Part X is making me most afraid of pushing me back with all kinds of excuses because I've learned to use it, strangely enough, as a guide if it's working. Again, like, just to give you an example, I've had a terror of public speaking most of my life. And one of the greatest things that I've done in the last couple of years is just force myself to do more public speaking. And it has inspired me and energized me in a way I never thought was possible. My philosophy of that is part X wouldn't be working so hard to stop me from doing this if it didn't know even better than I do the potential that lies in doing it. So it's kind of like a martial arts maneuver where you use the energy of the enemy against the enemy kind of thing. And it's a wonderful way to live because weirdly enough, you can be guided by your fears and your aversions. It's kind of like, oh, that's exactly what I need to do. And I want to say one other thing, because you were talking about Joseph Campbell. You know, if you study the Greek myths over and over and over again, the heroes have to descend into the underworld. They have these heroes, journeys that first go down into the very darkest place, you know, which the Greeks identified as the underworld. We would call it hell, you know, in a sense. And then they come back up again with powers they could not have gotten without that journey down. So we in the modern Western world, we like to think of things as progressing in a straight line. But the Greeks had a much finer sense of like, no, nothing is linear. Things are cyclical. You have to go down before you can come back up again. And when you do, you're higher than you were before you went down. You got strength. You have everything.

And then get ready to go down again. Because I think this is what I get so much from your work, is that we want to be exonerated. We want to get to that final high that then has solved all the future lows. And that naivete is the biggest threat, right? Because when we can embrace the fact that, again, it's not about us, it's about the human experience, and the more you're pushing, the more you're going to go through those cycles and perhaps even higher and lower amplitudes on those cycles, right?

It's happened to me my whole life. I'll tell you, the first example of this was all my life, for whatever reason, I wanted to go to Harvard College. I think it was because the Kennedys went there, and I grew up in the Kennedy era, and I just. I really wanted to go there. And I was relentless in my struggle to get in. I didn't have the best grades in my class. I didn't have the best SAT scores. But somehow I got in. And I'm convinced to this day it was a mistake. But they let me in. I get there, it's back east. I've never been back east. I've never seen cold like this in my life. By Thanksgiving, I was asking my friends, is it going to start warming up soon? It hadn't even snowed. I was just an ignorant. And I realized about halfway through the first semester of my freshman year, oh, my God, I got into Harvard. And this is just an incredible amount of work. It's like it wasn't an exoneration from anything. I got so depressed. And then I picked myself up and realized, all right, I got to take advantage of these opportunities. But this didn't really mean anything, this whole thing. So we create these false dreams for ourselves, these false hopes, and then when we achieve them, it's kind of like, oh, that's all this is. The only answer to that, again, is to accept the cyclicity of things and to build the life force inside of you so that no external goal becomes symbolic of exoneration. Exactly what you said.

That's cool. And those false hopes, which is, I think it's the third. Is that the mother tool that deals with that?

Exactly.

So can you give us a quick high level overview of the four tools and then we can perhaps have fun applying one?

Yes. So think. I like to think of these as Part X's strategies. It's kind of like, if I were the devil, what would I do to. To try to undermine someone and hold them back. And one of the simplest and most effective ways to hold somebody back is just to get them to give in to one temptation after another. You're on a diet, go off the diet. Here's a donut. One won't hurt. You know, you're on an exercise program, you know you're too tired today, give yourself a break, you know, kind of thing. And technology, by the way, has dramatically increased the number of temptations that we're subjected to. I have patients who cannot resist updating their Facebook page compulsively. And when my phone pings me that I have an email or a text, I'm like Pavlov's dog. It's like, ugh. I just struggle not to interrupt what I'm doing. Another example, by the way, of an impulse is that people often react in impulsively and overreact impulsively to things. I live in LA and you see people flipping other people off in traffic all the time, or a more common one is just overreacting to a tone in your partner's or your teenager's voice and getting really angry because of that tone. What the tool does is it gives you the ability to control those impulses. And, and when you can control your impulses, you get really confident. Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, said it this way. He said, he who conquers others is strong, but he who conquers himself is mighty. When you can conquer your own impulses, it adds to your confidence because you know your life is never going to go off the rails when you're constantly giving in to these temptations. You just never know when your life is going to fall apart. You can't rely on yourself to stick to anything.

So powerful. I get goosebumps listening to you say that, and you say that in the book, and it was actually one of the ideas I pulled out, that self restraint leads to self confidence. You may not think they're connected, but they are and it just. When I look at my own past over the last 20 years, I used to be super up and down, super inspired and then super not inspired by. And now it's almost bizarre for me to look back at that and I can look at some breadcrumbs of what's helped me gain the stability, but it's exactly that. There's just impossible to go off the rails or it's almost like there's scaffolding built because of some very, very simple bright line rules that you would describe as that self restraint. And what you know, Phil and I talk about all the time in our one on one work is those micro transactions, those tiny little moments that you don't think are big, but that's where the life force, the sublime come through. And to hear you say that, I just, I can feel it.

Incredible. Can I say something in addition to that? I've come to look at this as kind of an interaction between a dreamer and a doer. Both of them are inside of me. The dreamer is what it sounds like. It's the part of you that has these aspirations. It can see, see what you could do with your life. And it dreams and aspires to do them. Its only problem is it doesn't have control over your body or about the. It doesn't have control over the decisions you make with your time. That's the responsibility of the doer. Now just think about your own life for a moment. How are you doing with respect to the dreamer? Are you fulfilling his dreams every day? Are you taking action? Are you taking steps? Or are you going off track? And most people, if they really look at this for a moment, they say the dreamer must be so bummed out at my performance. I've given myself at best a C minus kind of thing. And if you start to think of it that way, then you imagine that dreamer looking at you every moment of every day and you're either fulfilling your contract with him or you're breaking the contract with him. And there's really no third option. Either you're using your time to fulfill his aspirations or you're not. Now, confidence, what confidence is, is that inner feeling that the dreamer has where he says to himself, I know if I ask the doer to do something, he'll do it. Lack of confidence is, I know if I ask the doer to do something, there's a 99% chance he'll blow it off, won't do it. You can't be confident if you're not fulfilling the dreams of the Dreamer.

So powerful. And if you don't believe that you have that ability to do so, as demonstrated by a proven competence, not by some naive pie in the sky. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'll do that. But a proven moment to moment to moment channeling of this energy in a constructive means. So this is the first tool to deal with the impulses that often take us away from. Paradox is taking us away via these impulses. And I love your case study of the guy who has a short fuse, temper, who gambles, who's married to a.

Woman who indulges in overeating, and they have children. One is an obsessive shopper, and the other plays video games. Just the perfect spectrum of. Yep, we've covered a good mix of impulses.

And by the way, this is the average American family. We're not talking about extremes here.

No, it's the average American person.

Right. I mean, we all have those facets within us.

And of course, we have our favorite flavor of addictive, impulsive behaviors. I'm so addicted to my phone that I literally, right now, it is off in my closet, in airplane mode, in the top back of the shelf, because I become a rat in a span of, like, minutes and hours the moment I allow myself to go into that little virtual maze. But can you tell us a little more about the dynamics of that tool?

Yes, absolutely. So let me explain the philosophy behind the tool, and then I can actually run you through the tool, if you want me to. The philosophy behind the tool is that if you need something outside of you again, whether it's sweets or whether you need to answer a text or you need to get someone to validate you, you're basically trying to fill some kind of emptiness inside of you. If you didn't need to fill it, you wouldn't feel impelled to act. You might be tempted, but it'd be like, no, that's going to take me off track. I'm not going to do that. The compulsion, the power that impulses have come from that feeling of, I need something to fill me up inside, which implies a kind of an emptiness, an empty place inside of you. Now, some people try to conquer this problem with just sheer willpower. They just bear down and they say, no, I'm not going to have that drink. No, I'm not going to answer that text. And some of them are strong enough to actually control their impulses with sheer willpower. The problem is it still leaves this gaping hole inside of you. This is what in aa, they call white knuckling. It. It's just sheer willpower. But there's still this hole inside of you. And they tend to be really angry, frustrated people because their whole experience of life, I want something and I'm not letting myself have it, which is not a great way to live. So what would happen if you could actually just give up the outside world as a source of anything that's going to fill you inside and instead just gaze inward at this empty place? It's interesting. Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, had this saying where he said, if you gaze into the abyss long enough, it will start to gaze back into you, which implies that although there is an emptiness inside, there's something in the emptiness. Now, I know that sounds paradoxical, but nothingness can actually turn into somethingness. There's something inside of you that can actually fill you up from the inside. Now, here's a pop quiz. You know what that is? Your life force. Now, the life force has many, many different symbols to represent it throughout human history. The symbol that we use in this tool is the symbol of a black sun. A black sun. We just went through a solar eclipse. The black sun just looks exactly like the total eclipse of the sun with the corona flashing out on the sides, but this black center because the moon has passed in front of it. And we use the symbol of the black sun because essentially it reminds you that you have this abundant power of the sun inside of you. But because you've been looking so much to the outside world to get what you need, you've eclipsed. Looks dark because you've never turned to it in the past type of thing. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah. Yeah.

Should I run you through the tool?

And I would love it. Yeah.

Okay, great. So close your eyes and just think of a specific situation where you typically give in to an impulse. It could be the impulse to eat, to text, to overreact to someone. That's the starting place. Because you're going to use this tool the moment you feel an impulse, and you're going to deprive yourself of acting on it. So step one is feel the deprivation of not getting what you want and feel it intensely. There's usually some frustration, maybe anger, maybe sadness or anxiety. Now let go of the thing that you want completely and even more. Forget about the whole outside world as the source of anything that's going to fill you up inside and turn inward. That's step two. Now, a moment ago, you were feeling deprived, but now you're just looking at an inner void. It's like an endless abyss inside of you. And all that we ask is that you face it. Be calm, be still. If anything, be curious, because you've never looked at it before, and it's part of you now. In step three, from the depths of. Of this void, imagine a black sun ascending slowly, and its warm and limitless energy is expanding you internally until you become one with the black sun. And the final step is, turn your attention back to the outside world. And the black sun energy overflows, surging out of you. And as it enters the world, it becomes the pure white light of infinite giving. How did that feel?

Great. I mean, I've been practicing it since I read the book, but great to hear your guidance through it.

What you'll see when you use the tool a couple of times is that the arc of the tool is really significant. We start the tool. Let me back out for a moment. What the arc does is it reverses the flow of your energy. Most of the time, we walk around trying to pull something in from the outside world to make us whole. At the end of the tool, you've reversed that 180 degrees, and you're giving out to the world. It sounds strange, but the solution to wanting more is to give more. And the reason for that, it doesn't make any sense in a finite world. In other words, if I only have $10 and I give you five, I only have five left. But because your life force is infinite, the more you give, the more access you have to your life force, and therefore, the more you have. And again, 12 step groups codify this by encouraging their members to be of service to others. It's the service that they do for others that actually keeps them sober. At the same time, they're giving, but they're also getting from the inside, super powerful.

And it reminds me of the. I believe the. I guess it was the second tool, right, the vortex. Just to step back for a moment in speaking to our audience, the. The book, you know, we start with the discussion on the life force, and we look at part X, and then Barry and Phil switch off on the four tools. So Barry writes about the first tool, which we just did, which is the Black sun. The second tool is the vortex, which deals with times when you feel lethargic and less motivated, energized. And then we can talk a little more about the third and fourth in a moment. But it reminds me of Phil's point on, if you want to be energized, you need to engage. And paradoxically, the energy is created via engagement. And those things that you think are going to deplete. You are actually the things, when you lean into them, that vitalize you. And I found that that's so powerful. I work hard to have a high level of consistent energy, and I do a lot of the things fundamental wise, you know, that keep me that way. But it was just a really cool distinction for me to see those subtle ways that I'm saying to myself, yeah, but that's going to be depleting. And it was so fun for me to practice the exact opposite of that story for myself with that vortex tool and just as a life frame, that rather than having a finite amount of things I can do in a day, which, of course, is true to a certain extent, and we need to be smart about it, There are also those little moments that I found in using the tool and the philosophy behind it, just a deeper sense of vitality that was really, really cool. You want to share the high level on that briefly?

Yes. I mean, in fact, if you don't mind, I'll tell you a story about that. I don't know. It was maybe 20 years ago, Phil started telling me, you have an infinite amount of energy. An infinite amount of energy. It just seemed like something he'd picked up on Oprah or something. I'm joking. But it just had that, like, are you kidding me? Really? But I tend to believe whatever Phil says. At least I try to experiment with it. So back then, it was the beginning of my practice. I was seeing an unbelievable number of people, just at a very low fee, by the way, just to get experience and to expand my practice. I would see, like, 10, 12 people a day, which might not seem like a lot, but, well, you got 10 people complaining at you all day long, telling you how miserable they are. It is draining, really draining. So I would come home maybe six, seven at night, come home end of the day so depleted and so exhausted that all I really wanted to do was be invisible, slip past my wife and kids and go upstairs and go to sleep, you know, kind of thing. Because I was so exhausted. So I decided to do an experiment. I would park my car about a half a block away from our home, and I would say to myself, all right, you just finished your day job. Now this is your night job. You got to go in there and be the best husband and father that you can possibly be. And the voice inside of me, part X would say, but I'm exhausted. I don't have any energy. And I would say to myself, all right, Phil says I have infinite energy. He hadn't Invented the vortex tool, unfortunately. But it was okay. What I said to myself is, well, let's just put this to the test. Phil says I have infinite energy. I say I don't. I say I gave everything I had at work, and I got nothing left. I'm running on empty. But what I'm gonna do is walk in the door and pretend I'm just gonna do the best acting job I've ever done. I'm enthused. I'm excited to be there. I'm so happy to see them. I'm gonna throw my kids up in the air. I'm gonna play with them. I'm gonna empathize with my wife, who's been driven crazy all day, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm just gonna act all of the energy in the world. And I got to tell you, the craziest thing kept happening, which was the moment I would walk in the door, I would feel like, no, no, no, it's too much. But then I would act as if I had. And sure enough, within a couple of minutes, I had more energy. Now, how is that possible? I don't know, other than to say we have vast, vast stores of energy that we're not used to tapping into, and when we're exhausted, what we do is disengage. I would have loved nothing more than to slip invisibly past them and disengage from them. But when you engage, you actually get more energy. You give more, you get more. And it was a great lesson for me. I actually realized, no, this is something I have to challenge every time it comes up.

And again, so much we can talk about there, but every time it comes up is another theme throughout the book, is that this is not theory, and part of. Part exit strategy is, yeah, yeah, you get it. Intellectually, we don't need to practice it anymore. And that idea of it's. It's. It doesn't stop and then get excited about it and to lean into it and to, from my vantage point, kind of make it a game, you know, of. Oh, there it is again. And to be able to observe it. I want to go back for a moment. We did the Black sun, which was awesome. Talk to me about the kind of the zero step, which is noticing that we just got hooked by an impulse. What are your coaching tips on that? How do you counsel your clients on that? Part of the process of just getting more adept at noticing when we're a little bit off. Does that question make sense?

It does. A lot of people you know, in the beginning, they bite off more than they can chew, so to speak. So what I. What I. Generally with somebody who's impulsive, and look, we're all impulsive, you know, in one way or another. It's, you know, you with your phone, it's me with whatever. I. I ask them to focus on just one impulse at a time. So, again, in the story, for example, Marty, the father, this is. This is in the. The family that I treated in the book. He had a gambling problem. He also had a rage problem. I felt that the rage problem was actually more crucial to the family stability and also to his credibility within the family. If I could get him to stop losing his temper, I knew that the other people in the family would start to listen to him and follow his example a little bit more. So I would never have chosen. I would never have told him, work on both impulses at the same time. I believe in working incrementally. Just carve off a little piece of the problem, work at it like your life depends on it, and then conquer that, and then you'll be empowered to go back and work on the gambling problem type of thing. So that's one thing that I do. The other thing that I tell people is, you're going to fail. It's okay. You're probably going to miss more impulses than you even catch. And then when you catch the impulse, you're going to fumble to remember what you're even supposed to do with it, because you're not used to any of this. I mean, I've been using tools for 30 years, so it comes pretty naturally to me. But believe me, there are times when I forget to use the tools. So, of course, just keep going. What was very helpful to me was something that Phil calls nightly review. At the end of every day, I would just go to my journal and I would remind myself of what I've been working on. Like I'm trying to control my temper today. And then I would write down all of the times that my temper came up, and I would label which ones I used the tool on, which ones I didn't use the tool on. Not to get down on myself and not to applaud myself, but just simply to get myself used to noticing. Because that's half the problem is part X gets you to act out unconsciously. You sort of unconscious of what you're actually doing at the moment. So just literally writing them down helped me develop the awareness. And then what I would do is at the end, I would survey the next Day. And I would think, all right, that's going to be a difficult moment. I have a confrontation with somebody, so I could lose my temper there, or later on I might get a difficult phone. So I'm kind of set. I'm giving myself a toehold to hold onto. You have a better chance of remembering type thing. If you keep practicing and you don't get down on yourself for the failures, you'll get better and better and better at this. It's really just acquiring a good habit as opposed to a bad habit.

Brilliant. And to focus and to identify. One of the words we use in our work with Optimize is kryptonite. So what's your number one? Kryptonite. The thing that if you were able to stop doing it, would have the most positive impact on your life. Focus on that. Not the 20 things, the one thing. And I loved your use of incremental. Just get a little better and two steps forward, one step back, maybe three steps back, sliding back and two steps forward. And you gotta finger your way back up or, you know, claw your way back up. But I think that that simplification the focus and then that observation from a neutral experimental phrase we use is needs work. So we did something that didn't work. It needs work. Neutral. What's. What we could have done a little better. What do we commit to doing a little better next time? On with our life. Super helpful and brilliant. So to quickly, we're running close to time here. And again, I appreciate you taking so much time. We've. We've covered one tool. We've just scratched the surface of it. But we did one tool, which is fantastic, which was the. The black sun dealing with impulses. The second one we briefly talked about, which was the vortex, dealing with lethargy and. And lack of motivation energetically. And then the third and fourth tools. Can you just give us a super brief overview?

Yeah, I'll give you an overview.

Cool.

Yeah. So the third strategy that we talk about, these are part X's strategies for undermining you, is to essentially get you to give up on your dreams as the result of a setback or a defeat. So the patient that I talk about in the book had a bad breakup of a relationship and she was just so demoralized that she gave up on dating altogether. We abandon our dreams because we get defeated and we get demoralized. But it happens with kids too. They'll get cut from a football team and give up on sports. At some point, we all hit an obstacle that just gets to us so much that we kind of get down and we give up on ourselves. What the tool in that chapter does is it gives you the resilience to get back up when you've been knocked down. See, real confidence doesn't come from some sort of guarantee that bad things aren't going to happen to you. That's impossible. In fact, it's a guarantee that bad things are going to happen to you. Real confidence is, I know bad things are going to happen to me, but I've picked myself up so many times in the past that I'm confident I will again. In a weird way, you know, you want to be knocked down because you want to prove to yourself that you can get back up again. I know it's a simplistic example, but every mother knows this because every mother has been the mother to a toddler who's learning how to walk. And if you watch kids learning how to walk, they are enormously resilient, more resilient than any adult that I've ever seen, because they. It hurts when you fall flat on your face. You bang into a wall and fall back and hit your head on the table or whatever. And yet they just keep going. They keep going. They keep going because at that age, they don't have as powerful a part X as we do. Their life force is imperial. To be upright, to walk, and even to run through the world. And that's what the tool gets you back in touch with, is that life force energy that just says, no, no, no, no, no, it's fine, you got knocked down, let's get back up again and right back into the game, you know, kind of thing. It's a very, very. You know, as someone who has sort of like Russian Jewish blood, you know, everybody in my heritage has been depressed at one time or another. This was one of the most inspiring tools to me because I realized, God, I can get myself out of any dark spot, any funk, no matter what negative thoughts or feelings I'm flooded with, I'm a failure. I'll never succeed at this. I've never accomplished, et cetera, et cetera. I can give them up to the mother and I can keep going. So you have to read the book to understand what the mother is, but it's the archetypal mother, not your personal.

Yep, again, beautiful. So that's our third tool dealing with. That's the third tool, demoralization, et cetera.

Yeah, yeah. And then the fourth strategy that PartX uses, that we talk about in the book, is that it gets you to fall into a state where if you're honest with yourself, you're sulking, you're obsessed with something that someone's done to you, or more often, that spreads into everything that anyone's ever done to you. In aa, they say you're throwing yourself a pity party. We call it essentially a victim state. Now, look, most of us don't like to think of ourselves as victims, but everyone at some time or another falls into this state. Could be your teenager is being disrespectful to you, or your boss promotes somebody less qualified over you, and you just go into this state where it's not fair, this shouldn't have happened, et cetera, et cetera. Here's the difficult truth that everyone doesn't like to face. Life isn't fair. Life isn't fair if you keep wallowing in the unfairnesses that are perpetrated on you. In other words, how you've been wronged. You can't build a fulfilling future because you're essentially telling yourself that wasn't fair and it could happen again. So why should I even bother extending myself or taking risks? What the tool does, called the tower, is that it gives you the power to get over an injury like that. It gets you to let go and move forward. You stop demanding that life be fair, which it isn't going to be anyway, and instead demand that you always move forward, no matter how unfair life is. Again, I didn't use Martin Luther King in this particular chapter, but he's another really good example of that. I mean, a person who was just reviled and hated the FBI was tapping his phones, literally sending him anonymous letters telling him he should commit suicide, threatening him, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And he simply refused to stop moving forward. He refused to be a victim.

Yeah, it's intense. And that tool in particular is intense. They're all intense in their own way.

But that's a good one. I mean, just the cycles of life.

And death that you walk through there is just amazing. And then, just to highlight, I have a stack of almost an inch thick of notes from my work with Phil. Right. And I go through them often. And you've mentioned it a couple times without saying the actual phrase, which is relentless forward motion. So the child, my baby, 6 months old, just started crawling. So to see that relentless forward motion, she's getting ready to go through that toddler phase. And that life force that's beckoning us to reach our potential in a physical domain and then in a spiritual domain is relentless forward Motion. I just love that concept of, of expansion and energy and life force moving. Right.

I do too. I do too. That's one of the concepts that appeals the most to me. I mean, if you think about it, relentless forward motion is the nature of the universe that we live in. There have never been two moments alike in the entire history of the universe. That's forward motion. And that force is both out there and it's inside of everyone and everything. You know, Dylan Thomas in a famous poem called it the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Meaning the life force comes up within a stem, causes the flower to bud and then to blossom. That's in all of us. Which is why we can say confidently that if you use these tools, your life will blossom. It will expand into forms that you couldn't have even anticipated.

Amen. And that sounds like a wonderful bookend to our chat. This has been wonderful. I appreciate you taking the time again, Barry.

I appreciate it too, Brian. I always love talking to you. Your enthusiasm is so inspiring. It brings out the best in me too.

Well, I appreciate that. And again, I appreciate your guys work to help me really ground that into something bigger than myself and to be able to play with it even more consciously and deliberately and consistently and kind of modulate the volume, if you will, a little more deliberately, rather than kind.

Of getting slung out of a cannon and wondering where I landed. So thank you.

Can I say one other thing about that? Because that's always been very helpful to me too, that Phil was able to codify this material and organize it in a way, kept it from being flighty to me. Like I was born with incredible flights of fancy. And I would get really charged up and excited about something for a week or two, but then I would fall into a pit. And I had no overarching structure, overarching philosophy within which to explain those mood swings and those swings in my level of inspiration. This says inspiration is something that you have to work on regardless of how you're feeling and at any one moment. And if you do, if you become disciplined about that, it grows again. It grows cyclically, but it grows.

Yeah, that's amazing. And actually the final big idea I shared was Phil's description of when you look at these problems and then you actually work on them, your life force grows, your connection to these higher forces grows. And he articulates it in just such an empowering way. And again, just to. Just another reason why I feel so connected to, to you and to Phil's work is it's grounded you guys have. You guys have done the traditional Western psychotherapeutic model. You've moved from my vantage point beyond that into this connection of that some of which is scientifically grounded, not all of which is even scientifically grounded in terms of the Freudian approach into experimentation. You talk about cognitive behavioral therapy vis a vis what you guys do into the spiritual realm, yet connected into the deep. Ancient wisdom, modern science, practical tools, approach that ultimately both makes sense and works. And I think that's the ultimate thing is try it out. See what happens when you actually engage in this practice consistently and run the experiment. I mean, that's the ultimate invitation, I think, from the book.

Exactly.

Don't believe us.

Try it.

I'm the ultimate skeptic. I was an attorney for God's sake. So I disbelieve everything until I can prove it. Every single time I tried out one of Phil's concepts and experimented with it, I found this works. And the ultimate proof in psychotherapy isn't logical. It's does this work? Do I see measurable improvement in my mood, my productivity, or whatever it is that I'm working on? And that's the inarguable element of the tools. They work.

Yep. Amazing. So the book is available Amazon, Easy place to get it. Coming Alive. What's your guys website again? Is it just the tools?

The toolsbook.com and there's lots of information on there. You can find lots of tools, you can find our videos, all kinds of stuff that's helpful.

Okay, perfect. So TheToolsBook.com they've also got a newsletter where they'll share some ideas. So check out.

And we're, we're going to have a podcast starting probably in mid September called Coming Alive.

Fantastic. Yeah, Phil shared that with me. That sounds awesome. And they'll be able to learn more about that by signing up for your newsletter. So Coming Alive the Tools again, couldn't recommend them more strongly. Check them out, Barry. Thank you. And I got to share one more little joke. So when Barry and I and Phil connected, I knew I wanted to work with you guys. Right? And I share this in the note and I'm like, but which one?

Because it's got to be one on one. It's not really one on two. And I literally, the way I did it in my head was it's like trying to choose between Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda. Like, that's not a fair decision. And my joke was you kind of have to go with Yoda in that scenario. But chatting with you here, it's like, oh Obi Wan, this is so good.

So it's an open door any time. Phil and I are very uncompetitive about that stuff, so it's fun.

So fun. Well, you guys are both just such beautiful souls and look forward to all that's in store, so love you, appreciate you, look forward to more soon.

Thanks so much Brian. It's great talking to you anytime.

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