The Power of Psychological Flexibility in Negotiations with Steven C. Hayes

Hello, my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for joining us today. With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Now, before we get into today's insightful conversation, I have a golden opportunity for those of you who recognize the power of negotiation in your professional lives. Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could navigate those high stakes conversations with more confidence? Or perhaps you're looking to empower your team with the art of persuasion and conflict resolution? At the American Negotiation Institute, we've crafted specialized keynotes and workshops tailored for those very needs. We've transformed the negotiation skills of professionals worldwide and we're eager to do the same for you. We believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And our goal is to help you improve your lives and the lives of those around you, one difficult conversation at a time. Don't let another challenging conversation leave you second guessing. Click the link in the description to discover how we can help you find confidence in conflict, negotiate better deals, and have stronger relationships. Because in the world of business, every conversation counts. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Steven, thanks for joining us today.

I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Kwame likewise, my friend. You come highly recommended, of course. And so how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Well, I'm a clinical psychologist who really wanted to dig deep into the why of the human mind. And, you know, I've spent 40 years trying to sort of hack how it is that we are the social primates who ended up in the situation we're in with all the spectacular progress on one hand, the other hand, it's often the case that people are miserable, unhappy, disconnected, etc. Even when they have everything that every other living creature on the planet would need to be happy. And so I've tried to distill down this knowledge to the smallest set of things that do the most good. And we've been able, I think, to summarize, and I think I can actually prove that empirically, the smallest set known in all of behavioral science of things, you need to focus to make a difference in your life, to make sure that you are your life is empowered and progressing socially, psychologically, physically, or conversely if you mismanage these processes, they're going to be taking you down. And so that's what I'm excited about and that's what I'm here. I hope I can reach your audience with what we know from this little wing of behavioral science about one of the smallest number of things we can do that make do the most good.

I'm so excited to dig into this. I've been looking forward to this one for a while and but before we get into it, I definitely want to make sure that we give you an opportunity to talk about your most recent book and the app because those are really exciting to too.

Yeah. My most recent trade book, the one that's normal human beings can read. I've been ever done several dozen books but a lot of them are geeky. I've done a couple that even I can't read. I mean they're I read them and I say man that's good but nobody would understand that. I mean pretty technical stuff especially when you're trying to language about language and trying to understand how the human mind works but you're a thinking person yourself. That self reflective process is really difficult. But the latest one is called Liberated Mind, which tells my personal story, the science story, and is also kind of a self help book and it's done really well, still doing well, building on a book that I wrote now 20 years ago called get out of your mind into your life, the first big self help book from what I do which is called acceptance and commitment Therapy or training when it's used outside of a psychotherapy context. Act in either case, by the way, not act. That always sounds like ECT to me and I don't want to be shocked, but get out of your mind into your life. Beat Harry Potter for one glorious week was written up in time as my five minutes of fame. But those two books kind of as a bookend, are things that people can look at to understand some of the tools that I've got to talk about, some of the principles I'm going to talk about. But the app you mentioned is we're trying to figure out a way to put some of these tools in the hands of clinicians to share with their clients while at the same time measuring these processes I'm talking about that are the really key things, not the things we've all been told we have to focus on. What's your disorder? What are the signs and symptoms? That dog just will not hunt 40 years without an Enough already with people with label after label after label stuck on them like glue, without really focusing on what can you do that will lift you up instead of take you down. And so I am right now, deep inside, trying to figure out a way to get that into people's hands, using the healthcare system essentially, to take therapy from one hour out of a week, one out of 68, 168 hours. To instead imagine that clinicians should be reaching out into the 24, 7, 5 out of 5 world. 5 out of 5, meaning it's not just 1 out of 5 with a mental health disorder, but it's 5 out of 5 of us that need social support so that mental health resilience help, meaning that maybe we can really rethink what is the role of helping professionals in this modern world where, you know, it's tough, it's hard to be a young person today. It's hard to look at the world around you and not be a little freaked out. And so there's no way to do that just one at a time with expensive therapists, but you might be able to do it using technology and apps and things like that. So those are the things I'm into, and maybe I'll find a way to work that in. But really what I want to do is here to serve the people who are listening, and I hope I can do that.

Absolutely. No, I appreciate the work that you've done in the field, and I know you have a lot to offer here, too, because, yes, of course, this is a negotiation podcast. And I think a lot of times people think very tactically about what it takes to negotiate effectively, just focusing on the strategies, the tactics, what to do, what to say, what not to say. But a lot of times we don't fully appreciate the nuances of psychology that lie behind all of these interactions. And so that's really what I'm excited to dig into today. Not just getting a better understanding of other people, but first, obviously, getting a better understanding of ourselves and.

Exactly. Negotiation is between two human beings. And if you're not in tune with yourself, your own thoughts, feelings, memory, bodily sensations, your own wishes, desires, values, and so forth, your own sense of awareness, perspective, taking, consciousness, and being able to put that in the behavior. If you're not able to do that with yourself and you're not able to take the perspective of the other person and what they have at stake, how are you going to negotiate? You're going to be thinking that, oh, how do I manipulate this person to get them to do the right thing? Nobody likes to be in conversations like that when you detect that that's the, you know, death to real communication. So I think psychology, period, end of story, done well, has everything to say about business and industry negotiation and all of that. And in fact, you know, the thousand randomized trials on ACT includes quite a number with organizations and with running your businesses and, you know, finding ways to be able to create cooperative groups. And so we're human beings, and everywhere we go, our psychology goes with us.

Absolutely. This is great. And I think a great place for us to start is by just giving us an Act 101. What is it and what makes it so different?

What makes it different is that we've spent these years trying to dig us down to what the processes of change are. But I can say it first, just kind of topographically what it looks like, and then I can say it in a way that is still very simple. I could do it with a single sentence, or at least two that point to the underlying processes of change. So ACT is a modern form of cognitive behavioral therapy or behavior therapy that uses acceptance and mindfulness skills, commitment, behavior change skills, to produce psychological flexibility. That's what it is. But to produce psychological flexibility. What's that? Well, that's a collection of these, what we call processes of change. Processes are just things done in a sequence, like a procession, a parade. And we want to know what are the things we can do in sequence that yield benefits for us or that create problems for us. And if you wanted to say what the key of psychological flexibility is, I could say it first with three words, and then each of those words can be broken down into two. That we need to learn how to be more open, aware, and actively engaged in life and to put that into our social relationships and taking care of our body. I just said in one sentence what 98% of the geeky mediational analyses of randomized trials. You don't even have to know what the word mediation means, except it's the geek statistical way that we figure out how did the positive outcomes that get produced by an intervention get produced? What is the sequence? What is the pathway? What is the process? We've done recently a summary of every single study ever done in the history of the world that claimed that had done the proper statistical analysis of how or why. Not just what, I did this. I got good outcomes. Fine. How? Why? There's a way to do that statistically. And we looked at every single study ever done on any method that was focused on mental health. And I can summarize 98% of what we found in what I. That sentence I just gave you. Learn to be more open, aware and actively engaged psychologically and extend it to your relationships and to take care of your body. Well, what do I mean by open? What do I mean by aware? What do I mean by actively engaged? What I mean by open is that you're able to notice and make use of your own cognitions with a little sense of distance there, to be able to see them, use them if they're useful, leave them there if they're not, without getting entangled with them. That you're able to access your own emotions, your own bodily sensations, your own memories, again, in a way that's open and neither clinging nor avoidant, but it's simply noticing and be aware of, making use of, but not necessarily having to cling to or run from your own insides. What I mean by where? I mean coming into the present moment in a way that's flexible, fluid and voluntary. And yeah, you've got memories and yeah, you've got plans for the future, that's fine too. That's in the present. But if you disappear into that, if you disappear the rumination and worry and you already know where you are and who's around you and what the situation affords, that's toxic. But you have to notice it from this more conscious part of you that connects you in a healthy attachment or interconnection with others. That started when Mama's eyes met you or is literally as a neonate and you dumped endorphins in your brain when you saw those kind eyes. Because we're the social primates, without the help of others, we die almost instantly. We're helpless for years. And we are built to connect with others consciously. Language builds that out. So when I mean aware, I mean this deeper sense. I could say more spiritual sense. The part of you that is not pointed at and given qualities, but the witnessing, noticing, observing part of you. The kind of when you look in the eyes of your lover and you connect and almost blend into a we. That part of you being able to notice what's present. And then when I say actively engaged, I mean, well, dude, if you've shown up in the present moment consciously and you've made room for your history that gives you all those thoughts, feelings, memories and bodily sensations. What are you going to do with all that? Those first four things we sometimes call mindfulness skills. But what are you going to do with that? Well, I don't know. What do you want your life to be about? What are the qualities of being and doing? You want to put into your life moments. And how are you going to do that with actual overt behavior? So actively engaged, I mean getting clear on your values and the goals that can foster your values. And by values I mean not the things you could obtain and possess, but the qualities of your behavior that you want to put into the world, the things you look up to, to others when you see somebody that you respect, what is that quality? And how could you put that into your behavior and then have a way to do that in a committed way? If you have those six things, then you have open, aware and actively gauge. You want one word for it called psychological flexibility. And then you got to put that into your relationships and you can do that one at a time. You know, compassion is an extension of your emotional openness to yourself. You know, genuine conversation, that's understanding is an extension of your ability to notice your own thoughts with a sense of openness and equanimity. Your connection is an extension of consciousness and perspective taking and shared values, shared commitments is an extension that we put into our groups, our relationships, our families, our communities, the world. But then you also have a body, dude. And if you're not taking care of your diet, sleep, exercise, if you're not doing the things that create an internal sense of safety and you're asking your brain to go into lizard mode because you're constantly hammering it with stressful and overwhelming kinds of non safe thoughts, actions, etc, you'll pay the cost. So that's it, that's the 98%. And really if I get aggressive, I could say 100%. There's a few things I don't quite yet know how to include in that. In terms of things people have found like a few studies showing that personality predicts positive outcomes. I'm not quite sure how to think about that yet. But pretty much the 40 years of the wilderness that we've done with our constant dsmization of everything and over medicating and all the rest that has not given us prosperity psychologically. I can summarize everything we know about how change happens and why it happens and what I just said and doesn't mean it's act overallist. I'm not being grabby about it. You look at the, you start talking about compassionate curiosity, you're going to find it inside these processes. You look at the things that really move people and I think it's fine, let's talk about it a hundred different ways. I'm not trying to make people, you know, be forced into a model. Quite the opposite I want to create a kind of intellectual agora where we connect as human beings and allow behavioral science to have a different role in our culture so that it isn't just the physical technologists talking about climate change or it isn't just the politicians talking about immigration. You know, it's your human sciences talking about how to empower individual and group human journeys that will make this a kinder and more successful world.

Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations? At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered. Don't just negotiate, Master the art with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate and succeed. Wow. Like I said at the beginning, I have a degree in psychology and I feel like you just gave it to me again in a more synthesized and effective and practical way in this introduction to acts. This is incredible. And I love the holistic nature of this because we've really captured what leads to change. Jen, I love the way that you said it. Psychological prosperity in a holistic sense. And really when you start to understand everything that goes into this, we recognize that we really can't empathize and connect with people on a fundamental level unless we start to focus on our own mental and emotional well being and then we can extend it out to other people.

Yeah, we've all been exposed to things that are difficult. And I, when I'm giving talks, I say, when is your, how old were you? And I usually do it by holding my hand up and I say, how tall were you when you first had the thought that deep down there's something wrong with you, or maybe you're not good enough, or maybe you're not lovable, or maybe you're not smart, or maybe you're not wanted, or maybe you'll not be included and you know, my hand is getting down to the height of a three year old. People start shaking their head that, yeah, that. So, you know, we come into this world without an owner's manual. We stumble through, we do the best we can, often with models who are not, who are struggling themselves, you know, almost everybody, you know, you've seen things in your Family, home and stuff that are difficult and painful. My dad was an alcoholic. My mom was struggling with OCD and with depression. That's not uncommon. It's everywhere. Just talk to people about their family and talk to them about their own experiences. You know, most people have had really painful and potentially trauma inducing experiences that if you do the wrong thing, will tell your whole body down to this lizard brain level. This is an unsafe world. Okay. It's a lot harder to be able to step forward, to love, to commit, to reach, to share, to cooperate in that mindset. So we're going to need help in being able to take our history on board. There's no delete button in the human nervous system. It's healthy short of brain injury. Take that history on board and use it to empower our journey. Because inside, the things that we struggle with the most are the things we care about. I mean, the reason we struggle with them is because it was so painful. It was so difficult. Yeah. But the flip side of that, because you cared so much about what was threatened or taken away, you know, if you've been betrayed and it was horrible, it's because you care about loyalty and intimacy. Hello. Yeah, I get that betrayal isn't what you'd want, but it whispers to you about what you do really want. And if, you know, I sometimes say to my clients, you know, if I could spink fairly dust on you and eliminate all these difficult emotions you have, eliminate all these difficult memories and eliminate all this past trauma, would you do it? Except before I sprinkle it, I got this one little thing to say. When your children come to you and just say, I'm sad, I'm afraid, or I'm angry, or I'm suffering. When your family comes to you or when your spouse reaches out to you, you will have no idea what the heck they're talking about. I've not met one person who wants that kind of fairy dust. They want the fairy dust where all the pain is gone, but all the wisdom is retained. Good luck with that. Dude, that ain't happening. So I'm not doing it to minimize. And this is not Pollyanna stuff. I'm just saying we're one whole person. And these difficult parts of us, when we learn how to take them on board and learn from them, we're able to heal. And you know that the root word of the word heal, the etymology of it, is whole. When you're whole, you can reach out to the other whole people around you who sometimes don't know their whole. They're acting, you know, like regular, fill in the blanks. And yeah, okay, you can judge them and so forth, but you can also reach inside them and take their perspective and maybe even find a way to compromise, communicate, lift up to share. And we probably all have friends, for example, who you know, are flawed. You know, there's places you don't want to go with them, there's places they can some, but still you see the person for who they really are. Yeah. And over time, sometimes you see that more and more. And how can we put that into our own hearts and heads and hands, but also into the culture and families and communities that we're part of, businesses that we're part of and you know, bump, nudge the world in a positive direction.

This last part that you mentioned, Steven, is really personally interesting to me. And let me give this caveat before I go into this side because I don't want my listeners to get excited. I'm not interested in getting into politics. But when I see the divisive nature of rhetoric and just how divided our communities are in general, it makes me wonder when, when we think about the ACT approach, it starts with you as an individual. You extend it out to other people. And what do you think it would take for this mindset, this movement, however we want to conceptualize it, what would it take to extend that out into communities?

Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, we're actively involved in that. There's a program called Pro Social if you're interested in. Go to Prosocial World that I and my colleagues, David Sloan Wilson, who's a major evolutionary biologist, one of the first persons to bring what's called multi level selection back to evolution science recently retired, but we created a program based on Lynn Ostrom's Nobel Prize winning core design principles. She won the Nobel in 2009. We spent some great weeks with her, myself, David, designing this program. She died soon after of cancer. But she found that indigenous peoples have been able to protect their forests, their rivers, their streams, their fisheries really well without any government intervention or without any greed is good bottom, you know, private ownership. And they've done it by arranging group processes that fit what we know about how safe and cooperative groups evolve. And we've added to that the psychological flexibility principles that I've been talking about and created this program called Pro Social. And it's just an example of what's happening around the world as people become more aware of psychological flexibility, of how we can kind of put it into places where there is conflict by Scaling it to social principles. But they maintain what we know about how psychology works. And if I could do a little prideful shout out. I mean, the one thing I'm probably most proud of in my whole life is that the World Health Organization WHO selected ACT when they were deciding how are we going to deal with real political conflicts that lead to war and knowing that when war happens, everything goes wrong. Everything. It isn't just mental health, it's relationships, it's physical health. It's everything. And the single most commonly downloaded book at the WHO website, and I can give you a link and give it to your listeners, is calling called Doing what Matters in Times of Stress. And it's an act self help book. It's being put right now into Uganda with South Sudanese refugees and you know, Turkey with Syrian refugees, or there's about 200 people from who putting it into Ukraine. And why? Because, you know, these political things that we're seeing, we've all faced it, we all know it. Whether you're left or right, everybody agrees the other side is wrong. That's what everybody agrees on. You know, I have dug in because change is happening so fast and the media has learned to, to benefit by dividing and by segmenting. And so the effect of the media that used to be kind of bringing people together because there's only so many things everybody could watch. Now you can watch and only the stuff that builds on your particular psych from morning till night. And that's fine. It's actually, if we learn how to manage it, it's going to be okay. But the short term effect has been to slice and dice on the ways of. We've had to create community. And some of the major institutions like religion, for example, or people are not going to church anymore. There's, you know, even things like Aquanus or Lions Club or things that my dad did, you know, those are really struggling. And so we're going to have to find a different way to create community. And I think one way is to learn these skills of how to bring on board all the disparate voices in your own history, cognitively, emotionally and so forth, to be better at carrying yourself as a whole human being and then reach out to others with a sense of curiosity. If I can tell a story, I was coming home from a, a major conference in Cyprus and then a family vacation in Greece with my eldest and my youngest. My eldest is 53, my youngest is 17. I will have had four kids, children in the home for 55 straight years. Under the age of 18 when Stevie goes to college, which sets a world record. So I was wonderful to be out there with my fam and a guy got into a very intense political conversation and a little kind of a. A waiting station for the ferry boat that was going to pick us up and in Santorini. And what I adopted was a real interest in why he thought that and why I thought that mattered. I disagreed with him on almost everything he said, but I just kept asking questions and making some points of things I knew about. And you could feel the softening. I didn't say what my politics was. Well, I said a little bit. But it was more important for us to be able to connect than. And for us to begin to create a grounding of understanding than it was be to convince him to think about political issues this way or that or economic issues this way or that. We're not going to get to a better, more interconnected world that way. We're gonna have to get up by perspective taking, by asking questions, by listening, by creating bonds of respect and by genuinely interacting with each other. And so if you're walking down the street and that flag is out there in front or that sign is out in front, you wince because it's that, you know, the political candidate you hate or whatever, that might be a time to say, hi, neighbor, and not go in there with the view that you're going to like, make them be like, you know, with the view that you're going to create a connection with another human being who is thinking differently than you. And you know, one of the things that we're finding and these processes have changed and one reason I'm so worried about what we've done with the DSM and so forth, is that we've put ourselves into these clown suits of categories that are ill fitting. We do it politically, but we also do it psychologically. I mean, even young people will tell you, I have this or I have that or here's my percentile score on this test or that, you know, I'm in gifted and talented. Oh, you're Gen ed. I mean, second graders think about it and immediately start creating judgments about. And usually again, our side is the good side and the other side's the bad side. One of the things that we're finding with these, when we actually get into studying these processes of change, is that every individual is different. And yeah, there's a way to put it together, but not by shoving people into categories. We've been doing that for 150 years. Galton started it all the way back. I'M not. If I get on that rant, I'll go off on. But we've learned, you know, the word normal wasn't in the English language until 1848. You couldn't say normal. You can't have a kitchen table conversation without saying the word normal nowadays. Normal, typical, usual, or how special we are, which is based on normal, you know, so we have to find a way to let us show up as individuals with diversity and differences there, but without climbing into these clown suits which are forcing other people into them. Instead, reach across the divide and really begin to understand who we are and what we're up to. And you'll find things even in the person who's in the opposite political view of you, where you have shared values, you have shared experiences, you have shared emotions. I can guarantee you that you have shared history. It's your job to find that and to build on that in a way that creates connection and attachment, not in a way that divides and is all about you being right and better, smarter and different.

Wow, this is a masterclass. And that hesitation you heard was in which grammatical tense I wanted to use because I said, I know it's been 30 minutes, I should probably say this has been a masterclass.

But I don't.

Want it to end. And I have one more thing that I want to focus on. And this comes down to identity categorizing people, categorizing ourselves. And I really like the point that you made about how focusing on putting ourselves and other people into these boxes necessarily creates divides between people. And nowadays it seems like that is in vogue. We either accuse other people about doing it maliciously while we do it ourselves and say it's an honorable endeavor when we do it. And how do we as a society break through that pernicious tendency of separating ourselves into these identity based categories?

I'm not sure because we don't have good models for it. I said the word normal has been around for 155, 50 years and on steroids, you know, since ever we. We linked it to modern statistics and its agenda of the individual differences, which was never about individuals, it was always about differences. We had to actually make up geek words to talk about what we want to talk about. Just recently I'll say what the word is and people's eyes will roll up in their head. We'll never. You get this into popular culture. But even the scientists need to think differently because as soon as they're thinking in terms of normative categories, it forces them into ways of researching questions and so forth, where individuals start being fuzzed, they become error terms inside statistics instead of the individual being focused on in a way that they can be understood. And then you could say, how is that person like someone else retaining that if and only outfit helps you see the person even more clearly. It's upside down statistics where the group isn't what's true and the individual is error. Our individual lives lived over time is what's true. And this abstracted group, this norm, this average, is the source of error. And so we're developing these upside down statistics and we had to create a word which we made up, this thing called idiomic, meaning it's idiographic. But we can't have everything be only you as an individual. We don't have the facility and language to do that. Language puts things together and it helps our thinking to do that. But can we then go nomathetic? Go to the group level? A geeky word, nomothetic for at the level of the collective, retaining what's useful if and only if it helps us understand individuals even better. We call, we call it idiomic. And so I can give you an example. We know that something like compassion, let's say for yourself, usually goes with compassion towards others. There's a vast amount of research for that. Compassion focused researchers, including myself, have been saying it's a correlation of about 0.4, 0.45, pretty good for how correlations go. Now we start looking at this, where we take measures within the person over time in couples and in groups, and we start looking at moment by moment, like several times a day, but over months. How compassionate are you feeling towards yourself? How compassionate are you feeling or doing towards others? And also what's going on with you emotionally, or what's going on with you in terms of being able to succeed in what you're doing in business or whatever the outcome might be. Then we look one at a time where we don't model the group, we just model that individual looking at the variability within a person over time and say, what lifts you up towards higher quality of life, towards greater sense of peace of mind or less anxiety or whatever it is you're trying to create. And here's what we find. A significant number of people, the nicer and more compassionate there to themselves, the meaner and nastier they are to others. It's about 1 out of 10 in our normal stats. It's invisible. In fact, even the stats that say, how does the individual group work? Every single person has a positive slope. But when we look just at the individual without turning people into error terms. Oh, that's not true. There's a subgroup of folks now. You need to know that. And then we look at why and what we start finding is what you know full well. Look around you. What happens as mindfulness goes into the world? Every secret. My freaking smart watch, you know, my Apple watch here, will will keep track of my mindful minutes. For me, it's one of five options. I could pick you, what, you want to track your heart or you want to track your mindful minutes. I mean, come on, it's getting pretty mainstream when that happens, right? Okay, I get it. It's great. We need these skills in the cacophony of the modern world. But we better not do one size fits all. Another version of the same category. You think, oh, mindfulness is always good. Compassion is always good. That's not true. My stuff, acceptance is always good. I used to think that. And then it turned out that first responders, when they're out on the streets driving a ambulance, if they are not able to suppress their emotions while they're doing it, they can't do their job, then they need to learn how to flip the switch and go home. Or they're hammering down martinis and whack on their spouse. Now that is a real thing too. But don't be saying emotional openness is good for everybody everywhere. And that's not true. If you have to deal with who's going to survive and who isn't. Somebody saying, help me, help me. And you can triage them and say, that person can't be helped. If I go try to save that person, I am going to give a death sentence. This other person in the same car accident who I might be able to say, can you imagine having that be your job? And then you have to go home. We ask all kinds of people to do that. Soldiers, policemen, first responders, it's everywhere. Well, we better give them the skills to be able to do it. So coming back to my compassion point, what we're doing now, as we dig into it, we realize, okay, when you disconnect compassion from values, for example, you can now produce this wonderful creation called selfish self compassion. Oh, I'm glad the psychologists were around to help us with that. Like, no, we don't want to put selfish self compassion in the world. We don't want that. We better be training values and self compassion so that reaching out compassionately towards others is part of what you're doing. And not just you take out other kids. I Gotta go take my bubble bath. You know, that's maybe self compassionate and self care, but it, it's also selfish or it can be. So I think what we're going to need, Kwame, you've asked a wonderful question. Is we're going to need a language that allows us to focus on what empowers us and how the combinations are needed to create the kind of life journeys we want. Fortunately, if I'm. What I've said earlier is true. It's such a small set that'll be less confusing than what we've been dealing with anyway. Learn how to be more emotionally and cognitively open and flexible more in the present moment, consciously and connected in consciousness with others, focused on our values and getting our feet moving in those directions and make sure that we do that in our relationships too and taking care of our body. That's pretty small set versus the 250,000 different ways you can get a PTSD diagnosis. I mean, please, that's complex. This is a lot simpler. And so let's focus on useful. Find a way to create new ways of speaking about it. And I'm not sure, I mean psychological flexibility is a good start, but we're probably going to need some pretty brilliant wordsmiths, you know, people who know how to popularize, reach out. Like, you know the brilliant Russ Harris who wrote that book I mentioned. The who. Who's a. An act person, a just md, not even a psychiatrist, but he's brilliant at it in Australia. And you know, it's being distributed around the world because it lifts people's up and it uses very common words like, you know, anchoring meaning grounding your present moment in awareness. We can find ways of speaking that just normal folks can understand. I mean, after all the randomized trials of this book were done with mostly illiterate South Sudanese refugees sitting in dirt in Uganda with nothing but their lives and having probably been raped along the way and seeing some of their family members be killed in front of them as they escape from the war. I mean if people, normal people there, it is normal. If people can do that, you know, with hell we can deal with our stuff we have to face. Which is not that most of the people listening to me right now have never been through what a lot of people around the world are through being living through right now with war and starvation and immigration and climate change, change in economic disparities and all the rest.

Wow, Stephen, this has now I can say this has been a masterclass. And one thing we didn't get into was Taking care of your body. And I've taken so many notes in this conversation that my hand literally started to cramp. So that's a note for me to hydrate. So I appreciate this. But before you go again, I want you to. I want to give you an opportunity to put a bow on this. Just reminding people about the work that you do and how best to get in touch with you and some of your materials.

Sure. But you tempted me. Now I'll do 30 seconds on the body. All the stuff that you're interested in, that you've talked about and so forth. You know, creating a sense of safety for the human body is what's needed. We are not at our best when we're freezing like lizards or running like terrified mammals. So fight flight and all the rest and all the mobilizations do that create a psychological. And of course, some people really need also the physical safety because people have. Are being abused or are living through wars right now. But all of us are turning on the television screen. I was just looking at what was going on in Ukraine not two hours ago and watching what? Watching tanks explode? There's human beings in those tanks. I don't care if you call them Russian. They're human beings in there, you know. Yeah, I didn't see the bodies fly out of the tank, but I know they're gone. So we all are living in a world where 24, 7, we have our body being asked to mobilize because it's unsafe. And so we're gonna have to create modern minds for this modern world where we can live in a safe way. So thank you for the invitation. And if people want to follow my work, you know, we mentioned the book of liberated mind. Get out of your mind into your life. But you can go to my website, it's just my name, and say, yes, please send it to me and I'll put you on my newsletter list. But. And you can follow it and the app that I was talking about and all of that. But if you don't want to do that, I mean, my name is Stephen with a V. My initial C. Charlie. My dad's name Hayes. H A Y e s. So www.stevenchays.com yes, please send it to me. You're on my list. And it's a one click opt out. I don't spam people. And if you ever feel like I'm not attending to your needs, it's an instant out. But the other thing is, now that you've heard these things, you've heard terms like psychological Flexibility or act acceptance and commitment therapy. Just Google it and you'll find hundreds of free resources, podcasts, films, so forth, and of course, lots of books and so forth. Be careful of pirated books. Try to get the ones because there's skimmers now who create fake books and sell them on Amazon with authors who are not real. And often there are a bit of a horror because they have skimming things that are done automatically by AI to cram together a book and Amazon makes money on it, so they won't stop it. They did stop one that actually used my name with one letter changed as the author. They stopped that one, but they won't stop the other one. So do a little bit of research to find out that these are real people, that they're in universities, other places, and that these are substantial. And you'll find it in the form of books, but just free. I mentioned the WHO website. If I could mention a bitly link, if you know how bitly works. Bit Ly. Just type in WHO all capitalized World Health Organization, an underline sign, and then act all capitalized, and it'll take you right to where you can get a free book and audio tape that is the single most commonly downloaded. He said pridefully, a document on the WHO website. So this doesn't have to be about money. This doesn't have to be about fame and building castles in the sky. There's a hundred. Look, all these principles I'm talking about, they're in the major religions, they're in the best, deepest clinical traditions. They're in the wisest people on the planet doing the most things, such as, for example, Kwame, Christians Talks. Just go look at it. You're going to see an echo of what I just said, because we're human beings. And so I just want to be about empowering people, not about throwing people into a funnel. And if something that I've said have moved you or somehow seems relevant, these are some easy ways to get to the resources.

Oh, man. I appreciate you, my friend. I appreciate you listeners. We will put all of these resources in the description of this episode, and I am very proud to share all of them. Stephen, again, thank you. Really appreciate it.

I appreciate the opportunity. Kwame. Awesome. Thank you for giving it to me.

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