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High Performance Coach: How To Build Psychological Resilience - Dr Aria

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Ali AbdaalhostDr. Aria Campbell-Daneshguest

Apr 6, 20232h 4mWatch on YouTube

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Transcript

105 min read · 21,426 words

0:00 – 2:00
Intro
1. AAAli Abdaal
  Hey friends, and welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week it's my immense privilege to sit down with academics and authors and creators and entrepreneurs and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are, and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help us build a life that we love. What you're about to hear is an interview between me and Dr Aria. Now, Dr Aria is a clinical psychologist who specializes in psychological resilience.
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Resilience is the ability to accept, understand, process, and grow through emotional pain. First of all, we have to accept and acknowledge it. Next, we have to release and process it. Then we have to understand it, and then we can grow through it. And the final A is to act in line with our values and our vision.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  He's worked with Academy Award winners, high-profile creative artists, global entrepreneurs, and some of the world's most successful CEOs.
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  And I've worked with individuals who've created multi-billion pound companies and products who are deeply dissatisfied and discontent with where they are. It may be bringing in a huge amount of income, but they don't feel fully fulfilled because they've lost something along the way.
5. AAAli Abdaal
  He's also the co-author of the best-selling book, A Mindful Year, and he regularly features in publications like The Times and The Telegraph and Men's Health. And in the conversation, we talk about, firstly, our life quest and how we can find our truth, power of vulnerability, and how to build greater resilience. We talk about the importance of struggle when it comes to growth. And there were so many parts of the conversation where I literally got goosebumps from the way that he was describing the stuff. I was like, "Oh my God, this is like he's literally speaking truth so, so... That hits my soul so much that I'm getting goosebumps."
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  There's a storm coming, and it's going to hit. The question is, will we be able to find the calm amidst the storm?
7. AAAli Abdaal
  At the moment, according to the YouTube analytics, 81% of you who are watching this on YouTube have not yet hit the subscribe button. And so if you're, for example, in the now 81% of people who are watching this on YouTube but who are not subscribed to the channel, I would love it if you could do so, and it would be awesome to get that number down to 50%, and it would be cool to get like 50/50 sub/non-sub ratio just, just for fun. So
2:00 – 8:38
Your background
1. AAAli Abdaal
  Dr Aria, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Oh, it's a pleasure. I'm delighted to be here.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  So much to talk about, um, around mindfulness, around high performance, around behavior change, around the things that we struggle with when it comes to behavior and, and things. But before we go there, I wonder if, um, k- for, for people in, in our audience who might not be familiar with your work or, or who you are, I wonder if you can just kind of blitz through your backstory in, in a few minutes. Like, what's... How did, how did we get here? What's the backstory?
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  I was born and bred in Glasgow, so my father is Persian. He's from Iran, and his family were from, uh, diplomatics close to the Shah of Iran, and he studied medicine. And when he was 19, he moved to London and began to train in the UK. And my mum grew up in a very tough upbringing in Glasgow, and her family said, you know, "If you wanted to go into the helping profession, you should be a nurse." But my mum always said, "No, I want to be a doctor." And she was the first person in her family to go to university, and she met my dad at medical school. So fast-forward a number of years, I was born, my older brother, uh, and there was the two of us for about 11 years, and then we had a younger brother join us. Uh, he was the joke is he was a surprise to my mum, but or a surprise to my dad, but not to my mum. And we had a very, very close family, huge amount of love. Uh, my father put a huge amount of focus and credence on academia and developing yourself. My mum, I would say, is almost like an angel. She's got a heart full of love and really taught me the values of compassion and understanding. And in terms of my career scope, initially school, and then I went to Edinburgh to study medicine. And that was really following the footsteps of my parents and was my first lesson in the difference between doing what society deems to be what you should do versus following your intuitive wisdom and your heart, so to speak. My dad was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, it's a type of cancer, and it was grade four. It very progressed, and he was given a poor prognosis of about 15% survival. And again, that was my first introduction to mortality or life not going the way that you would expect it to, and really dealing with a reality that you don't want to accept. And my girlfriend went through a traumatic incident, and that's the first time I think I really felt out of control, where something's happening, and you have no ability to change the outcome. And I spiraled into depression. Uh, I didn't know how to handle my emotions. From a kid growing up, I was very quiet, and if I felt anything, I'd push it down. I would just go into my head, create an internal world, and, and I really struggled. It just began to spiral down, and I was at the point of, you know, considering suicide. I was on medication. And I had this moment where my brother, out of love, thought like, "Let's get away. I'll take you to a beautiful place. We'll just have time together." And I remember I was standing on a beach in Mauritius with him, and the sun was shining, and the, the waves were rolling up to my feet. And I looked around, and the scenery was beautiful, and I was miserable, and I didn't want to be here. And in that moment, I had this instant that no matter what is happening around you, there's two paths. There's the external journey, and, and there's the internal one. There's inner peace and joy and meaning and fulfillment, and these two are not necessarily connected. And so I really made a spiritual intention to go on a journey to find what at that time I could only describe as inner peace How can I find that sense of serenity and calmness so that no matter what is happening to me, I can still remain standing? And so to try and, yeah, fast-track that, I left, uh, university, dropped out, probably more apt, began doing the only thing which I knew that I loved, which was working for charities. Began fundraising, trained to be an actor because I struggled to find my own voice, and I, I learned a lot through that process. And then one day I was actually on a pilgrimage with my father, who couldn't continue the... couldn't really carry out the, uh, the pilgrimage on his own, so I was pushing him in, in a wheelchair, and I just had this whisper that came from my heart, which was, "Go back and study psychology." So I literally changed tact, went back. I had six days before UCAS closed, sent off my application, did a doctorate in UCL in clinical psychology, specialized in the overlap between physical health and mental health, particularly looking at if you were dealt a hand at its very worst, so individuals who were told they had a life-limiting disease or they had X number of months to live, how would you live out the rest of that time with as much joy as possible? And then I worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital with individuals who, whose children were given a prognosis of, uh, a terminal illness. And as a parent, whenever you're suffering this immense emotional pain, how do you still turn up to your child? How do you still be there for them and, and squeeze any joy that is still left in that time that you have, which is so precious? And then I did my clinic- my, uh, clinical research in sustainable weight loss, and then from then it was another, uh, scenic route to high-performance work. But I think that's probably taken about 14 minutes already. [chuckles]
5. AAAli Abdaal
  Wow. That's, that's a... It's quite a circuitous kind of path.
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm.
7. AAAli Abdaal
  I think often... I find this a lot with people on this, on this podcast where kind of someone gets interviewed because they've kind of quote made it in a particular field, and you would think that the path was like, "Oh, I knew what I wanted, and I just kinda went for it 'cause, like, why not?"
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes.
9. AAAli Abdaal
  Um, but actually, there's a lot of windy twists and turns along, along the way to, to get somewhere.
8:38 – 11:32
Life as a quest to return to your truth
1. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  I see life as a... It's a quest. It's a quest to return to your truth. And along the way, as you grow up, you pick up certain beliefs or ideas. Your mind is conditioned in a certain way because of the accidents of birth, because of your personal experiences, and we build up all these layers and coping mechanisms and this armory that we put on to protect ourselves. And this quest is an unraveling, uh, a shedding to return to who you truly are, and that's the path that we're all on. And there's a, there's a quote by A.H. Almaas which always stands by me, which is, "All these conflicts, the difficult situations, the problematic situations are not chance or haphazard. They're actually yours. They're specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. And that part of you loves you more than anything else, has created roadblocks to lead you back to yourself, and you're not going in the right direction unless there's something pricking you in the side telling you, 'Look here.' And that part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures, and it will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose."
2. AAAli Abdaal
  So it's like the obstacles that you encounter are not a sign, ne-necessarily a sign that you're going in the wrong direction, but that you're going in the right direction.
3. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  The obstacles are, are fire, and in order to be refined, we need to apply heat. There is no growth without struggle. Painful experiences are why we change, and the difficulty is how we grow. Without it, we'll be staying in the same place, and the one principle of the universe is evolution. We evolve. The world evolves, and it will continue to evolve, and it's evolved for 13.8 billion years, and it will continue to evolve, the estimates are, for hundreds of trillions of years. So this process will continue, and we've been given this gift of, uh, a snapshot, literally just a, a micro blink in this history of this universe, and we are part of that evolution, and that's what I see our, our, our purpose here is to evolve.
4. AAAli Abdaal
  One of the things I love about your, your story and, and the kind of when you, when you've been on other podcasts and things is that
11:32 – 16:04
Science and spirituality
1. AAAli Abdaal
  you, I think, do a really good job of combining the, the woo side of life with, like, the science-y side of life. [chuckles]
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  Um, but recently I've started reading, you know, a bunch of Alan Watts, like trying-
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah
5. AAAli Abdaal
  ... to understand the whole Zen thing, like coming across, um, you know, "The Power of Now" and that-
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah
7. AAAli Abdaal
  ... kind of stuff. And then speaking to a bunch of guests on the podcast, sometimes during the conversation, sometimes outside of the conversation, a lot of people discover their route through spir- to spirituality through psychedelics or-
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm
9. AAAli Abdaal
  ... something like that to make them realize, oh, hang on, there's something, like, bigger out there. Um, but then you kind of take that side of things and combine it with the clinical psychologist approach.
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  I'm very similar to you. I, I grew up with academia, and I grew up with science, and I trained as a scientist practitioner. And I value the mind so much, and my expertise is in psychology, is in understanding how does the mind work? Why do we do what we do, and how can we develop greater self-awareness to be able to see that the mind is a tool? It's not who we are. It is a, an instrument. And we can use that instrument for immense good, or we can use it for atrocities. We can use it to become closer and bring the best out of our partner, and we can use it in a way that will end up devastating a relationship and hurt-hurting the partner. We've created the atomic bomb, and we've created treatments for cancer. So it's a tool, and how we use it is integral to the welfare of ourselves and others. And I would always place so much importance on, on the mind and on science, and I'll be 40 this year. In the last couple of years, what I've realized is that there is more to what we can see, and there's more to what we can test in a laboratory. And, and I'm putting more value on what I feel and the experiences which I'm having which I cannot explain. Because, uh, the truth is we can only see a fragment of the light spectrum anyway, and we don't see mobile waves or infrared waves. We don't hear every sound there is. We're actually just having this limited splice of reality. And you can even bring in quantum physics. I used to, you know, I used to hear we're all connected. The Buddhists or the Hindus or the mystics would talk about oneness and experiencing oneness with all. And when you look at quantum physics, on a subatomic level, 99.999% is space. There is actually no quantum physical difference between myself and this table. Whenever I'm tapping the table, it's the electrons in this el-electromagnetic field hitting off the electrons in the ele-electromagnetic field of the table. But I sense it as being solid. So the spiritual, I think, and the scientific are often intimately intertwined, and there's a way of holding both. And when we look at even clinical psychology and we look at cognitive behavioral theory or we look at third wave approaches to mental health, where do these come from? They actually grew out of ancient contemplative traditions. From, from cognitive theory grew out of Stoic philosophy. Mindfulness-based approaches grew out of Buddhist and Hindu and yogic and meditative practices. So if we're going to ask ancient questions such as, "What is the purpose of my life? Where do I find meaning in my life? How can I live a good life that is, is rich and full of meaning and joy and, and peace?" Then really a lot of the ancient thinkers and ancient traditions hold, hold vehicles which we, we can begin to use to get closer to our own truth.
11. AAAli Abdaal
  Love it. So, okay, so many, so many kind of, um, paths to go down here. I wonder if we can kind of frame this in the...
16:04 – 20:19
High performance and understanding the mind
1. AAAli Abdaal
  almost with the, with the lens of high performance.
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  So, so you work with, um, kind of executive CEOs, founders, like people running, you know, multimillion to multi-billion dollar companies. And w- so what are the problems that people like that-- or actually, and, and I guess kind of more, quote, "normal people," what are the problems that people face in their day-to-day life and their day-to-day work where you find that your experience kind of combining spiritual with the scientific c-can help?
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  So individuals that I work with are highly brilliant. They have creative minds. They have very powerful minds. They are self-motivated. They're interested in self-growth. They often come from a place of care and compassion. And something will have happened where they feel stuck in their life right now, and it's not something they're used to. They're struggling with an aspect of their life. And it could be that they wake up one day and everything from an external perspective looks impressive. But then they have this question which is nagging, which is, "Is this it? Is this what my life is all about?" Or they focus so much on career and on supporting people around them that they've lost that sense of balance, and they've lost that sense of who they are. Or their relationships are suffering. Again, they've, they've put so much focus that suddenly they've lost intimacy in the relationship, or they've lost connection. And again, they wake up one day and they, they look at the person next to them and they know that they love them, and they know that they make a great team and that they're amazing parents together. But it's almost like two individuals just living in the same house. They don't have, they don't have that connection which they could see they had 10 years ago. And that is so tough because it's so tough whenever you know how you'd like life to be, but you don't know where to start. And what they've recognized is It's their own psychology which is often the biggest barrier. Your own mind can either propel you with such force or it can hold you back and keep you paralyzed and keep you stuck. And where I come in is I ha- happen to have dedicated 10, 15, 20 years to understanding the mind because the mind follows certain principles and certain rules, and the more that you can intimately get to know your mind, the more you can actually begin to take action or have clarity from your mind. So it's not about having peace of mind, it's about having peace from mind, and in those moments of stillness, life becomes so clear. You have clarity. You see what has gone wrong and where you should go next.
5. AAAli Abdaal
  So when, when someone comes to you as a new client or patient or whatever you call it, like a d- d-
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Client, yeah
7. AAAli Abdaal
  ... a client, do they know what's up with them and, like, what their problem is? Or, like, what sort of questions do you ask them to get, yeah, to, to kind of unravel what's, what's, w- w- what's going on and what's, what's keeping them stuck?
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  They often have an, a, a very good idea of the pain that they're in and what they're suffering, and it could be that life has dealt them a hard hand at this point in the game of life. And even bringing in Buddhist philosophy, one of the first noble truth is that life involves suffering. And from my perspective, there's three aspects of reality we cannot avoid. Life involves pain, it involves uncertainty, and it involves change. And we all face unexpected and unwanted events in life.
20:19 – 29:38
Your ex-wife's affair and pregnancy
1. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  I went through three years ago where the, the woman that I loved who we built a, a life up together over 10 years one day told me that she'd been having an affair with a man from work and is pregnant with his child. That was, for me at the time, one of the worst things that I could have imagined. Just one of them. Because it felt like I had lost this world that I'd built up. I'd lost my wife and our dog Alfie and the home we'd created and her family who became like family to me, and this, and this imagined life of growing old together. I'd see an old man and woman on the street, and I'd imagine that would be us together. And it just came crashing down. Now, that just happened to be my story. Everyone has gone through deep heartache and pain. So we lose someone we love, or we're a single woman, we'd love to be in a relationship, or we struggle to conceive, or we become pregnant when we didn't expect to, or we become unwell, or a loved one does, or we just face these curveballs and challenges at work, in our personal life that we have no control over and we didn't see coming. And so often people know what the problem is, but what they can tell is they feel overwhelmed, or they feel isolated, or there is a lack of security in terms of what is happening, and they n- want to find a way from the darkness into the light. And that is the path that we go on. There's a storm coming, and it's going to hit. The question is, will we be able to find the calm amidst the storm? The path has involved cultivating that inner strength and knowing and resilience and compassion in order to deal with whatever life throws at us, because success doesn't depend on what happens to you. It's determined by what we do next. And if we can cultivate that place of calm so that no matter what is happening, even if there's a, a storm raging, the stillest part of a hurricane is its center. And from... And that place of stillness and calmness and serenity exists within all of us, deep down. It's a field of consciousness which we can access, and from that place of calmness and serenity, it doesn't mean that life isn't difficult, but there's a sense of ease, and we begin to flow with life, and then life begins to change. The only constant in life is change. The question is, are we fighting against it, or are we going to flow with it?
2. AAAli Abdaal
  All right. We're just gonna take a quick break from the podcast to introduce our sponsor, which is very excitingly Huel. I have been a paying customer of Huel since 2017, so it's been about six years now that I've been using Huel fairly regularly. I started eating Huel in my fifth year of medical school, and I've been using Huel regularly ever since because, you know, I like to be productive. I've... You know, my calendar is full with a lot of things, and often I don't have the time or don't make the time to have a particularly healthy breakfast or a particularly healthy lunch. My favorite flavor is salted caramel because for 400 calories, you get 40 grams of protein, which is absolutely insane, and you also get a decent, healthy mix of carbohydrates and fiber and fat, along with 26 different vitamins and minerals, which are all very good for the body. There's nine different flavors of this to choose from. My favorite is A, the banana version, and also the salted caramel version. So what I do is I take my two scoops, I put them into my NutriBullet blender-type thing, although you can just use a normal shaker if you want. I mix it up normally with water, but a little bit of milk to add a bit more of a milkshake-like consistency to it. And then I just sip that while I'm on my desk doing my work in the morning. And it ensures that I get a very healthy breakfast in that's nutritionally complete rather than some high-sugar cereal, which is what I would have defaulted to instead. Also, Huel is ridiculously reasonably priced. Like, a meal for 400 calories comes out to £1.68 per meal, which is super, super cheap compared to what the alternative would be if you were ordering takeout, for example. Anyway, if you like the idea of getting these cheap and healthy and nutritionally complete meals in your diet, then head over to huel.com/deepdive. And if you use that URL, huel.com/deepdive, they will send you a free t-shirt, which are quite nice, and also a free kind of shaker bottle type thing with your first order. So thank you so much, Huel, for sponsoring this episode This episode is very kindly brought to you by Trading 212. Now, people ask me all the time for advice about investing because I've made a bunch of videos about it on the YouTube channel. And my advice for most people is generally invest in broad stock market index funds, which is exactly what you can do completely for free with Trading 212. It's a great app that lets you trade stocks and funds and ETFs and foreign exchange if you really want to. And one of the great things about the app is that if you're new to the world of investing, you can actually invest with fake money. You don't have to put real money in. They've got a practice mode where you invest fake money, and then it actually tracks what the market is doing in real time. So you can see, had I invested 100 pounds into this thing, what would my return have been X weeks or X months further down the line? Once you've got some comfort with that, then it's super easy to deposit money into your Trading 212 account. You can use Apple Pay like I do initially, or you can use a direct bank transfer. And then once the money is in your Trading 212 account, then you can invest it in basically whatever you want. The other really cool feature about Trading 212 is their Pies feature. So what you can do is you can follow people who've created investing pies. For example, someone might have a pie where, I don't know, 30% of it's Apple and 20% is Tesla and 10% is the S&P 500. And you can follow people on the app and see what pies they've created, and you can see the performance of those pies, and then you can just copy and paste a particular pie into your own account. And so that means like, let's say you've got 100 pounds to invest and you've put 50 of it into the S&P 500, but you want to be a little bit more experimental with the other 50 pounds, you could invest it into a pie where someone else who's generally a pro or someone in their bedroom who just loves the markets has already done all the homework for you. The app also lets you auto-invest, which is a great thing because then you can automatically invest a percentage of your paycheck into the thing every month. And so if you haven't yet started with investing and you want to give it a go, then you can download the app on the App Store. And if you use the coupon code ALI, A-L-I, at the checkout, that will give you a totally free share worth up to 100 pounds. It's available on iPhone and Android, and you can check it out by typing in Trading 212 into your respective app store. So thank you so much, Trading 212, for sponsoring this episode. When your, I guess, ex-wife broke this news to you a few years ago-
3. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes
4. AAAli Abdaal
  ... it strikes me that, like, you would have been more prepared than the normal, than a normal person who's not studied this stuff to deal with that kind of turbulence. How-- To, to what extent did your prior kind of knowledge, understanding, background in this kind of stuff help you to navigate that? And like, I guess, how, how did you navigate it? Or was that something that just hit you from like left of field and you were like, "Oh, shit," like-
5. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
6. AAAli Abdaal
  ... things are, are, are not as easy as like Marcus Aurelius' book made it seem like. [laughs]
7. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  [laughs] Totally. Whenever it hit all the principles which I've worked from just naturally came into play. It, it worked through me. I don't think it's something which I consciously began to think, "Okay. Oh, I should bring this in," or, "I should bring that in." It's something which I'd already begun to practice as part of my life. Just the individual I am, I can only talk about something or teach or train something that I have lived by and that I do on a daily basis. Everything that I speak to you about with my clients, I do every day for hours every day. I'm continually wanting to focus on becoming present. This present is the only moment that exists. And in this, this moment right now, everything is actually okay. All is well in this present moment. Where the suffering kick in is when our mind pulls us out of the present moment and then replays what has happened or creates a story or a narrative around what has happened. Oh, your wife has had an affair. It will then add on these layers of perception on top of reality. So the reality is she's had an affair. This layer of perception is, "I'll never be able to get through this. I can't handle this. It's too painful. There must be something wrong with me because this has happened. I could have prevented it. What should I have done earlier or quicker or sooner?" It's this story, this narrative which the mind creates around it, which is like adding gasoline onto a fire, and it will just burn stronger and more brightly. And what I have come to experience is that continually coming back to the present moment is the first part, and acknowledging reality. A lot of the time we try and fight against reality, but reality will begin to sink in the more that we accept what has happened externally, but also internally, what's coming up within me, where-- And in the beginning, in that instance, there was so much sadness, and of course, there was anger which was fused into it. And so it's then acknowledging the emotion and allowing it to pass, and that's a process.
29:38 – 35:50
ARIA framework
1. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  So I actually have a, an ARIA framework. So the A is to acknowledge what is happening around you and within you. The R is to begin to release this feeling, to continually let it flow through you, to recognize that the feeling is within you. Now, if a feeling is within you, it's then our responsibility to deal with it. It would've been too easy to say, "You know, you made me feel this way because of what of you have done, and so I'm going to blame you." But what happens in that instance is I give away all my power. Responsibility is the ability to respond. The ability to act is the definition of power. And so responsibility holds great power. If I hold my responsibility, I hold my power. Now, where the mind often fights against that is it conflates responsibility with fault, and the mind doesn't want to hold onto fault because it's too heavy for it. But analogy would be, let's say you're Do you ever go walking or do you ever-
2. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah, I double. [chuckles]
3. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah. You go for a little-
4. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah. I go for a stroll
5. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... a little stroll
6. AAAli Abdaal
  I head down to Pret, use my Pret coffee subscription to get a free coffee, you know, that kind of thing.
7. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah. Yeah. And so imagine you're going on a walk, but imagine, uh, in fact, you're in the countryside.
8. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
9. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  And a storm, we'll bring back the storm. A storm hits.
10. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
11. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Now, whenever you set off, it was sunny skies, it was a lovely light breeze, you know, it was an... The sun was shining. Now a storm is hitting, and it's torrential rain and high winds. The weather change is not your fault. It'd be ludicrous to think it's your fault, but it is your responsibility of how you're going to respond. Are you going to take out your jacket and put on a waterproof? Are you going to find shelter? Are you going to even call for someone to pick you up? Our feelings, it's not our fault, okay? It- they've, they've arisen. The sadness is natural based on what had happened, but it's my responsibility. How do I deal with and manage those feelings next?
12. AAAli Abdaal
  So acknowledge, release.
13. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah. Then the I is to inquire into what this event is triggering within you because reality is okay. Everything is, everything is just unfolding. Like we talked about, the universe is just continually unfolding, and it has for 13.8 billion years, and it will continue to do so. What the mind does is it places a judgment on this event. This event is good or this event is bad. This is success or this is failure. And if we feel hurt, it will have triggered something within us. There's something that your mind is probably personalizing or imagining will be the outcome. And our task is to figure out what that is. So to give you a little example, often what the mind will do is it will personalize what the person has done. So in this example, with my wife at the time having an affair, my mind will personalize it and say, "There must be something wrong with me. I'm not man enough or I'm not good enough," or whatever that may be. Truly, the principle I work with is that whatever anyone else says or does tells you nothing about you. It only tells you about what is going on within them, within their thoughts and their feelings. My wife at the time didn't take those actions because of how she viewed me. She took it because she was in a place of hurt and fear, and we'd lost intimacy and connection. Now, my responsibility, did I play into that context 100% and I'll learn from that? And I did, and I looked at the part that I played that created a situation out of which she acted. But I'm not taking responsibility for her actions.
14. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
15. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  That is more indicative of what she was going through. So once we begin to... Once the emotion has passed and we, we can begin to look at this, we can actually begin to learn and grow through it. The way that I define resilience, it's the ability to accept, understand, process, and grow through emotional pain. First of all, we have to accept and acknowledge it. Next, we have to release and process it. Then we have to understand it, inquire what is my mind making this about, learn from it, and then we can grow through it. And the final A is to act, to act in line with our values and our vision, with the place that we want to go to and the values that we want to hold close to us on our path. Because I've worked with so many business leaders and, and visionaries and CEOs who whenever something huge or detrimental happens, particularly to their business or in their personal life, they lose sight of their vision. And we all need something to move towards, something that is in a way aspirational. And how we do it is so crucial. Royal Robbins, one of my favorite quotes is from, uh, this pioneer in rock climbing, and he'd scale Yosemite, but he was the first one to do it without anchoring or hammering pins into the rock surface and creating damage. And he said, "Getting to the top is nothing. The way you do it is everything." And I've worked with individuals who've created multi-billion pound companies and products who are deeply dissatisfied and discontent with where they are because they're not proud of what they've created. It may be bringing in a huge amount of income, but they don't feel fully fulfilled because they've lost something along the way. And so the way we do something, staying close to who we are, returning to who we are, and moving from that place of freedom and integrity and grace is part of a fulfilling life for everybody.
16. AAAli Abdaal
  We, we, we've talked a lot about,
35:50 – 49:51
Figuring out your values and mission
1. AAAli Abdaal
  or, or you've, you've mentioned quite a bit this thing around, uh, this idea of returning to who you are.
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  And, um, you know, we just talked about values and vision.
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes.
5. AAAli Abdaal
  Um, how does one begin to figure out what their vision or values are? Um, I guess I've come across exercises and things that you can do for companies of like, you know, every, every company needs a mission, a vision, a value, values and all that jazz.
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm.
7. AAAli Abdaal
  How do you approach that for an individual?
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  The simplest question would be: what would you love? Like, Ali, what would you love? So if you, if we looked at relationships-
9. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... what would you love to experience in a relationship?
11. AAAli Abdaal
  Intimacy, closeness, togetherness. I, I... All these somewhat cliché-sounding words that are, are making me feel a bit embarrassed even as I say them Um-
12. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  And what-
13. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah
14. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... is it about even talking about intimacy or closeness-
15. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah
16. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... that is embarrassing?
17. AAAli Abdaal
  I think, well, embarrassing may be the wrong word. I think it feels, it feels kinda cliché. Like, what do, what do I want? What, what, what would I love? Oh, I'd love intimacy and closeness.
18. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
19. AAAli Abdaal
  I feel like-
20. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  And what's wrong with cliché?
21. AAAli Abdaal
  What's wrong with cliché? I feel like I almost should be able to come up with something that feels less, less cliché, more, more true to myself. I guess I sh- feel like I almost should know what I want and be able to describe that in more words than just throwing out a word like togetherness or something like that.
22. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm. So you just started by describing some of the most powerful, meaningful forces in life. Closeness, intimacy, connection. I do not know any individual who would not love to experience closeness and connection and intimacy. That's beautiful. It's literally, it's like hearing poetry to me whenever you spoke about that. And then you undermined it. [laughs] And then you completely undermined what you love-
23. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah
24. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... and what is important to you. And actually holding and putting it out there felt too scary. It was no just-
25. AAAli Abdaal
  It was like, "Ugh," yeah.
26. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah. Keep it in here. Keep it in here. It's safer here.
27. AAAli Abdaal
  Yep.
28. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  And, and potentially your mind might have even built up an identity around being unique and doing, doing things differently, and having a clear, specific idea of what something is for you. And that creates a huge amount of pressure, because you have to have everything figured out before you even start.
29. AAAli Abdaal
  Hmm.
30. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Try going into a relationship with that. It's gonna be... It's gonna create anxiety, or it's going to hold us back from even taking a step into it, because that's a huge ask. I wouldn't even know where to start with that. But if we go back to your truth, what was important to you was intimacy.
49:51 – 1:00:32
Fears and the strength of vulnerability
1. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  There's no reason to be embarrassed about anything, Ali. Like, you have so much wisdom. You, you see truth and you talk about it, but then you undermine it and throw it away. Don't do that anymore, Ali.
2. AAAli Abdaal
  Hmm.
3. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Don't do that. Don't undermine your power.
4. AAAli Abdaal
  My girlfriend says the same thing. Like, I would say something-
5. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah
6. AAAli Abdaal
  ... I would say a compliment, and then I'd undermi- immediately undermine it by like kind of-
7. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah
8. AAAli Abdaal
  ... turning it into a bit of a joke.
9. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
10. AAAli Abdaal
  And that feeling of like, "Ugh, I c- I can't be too sincere 'cause that's, that's weird."
11. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah. Yeah. What would be the worst thing about being too sincere, and what would it, what would it say about you?
12. AAAli Abdaal
  It would... It's... I think it's v- v- a vulnerability.
13. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Right.
14. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah. It's like putting, putting my heart on the line-
15. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Totally
16. AAAli Abdaal
  ... and being... leaving it open to being laughed at, be like-
17. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
18. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
19. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah. I get that. I totally get that. That's ultimate vulnerability. Vulnerability is the ability to be hurt, so it's understandable that your mind will not want you to be hurt. So any time you're getting close to putting something out there-
20. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm
21. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... that is going to potentially be laughed at or ridiculed or sniggered at or rejected or undermined or diminished, that's an act of vulnerability, and your mind will protect you from it. So what will it do? It'll do, it'll do it first.
22. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
23. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  It'll do it first, and it'll keep you safe. But what do we lose by not sharing our truth? We lose everything. We lose connection. We lose intimacy. We lose our power. Like, you have so much power. I can feel it in the room with you. You're, you're immensely powerful, and you have such wisdom, and you have such a brilliant mind, and it's so astute. And you can identify things, and you can synthesize them, and you can put them out there. And you've achieved phenomenal success in what you're doing even when your mind has been holding you back through certain fears. What would Ali be like if you were moving more and more away from the place of fear and a place of mind and allowing you to flow in its full force? Fuck. Now I'm getting excited, and I don't know anything about your life. [laughs]
24. AAAli Abdaal
  [laughs]
25. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  It's like a river. Within all of us is a river, and if a river isn't... If we look and, and the river isn't flowing as much, then people think, "Oh, I need to try and increase the force of the river." No, no, no. You don't. Water has its own power. All we need to do is look upstream and see where are the rocks, where are the blocks, and take those out. We take those out. We disidentify with the mind. We dissolve those parts which are holding us back. That river will flow, and it will flow with more power and more force than we could ever imagine.
26. AAAli Abdaal
  This episode is very kindly brought to you by WeWork. Now, this is particularly exciting for me because I have been a full-paying customer of WeWork for the last two years now. I discovered it during, you know, when the pandemic was in, on the verge of being lifted, and I'd spent, like, the whole year just sort of sitting in my room making YouTube videos. But then I discovered WeWork, and I was a member, me and Angus, my team members, we were members of the WeWork in Cambridge, and they have like hundreds of other locations worldwide as well. And it was incredible because we had this fantastic, beautifully designed office space to go to to work, and we found ourselves, like, every day just at 9:00 in the morning just going to WeWork because it was a way nicer experience working from the co-working space than it was just sitting at home working. These days, what me and everyone on my team has is the All Access Pass, which means you're not tied to a specific WeWork location, but it means you can use any of their several hundred co-working spaces around London, around the UK, and also around the world. And one of the things I really love about the co-working setup is that it's fantastic as a bit of a change of scenery. So these days I work from home. I've got the studio at home. But if I need to get some focused writing work done and I've been a... I'm feeling a bit drained just sitting at my desk all day, I will just pop over to the local WeWork, which is about a 10-minute walk from where I am. I'll take my laptop with me. I'll get some free coffee from there. I'll get a few snacks, and it's just such a great vibe, and you get to meet cool people. I've made a few friends through meeting them at WeWork, and it's just really nice being in an environment almost like a library but kind of nicer because there's, like, a little bit of soft music in the background, and there's other kind of startup bros and creators and stuff in, in there as well. And it's just my absolute favorite co-working space of all time. It's super easy to book a desk or book a conference room using the app, and it's a great place to meet up with team members if you're gonna collaborate and you all live in different places. They've got unlimited tea and coffee and herbal teas and drinks on tap, and they've also got various kind of after-work events that happen like happy hours and yoga and a few other exercise type things. And you can also take in guests. So often when guests will come over to visit, I'll say, "Hey, let's pop into WeWork," and we'll just work from there for the whole day, and then we'll go out for dinner some time in the evening. Anyway, if you're looking for a co-working space for you or your team, then I'd 100% recommend WeWork. Like I said, I've been a paying customer for theirs for the last two years, which is why it's particularly exciting that they're now sponsoring this episode. And if you wanna get 50% off your first booking, then do head over to we.co/ali, and you can use the coupon code ALI at checkout, A-L-I, to get 50% off your first booking. So thank you so much, WeWork, for sponsoring this episode. I, um, worked with a ... clinical psychologist/executive coach/ more like, yeah, at, at one point last year. And I kind of joked to him that, like, our sessions felt more like therapy than executive coaching. And he was like, "Oh, man, everyone says that. Don't worry about it." [chuckles]
27. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm.
28. AAAli Abdaal
  Um, and this is kind of feeling just like a, a similar kind of vibe. Um, but I'm curious, so l- like, for me, I, I kind of know that the, my, I guess, personal vision with my career is around this teaching idea and this freedom idea kind of coming together.
29. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
30. AAAli Abdaal
  Um, but I'm not in anyone else's head, so I don't know what... Like, with, with your clients, when you ask them that question, like, what are, what, what sort of answers do you get from different people around what's their own vision for their career?
1:00:32 – 1:06:46
How to understand your feelings
1. AAAli Abdaal
  struggle to know what I'm feeling. Um, and we, we kind of alluded to that earlier on the, in, in the, in the conversation. Um, I was gonna, gonna fo- gonna, gonna follow that.
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  I feel like often, like, someone will ask me, "How, how do you feel about X?"
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
5. AAAli Abdaal
  And I would immediately construct a cognitive representation of-
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah
7. AAAli Abdaal
  ... that-
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah
9. AAAli Abdaal
  ... rather than... And, you know, like my My sister-in-law might be s- might say something like, "Huh, it's interesting that that sentence started with 'I think' rather than 'I feel.'"
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Totally.
11. AAAli Abdaal
  And I'll be like, "God. Goddammit. [laughs] You're right." Um, yeah, I think I, I really, I really struggle to articulate how I feel about stuff.
12. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
13. AAAli Abdaal
  'Cause I think the mind is always so s-
14. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah
15. AAAli Abdaal
  ... in, yeah, just on, in, in overdrive.
16. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
17. AAAli Abdaal
  Um-
18. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Ali, you're not alone. One pattern I've seen when you have an in- individual like yourself that has such a brilliant mind that's so intelligent and sharp and powerful, it begins to, in a way, rule the show because it's a phenomenal powerhouse of an engine, and the mind operates on a cognitive level, so it will continually be pulling you into your mind, and you'll be experiencing the world through your mind. And what does that mind do? It will create concepts and ideas and constructions, and it will understand where things place them together. I valued my mind so much that I was always, again, living in my mind, and what I wasn't connecting to was how I felt. I had no idea how I felt for years. I had no idea. I wouldn't even know how to answer the question. And in my 20s, what happened was all this emotion was built up, and what would happen, truthfully, is I'd get drunk, and it would all come out as rage, as anger. And I'd have these moments where, in my 20s, during the day, I would just been, seem so serene, serene and calm, and then with alcohol, it would just, this anger would, would burst through.
19. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
20. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Because I didn't know how to connect to my emotion. I didn't even know where to start. I didn't know how to live from that space, and that became part of my journey, living from and connecting to my heart, knowing what is here. And over time, we become more attuned to it, and we can pick, we can pick up even more granularity with it. Gosh, something feels off, or I can feel hurt, or I can feel, I can feel tightness or tension. And, and if you want, you can even start with the body. You know, you can start to notice, when do I feel tight or tense or something doesn't feel right? It's like something's a little bit off, just even beginning to start with the body. And then we can move to beginning to notice, oh, if there's something in my body, what do I, what do I feel? What do I notice is stirring there? We can just begin to attune to it a little bit more. And it's with so many individuals that I work with, like, they're doing phenomenally well in their career, but often what has happened is, just like you described, their biggest challenge is sharing how they truly feel. And a lot of the time, there's actually a bit of a, a gender pattern which I've seen. Men really struggle to know what they feel and how they feel, and if they can identify anything, it's anger. But, but anger is a superficial emotion. It's almost like a secondary emotion. It'll be masking a deeper hurt. And then we'll explore with courage and with openness and with vulnerability safely what is underneath that. There will be hurt there that your mind's trying to protect you from, and it's easier to feel anger. Anger is very empowering, whereas hurt is very opening. Or with, often with females, they know how they feel, but they're not sharing it. They're not truly sharing how they feel to the person they love or sharing truly what they're experiencing at work. And it's holding them back, and eventually they'll reach a point where we're sick of our sickness. We can't continue anymore because the pain of not connecting to our truth and expressing our truth is too much. Because we go back to that quest, what will life do? It will bring more and more situations into your life to get you to look at this. Look at this, Ali. Look at this. I don't think it's a coincidence that your girlfriend said there are times that you share, and then you pull it back, and that I've said the same thing today. Life is saying to you, "Ali, look at this. I love you, Ali, and this is part of your path. Take a little look." And it's beautiful that you have people around you, and you have a partner who is also to bring in another aspect of love can be a part of your emotional and spiritual and psychological growth. That's beautiful. Now you've got two people who see each other, who love each other, who share and are supporting each other to grow, and you can grow together. That's a blessing.
21. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah. Yeah.
22. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Doesn't mean it's easy, though.
23. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
24. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Doesn't mean it's easy. And look, I made the same mistake. One of the aspects I've learned from most through my 10-year relationship and marriage is I didn't share how I truly felt because I was afraid of hurting the other person. I didn't want to create conflict. I didn't want to create pain for someone else, and I was afraid that if I said how I truly felt, that is what would happen. But instead, I moved away from my truth, and everything fell apart.
25. AAAli Abdaal
  What's, what's the balance there? Like, you know, people... some people would say
1:06:46 – 1:11:00
Negative emotions in relationships
1. AAAli Abdaal
  the key to a relationship is to not share how you truly feel about everything. Like, if she asks you if you, if she looks nice in the dress, the answer is always yes. Kind-- Like-
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm
3. AAAli Abdaal
  ... there's that kind of... People are clearly being, you know, a, a bit flippant when they say things like that.
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes.
5. AAAli Abdaal
  But I feel like there is, like, a truth there underneath that-
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes
7. AAAli Abdaal
  If you were to sample 24 times a day, how do I currently feel about my partner and about my relationship?
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
9. AAAli Abdaal
  That feels like an almost unhealthy level of sampling. Um, to what extent do you agree or disagree?
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Any time we feel anger, frustration, uh, resentment, disappointment, uh, anything that we'd call a negative emotion towards something else, there's something wrong with you.
11. AAAli Abdaal
  Oh. Okay. Interesting.
12. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  The mind will blame the other person. What I'm saying is there is something within... You're wearing a lens or a filter right now. We go through life with a clear lens, and as we go through life, we're driving the car, little bits of dirt flick up, and they hit onto the windscreen. And now we're looking at the landscape thinking, "Gosh, that bit's dark. Gosh, that bit's muddy." No, no, no, no. There's nothing wrong with outside. It's your lens. That's what we need to clean first. So it's about recognizing anytime I feel emotion, there's something happening within me. It's within me. It's my responsibility to look at. Where people go wrong is they think that sharing truth means, "Do you know what? You're really pissing me off because you keep on doing this, and I feel like you don't care, and I feel-- and you're not respecting me, and you're not good enough," essentially is what we're saying, "and you need to change." So we've got a little mini dictator in all our heads, and what it says is, "Reality isn't right. I want to feel safe and secure, so what I'm gonna try and do is I'm gonna try and control reality. I'm gonna try and control what's happening around me, and I'm gonna try and control you so that you don't trigger me." No, no, no, no, no, no. Where there's love, there's no control. Where there's control, there's no love. Moving deeper, we want to see what it, what is being triggered within me. What is, what is the hurt really about? I'm, I'm sharing that. I'm realizing that, for instance, I feel unloved, and that is not your fault. That is not... Just so you know, when I share something, and I'm not saying it's your fault. This is something I'm, I realize I need to work on, but there's a part of me that feels unlovable and feels like I don't deserve to be loved. And do you know what? I'm gonna work on figuring out maybe where that came from, and I'd love to work on healing that. And whenever you say or do this, you're not doing anything wrong. And I, I understand, and, um, maybe we'll get to know what your intention is behind it. But I personalize it, or my mind personalizes it, and it makes it about something else. And you know, in those moments when I feel alone and, and hurt, I'm gonna try and not attack you, and I'm gonna try and share how I feel. 'Cause when we share truth of how we truly feel, when someone opens their heart, it opens the other person's heart. Anytime you began to, like, open up a little bit about how you felt, Ali, I felt even more connected to you. And I was fascinated, and I wanted to know more about it. And if we weren't making a podcast, and I wasn't also wanting to bring something for people to listen to, I would just sit down and we would want to know more for hours.
13. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm-hmm.
14. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Because it's beautiful. Because truth is beautiful. Even amidst the pain and what we see as insecurity, there's still beauty. It's like kintsugi, that Japanese art form. There's beauty and perfection in the imperfection. And so part of it's creating compassion for that.
1:11:00 – 1:26:17
Expressing your inner truth
1. AAAli Abdaal
  So I imagine you have clients who, for them, expressing their inner truth, um, could potentially cause a drop in the value of their business. Um, and I sort of just to, to, to use an example that's, that, that I see a lot, we have, uh, however many students on our kind of this course that I run to teach people how to be YouTubers. And at the start of someone's journey, I'm always like, "Look, just sh-share whatever you want. Make videos about anything. It's, it's not gonna get views anyway, so don't worry about it." Like, you know, just lower the bar as much as possible. But at some point, um, you get to a- an area where it's like, "Oh, damn, I've got, I've got an audience now, and I've built an audience by making videos about finance. Um, but I really wanna make a video talking about mindfulness or talking about yoga or talking about the power of psychedelics or something like that. But my, my business, my channel is about finance."
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  "And so while I might feel pulled to share my truth around meditation, I am worried that the finance audience won't care and that it will cause my channel to become less good and the business to fall and stuff," all, all of that kind of thing. And I imagine if I were working with, I don't know, billion-dollar CEOs, that, that they have to be very careful about the truth they put out into the world-
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
5. AAAli Abdaal
  ... for fear that it will reflect badly on their brand or their business or their team.
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
7. AAAli Abdaal
  Like m- if I had a, a, I don't know, a company of 50 people, my truth might be I actually wanna fire all of them and just go back to just being me making websites for f- freelance clients.
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
9. AAAli Abdaal
  But sharing that truth would be pretty disastrous for my company, and everyone would mutiny and et cetera, et cetera.
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes.
11. AAAli Abdaal
  So I guess my question is: how do you balance the sharing of your internal truth and living true to that with the market- [chuckles]
12. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes
13. AAAli Abdaal
  ... as it were?
14. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes. It's an understandable situation. It's one that I see time and time and time again in multiple areas, in multiple ways. We can even just take one example one step back in terms of individuals who are leaving university and- You can be looking at two options and one pays very well and the other one doesn't.
15. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
16. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Jimmy Carr put it in a beautiful way. What's your price? How much would you have to be paid to give up on what you love? 50 grand a year when you're coming out? 100 grand a year? 150? 200? There'll be a point where without awareness we'll pay the price. It's the same question at any level. What's your price? What are you willing to let go of to follow truth? And some people, the price is too high for them. 100 million, 200 million, 500 million. No, no, no. I'll forego truth for the external. And that's a choice. And it's not saying that it's a bad choice. There is no good or bad, just both will have consequences. Now, does it mean, oh, suddenly you quit your company and everything falls apart? No, we also live in this world. It's about being in the world but not of the world. So you may see that actually this is truly where I want to move into. And is there a more strategic way? Is there someone that I could bring in who could begin to take over the role that I'm doing? Or do I want to continue to grow and scale? Or would I be happy keeping the company at this level? Or is there a way of me doing both at the one time? Or is there, there could be an infinite number of possibilities to even take a step closer towards you moving from a place of truth. I'm not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm not saying suddenly create radical change. You may, and that may work. But what I'm saying is if we can just take one step closer to connecting to your truth, things will begin to change in and of themselves. And I see it. And look, there's a number of examples that come to mind and they reach a crossroads where literally they're at a critical juncture in their career. And let's say the company, okay, well, the company is worth 200, 300 million. But if they go down a certain road, we could be worth, we could go public, could be four or five billion. The mind will say, well, most likely go public. With awareness, I've met individuals who have chosen not to do that because they've lived it for the last one years, two years, three years, four years, and it isn't what they expected it to be. And yes, you have more wealth and you have more financial security and you have more and more and more, but inside there's less and less and less. And you're feeling more disconnected and more out of align with who you are. And we'll reach a point with these individuals where with awareness they say, no, that is not what my life is about. My life is not about keeping the 50 people in the company happy. My life is not about doing something for someone else because they say you're good at it. You're good at it, Ali, so do it and do it again and do it again and don't leave it. Don't change lane. And they see that actually, no, their power is in doing what they love. And then whenever that may change, they continue to move to what they love. And often they end up being successful in that area too. Okay, well, I'm doing marketing and that might be worth X, but who knows? You could move into meditation and you could be making X to the power of four, but your mind won't see it that way. It wants to keep you safe. So all I'm saying is the more we have awareness, the more we can sense when we're coming from a place of fear and when we're coming from a sense of freedom and love, then we can use the tool, which is the mind, which is brilliant. You'd have much better ideas about probably how you could pivot in that way because you understand the industry or you understand psychology or you have that intimate knowledge. You know how things work. You'll be creative. You'll be able to take two different parts and bring them together. So you will then find a way. You then use your mind to say, okay, mind, this is what I would love to achieve. This is what I'd love to create. Help me find a way. Your mind will find it. It will work with you. Okay, Ali, this sounds like an adventure. Let's do it.
17. AAAli Abdaal
  So it's like you're, you know, that question I asked earlier around how do you figure out your vision and your values? That's based on your own internal truth. And then the journey of moving in that direction. Well, that's a path that the mind can figure out.
18. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Your mind will become your best friend. It will help you along the way. But it's continually moving back to seeing at what point am I now moving more towards a place of fear?
19. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
20. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Because the more that we create, the more we have to lose.
21. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
22. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  In a way, it's easier when you're at the beginning of your career and you've got that happy-go-lucky, well, what's the worst that could happen? But then we build and we create and then we have structures which begin to keep us in place or we have structures in our relationships which begin to keep things static. But life is not static. Life continually flows. Life is like the river. Whenever we try and keep life as it is, it's like taking a bucket, going to the Niagara Falls, taking the water and saying, oh, I've got the Niagara Falls in my bucket.
23. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
24. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  No, no, no, no. You just took away the magic of the water because you tried to control it and put it in a box and keep it there. But life flows. If you keep on flowing with your truth, it will keep you, and you will have... You will often end up in a place that you never even imagined in the first place. But it's more brilliant and more bright and more fulfilling and more challenging than ever before. But you'll love it because it's your choice, and you lived your life on your terms with your a- agency and your independence, and that's something that you even talked about before. You want to be the author of your own story.
25. AAAli Abdaal
  Uh, there's a, a... I, I had dinner with a friend, like, last week-
26. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
27. AAAli Abdaal
  ... and, um, he runs this, uh, agency managing creators, influencers, YouTubers. And I asked him to analyze a few, like, a few, a few YouTube channels of some other friends of mine. And there was something he said around this. Like, he wa- he was like, he was analyzing a friend's channel, and he was like, "You know, this friend, um, he needs to, uh, be more experimental with his content." And he said, "At this stage, the f- the guy's probably thinking, 'You know, I've got, I've got this type of video that's doing well, that's getting lots of views, but it's not really what I wanna do forever.'" And he's, he's probably feeling like he's, he can't experiment now because he's got his lane. And the advice that this, this guy gave, who, who runs this agency, he was like, "I've, I've seen this time and time and time again. When you're early in your career, like as a YouTuber or whatever, you can take way more risks."
28. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
29. AAAli Abdaal
  At the point where, where every video is getting 500,000 views, it becomes way harder to take risks.
30. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
1:26:17 – 1:31:33
Dealing with doubt and overthinking
1. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... the mind will do that.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  That's the nature of the mind. You can't change the nature of a lion. The nature of the mind is that it will be fear-based, and it will doubt what you are thinking about, and it will judge it.
5. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  I wouldn't expect any otherwise. That's what my mind would do, but I've created so much distance and separation from my mind, and I've ignored it for so long, it stops, it just stops talking.
7. AAAli Abdaal
  [laughs]
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Just gone quiet.
9. AAAli Abdaal
  How, how do you create that distance?
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  By continually recognizing when it is speaking.
11. AAAli Abdaal
  Yep.
12. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Recognizing that fear-
13. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah
14. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... and then going down into that place of truth-
15. AAAli Abdaal
  Yep
16. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... and f- and still taking action. That's what you did there, right? Your mind said, "Ugh, terrible example," but you still did it, Ali, and that's the point. You still did it. You still took that action, and it connected with me. That's beautiful. That's powerful. That begins to show your mind that it's not in control.
17. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
18. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  That actually you have a deeper wisdom, and for whatever reason, that, that example came to you, and you shared it. I'm inspired by that. I'm now gonna go back and think what are the ways in which I'm getting tied into something and should be listening more to that truth like Ali did. Beautiful. You just changed my life. Literally, I'm gonna go back and think on that.
19. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
20. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  'Cause there will be ways that I am, and I already have an idea of what it might be. So-
21. AAAli Abdaal
  What's the idea? [laughs]
22. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  The idea is that what I'm... The way that right now I'm in my comfort zone, in that I work one-to-one, and I love it.
23. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
24. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  And I work with people who I respect and admire, and it's, it, it's such a privilege to be a part of that journey, and there's a part of me that's saying, "Share more in a way where you're in- serving by having conversations like this." I've not done a podcast in two years. For me, this was one step to... I should say I've not done a podcast of this, of this, uh, of this type before because there's a part of my mind that says, "Don't, don't, Aria. Stay small. Don't come in here and tell Ali, who's got, you know, a huge following, who's respected and admired in this area, don't begin to ask him questions. It's his fucking show, and what, you're gonna come and ask him questions about his life?" My mind will, will, will do the same things for the things that it's most afraid about. So whenever I say yes, it goes quiet, but then right now I can sense what... Or that is at least what my mind would have said.
25. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
26. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  I can tell already what my mind would have said. It will say all these things.
27. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
28. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  It'll say, "No, Aria, you're not... Who are you?"
29. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
30. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  "Who are you to talk about truth?"
1:31:33 – 1:36:30
The importance of losing yourself
1. AAAli Abdaal
  How did, how did you get so good at this? [laughs] You're like... Your, your vibe is, uh, like, for want of a better word, very zen and-
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
3. AAAli Abdaal
  ... wise. And when you said you were 40, I was kind of surprised because the way you're talking is kind of what I would more expect from someone like Sadhguru or, you know, a spiritual teacher who's, like, in their 70s or something like that. Uh, where did... Were you like this when you were, like, 20? Like how did, how did, how did this kind of-
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  I was a nightmare when I was 20.
5. AAAli Abdaal
  Develop. Yeah. [laughs]
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  In order to find ourselves, we have to lose ourselves. And I, and I lost myself, and I've lost myself many times in multiple ways. And, and for whatever reason, life is just continually... This will sound... Ah, I was nearly going to do what you were, you were going to do. I was gonna say, "This is gonna sound clichéd." My mind was just about to-
7. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... undermine what I'm gonna say because it judges what I'm about to say-
9. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  ... in terms of how it will be perceived.
11. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
12. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Life loves all of us, and life loves itself. We are... If life is the dancer, we are the dance. And the sense that I've always felt is that God or the universe or life loves me. And even in the times when I've suffered the most, there's still love there, and there's love that will support me through that. And a- again, it goes back to that sense of not, "God, why is this happening?" but, "God, where are you taking me?" It's, it's a part of a bigger picture, and I just can't see that picture right now. Now the mind, again, like we said, it tries to take a snap judgment and determine it as good or bad. There's a Zen story of the farmer. I don't know if you're aware of it. But essentially a farmer, his horse runs away, and all the neigh- all the neighboring village, uh, people come and say, "Oh, such bad luck." And he says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" And they seem a bit perturbed by it. They're confused by it or bemused by it, and then the horse comes back, but it brings 10 other wild horses with it. "Oh," the villagers say, "That's amazing. What good luck." "Well, good luck, bad luck, who knows?" Then one day his son is riding, trying to train one of the wild horses, kicks off. He falls and breaks his leg. The villagers come. "Oh, what terrible luck." "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" The, uh, son is now lying in bed. He's injured. The army comes through, and they're taking young men to, for conscription to the army. They see that he's injured, so they leave him. Villagers come. "Oh my goodness, what amazing luck." We know the answer. Good luck, bad luck, who knows? The mind will assign each moment as good or bad, success or failure, but we're not seeing the bigger picture. It would be like taking a book, opening it up to a page, reading one line, and saying, "Oh my goodness, this is a horrific book. This is a terrible book. This is awful. This is the worst book I've ever read." We've only read a line. We take another book and we open it up and, "Wow, this is a beautiful book. I know exactly how it's going to end." No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's just a line. We take this moment in our lives and we say, "This is awful. This is terrible. I can't get through this." No, no, no, no, no, no. Part of it is beginning to take a step back and see there is so much I do not know, and that's faith. That's trust. That's trust that this is unfolding. And not only that all will be well, but all is well. That moment of what happened, yes, at the time I would say it was awful, terrible, painful. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't undo it. I had to go through that to grow and evolve as a person, 'cause I'd lost myself. I wasn't connected to my truth, and now I will not give that up. Not for anything. And I've met, um, in a beautiful relationship where I'm experiencing a depth of sharing and vulnerability I've never had before. I never would have had that because I was stuck in my structure, and life came and said, "You know what? Aria, you're not gonna move." I wasn't going to. I made a vow, and I was too committed. I was staying there. It was the only way that life was able to shift me onto a different trajectory. And it happened, and it happened through me, and it's led to this path which is still continuing, still growing, and I don't know what will happen next. But as long as I follow tr- the truth, reality will take care of the rest.
13. AAAli Abdaal
  Um, we've talked a lot
1:36:30 – 1:50:47
Identifying and releasing emotions
1. AAAli Abdaal
  about, um, kind of feelings, emotions, and stuff, and the impression I get from, from the stuff you've said is that, you know, the feelings are almost the truth that we need to connect with. Um, but then in, for example, stoicism and in some other schools of thought, there's the idea that, well, feelings are a bit of a myth. There are only really four feelings like, um, disgust, pleasure, um, salience, and, like, inattention or something like that, and everything else is, uh, the mind or culture or society putting labels and constructs on top of fundamentally just these four things.
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  What's your take on how true or, quote, "valid," or, quote, "real" feelings and emotions are- [chuckles]
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm
5. AAAli Abdaal
  ... um, in this kind of, in the, in this arena?
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  I put more and more value on my experience. Are emotions real? I experience emotions, and so that is a part of my internal reality. What we do with what we're experiencing is when the mind becomes involved, it will then categorize and create delineations and structures in order to try and understand reality. And that is an act of the mind. With emotions, we even know that labeling an emotion, for instance, decreases the intensity of the emotion. So on a neural level, if you're experiencing anger and you're able to identify, "I am experiencing anger," it actually strengthens the circuitry in the prefrontal cortex and will dampen down the older, more primal parts of the brain which are responsible for emotion like the amygdala. And so even labeling an emotion can decrease its intensity. The words that we have for an emotion impact our experience of it. There are tribes around the world that have labels for emotions that we don't even know. And the scientific understanding is that they will experience emotions that we don't because we don't even have a word for it. And so we could get lost in this, but essentially what I bring it back to is what is most effective? Even if we tie it into high performance, high performance is taking effective actions at effective times. When we often make poor decisions is when we're acting from a place of emotion. When fear goes up, intellect goes down. So if we're looking at wanting to make a strategic move within our business or we want to create something within our relationship, part of it is knowing and sensing and feeling the emotion that's there. Because I know that if an emotion is there, now is not the time to make a decision. In the beginning, you've got one problem, and that could be the work issue at hand. As soon as the emotion gets involved, you've got a second problem, which is all the feelings around it, the anger, the frustration, the disappointment, the feeling of disrespect. It's only once I've created space for the feeling and allow that to dissolve will I then look at what that initial problem in the world is.
7. AAAli Abdaal
  And I suppose as part of your ARIA framework, sort of acknowledge, release, and then you can inquire as to what's the trigger here.
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Precisely. The first step is the acceptance part. It's allowing the emotion to be there, to recognize it, to acknowledge it, and to release it.
9. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  To allow it to flow through us. Only then do we have access to the greatest part of the brain, which is the, the part responsible for the, the judgment of a situation, holding multiple options in mind, assessing and weighing up the balance, impulse control, that executive control of what to do next. That comes into play, and we can use the mind as a tool to reflect. And the Stoics would do that. They would create times during the day where they would reflect on, on their life or on what makes a meaningful day or on what they're taking for granted or on where their work or growth is. But the first part has to be the acceptance, the allowance before the change can take place. We can only change what we accept.
11. AAAli Abdaal
  L- let's say you're working with, with one of your clients or even for yourself, and you're having... I guess you're having an, an issue in the business or in your personal life where you're feeling kind of these emotions coming up and taking you away from, from the present moment. What, what are some examples of what this kind of acknowledge, release, inquire thing-
12. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
13. AAAli Abdaal
  ... looks like?
14. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Can you think of a time where you felt, maybe in the last week or two, where you felt a difficult, a difficult or challenging emotion, a, a negative emotion where you felt anger or frustration or hurt?
15. AAAli Abdaal
  Okay. So-
16. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
17. AAAli Abdaal
  ... in my relationship, for example, often there'll be times where, or sometimes there'll be times where she's busy with something or other at work and hasn't replied to a message for a while.
18. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
19. AAAli Abdaal
  And my mind will start thinking, "Uh-oh, have I done something wrong?"
20. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
21. AAAli Abdaal
  Um, and usually, like I've, I feel like I've been drinking the Stoicism Kool-Aid for like a decade, and so-
22. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
23. AAAli Abdaal
  ... I can then al- almost override that with another part of the mind, with the voices of like, you know, [chuckles] Ryan Holiday and all of the-
24. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
25. AAAli Abdaal
  ... original Stoics in my mind being like, "Oh, you know, control the things under your control." S- like, her response is not under my control. All of, all of that kind of stuff would then come and make me, well, sort of s- somewhat override that. But I think the core feeling at it is still, "Uh-oh, have I done something wrong here?"
26. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  So it's a very simple example, but for instance, uh, and in this case, the gender was the wife asking the husband, "Are you able to come home tonight at 5:45?" And he's CEO of a company. And he was explaining this to me. He go- he's like, "I just felt so frustrated-" And angry because she knows I can't come home at 5:45 on a Tuesday because I've got that board meeting. And I was saying, "Look, why are you putting this pressure on me in order for me to be home whenever you know I can't? You need to be more understanding." And he got frustrated, angry at her, and then she got defensive and got upset with him, and it led into a spiral. Whenever we began to break it down, w- what he was doing was he was acting from the emotion. So there are three things or three traps that people fall into. One is they try and avoid the emotion, the emotional pain. We try and avoid it, reject it, negate it, push it down, and just not feel it. But what happens in that instance is that it's like putting a suitcase into a basement. It's not disappeared, but we put in another suitcase and another suitcase, and eventually our whole basement is filled, and it's gonna start coming out. We're not gonna put anything else in. And a little bit like pressure building up in a volcano, eventually it then just erupts. So there are all these instances beforehand where he has felt frustrated and just said, "Okay, do you know what? I'm just going to just stay calm, don't react," and he just moves on. But he hasn't connected to the emotion, and so it's still there, and it builds up. And over time, frustration and anger hardens and turns into resentment. So now we're seeing through a different lens and filter. So one is we try and avoid the pain. The second mistake is that we fuse with the pain. We create a story or a narrative around it. "Ah, my wife doesn't understand. She doesn't care. She's not showing me the respect that I should have." And it's created a narrative around respect or not being loved. The third is we act out of the pain, and in that instance, the person then got angry or snapped, and it led to conflict. And then that conflict leads to a, a rupture in the connection and the relationship. Part of the path, in this very simple example, is to see, is to acknowledge, "What am I experiencing? Okay, there is anger or frustration." Remember, anger is the surface level. What is beneath that? Once we begin to, you know, acknowledge it and release it, and then he and I together can explore it, beneath the anger was actually guilt. The truth is he feels bad. Why does he feel bad? He feels bad because there's a part of him that feels like, "I should be home at 5:45." And there's a part of him that feels like he's not being a good enough father or not being a good enough husband. Now, the mind will try and protect us from that because that's a hard truth to hold. So what will it do? It will then turn it around and attack the other person, saying, "You're making me feel like a bad husband," or, "You're making me feel like I'm not doing enough." No, no, no, no, no. We can only experience what we judge ourselves. If we feel hurt by something, it's because part of a, part of us believes that it's true. So I'll repeat that. If we ever feel hurt or upset or resentful or angry about something, part of us is holding that same judgment towards ourselves. If I said, "Ali, you're a burrito." [laughs] How are you feeling?
27. AAAli Abdaal
  Kind of amused.
28. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
29. AAAli Abdaal
  Yeah.
30. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  It's almost quite comical.
1:50:47 – 2:04:56
The conditioned self vs the true self
1. AAAli Abdaal
  I guess, being yourself versus choosing yourself? In the sense of, for me, my, my default self. You know, we've talked about how the self is, you know, um, a result of accidents of stuff.
2. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
3. AAAli Abdaal
  My default behavior is often to prioritize work at the expense of everything else.
4. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
5. AAAli Abdaal
  I am the happiest person in the world if I've spent five hours in the evening on my laptop from 6:00 PM till 11:00 PM.
6. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
7. AAAli Abdaal
  Um, but that's not really the person I want to be. I want to be a person who has more balance, who takes care of their health and their relationships, and who views time spent with loved one- loved ones not as a, you know, I wanna... I'd rather be on my laptop, but more like a, I'm genuinely happy to be here in the present moment.
8. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
9. AAAli Abdaal
  Even so, so that's, that's kind of who I want to be, but it's not who I am, if that, if that makes sense. So how do we-- how do, how do I know which one is more, quote, "authentic"?
10. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
11. AAAli Abdaal
  Because I find that my mom often says sometimes that, "Oh, you know, Ali, you know, you're, you're trying to change for other people and stuff."
12. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
13. AAAli Abdaal
  This was when I, I, at university, I made the active decision that I wanted to become more confident and charismatic and be more of-
14. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm
15. AAAli Abdaal
  ... more outgoing. Whereas in school, I was a massive nerd and played World of Warcraft all evening.
16. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
17. AAAli Abdaal
  And so to my mom, that was the quote, "The real me." And she would say that, "Y- you're fine as you are. You don't need to change."
18. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Mm-hmm.
19. AAAli Abdaal
  And I'd be like, "No, but I want to change. Like, I wanna, I wanna level up." [chuckles]
20. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes.
21. AAAli Abdaal
  And it's just better, I think, to be more confident.
22. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yeah.
23. AAAli Abdaal
  And I'm going. Uh, yeah. What do you reckon?
24. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  There is the conditioned self, and there is true self. There is the mind and identity, and there is spirit. What we've come to identify as who we are is actually the construction of the mind. The mind has created an identity. We enter this world, and then the mind is trying to understand, who am I? What does that mean? Who are you? What is this world? How does it all fit together? And it creates an identity, and it builds one. And it builds certain understandings of the world and what people do and intentions, and it's mapping out this internal world. And that is down to the accidents of birth. That is down to, like you're saying, you know, your family, your cultural experiences, the place and time in this universe that we have this opportunity. The mind will always do that. Then there is true self, which is just consciousness, and the nature of consciousness is love, is truth. The mind says, "I need to get everything in place, and then I'll feel at peace." The soul says, "Be at peace, and everything else falls into place." We've been living from our minds for the majority of our lives, though. We've been living from that place, and we've built up armory, and we've built up coping mechanisms to navigate. The path is beginning to take off some of that armory, to see that actually, when I connect to truth and love, I will then see what it looks like. You don't need to figure that out. If you can just go down into that place of truth and love, you will see what it will look like. Because one thing we do know is that the mind is a terrible predictor of what will make us happy. It's got all these ideas. My life has to look like this or should look like this, and then I'll be happy. We've got no idea. We've got no idea. We don't even know what's gonna happen in one minute's time. So to take away all the configurations of the mind trying to even choose or map or, or build or be... A lot of self-improvement is talking about improving who you are or optimizing who you are, which is based on the premise that you are not enough. You're, you're not good enough. You're not whole enough. You're not, you're not enough.
25. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
26. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  So you gotta do more change to be better.
27. AAAli Abdaal
  Mm.
28. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Get-- being caught in the same trap. Move away from mind down into consciousness, into that field of consciousness. Tap into that place of love and intuit intuition, and move from that place of truth, and then we'll see what it looks like.
29. AAAli Abdaal
  So what does that look like in my confidence? W- w- I want to be confident because I feel like I'm not yet confident, and I would like to be more that way.
30. ACDr. Aria Campbell-Danesh
  Yes.