Andy Johns: preference

Transcript context

…Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. The best way to see what Miro is all about and how it can help your team collaborate better is not to listen to me talk about it, but to go check it out for yourself. Go to miro.com/lenny. With the help of the Miro team, I created a super cool Miro board with two of my own favorite templates, my one pager template and my managing up template that you can plug and play and start using immediately with your team. I've also embedded a handful of my favorite templates that other people have published in the Miroverse. When you get to the board, you can also leave suggestions for the podcast, answer a question that I have for you, and generally just play around to get a sense of how it all works. Miro is a killer tool for brainstorming with your team, laying out your strategy, sharing user research findings, capturing ideas, giving feedback on wireframes, and generally just collaborating with your colleagues. I actually used Miro to collaborate with the Miro team on creating my own board, and it was super fun and super easy. Go check it out at miro.com/lenny. That's M-I-R-O dot com slash Lenny. We've talked about the suffering step, then the understanding the truth of what is going on. Say someone sits down in a room, writes out what's going on, has this epiphany of, "Oh, wow, it's really this moment in my childhood that really led me to need to achieve and do all these things." The next step is self-compassion and recognizing that it's not your fault. That sounds very easy on the surface like, "Okay. I understand this is not my fault." I know it's not that easy. How do you go about actually deeply doing that steps? It's likely this deeply internalized self-belief. You can think of that as one of the deepest grooves in the neural pathways in your mind. Now, that was the case for me, so deep that you don't even realize that it's there, it's omnipresent. It's going to take time to rewire that because what you're effectively trying to do is take an internal narrative and edit and rewrite that thing, and this internal narrative is probably at a foothold in you for years or decades. So it's reasonable to believe or to understand that, "Okay. If I have not had a high opinion of myself for 30 years, that's not going to change overnight." For some people, it miraculously does. That's not the norm. For most others, including myself, it starts with that truth stage because with truth is the awareness, "Okay. I understand that I have a low sense of self-worth, and I understand that it plays out in all these ways, and I have the awareness of it that now when I'm doing something that is a conditioned behavior or a conditioned response born out of that deep self-belief or that negative core belief, then when I spot it, there's an opportunity for me to intervene," and it starts in the simple ways. For example, I had a boss once where he would come over and he would give me praise all the time. He was wonderful human being, and I think I was doing a good job. One day, he swung by, he said, "Hey, amazing job," and my response was, "Oh, yeah, I did my best," and then he looked at me and he said, "Hey, say thank you or you're welcome. That's it. When somebody gives you a compliment, just say thanks, accept it." So it's become a pattern of mine now that if somebody gives me a compliment, I look them in the eyes and I say, "Thank you," and I really try and embrace that little moment because it's in all of those ways where you identify these little patterns, you intercept them, and you choose to make a change to how you're conditioned to behave in that moment. If you do that consistently enough and you keep practicing it, and you keep it up every day, then you're developing a new internal narrative through all those little actions, and it accumulates in ways that are pretty powerful. Every now and then, there's things that you can do that are more of a brute force method of driving that home. Some may find it through a Vipassana retreat, a seven to 10-day silent retreat, which is agonizing if folks haven't tried to be that quiet that long. Things bubble up, you confront the stuff in your mind that in our day-to-day, it's easy to just keep it under the hood. Some find that through psychedelics. Some find that through somewhat extreme physical feats. There was a period in time where I didn't realize this at the time, but not only was I building my career, but I was running ultra marathons. s. Some find that through somewhat extreme physical feats. There was a period in time where I didn't realize this at the time, but not only was I building my career, but I was running ultra marathons. Looking back at that I was like, "Yeah, there I was, another desperate attempt to feel worthy," but I also recognize now that that was medicine for me, that me going out onto a remote mountain range for five hours every Saturday and just running well beyond the point of discomfort was consistently cathartic for me. I would cry at the end of almost every single one of those runs. So it's just a recap. It's in those little moments and sometimes in those big moments too, but it begins with the awareness based on truth and then the daily practice.…

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