Stewart Emery – Distinctions of Success

Imagine you live in this one room and you live in it all of your life. Now, it's magical. You can furnish it extravagantly and it's magical in so much as it's like a magic carpet. The room is on a magic carpet. You can travel wherever you want to travel. But it has one feature which is a very big deal. It only has a single door. And you say to me, well, Stuart, so what? I mean, lots of rooms only have a single door. My bedroom only has a single door. I say, yeah, I get that. But this door is different. It's a one way door. In but not out entry, but no exit ever. And what this means is whoever comes into the room of your life and whatever comes in with them will be with you in this room of your life for the rest of your life. They will never leave. Mostly the people who come into the room of our life come in there through happenstance. But as we get older and if we understand this principle, we get to choose who comes in and that determines the quality of our life. Choose wisely.

Welcome to the mindtrax podcast with breakthrough ideas to live your best life possible and and how to make it happen. I'm Paul Scheele and today we'll be talking with Stuart Emery. Stuart Emery is a renowned storyteller, entrepreneur and executive coach who has impacted the lives of millions. He's one of the most influential people in the human potential movement. Stuart was the first CEO of EST and co founder of Estate Actualizations, a global learning and development organization. His international bestseller, Success Built to Last, Creating a life that Matters is the basis for the Success Built to Last Paralimal he created with me. Stuart and his co authors interviewed hundreds of the world's most successful people in business, social sciences, the arts and sports to uncover the key traits and habits of success. He's co authored many other bestselling books including now you're thinking, do you matter? And who's in your room?

Hello, Stuart. So good to be with you. Thank you for being a part of this podcast, Paul.

I'm delighted to be here. I enjoy talking to you whenever we get to do that, which is, I realize, too rare an occasion. And I find you fascinating to converse with because you know a lot about a lot of things and, and you intellectually curious. I love that. Thank you.

Well, you and I share a real passion for human development. You've been one of the early voices in the human potential movement. And while we could talk about a zillion things today, Stuart, I'd like to Focus on two areas. One is Success Built to Last, and the other is who's in your room. And in your book, Success Built to Last, one of the things you emphasize is that to be successful in life, to have enduring success, we should find what it is that we're truly passionate about and then get really good at it. Could you share some of the origin story about that?

Well, so we started Success Book the Last because we noticed there were people who were conspicuously successful no matter what. And there were a lot of us who hadn't quite mastered that art. And I think that if I say what's the defining quality of mine is I'm a passionately curious man. So I was curious about it. Is there any thread of commonality in these people's approach to life, the way they think about their role in the world and what it is that they do? And it turned out that whatever they were doing, they had unbridled enthusiasm for. And then that led to them getting very, very, very good at it. So I saw it was a two step process.

One, you had to find something you love to do, because otherwise people who were doing it, who did love it would outperform you who didn't love it so much. But the thing that's unexpected in all of this, Paul, is that love is a resource within us. So we have to choose to invest somewhere. Now, back in the days of est, which nobody can remember pretty much now, except those of us who are definitely senior citizens, we would talk about, are you going to live in the world at effect or at source? In other words, are you going to have the incoming input of sound and vision and all of the other things that go on in our world? Is that going to drive our inner experience? Or are we going to express our inner divinity into the world and create an experience not only for ourselves, but for those around us? So it's are you going to be sourceful or you're going to be an effect and a victim? Sometimes you're a happy victim because you're deliriously joyful as a result of all kinds of things that one might ingest or otherwise be part of, or are you going to find that link with the divine and express it, you know, like a Mozart or an incredible chef and so on and so forth. So we found that, and then I got really curious, okay, why do some people excel, other people not so much? And so we looked at these qualities of what have you actually got to do to get good at something? So that ended up being more expressed than who's in your room. But.

The short story of it is what we call deliberate practice. So if you ask a golfer, they can go out and hit a lot of balls and not get any better. But if you talk to a golfer who goes out and hits 100 balls or a thousand balls and keeps track of where each ball lands and are they actually making improvement, measurable improvement? So we found that in order to get good at something, you have to have metrics. You have to have, first of all, you've got to know what good is. You've got to understand what really good is. And it's interesting, you talk to people who are elite performers in whatever field they've achieved at. It's a different level of conversation than the rest of us have. They don't do small talk very well.

They're very focused. They have what we would call extreme awareness. And you and I both have worked with people trying to assist them in developing awareness. And they know each increment of improvement and they have an experimental approach to life. And what I mean by that is they don't do something and decide those outcomes are good or bad and they're a good person or terrible person. They do each thing with this kind of, I wonder what will happen when I do this? Will it be better than the last time I did it? And will I have gotten better as a result of it? And how can I improve next time I do this?

All right, now I want to take that for just a moment. I want you to keep on this track, but I want to add perhaps a little bit to this dialogue. It's what we find in organizations, it's easy to gather metrics about what's happening. And in agile software development, for example, we want to get rapid feedback, we want to have dynamic steering going on. We want to be able to get fast feedback with small incremental changes. One of the most central concepts to brief therapy that emerged out of this human development process is this idea of being able to notice small, concrete indicators of success in the direction of where we want to go. So that's spot on to what you're talking about.

Right, right. And actually more elegantly expressed. Paul, thank you.

That was perfect. Because it is what it takes and the metrics get interesting. I have a couple of friends and people I know who are Michelin starred chefs. And so this gets to be interesting because what's the metric? You don't have a measurement for that. Right. It doesn't lend itself to that. But what they have is a very refined palate.

And so they taste continually, and they compare the taste of this to the next taste of this to the next taste of this, and is it getting better? And they can't actually give it to you or me to taste because, one, our palate isn't that good, and two, we don't know where they're trying to get to. I interviewed Alice Waters. Now, if you're in the food, you know who Alice Waters is. She's one of the cornerstones of modern American cuisine and of the food, the table movement. And so I was talking to her, and I said, so, what do you think you're good at? One of the things I always ask people is, what do you think you're good at? And people have never either asked them that or they've never asked themselves that question. And Alice thought for a while, and she said, you know, I think I'm a pretty good taster. And I said, where did you learn to do that? She said, I spent some time in Provence, and the French people who I was with, who were chefs, taught me how to taste. And she tells. And I spoke to a woman whose name I cannot pronounce, who wrote Salt, Fat, Acid Heat. And she talks about working at Chez Panay and doing a. A charity event that Alice was speaking at. But Chez Panisse, which is Alice's restaurant, were doing the food. The service was over. They're sitting there, I think have done a great job and having their own dinner afterwards with the leftovers. And Alice walks in, and she said, well, you're looking very pleased with yourselves. They said, yes, we think we did really well tonight. We particularly like the salad. And I said, do you know. She said, okay, so I want you to assemble the meal you serve tonight. Now, taste the salad in that order in which it was served. I said, oh, my God, it needs more acid in it.

Because they had tasted things individually, not in the context of the entire meal.

Very interesting. That's like wine pairing.

Correct?

Wine pairing.

Exactly, exactly.

Got to get it right in the right sequence.

Yeah. And the context. So therefore, people at the highest level of performance, particularly in the arts, whether it's the culinary arts or the music arts or the painting arts, like Libby does, you become your own source of the metrics by which you judge your progress, because it is only you in that moment, who knows where you're trying to get to with this and whether you're getting closer or you're not getting closer.

Excellent. So let me pause there for a moment. When you and I taught with Joni in Minneapolis many years ago, we talked about how we can achieve enduring success. And one of the things that we did was what I would call learning to learn activities. Like how do you train someone to learn how to learn to make distinctions? And we brought in coffees, and then on the next day, we brought in chocolates. Do you remember that?

Oh, I love, you know, this. This is one of my favorite things to do.

Yeah. And this, the ability to make a fine distinction there actually translates very nicely into these metrics for dynamically steering our lives. I really admire that. How can we get transferable skills from classroom into life? So how does that work? That being able to note nuanced distinctions in coffee or wine or chocolate or like you and I did in Texas whiskeys. Do you remember we were sitting next to each other at the whiskey bar?

I know. That was so much fun, tasting whiskey. So firstly, what I found is that once you've learned how to get good at something, those skills, that ability transfers.

So if you've trained yourself to make distinctions in an area of interest. So let's say, for example, it is coffee or it is chocolate, if you have developed the sense of focus, if you develop the sense of awareness, if you've expanded your consciousness, if you want to think of in that realm, so you can make small distinctions, then that seems to just transfer to the next thing you focus your awareness on.

Okay, so there is an author in Human development, Child Development named Glenn Doman. And one of the things that he talks about is teaching your baby to become a genius. And what he said, for example, this has always stuck with me. If you see a dog and you point to the dog and you teach the baby, oh, there's a bow wow. Then every time a dog goes by, they say bow wow and you go, yay. You've made a distinction called a bow wow. But he said, within one category called dog, if you can make 10 distinctions, length of the hair, length of the tail, length of the ears, coloring size, etc. If you can make 10 distinctions in one category, you now have built into your brain 3 million new neurological connections. And it's just as easy to do it with a dog as it would be for wine or for how did I awaken today? And how did I participate in life today?

Yes, well, again, that's so elegantly and eloquently expressed, because that is the deal.

And to take it a little bit further, in the example you just offered us, the baby, the emerging beings, is using visual input. Now, the dog may go bow wow. So that makes it a little bit easier, perhaps.

Definitely a bow wow.

Right? So if you look at people who have achieved elite performance in any field.

All of their senses are cooperating to make distinctions in the field of focus.

It's almost like they see the back of their head.

You know, and you do things. You can't resist being a smart ass. Jody said, before I came out, she do you want another coffee? I said, but I want a cup of chino. I just need an Americano. And I said, so 18 grams on the basket. Use the double program shot on the right. And she said, well, what will the poor time be? I said, I'll tell you how long it'll be when I hear the machine start. And I said, it's going to be 32, 33 seconds. And it was 33. Now how do I know that? I have no idea, Paul.

I don't know how I know that anymore. If I go to a cafe, I could hear from across the room whether that batch of milk was going to be any good or not. You know how long it took me to get there? 20 years. 20 years. And it took 20 years. Not because I'm stupid, although sometimes I am, but because you've got to get enough repetitions.

Well, and I wonder sometimes we'll see people pop into a field as these marvelous successes, and.

People from outside the field say, wow, you're an overnight success. And you said, and they say, yeah, 30 years to become an overnight success. And there is, I think it's a beautiful way of thinking about it by building neurology, by building distinctions, our conscious as well as our non conscious and perhaps way more at a non conscious level. Are we starting to see what's important and what's not?

Yes, in, in.

The theological circles, you know, I remember the benediction. I went to a church boarding school, which I didn't actually enjoy. Too much of a rebel. But I remember, you know, they would say, may the love of God that passeth all understanding touch your hearts and mine, so we may live in peace forevermore. That doesn't appear to be working out very well in the world today.

Well, maybe not enough people who have prayed that maybe.

Well, but you know, it's not that we, we don't actually believe in God, Moses. We believe in our belief about God. So that's where all the bad things happen. So I'd hear that benediction, God, then somebody would bully me. So I figured the message isn't getting across. But where I'm going with this is.

If I look at elite performers, when they're performing at their best, they have transcendeth all understanding.

There's no, there's no discernible conscious processing going on. You know, you look at a quarterback, they make, they process as much information in a fraction of a second as my, almost as much as my iPhone can calculate with all its trillion of transistors in there. So. But what it takes to get there is time and repetition, but time and repetition, where you have metrics for the repetitions, whether they're self created metrics if you're an artist or a chef, or the defined metrics if you're a golfer.

I think that idea of being able to grow ourselves by, number one, focusing our attention on the things that matter most is huge. It's super huge. Secondly is the idea that who we hang out with is going to make a big difference in that realm as well. So you had the advantage of going out and interviewing elite performers in business and in sports and so on.

Most of us out here living our lives to the best of our ability aren't making some very important distinctions which you bring to light in your book who's in your room. So I would love you to talk about some of these concepts. First of all, just the idea of the room. Would you describe that and why it's so critical for our development?

So I say to people, imagine you live in this one room and you live in it all of your life. Now it's magical. You can furnish it extravagantly and it's magical in so much as it's like a magic carpet. The rim is on a magic carpet. You can travel wherever you want to travel. But it has one feature which is a very big deal. It only has a single door. And you say to me, well, Stuart, so what? I mean, lots of rooms only have a single door. My bedroom only has a single door. I say, yeah, I get that. But this door is different. What's different? Well, it's a one way door in but not out entry, but no exit ever. And what this means is whoever comes into the room of your life and whatever comes in with them will be with you in this room of your life for the rest of your life. They will never leave. Now if you knew that, and I never get to say that, if you knew that, would you choose more carefully? People will go, oh my God. I get so many oh my God. Because you watch people, their life flashing before their eyes in that moment. And it's like you almost don't have to say anything else. They get It. But then you say, okay, so that's true. Now, if you would choose more carefully, if you really look at people's lives, there's been those people in their lives that have enduringly and forever have impacted their lives, for better or for worse.

I am reading the biography of the Wright brothers by a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and somebody says to the Wright brothers, well, it's just amazing what kind of couple of ordinary Americans can do who enjoyed no special privilege or advantage.

And Wilbur says, oh, but that's not true. We were blessed to grow up in a family that valued and supported curiosity.

And I love that because I thought, what changed my life? And it was my godfather, Uncle Harry. He was a passionately curious man. And this moment of reading the Wright brothers thing, I had an appreciation for Uncle Harry long since gone.

Because I didn't have a father that I'd met. I was conceived and went off to the war. Came back when I was 4 and passed from injuries sustained. So Uncle Harry was that man that lit me up about curiosity.

So mostly the people who come into our lives, into the room of our life, come in there through happenstance.

But, yes, as we get older and if we understand this principle, we get to choose who comes in, and that determines the quality of our life. Choose wisely.

That's. That's the key. Especially if we now are coming into that awareness for the very first time in our lives. Oh, my God, A moment. That we might be having this idea that neurologically we do have these connections that are placed that don't go away. There's some very good neurological proof of that. And if you want to go to quantum physics, we also know of the concept of quantum entanglement, that there is this entangled nature of our connection with each other.

Einstein said spooky action at a distance that drove him craziness.

Yes, exactly. So the idea is that if we could now choose, we should do it. But you have three cool distinctions in your book. First of all is the idea of the doorkeeper. The other is the concierge. And each one of these are great ways that we can work with the concept. And the third, which I really love is. Is the lockbox for those crazy influencers that are in our head that we just as soon relegate to a distant connection with us. So let's talk about each one of these. Let's start with the doorkeeper. Who is that? How does that work?

Right. So most of us have an endless internal dialogue going on.

Can you hear the voice in my head? I Didn't realize that that could.

No, but you can, which is the problem.

I can see the voice in your head as your countenance changes, right?

So I always thought it was amazing when we were kids, we had. Well, maybe I'm just weird. But you were weird too, I'm sure, where you had these imaginary friends, right? And you'd be all alone and lonely, perhaps. So you would have these people you would talk to and they would be consultants in your life. And you're like a couple of years old, maybe. So I thought. A lot of us have trouble saying no, but if we had somebody who could say no on our behalf.

That would be better. We have a doorman who would vet people. And I remember my dear mother in law who's passed now, but she was one of those people who would shoot on people. You should do this, you should do the other thing. You should do this. You shouldn't do that. And I said to her one day, I said, doris, I've written this book called who's in youn Room? And I told her what the deal was. And I said, you have a doorman, and that determines who gets in the room and who doesn't. And I said, I love you, but if you call up and you start telling me what I should do or I shouldn't do, my doorman's likely to hang up on you. And she went straight at it again like she never heard what I said. So the phone gets hung up. Ring, ring, ring. Did you just hang up at me? No, Doris, I would never do that. But my doorman did.

You know what? It transformed our relationship.

Oh, excellent. Yeah. This idea that.

If it gets back to one of the first statements you made, are you at the effect of everybody who gives a call, or are you at cause and to have a choice whether or not you want to be perceived as the bad guy in this scenario or not. But to be very clear that here are boundaries, and I've got a doorman that's going to maintain those boundaries.

And I found if you tell this who's in your room theory to people, you're able to say no with good humor. You know, I'd love to do that with you, Paul, but I consulted my doorman and my doorman said, you got to be kidding me. And I said, and if I piss the doorman off, it's going to have a really negative impact, you know, I mean, we have a story about it, but we're both laughing. And that makes a difference. If we can bring good humor and Kindness to the interactions of our life.

We get better outcomes, Much better. And the next concept in your model is this idea of a concierge, and that's those folks that we have close into us that we want to have as regular influence in our internal world and those who we'd rather relegate to a more distant way of being in relationship with them. What is that distinction?

Well, I think it's. Firstly, we talk about there are people who are in your room. I don't want to get into a whole argument about free choice, but your family's your family, and pretty much they're going to be in your room no matter what. And I think the thing that's really important to get also is if somebody has a conversation with you, whether it's joyful or not so much.

That conversation is embedded in your brain like a holographic event.

Oh. And it'll replay, especially if it's bothering you. I know.

And I tell people what trips you up. All of those events in your subconscious. In other words, they're below the level of your waking consciousness and the power they have over you without your awareness that they have power over you.

So we're at effect even though we want to be at cause, Right?

Correct.

Even though we're operating.

Exactly. That's what happens. So the concierge is, okay, they got past the doorman. Now where do they get to sit? So that's going to a Vegas showroom. Right. You get on the nosebleed section. Right. Or are you up close on the stage where you. The main performer in this event is very close with this person. And so the concierge helps get the people who need to be in the noble section, which is certain members of the family, or even in the dungeon or the attic or the. The lockbox, depending on how Draconian you feel you can be and still think you're a good person? You know, some of us. Right. A little.

Throw him in the Iron Maiden. Right.

That's right.

Okay, I get it. So we could be. Yeah, we could be kind of tough on it. But to be quite honest, in my family's extended family system, there are some very weird arguments that are going on on my wife's side of the family. And when she steps into it, it's like walking into a propeller. She thinks she's there being of some assistance, but she. She walked into that dreaded triangle of victim rescue or persecutor. Right. Yes. She's there to try to help out, and now she's a persecutor and now she gets victimized by all these people that are attacking her. So this, to be able to, to not step into the fray, but to be able to recognize that we can have some psychological and emotional distance, even though there may be physical proximity, that's super helpful.

And you can choose that. One of my favorite ideas in the book, I think we didn't make quite enough of it, but Janine Roth was over for dinner one night and you know Janine. Oh yeah, and I've been a lifelong asthmatic. So I said, you know Janine, we're all getting older and the number of breaths we have in life are finite, they're not infinite and we never know when the last one's going to occur.

So, you know, I think we should be really careful about how we invest the breaths we have left. And she wrote an essay which.

The guy who did the.

Oh, I'll think of his name in a minute. But.

That, that this idea of how will we treasure the breaths we have left is a huge idea.

And who we share that breath with. If you've ever watched the Hawaiian peoples, when they meet, they press their foreheads together and touch their noses and they breathe together.

So it's a beautiful metaphor for this.

It really is. It really has to do with the connection and the projection of love that we want to have with an other. So if we fill our room with those people who are going to influence along the line of our great passions, our great desires, that's the big win. Yes. And how do we then make distinctions upon. Here's a person who seems to be giving a very reasonable proposal to me, but it's a distraction from what really matters. Yeah. How have you found the ability to make that distinction? Especially let's, let's talk about young entrepreneurs. People are trying to grow their business and they want to get as many people in the room as possible because that's going to be their sphere of influence. That's going to matter, but.

Not really.

So we both know Ivan Meisner, who's the co author of the book, and he's got this thing called a Business Network International, which is the biggest networking company in existence. They refer billions of dollars a year in transactions to one another these days. And so I said, Ivan, you've got to be getting an avalanche of requests. How do you say no? And he said, well, this is what I say. I say, you know, I actually think that's a good idea.

But I think that if I tried to take this on, I would let you down and this idea deserves more than that. I don't have the time or the ability to do this idea justice. But I know a guy or some.

Variation of that, right well, and that's where you network. That's his brilliance. I love that I had to do something like that when writing my dissertation. People would come to me with an idea and I'd say, you know, I really love this idea. Let me think about it overnight. I'll let you know. And I had to do that because, Stuart, I had such a propensity to say yes to every idea. I love people who want to grow and develop and if they have a cool idea, I want to participate.

I suffer from that.

Makes sense. It doesn't make sense. That's a super cool way of doing it.

And then we both know Steve and Joseph and Stephen called me one day and he said, you know, Stuart, your problem is you come up with too many good ideas. You need an indolence coach.

I'm going to coach you on how to do nothing without feeling guilty.

Oh, that's wonderful, wonderful.

I think as we get older that's probably a worthwhile trait to. Because I some of the breasts I have left with myself. That's okay.

You know what? We should do that as our next paralyminal together. How about it?

Would that be fun?

That would be fabulous. Okay, so there's one more concept in this who's in your room idea that we should focus on. It's the lock box.

Yes. So.

That'S kind of like the dungeon, isn't it? You know, I think of it that way. It's like, what can you lock in there that you can't shred, you can't recycle? You know, you can't have it vanish because. Sorry.

Well, what I'm thinking about, let's say we've decided that here's a relationship that is only self serving to that person. And it's really a drain and a distraction in my life. This is a person concierge says goes into the lockbox when that person's place there and then they show up, what then?

Well, you know.

Stuff happens, as we both know. But I think that the real secret to the lockbox is we've gotten to a point where we can just say no to allowing that to impact our behavior.

So it's training ourselves.

It is training. Yes. It gets back to that. Unfortunately, we have to do some work. You know, people would come to workshops, we both run workshops and they'd say, well, let's have, you know what I'LL get out of the workshop. Oh, what you, you know, you go to a beauty parlor, maybe you get beauty. You go to the hardware store, you buy hardware, you pay for it. You come to workshop. What you get is a lot of work after you leave. And if you do the work, you'll get the benefits. If you don't do the work, you won't. I was listening to Steph Curry. Anybody who's in the basketball knows who Steph Curry is. They said, well, what did you do with your summer, Steph? He said, I worked. I went to the gym more than I ever have in the summer before. Well, why Steph? Well, I'm getting older now, and if I slide back, it takes me so much to get back to where I was before I slid. So one of the principles of these people who are elite performers and enduringly successful is Steph obviously loves playing basketball.

He's able to inspire others and provide youngsters as an example of a work ethic because simply to beat his spaces, to be mentored by this level of elite performance, but also his own self discipline of not allowing distractions in his room, making the gymnasium in his room and monitoring his performance. And it's really interesting because at that level of elite play, only he really knows what happened with that last shot.

You know, I will watch Steph play basketball occasionally. We have friends with tickets. We'll go and I'll watch him fire a three pointer and he won't even watch it go in. He just turns around and walks back to set up for the next thing because he knows it's going in. And I've watched now I can see. I can see so many micro shots that's going to go in. That's when they're starting to go back. How do you know? I don't. At some level, you don't know how you know anymore, but you put in the work. So these things are going along just beyond conscious awareness.

Yes. And this idea, it seems. Oh, absolutely. Because there is too much complex information for the conscious mind to handle. Can't cope something like a swinging a bat or a golf club or throwing a three pointer. I mean, there's so much that goes into it. So the. What I'm also hearing and what you're just saying now there's a subtext that actually comes through very clearly in your book, who's in your room? It's the idea of being very clear about your values. Could you, like, as we finish up in this session, talk about why coming to an awareness of what is truly important to us. What we value makes such a distinction in our enduring success because once you're.

Clear about your values, then your values.

Are the arbitrator of the choices that you make.

So any choice point gets lined up against all of the values that we hold most dear to us.

Now.

This is back to cause and effect. A lot of you ask people what their values are and they will trot out a list of values. But they're the values of the socialized mind. Keegan talks about this. People who have been perfectly socialized. I was voted the least likely person to succeed in my boarding school years because all attempts to socialize me according to their view of how the world should be were not successful. So. So I would be what Keegan would call at that point, a self authoring mind. I made up my own narrative, tried to live that, but I'm still not out of it because a lot of it was in rebellion to the reigning socialized model trying to become independent of what and the opposite of that. So it's like what you resist, you become. You're still controlled by what you resist.

And then, and then I thought Keegan's next distinction of the self transforming mind, where you have some awareness into your narrative, the whole that narrative is had over of you. The ability to recognize the hold it has had over you, the way it wants to drive the next decision. But there's a moment there when you can say not this time.

So the self transforming mind sees its own frailties and tries to discount that in the next decision. So it's a bit like noise canceling headsets which we're going along. There's this noise in the background. So a noise canceling headset generates a waveform that's 180 degrees out of phase with the noise and cancels the noise. So the self transforming mind is like having a self canceling mechanism where you see your frailties and say, well, if I didn't have this frailty, how would I see the situation? I tend to judge people negatively over this. What would it be like if I didn't judge them? If I just was with them in the moment.

And I've had some astonishing experiences. In fact, it's the ultimate joy of my life where I'll just be with somebody in this moment. And we both know that we're just in the moment.

Our history isn't colliding. Our biases aren't colliding in this moment. Our hopes and dreams or fears of the future aren't colliding. This Moment. There's thus this unencumbered connection and a moment of bliss.

That's what we call co presencing that.

Oh, you have all of these wonderful words. I should have gotten the real education. Paul.

Just. I love you, Paul Shirley, so much.

You have no idea. Stuart, you know, you. In the, in the front of your book, you dedicated to those who are self authoring. And I just want to take a moment to really talk about something that you just walked us through this movement from. You know, having been raised in a culture, we end up as an adult with all of the imprints that that culture wanted us to have. That's called the socialized mind. And then at some point, we realized there's more to life than what they've given me. That's where we become self authoring. And in my life.

In the field of human development, I was building product for people who had already identified themselves as self authoring. But what I recognize, which is what I'm also recognizing in your work, which is probably why I love it so much, why I love both you and Joni so much, is because really, while we're speaking to the self authoring, we're offering technologies.

Means, strategies, awareness for everyone to become self transforming. So thank you very much for that.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's, that's the opportunity. And you know, you must have done it. You're talking with people or particularly if you're leading a program and you say something and some said, could you just repeat that? And you can't because you have no idea what you just said, because you actually didn't say it, it just appeared. And that's that moment of self authorship, right beyond self authorship to self transformation, because the egoic part of us had no hand in that. It might have started out as a self authoring moment, but suddenly something happened and you had no idea where it came from. And it seemed to have moved things in the direction of goodness, which is an engineering term, as we both know. You know, I think you've got to treasure those moments. You've got to make those moments more important than all of the madness.

I love it. And that's a perfect note. I think that we could end on. If you were to offer one small bit of advice for anyone who truly resonates with that idea, would you say they could do in the next 24 hours to really implement these concepts?

I'd say find something that's in your life right now that has meaning to you.

That that matters to you. Some activity involved with that and start developing awareness about getting better at it.

The better you get, fine distinctions will take you to enduring success.

And it's really an interesting thing because I found out you don't know whether it's the chicken or the egg. Because as you're getting good at something, even if when you started out doing it, you didn't like it all that well, the moment you start getting really good at it, surprise you actually love it now. So what happened? Right? Did I change inside or did my self judgment about that whole process fall away?

We transcended the self transforming mind. Stuart, what a pleasure to be with you.

So much fun. We're gonna do this more often.

I would love to. Thanks so much.

Yeah. Take care. Have a wonderful day.

All the best.

I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Stuart Emery. You can find all of Stuart's books on Amazon.com and now in the second part of the podcast, it's just you and me. I'll tell you how to use the paralyminal sessions in the MindTrax app to easily handle obstacles and move toward the success you want. Especially as it relates to Stuart's message. If you're new to the relaxing Paralympical audio sessions, they use breakthrough technologies to activate your whole mind in only 20 minutes to help improve any area of your life. Let's get going.

Welcome to this. Follow on to my conversation with Stuart Emery and our examination of success built to last and who's in your room.

Love Stuart. Love his work. He is truly one of the first people to have a significant influence in what has been known as the human potential movement. His history is spectacular. He has tremendous wisdom. I just adore being with him, as you could probably tell. Had a really fun conversation with him and what emerged out of it, I think are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 areas that you might consider.

Using Paralympical technology to assist you with. First is how do we create enduring success? Second is how do we stay focused on doing what it is we truly love. The third is getting good metrics on the progress that we're making because unless we can get good feedback, we're not going to be able to successfully dynamically steer our lives to where we want to go. The next area is deciding who's in your room and making it possible for you to be in a supportive relationship whenever you're with someone, either in person or in your mind. And finally, the idea of making values based decisions, because values are really the core drivers for everything that's going to matter most to you in your life. So let's start out with the idea of creating enduring success. Do I have to tell you what Paralympical this is? It's the one that I did with Stuart called Success Built to Last. Now, if you've watched this podcast, I've actually suggested using that many times because it really does get us to focus in on what is really significant in how I spend my time today and then being on it, being very permissive with yourself for failures, being able to acknowledge and recognize you're on a learning curve. And even if you do something that's really important to you really badly at first, you're still doing something you love doing and you'll get better at it. So staying in it is essential. It was fun that at the end of our conversation he mentioned the idea of, you know, you might not think that that was something you truly loved when you first started on it, but by the time you started making new distinctions on it and getting really good at it, turned out you did love it. That's certainly been true in a number of areas in my life as well. Secondary is doing what you truly love. And I think that the Joy Paralympical is great because it talks about being passionate. Passionate is the energy of our heart. Passion and joy for whatever it is that we engage in means that we're going to be full of heart, we're going to go into it wholeheartedly. So, so the joy para liminal helps you really fine tune what is it that brings you the most joy in life. The next one that I think would be helpful in this area is the new Action Generator. So once you know what it is you truly want to do, want to bring as an expression of your life, your gifts, your talents into the world. New Action Generator puts you on it so that you stay in it as the day proceeds.

The next is the idea of getting good metrics on your progress. So the first one I would recommend is the way in which you would start your day. And that parallel is conscious time, where you get to say, hey, Here are the 24 hours that I'm going to be alive today. Could count them as breaths. As Stuart said, you think about how do I want to spend these breaths, these moments in this day in order to bring the fullness of who I am into my life and to live it passionately, joyfully, to the best of my ability. So conscious time is going to be.

A good.

Setter of your intention. So it's your intention setting.

Then at the end of the day, how did you do? Being able to review the day and see the areas where you were on it, you did it. The areas where you were not on it, and what might you do differently next time? And then planning for tomorrow's success. That's in the new history generator, Session B, which is the mental review of your day. It's really great. It's one of the shorter paraliminals. I really do recommend it. Get in the habit of using it in the.

Paralympical accelerator program. It's part of the Mindtracks app. You could listen to that. And I actually have you at the end of each 10 day cycle focusing in on how are you doing. That's a great way to get good metrics on your ongoing behavior on a daily basis. The next area is this concept of deciding who's in your room.

Now. It's important, I believe, that we are really present. Did you notice when Stuart talked about when we're really with people that we resonate with, there is this almost timelessness, this full engagement to the exclusion of all else, or just so present, so attentive and so in the moment, we're not talking from our heads, we're just really holding space. I called it co presence thing, which he loved. Not an idea that I generated, but it's this idea of being present to that something greater which defines why we are together. And a good way of building to that is the paralimal called Active listening. To be able to move away from just downloading or debating, but real dialogue and really to be actively listening into that deeper source that both of us are being present to and sensing in that moment. That's where we want to be. So active listening. Super good. The next one is called Positive relations. And that.

Paralympical has two parts to it. One is if you're in conflict with another person, this is how you can resolve it. And the session B in positive relationships is this. How do you attract to you those people that are most meaningful and that are going to be the best energy for you to help you get where you want to go to live your life in the fullest way possible? So that would be a super good one for you to be listening to. It's the session B side. Now the other part of it, which was a bit of a subtext to my dialogue, is sometimes we need to confront people that shouldn't be so close to us in the room that we need to really relegate to a more distant position. It's that concierge or the lockbox. Sometimes we need to be able to fearlessly communicate to someone, you know what this really isn't working for me. And.

Stuart put it in a kind of a fun way. It's really not me, it's my doorkeeper or it's the concierge in me that needs to move you away because it's too distracting for what's really important to me right now anyway. To have those kind of, I'll call them brutally honest conversations might require a little bit of fearlessness and that Paralympical is what I'm recommending here. So deciding who's in your room, active listening, positive relationships and fearlessness. Super good. And the final one is making values based decisions how you will spend your time. Certainly this is back to the idea of getting good metrics, but it's a little deeper than that. It's not so much just on this day, but to really look at the arc of what you value most and then to live.

Honestly and congruently according to those values based decisions. I think the best one for this would be self discipline.

Because what it means is that you're following what it is that you value most and when you do, you're going to be in the flow of your most abundant energy and really creating a life of enduring success.

Thanks very much.

Foreign.

Thank you for joining me today. I applaud your willingness to maximize your potential. You can easily use the paraliminal audio sessions in the MindTrax app to stimulate your non conscious mind, I.e. your inner mind, to reduce any resistance in your life and to propel you toward the success you want. Go to www.mindtracks.com go. That's www.minddtrx.com go. These amazing audio tools have helped millions and I encourage you to bring them into your world today. Be sure to be back for more episodes of the mindtrax podcast. You'll find insightful conversations with authors, experts and thought leaders all devoted to improving your life's experience. Thank you again for being here on our MindTrax podcast.

Sa.