Sean: [00:02:27] Jim, Welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

Jim: [00:02:30] I’m doing great. Can you hear my cuckoo clock?

Jim’s Non-negotiables

Sean: [00:02:36]  Oh yeah. It’s the best way to get an episode started. You got the cuckoo in the background, but I’m wondering as we do get started here, I would love to get warmed up a bit. And I’m wondering, do you have any non-negotiables that you feel you just really need to get in each day that just move the big buckets forward for you each day?

Jim: [00:02:53] Sure. Yes, I do. So are you talking about non-negotiable practices that I do each day, rituals, if you will? 

Sean: [00:03:01] Yeah. I would love to hear that. 

Jim: [00:03:03] Okay, great. Yeah. Generally I do the following; I haven’t used an alarm clock for many years, I wake up sometime between five and 6:00 AM, I go downstairs, I make one cup of coffee. One for me, one for my wife. I take it back up to Debbie. That’s a non-negotiable by the way, making her a cup of coffee. The other day, she got up and made the coffee and I said, “nope, you cannot do that.” I make her a cup of coffee. Then after I give her her cup of coffee, I come back down. This is a little different than a lot of people. I actually scan my world and I don’t do anything. I’m not on social media of any kind, but I do look at a text or emails just to see, cause it might’ve been 12, 14, 18 hours since I checked that. So I just look and see if there is anything requiring immediate attention. That takes about 30 seconds. Then I get still and I meditate. That’s a non-negotiable. So I do that every day, all the time.  

After I’m done meditating and “getting present”, then I go and I write three pages. I got the idea years ago from… it’s called Morning Pages. It came from a book on creativity. I do morning pages often. Now, this is not every day, but many, many days, if you look at the last two years, certainly 70% of the time. I then do Wim Hof breathing and yoga and by then, Debbie has come downstairs and a non-negotiable is that we sit and connect with each other for a few minutes. Often what we do is we say, “so what came up for you in your morning pages?” For years, we’ve connected for a few minutes before we enter our day. But that idea of writing honestly, stream of thought, anything that is coming to our mind really opens up a whole new level of connection and intimacy in the mornings when we talk. So those are non-negotiables in the morning. I do that every day. 

And then another non-negotiable is I get some sort of meaningful physical movement throughout the day that occurs generally in three forms. I love to be in nature, so I have a beautiful walk here in Northern Michigan that I take through the woods and along the lakes, I play pickleball on a regular basis and I play golf. So I’ll do some combination of one, two or three of those, certainly five days a week. I don’t do strength training anymore or any of that stuff. So there you go.

Sean: [00:05:28] Well, it certainly seems like you’re hitting the big buckets right. Like mind, body, and spirit getting those all warmed up throughout the day. I love the morning pages practice. I also do Wim Hof every single day. That’s been very helpful for me. I’m wondering for you with the morning pages, that’s where you’re not picking up your pen, correct? The entire time?

Jim: [00:05:47] That’s correct

Sean: [00:05:47] I would love to know, are there recurring themes that tend to come up?

Jim: [00:05:53] Absolutely. So let’s talk about… for my morning pages I always start writing. I actually do it on an iPad. I found that I love to write longhand on my iPad. I liked that experience better than pen on paper. That’s not a small thing because when I’ve coached people over the years around things like morning pages and journaling, I tell them to pick a notebook, a journal, a pen that they really love because part of it is the somatic experience of writing. We could digress onto that. 

Full Aliveness And Alignment

So almost always I’d begin my morning pages with a brief, check-in just, what’s here physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. What am I aware of that’s here right now? And then I just start free streaming. There are meta-themes that come back over and over again, which are really the themes of my life. Like it would be around, “Am I experiencing full aliveness in this moment and in my relationships and in my work?” Now that can shape itself in different ways, but I’m always monitoring my full “aliveness”.

Sean: [00:07:10] I would love to know what you think of as full aliveness? Just, for someone who’s not familiar with it.

Jim: [00:07:17] Okay. It means many things to me, one, it means being totally available to “this-now-moment” with my complete creative presence. Now that’s a big mouthful because it includes what does it mean to be in “this-now-moment” as opposed to living in the future, living in the past, what does it mean to live in this moment? Second, what does it mean to be fully available to this moment? Most of us are not fully available to this moment because we’re still in some sort of reactivity either related to the past or the anticipation of the future, or we’re not available to this full moment because we have an integrity breach in our life that is consuming some psychic, emotional, physical energy, which we can talk a lot about because that’s another theme that comes up in my morning pages, is my full alignment in integrity. 

So, aliveness and alignment. Aliveness to me means being fully available to “this-now-moment” with my complete creative expression. So another part of being fully available to“this-now-moment”means that I can experience my experience in“this-now-moment”. I can feel my feelings, I’m in touch with my body. I’m aware of both my subtle body and my gross body, my physical sensations, as well as my energetic harness, which is part of being fully alive. And then am I able to bring my full creative expression to “this-now-moment”? Which doesn’t necessarily mean in every “now moment” doing a creative thing, but it means that I am surrendered and available to this “now moment”. 

So full aliveness is I’m here now being with what is fully available to what wants to be. That’s what full aliveness means to me. I can feel all feelings. I can imagine all possibilities. I’m not encumbered by guilt, shame, resentment from the past. I’m not worrying about plans in the future. I’m just here now, fully alive in every fiber of my being. So that’s a big part of what “morning pages” is for me, checking in on my full aliveness. And as I mentioned, that usually involves a real quick integrity inventory. Am I in full integrity in “this-now-moment”? I’ve never met anybody who can be fully alive, who has integrity breaches. I check in with that.

Those are meta-themes that come up and then I have on like themes that will occur for a couple of days to a couple of weeks. Like right now, I’m really enjoying the theme of writing how I want to die. So I’m 68 years old. Death is a much more present reality. Usually in my meditation, I think about death for a few minutes every day. So I’ve been exploring now, how do I want to breathe my last breath? It just came to me. One of my mentors, Gay Hendricks wrote a little thing in one of his books. He wrote about how he wanted to die, that’s brilliant. So I’ve been writing about how I want to die. That’s been going on for a couple of weeks.

Another thing we’re in our summer home, we have six kids, seven soon to be eight grandkids. Most of them have been here for a month or so. So anything that’s coming up around my relationship with any of my children or my grandchildren. I’m writing about my relationships as a theme for this month. So I have meta themes and then I have episodic themes that are usually capturing my attention. And then like most good morning pages, I just free associate, whatever else comes up. I just write until I fill the pages and then I stop. 

Sean: [00:11:25] I’m wondering, you were mentioning full aliveness. How much of your time are you spent in that state being fully alive?

Jim: [00:11:34] That’s such a good question. Well, certainly the vast majority of my time. I imagine there are some times when I am choosing to deaden myself, when I’m choosing not to fully face the “now moment”, when I am choosing an integrity breach. But those at this point in my life are fairly rare. So I would say I’m in this experience of full aliveliness, certainly 90% of my time. And more importantly, Sean, because this has been a devoted practice of my life for decades. I’m incredibly aware when I’m not in full aliveness. So, many of the people that I talked to in coach, one of the first things I want them to do is get a set point of what full aliveness actually is and feels like, and then begin to develop enough self-awareness so they know when they’re not fully alive when they’re in a drift, when they’re numbing, when they’re not fully being with the moment.

So, you can catch it then because… do I drift out of full aliveness? I do. I don’t do as much as I used to, but more importantly, I catch the drift very quickly and can bring it to a choice point. Do I want to continue to drift, numb, not face or do I want to recommit to my full aliveness? I do the same thing in my relationship with Debbie, we’re committed to closeness and to removing all barriers to closeness. If somebody said to me, what percentage of the time are you and Debbie close? Well, the vast majority of the time, again, probably 95% of the time. We’re really good at catching when we’re not close, when something has interrupted our closeness, then we get to make a choice. Are we willing to recommit to being close? Or do we want to stay separate for a little while? And I don’t mean, I don’t mean physically separate because we maintain closeness while honoring the rhythms of physical closeness and separation and all that. I mean, psychically, emotionally, spiritually, energetically, relationally. So, there you go.

Developing Self-awareness

Sean: [00:13:56] That’s so beautiful. I love that moment around the awareness where it’s there and when you’re alive to that, you’re fully attuned to that. I found that that was just transformational. And I’ve got so many further layers to go then you, but those little moments have been absolute game changers. And you mentioned that just the first mark of a conscious leader is around self-awareness, it’s such a vital, important thing. I would love to know for you. How have you gone about developing more self-awareness? 

Jim: [00:14:24] yeah, I say to people all the time, I’m pretty familiar with three ways to develop self-awareness and there might be others, but these three are pretty useful. Number one self-reflection so I don’t know many people who become self-aware without some degree of self-reflection, even you, I know you were an elite athlete. I’m not an elite athlete, but I love sports. And like I said, I love pickleball. Pickleball has become the fastest growing sport in the world, especially with old folks like me, but you know, most people just play pickleball casually, and I love to play pickleball casually, but like I want to grow in self-awareness.

So after a pickleball game, I deconstruct my game. How many unforced errors that I have, what percentage of serves that I get in, what percentage of return of serves? Did I get to the kitchen line fast enough? How did I do it? The hand speed ball game? I deconstruct my game in order to be self-reflective to grow. I think if people don’t have some sort of self-reflection practice and there are many, it’s impossible to grow in self-awareness. 

So that’s one, a second way to grow in self awareness is through instruments. The favorite instrument that I use is the Enneagram. I think it’s an incredibly powerful tool for helping people grow in self-awareness. So there are instrument tools, Myers Briggs, DISC, Performax MCMI, all those kinds of things, but I think there’s a place for tools in growing in self-awareness. There are a couple that I really like. 

And then the third way you can grow in self-awareness is by creating a feedback rich environment. Again, most leaders that I know that are transforming and becoming catalytic, transformational leaders have a regular practice of self-reflection. They create feedback rich environments, and they’re open to tools that give them a snapshot of their psychology, their physiology, their consciousness, so that they can become more self-reflective. 

Now the fourth one, which is becoming more and more standard fare. And it’s become part of my life in the last probably decade or so is “medicine journeys”. So psilocybin, MDMA, Ayahuasca, peyote, whatever it is. There are things available in the realm of self-awareness and certainly things way beyond self-awareness that are available in what I would call conscious medicine states that many people have been doing for millennia, but are becoming more and more mainstream, since Michael Pollan’s book. And since all the work that Tim Ferriss is doing around bringing these things into the world. So I’m now suggesting that might be a fourth. I say there are three, there might be a fourth way to grow in self-awareness that I found personally incredibly valuable and many, many of the people that I hang out with and work with are using that portal as well. So those would be ways that I think people can grow in self-awareness.

Creating A Feedback Rich Environment

Sean: [00:17:29] I love feedback rich environments. So I’m thinking for you, as the master, what does a great feedback rich environment look like? And we can use a working context here. I’m just wondering if you had a vivid picture of what that is.

Jim: [00:17:42] Absolutely. So, first of all, I always ask people, are they willing to create a rich feedback environment? Because everybody says, yeah, I want feedback. But if you tell me you want feedback and you’re not getting feedback, then I’ll tell you, you better go deeper and see if you’re willing, really willing to have a feedback rich environment. Because wanting feedback and being willing to have a feedback rich environment are two very different things. If people are willing to have a feedback rich environment, the simplest thing to do is just regularly ask for feedback. Now, the problem is that if you just ask people for feedback, you’re not going to get quality feedback. 

So let’s put it in a business context. Let’s say that you make a presentation. Let’s say you’re an analyst and you’re working in an investment firm and you make a presentation, after the presentation go to the relevant parties that you want feedback from. Let’s say your manager, maybe your manager’s manager, a couple of peers, anybody. And say I would like some feedback. Would you be willing to give me feedback on my presentation? Most people say, yes, you don’t have to say right now, I’ll give you 24 hours to think about whatever you want. But then here’s how you ask for the feedback is really important. 

Here’s a hack, say to people I’d like you to give me a number between one and 10, 10 being I absolutely killed it. It was world class. It could not be improved upon. One being it was a complete disaster. Is it alright if I say, fuck? It was a complete disaster. Fuck. You could not have done worse. Give me a number, some place between one and 10. Good. So they’re going to give you a number. If you give me a number less than 10 greater than one, tell me one thing, practical thing I could have done to improve the number from seven to eight, six to seven, eight to nine eight. Tell me one thing that I did well enough that you’re not giving me “a one”. So tell me one thing I could do to improve and tell me one thing I did well enough that you’re not giving me “a one”.

Now I’ve found that when you ask for feedback that way, you get much better feedback. You know, some people are really great at giving feedback, some people aren’t. Being a great feedback giver is a whole other master skill, but it basically comes first and foremost from your ability to pay attention, to really reduce your mind chatter and see another human. So that’s the way I like to ask for feedback in a setting like that. Another one in a work setting would be, you know, trust is obviously an incredibly important commodity in work environments. A great question I like to ask people is, tell me one thing I could do or be that would cause you to trust me even more.

So it’s assuming some amount of trust, which there almost always is. If it’s nothing more than I trust you not to take an ice pick and jam it into my forehead in the kitchen. Okay. So there’s some trust here. So what could I do or be that would allow you to trust me even more? That’s a fabulous question. By the way, I do those kinds of questions. Those are great to ask in your intimate relationship as well. Give me a number on a scale of one to 10 on how I’m doing as an intimate partner. If it’s anything less than 10, what, tell me one thing I could do to improve and tell me one thing I’m already doing that puts me above a zero.

You can do it as a parent. If your kids are of a certain age, you can ask them the same kind of a question. So that’s something, that is a practical way to create a feedback rich environment. Things like normal feedback tools in most organizations, I don’t find to be extremely useful. And most people don’t report that they’re extremely useful, especially if they’re like annual or semi-annual, they’re virtually a waste of time.

Sean: [00:21:55] Yeah. Jim, I just want to highlight a point you brought up here a minute ago and this isn’t only applicable to the business context. It could be your close relationships at home. It could be you as a parent and, and you know how much your work’s transformed me. And I think that’s been the key thing for me is applying this in my intimate relationships as a father. And there’s just so much beauty in that. 

Power of Questions

You brought up something too that I just love, and that’s just the power of questions. You are an exquisite asker of great questions. Is this a skill you’ve had? I mean, of course this has been developed. I’m just wondering about the thought that you put behind great questions.

Jim: [00:22:29] Well, I think I’ve always been curious and I love to learn. So most people who are curious and like to learn, tend to ask questions. The other thing that’s true about me is I love to know people and I love to map the terrain of people’s internal experience. So I’ve become really good at asking questions that allow me to know people if they want to be known. And the deal with me is my curiosity and my learning is pretty focused. I’m not extremely curious about what makes a jet engine work or how to build a world-class Lego project. A lot of things don’t interest me, but I’m very clear about the things that do interest me and around those I’m deeply curious.

So if you find me at a cocktail party, which you won’t find very often, but periodically I end up at something like that or some sort of gathering. In order to cut through the normal social dynamic of the things I would do is like, let’s say you and I were seated together at a table pretty early on. I might say, Sean, I’d really love to have a meaningful, maybe even transformational conversation with you if you’re up for that. And if you are, here’s what I’d like to know. What are things, subjects, people that you’re passionate about. It’s not going to be a thousand, give me two or three that totally lights you up because then I’d like to ask you questions about those things and about you or Sean, tell me two or three things that you know a lot about, not just intellectually, but experientially, they might or might not be things you’re passionate about because I’d like to ask you questions about those so that I can walk away from this dinner with a lot of learnings.

And by the way, I’m happy to tell you two or three things I’m passionate about. And two or three things that I know a lot about. If you wanted to know a lot about them, we could have a good conversation. Those kinds of things, I’ve found to create meaningful conversations, which I prefer over just any kind of social banter I have. I actually have no capacity for. I’d rather just sit in the corner by myself. 

Sean: [00:25:03] What I love about those questions is automatically, you’re just going levels deeper, like right off the bat. If they’re willing, if they say yes, you just get so much deeper. And that’s what I love. It leads to so much more beautiful conversation the rest of the evening.

Jim: [00:25:16] Yeah. And it leads to the possibility of real connection. If we get a bingo where we’re both passionate about the same thing, we could have the beginning of a relationship. If we get a bingo where we both know a lot about something that really matters to us, we could get a bingo. But if I don’t do that, if I just talk about the normal loose chatter, there’s no possibility of anything coming from that, that is going to be at all transformation.

Risking Vulnerability

And there are other questions, if it’s a long dinner and we get going, then we can explore even deeper questions. You know, we love that. If I were to really, really know you, what would I know about you? That’s a deeper question. Another one, if, if let’s say now we’re, you know, a couple of beers in, or a couple of articles or a couple of glasses of wine, and I might say this, what do you really not want me or anybody else to know about you? And I’ll tell you first, I’ll go first. You know, stuff like that. So now we’re risking vulnerability, which if we’re going to go deep in the relationship, but eventually we’re going to choose to risk vulnerability. So it’s just how deep, how fast, how far do we want to go? 

Sean: [00:26:29] I would love to explore that parallel journey with risk and vulnerability. Is it crucial that you’re both in sync on that journey together in order for those levels to be reached?

Jim: [00:26:42] Well, think about. In all the relationships you’ve had in life, where you reach a level of, let’s say intimacy, and I’m not talking solely or exclusively, or necessarily primarily about sexual or physical intimacy. I like the word intimacy, by the way, we stick a couple of hyphens in it and you get into me. See, you think about all the relationships where you’ve gotten to some level of intimacy, some level of connection, some level of alignment, some level of a holy shit moment. Didn’t almost all of those involve shared vulnerability?

Now there might be an exception to that. If you’re in some sort of guided experience where you’re with somebody who’s guiding, it might be primarily you who’s getting vulnerable, but even there,…  I spend a proportion of my time coaching people, and I say to them right at the get go, let’s just be clear here that this isn’t a typical therapeutic relationship where you’re going to get vulnerable and I’m going to stay virtually impenetrable.

I’m going to reveal to you as much as you reveal to me. Now, I’m not going to necessarily talk about my frustrations that I missed a six foot, the other day and lost a golf match. And what that says about my ego and my identity and all that. But anything that’s real to our conversation I’ll get vulnerable with. So to answer your question, I think there’s a shared vulnerability where we are trusting ourselves and the conversation and each other enough to successively peel layers away to find deeper and deeper possibilities for co-creativity as well as connection.

Sean: [00:28:31] That co-creativity and connection is just such a wonderful thing. You bring this up and I asked the question and now in hindsight, it’s so obvious. It’s funny, it’s one of my best friend’s birthdays, and over the last two years, we’ve just gone to so many layers deeper because of this, those shared experiences, that trust. Yeah. I guess when you really think hard on some of those relationships it’s incredibly obvious why it’s led to such a great relationship.

Exploration Versus Exploitation

You mentioned something I just need to pick on. And then that’s around curiosity mentioning you’re a curious person, but only curious on certain things. So I’m thinking about that whole exploration versus exploitation, like what are you doing during that exploration phase? Where all of a sudden you go, oh, wow, this is something I missed.

Jim: [00:29:16] Okay. Great. So, I brought it up, so let’s stay with it. I picked up a pickleball racket for the first time, three years ago. I played a lot of other sports, picked up a racket. I played once. It’s very casual, played with a couple of our kids and grandkids. And after about 30 minutes, I thought, I love this now. How did I know? How did I know that I would be interested? By the way, this is relevant whether you’re talking about pickleball or neuroscience or tantric sex, or it doesn’t matter what the category is. How do you know? Okay.  The first thing I feel is a somatic experience when I’m around something that I can feel excited about. Not just titillating me, but starting to excite me. And that feels like an upwelling of energy in my body. It feels like a stance, a posture of leaning in versus neutral or leaning back. It feels like a physical likeness. It feels like my body is starting to tell me, yes, I belong here. By the way, I can feel the same thing in relationships. I can sit with somebody for two minutes and I can feel in my body whether my aliveness is going up, staying the same or going down. 

So many, many people are not tuned into their somatic awareness of their body intelligence. We talk about IQ, EEQ, emotional intelligence, but now we’re talking about BQ, body intelligence. So after 30 minutes of pickleball, there’s something about this. Like now, I try to make sense of as a little kid growing up, we played countless hours of ping pong. I loved ping pong. I don’t play ping pong anymore, but I loved that. There was something about the flow of it in my body. Second, in college I took two years of badminton. Who the hell signs up for badminton? But the teacher happened to be a nationally ranked badminton player. And all I’d ever done was sit in the backyard and play social badminton. Well, competitive badminton is a hell of a sport. It involves quickness, agility, speed, a lot of really cool stuff. I hadn’t touched badminton for many, many years. Pickleball has a whole lot more to do with ping pong and badminton than it does with tennis. Most people think of it as 10. So I could correlate it back to somatic experiences from the past where I felt alive.

30 minutes into the pickleball thing, I felt alive. Three months later, I signed up because  once I find something I start playing. Three months later, I flew to Hawaii to go to a three-day pickleball camp because I want to get good 10 best teachers in the world. Now I start stalking those teachers. So now I get a personal instructor. This is how wild I am, once I get devoted to something. During COVID, it was hard to get a real teacher in person. One of, I think one of the best teachers in the world is a guy named Morgan Evans who lives in Southern California. He’s Australian. I ping him and I say, Hey, Morgan you’re just sitting around there on your butt. And you’re a great teacher. How about if we do a virtual lesson, I’ll bring an iPad, an iPhone, we’ll get on zoom. I’ll put on some earbuds and you can give me a virtual lesson. We can stay COVID safe. He said, “never thought about it. Let’s try it.” So we did it. 

Now I’m setting up more and more virtual lessons. And then I bought a pickleball machine because I just want to drill and drill and drill. Now I would tell you that pickleball just sounds silly to many people, but it’s not about pickleball. It’s about my curiosity, and my passion. You could be doing the exact same thing, like I said, with neuroscience or contemplating altered states of consciousness, what lights up your body? What gets you leaning in? What can you not, not say yes to? What do you have to say yes to? Those are the things that I invest my life in. Those are the things that bring forward all of my curiosity. It just so happens that consciousness, leadership and relationship are the top three over the course of my 68 years, and that leads to a calling and career. Pickleball isn’t going to lead to a calling and a career, but the things that really interest me, consciousness, relationships, and leadership that leads to something that’s not only a calling, but a career. That’s nice when your calling and your career can overlap.

Mastery, Pattern Recognition And Energetic Recognition

Sean: [00:34:03] You’ve gotten better at pickle ball and even around coaching and leadership. Has this body awareness, has it extended, even outside yourself where you can just, even by sitting there grasp patterns and ideas around things that are going to transpire into the future around your work.

Jim: [00:34:21] In my body or in other people’s bodies?

Sean: [00:34:25] I’m probably doing a pretty bad job asking this question, Jim. So I’m thinking about a great chess player. And I’ll tie this back into my sports background, great chess players. They can look at the board and they have a sense of, a feel for what’s going to happen next. In my lacrosse days I got, as I performed much better and got better, I would have ideas. And I knew where the ball was going to be in where certain people were gonna be on the field. Well, before it ever happened. That awareness is something I just searched for continually. So I’m wondering if that comes out for you and if that’s the same type of thing as this body intelligence?

Jim: [00:34:56] Well, let me ask you this. If you don’t mind, let me ask you a couple of questions. Let’s go back to lacrosse where you had a mastery of this knowing. Did you know it in your body? Like, could you feel it in your body? When in the moment when you thought I know where that, like Gretzky said, I go to where the puck is going to be. That whole thing, or Larry Bird could see the whole court incident. Was that something you experienced in your body? If so, where was it located? Did you feel it in your chest? Did you feel it in your abdomen? Did you feel it in your back, in your jaw? Was it somatic or was it more of an energetic intuitiveness or was it more of a high level of pattern recognition that you didn’t even need to? Obviously when you’re playing lacrosse, you can’t think about it unlike golf. It wasn’t a stationary game. It’s a movement game, like hockey or basketball or something like that. How did you know what you knew?

Sean: [00:35:58] This is beautiful. I think that there’s two separate things going on here. One is around the actual skill. That was where the level of mastery that was just happening at a subconscious level. I had done those things so many times, I did not have to think about performing the actual action. When I’m describing the ball and people moving on the field that was both a combination of pattern awareness, and then just energetic movement where someone hadn’t even moved yet, but I had a sense of what they were doing. So, for me, I think it was two different things. It was the subconscious level of mastery, that deeper level of knowing how to do certain things that it happens subconsciously. But then the energy awareness and pattern recognition around things that were going to transpire on the field. I don’t know if that answers the question that’s just kind of…

Jim: [00:36:41] love it. I love it. So again, we’re flipping the interview here. I listen to you, I hear three things. One, thousands and thousands and thousands of reps. So if I picked up a lacrosse stick right now and we started to play catch. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do it. You don’t have to think about it. You just do it. You just know it right. Instantaneous. Yeah.

Sean: [00:37:02] I haven’t picked one up in a few years. I can pick one up right now, I can literally feel the bodily emotions exactly how it would feel no matter what I’m doing with it.

Jim: [00:37:11] Yeah. Actually at this point, the stick in your body is becoming inseparable. 

Sean: [00:37:13] One hundred percent. 

Jim: [00:37:15] Exactly. Okay. And that came from thousands of repetitions. Good, pickleball, same thing. I bought a pickleball machine. I can load it with a hundred balls. It throws me balls at whatever interval speed spin I want, why? I want reps, reps, reps, reps at that level. Okay. So we got that. So that’s a necessary ingredient of mastery. Next thought, pattern recognition. So now we’re not just talking about you with a stick and a ball. Now we’re talking about infinitely more complex things as human beings are moving around in space and time. You started to be able to recognize those patterns, a whole other dimension.

So now when I’m playing pickleball, most pickleball that I play is played with doubles. I’m getting better and better and better at pattern recognition. In pickleball, I’m always looking for the open space, because you want to put the ball where the open spaces are. Third thought, and this is the one I want to grab is you mentioned energetic recognition. Now this is an interesting one probably because when I talk to most world-class athletes, you could start to feel where somebody was going to go before they went there. You could start to feel the movement of energy. In, as the game was developing, that’s a totally different thing. 

So one of my mentors is a guy named Loch Kelly. Kelly is the mentor in the realm of joke, Chan Buddhism or meditation. I love him, I love his books. Debbie and I went and studied with Loch for a week in Costa Rica.  If you listen to his journey around what does it mean to be aware and the parameters of my body? And for example, my sight and hearing. He said that when he was a kid, he was evidently a pretty good hockey player. And he heard the statement that people have eyes in the back of their head. He thought, what does that mean? And through these practices of meditation and glimpses beyond meditation, what he discovered is you can actually have energetic awareness of things that are transpiring beyond and outside of your sight and your hearing, your taste, your smell, and your physical touch, any cultivated eyes in the back of his head, which is not an uncommon thing.

What his point is for people who get devoted to cultivating that, that is this energetic awareness now. So you cultivated it in lacrosse. I’m cultivating it in pickleball. I’ve cultivated it in my relationship with Debbie. So let’s get real practical here. We’ve had thousands of reps at practicing world-class conversation, we’re not accidental about it. We know what creates world-class conversation. We practice world-class conversation. That’s equivalent to me and my pickleball machine, or you throwing and catching, throwing, and catching particular moves. That’s the equivalent of that, right? And then we’ve gotten the pattern recognition. Now here’s what I want to say about that is, and you, everybody knows this. You can tell whether your intimate partner, you can tell their mood just by pattern recognition, literally how they’re holding their physical body, their facial structure, the tone with which they say ummm, that’s pattern recognition. 

So we’ve cultivated that. So have you, but there’s something even beyond that. I can sense Debbie’s mood, when she’s not even physically in my presence. I can sense where her mood is trending because there’s all different subjects. I’ve cultivated, energetic, oneness with her as a practice. And so I can feel her energetically and she can feel me. And we can start to feel where the relationship is going, which is incredibly useful because it allows us to anticipate what we might call an energetic, upper limit, where we’re going to crash our heads against too much exquisite love. And we’re going to pick a fight or something, or we can see that we’re exhausted and we’re going to get into some low energy depleted state that isn’t going to be good for the relationship. So these three things that you identified; tens of thousands of reps, pattern recognition, and then this other state of feeling. I just don’t know what else to call it, feeling energy and sensing things before they occur, because in the field, in the realm of energy they’re already occurring and you can start to feel, I think if you deconstruct most great creators, innovators, leaders, they’re doing those things. Whether they can label them or not. Does that make sense?

Can Energetic Recognition Be Cultivated?

Sean: [00:42:42] It does make sense. I feel like there’s even so many layers there for the people we can even call them creatives or athletes that transcend to that higher level. Is there anything that you’ve uncovered that allows them to get to that place? Or is it just around the deconstruction and reps?

Jim: [00:42:57] A couple of things. Some people are just gifted, it just came to them. They just get it because if you ask them, how did you develop the ability to do that? They would have no idea. They couldn’t teach you how to do what they know how to do. They’re good, but let’s stay at that third level of energy and how energy is moving. First of all, I think it involves being open to the possibility that there are dimensions beyond the gross sensory experience, the material that is happening. It requires at least being open to that. Some people aren’t open to that, they’re radical materialists. They don’t believe there’s anything else going on, other than that, which can exist in that plane. Once I’m open to it, am I willing to start to learn its language, the language of energy? And am I willing to start to understand how I experience the language of energy? 

Now these are big buckets that people could spend hours exploring. And there are people who have spent their life cultivating this, the ability to be with energy, to understand energy, to move energy. So energy healers, shamonic practices, all that stuff that’s gone on for years. Again, I want to tell you that most great leaders who wouldn’t recognize that there’s energy at all… If I start asking him questions, what was your sense of what was going to happen in that meeting? And then they pause and they go, I knew 10 minutes before she said that she was going to say that. That’s not just pattern recognition. Sometimes there’s something else going on. And I say, because they haven’t thought about it, I say, is that been something you’ve been able to feel much of your life?

And then not always, but you might get something like this, actually, if you asked me to think about it, I have, you know and then they might tell a story. Like, you know, my dad was an alcoholic and I began to sense based on how the front door opened, what was going to happen in my world for the rest of that night. So they began to be able to feel what was going on and they didn’t know they did it, but they could sense moods. They can sense inclinations at a non-verbal intuitive, energetic level. So, but that’s also a cultivable skill. So if people want that and they’re willing to develop it, there are ways to cultivate that skill.

Sean: [00:45:56] Thinking about skill cultivation, believe me, we could go down hours and hours. Just because of your articulation of skill development of mastery, this seems like this is something you’ve really thought deeply about. Is that the case or are you just so experienced in learning multiple things that it just kind of natural for you to understand it to this level?

Jim: [00:46:17] It’s just natural. At least I was looking at your website. You did something with Josh Waitzkin  or you referenced Josh Waitzkin to somebody. 

Sean: [00:46:27] When you brought that question earlier around people that really… Yeah. Waitzkin, been pretty foundational? I know you’re close with him.

Jim: [00:46:33] Yeah. He’s a buddy. So if you asked me, do I understand learning or skill acquisition? Well, immediately think about Josh, you know? No, is the answer to the question, if what we’re talking about is Josh. Who literally spent a lifetime, not just becoming a world class chess player or pushing hands, or,… now he’s foil surfing and all these things. He not only becomes world-class at those things, but he deconstructs how people learn and how he works. So to answer your question, am I like that? No, not a million times. No. In fact, one of the first times Josh and I ever had lunch together with our mutual friend, a guy named Graham Dunkin and Debbie, the four of us were together.

And Josh asked, started asking me some of the deconstructing questions about how I knew what I knew. And I wasn’t even that clear about how I knew what I knew. So I think I’m a novice in all that compared to people who really are learning experts and about the things that matter to me, I’m pretty good at skill acquisition. Now, again, the things that matter to me just to review deeply consciousness, relationship, and leadership. So I’m pretty good at understanding skill acquisition around those things, because I have just been a learner and a skill acquirer in those three areas. So that makes me able to come alongside somebody who wants to grow in consciousness, leadership, or relationship and map the territory a little bit to help her or him become more skillful.

Because I know that you want to do these three things before you do those two things, because you can’t do that thing until you’ve done these three things, and those two things. It’s a little bit like the other thing I’m passionate about is golf. And I pursued great golf teachers all over the United States. And one of the things to me that makes a great golf teacher, a great teacher of any state. Yes. They can immediately after just a couple of golf swings, they can immediately see the entire picture of me and my body, my somatic experience, my flexibility, my strength, my balance, my capacity to move, my sense of spatial relationship. The great teachers can see and sense that in any given moment, right? And then they can map that to what a great golf swing is. Now, again, the greatest teachers don’t map my golf swing to Tiger Woods in his prime, because that would be absurd. His body can get in places my body can not get into. They map my golf swing to an advanced picture of my golf swing.

That might look more like Ernie ELs because our body type is different, our flexibility. Okay, good. So they can do those two things, instant snapshot mapping to the highest possibility, but then what makes them fabulous is they can deconstruct my entire learning curve and say, the first thing we need to do is change your grip three centimeters. Well, what they already already know is that the biggest problem with my golf swing is that my sequencing is all out of whack from the top of my swing. I start my hands before my lower body, which means I’m going to cast the club and come over the top, but they can’t start there because they know if they don’t get my grip right, I can’t get my stance and posture right. Which is going to cause a fundamental flaw in my takeaway. So until my takeaway and the top of my swing is just right, they can’t talk to me about sequencing. Isn’t that true? 

So great learners, deconstruct sequence. If I were going to say to you, one of my kids is getting into lacrosse. I want to learn about lacrosse. Would you teach me? Would you start by teaching me about energetic movement on the field or pattern recognition? You’d say here’s how you hold a stick. Even though you could see the entire future. So all that to say in certain areas, consciousness, relationship, and leadership, but very particular aspects of leadership. I’m pretty good at talking to somebody for a short period of time, getting a glimpse of where they’re currently at, seeing the possibility that exists for their future self, and then deconstructing their learning down to a couple of the next steps they need to take in order to get themselves set up. So all that’s very secure. It’s just to say, that’s what I’m doing. I’m not necessarily good at that, like Josh is as a universal principle on how to be a world-class learner.

Sean: [00:51:13] Jim, one of the things I just appreciate so much is the level of depth that you were able to go to to basically say that you’re not at that level of learning, which is just, I hope people understand that as well. For you though, I am so curious now, where do you feel you’ve reached the highest level we can call it mastery or expertise just for yourself individually?

Jim: [00:51:38] Well, it would be in those three categories. So probably if you asked me to rank those three consciousness, relationships, whether they be professional or personal, whether they be familial or sociological and then leadership, I would say I probably have the most understanding and mastery of intimate, personal relationships. I don’t know how many levels of black belts there are, but I’m a 10th degree black belt. I would say in the area of consciousness the difficulty here is I can easily imagine people like Ramana Maharshi or Jesus or Buddha, or even contemporaries that, … but I know the field, I know the terrain, I have some degree of mastery, especially consciousness, not as an end as itself, but as a means to the end of equanimity, peace, freedom, aliveness. I have a high degree of mastery around that.

Not necessarily, the stratifications of the levels of consciousness that many of the great traditions have talked about. I don’t know much about any of that, but I know a lot about consciousness as a means to being equanimous, peaceful, imperturbable, happy, alive, present. I know a lot about that. And then on leadership, there are many, many people who know a ton more about leadership, but I know a lot about conscious leadership and what it looks like to be a leader who takes radical responsibility for the influence they’re having in the world and how to be that kind of a leader in the world. So those are the three areas that I have some mastery of. That’s probably the only three areas I have any mastery of actually. Yeah, but those have been my life’s devotion. 

Sean: [00:53:47] We’re going to dive into some of the specifics there on leadership. I just love hearing and exploring all this. I’m wondering though, if you’re looking at different chapters of your life it’s pretty remarkable to have that rounded, that skill set. How long have you been in this place where you felt you had this level of expertise in those three domains?

Jim: [00:54:07] Yeah. Great question. So if we look chronologically, like I said, I’m a 68. I feel like I have had meaningful mastery for the last 20 years. So certainly since my late forties. If I divided my life, I’d never done this before. I might do it this way. I would say in era one of my life, which would be early formation, and I’m going to make it, we can subdivide this, but let’s say up through my twenties. I was largely experiencing the ache, the existential angst in the center of my chest, through the family of origin that I was ,through pursuing things like relationships, through competing athletically, through just the normal development of an ego identity, through getting degreed and pedigreed.

All of that was really in service of me developing the hunger, the thirst, the insatiable appetite for freedom, for peace, for connection, for the big things that would drive me all of my life. So one of the things I do, this is important when I work with leaders, when I coach them is I want to find out through inquiry with them. What are the big things that have been driving them since they were a little kid, because it’s still driving them. So for me, one of the questions that’s been driving me relationally since I was a little kid, is if I am just who I am, am I lovable? Or do I have to do something for me to largely meet the needs of other people in order to be lovable?

That question was in me from the time I was a little kid and in one form or another, I’ve been exploring that. Some leaders I work with it would be this, “do I have value apart from what I do? That question has been in them since they were a little kid. By the way, these are the people who become great doers, great achievers, people like you, people who will become world-class athletes then world-class entrepreneurs, then great podcasters. Often what’s motivating them is drive to do. Now, if you ask them, what’s driving you, if they get still enough, quiet and if they go into the shadows, if they go into the basement, they go in and explore the deepest, darkest place, what they discover is I don’t believe I have value apart from doing. 

For others they might be asking the question, is the world fundamentally a dangerous or safe place? And their whole life that’s the question they’ve been asking. Now they ask at a very practical level and very deep and existential. For others, it might be what is under my control and what isn’t? And how do I relate to control? There are these fundamental questions. For the first 25 years of my life, I was deeply embedded in those questions that I was beginning to try to answer them. But I was more feeling the pull of the question when I worked with people. One of the questions I want to know is what’s the question you’ve been asking all your life.

That’s a really good question. What is the question? Whether you like this word or not, what is the question that your soul is hungry to know the answer to? God, that’s a good question. 

Sean: [00:56:07] That’s a great question. 

Jim: [00:56:09] And that’s not something you say, just let’s go have a beer and tell me your soul’s deepest question. But that is the kind of thing where you go sit in silence, solitude, and fasting for five days until everything gets stripped away and see what’s there. That’s the kind of thing you discover in a medicine journey. That’s the kind of thing that you discover, in deep, deep reflection. Okay. That’d be the first period of my life. Then the next period, let’s say my thirties and forties, I was looking to answer the question. The question of am I lovable apart from giving and meeting the needs of other people?

Another question I was asking all of my life was, “is it possible to have peace at the center of my being?” Because as a little kid, I just didn’t, it didn’t matter what I did. I could achieve athletically, or I could do well academically or socially, but when I went to bed at night, there was still this aching hunger in the center of my being. So I was asking, am I lovable apart from meeting the needs of other people, which leads to a lot of codependency and stuff like that? Is there such a thing as imperturbable peace? I was asking those questions then in my thirties and forties, I got about to answer. And I had a lot of trial and error, a lot of failures that didn’t answer it.

And I was deeply devoted to spirituality. My advanced degree is in theology. I explored that realm as a possibility. I got some answers, but that was my first career. I became a minister at the largest church in the United States. I mean, I was at the pinnacle of that career and I just quit and walked away because I thought this isn’t answering the deepest questions yet. And so then I started this pursuit of so thirties and forties finding technologies and modalities that answered those questions, not at a theoretical, but at an experiential level, which included creating some deep, deep relationships where I found that I am not only lovable beyond my ability to help others, care for others, love others. 

My lovability is permanent and it’s not what I get from other people. It’s found in “this-now-moment”. Okay. I settled that by the time I was about 45, 50 years old, and I settled peace by about that time. So now you asked me for mastery that’s in that last 20 year period. So that’s what feels like mastery to me now. And mastery to me is that I don’t have to put much effort into it. Like I have mastery at articulating and communicating these kinds of ideas. 

So Debbie was just going out to go play pickleball actually with some of her friends. And she said, what are you going to do? So I’m doing a podcast and I don’t have to prepare, I don’t have to think. I didn’t talk to you ahead of time. You just sent me the invite. I actually tuned in energetically to what you’re up to. There’s a match here because I get invited to a lot of these, I say no to most of them. So I don’t need to prepare because I’ve been preparing all of my life. I have mastery at doing this, which is talking about the things that matter to you and me at an experiential cognitive, somatic experiential level, that’s mastery that I’ve had, like I said for about 20 years.

Quitting Versus Completing

Sean: [01:01:16] I’m wondering if you’re, while you’re able to, to step back and analyze this, or are there things you would have stripped away sooner or, or holes you went down that just led you in the wrong direction. We always analyze successes. I’m also wondering about analyzing some of these failures where you’re like, you know what, maybe I could’ve sped this up and maybe the answer is, you know what? No, you can’t speed this up. That’s the point, Sean?  I don’t know.

Jim: [01:01:38] Well, there are two ways to answer it. The way I would answer it is I couldn’t have sped it up and I couldn’t have done anything other than what I did. I just couldn’t. This was my path. Now Deb and I joke all the time. I have a fairly traditional educational background. I went through K through 12 and then I immediately went to college and I majored in business management and economics. And I worked for a couple of years. I spent four years getting an advanced degree in theology. Some of my peers who are a little bit older than me are kind of the gang that went to Harvard and started doing a combination of things. They started, they dropped out of Harvard. They started doing LSD and then a ton of them went to India and started meditating earlier and all that. And every time I hear any of them and I love their writings and what they’ve done in the world, I say to Debbie, God darn it. I wasted a bunch of time in college and graduate school in theology. I should have been in an ashram learning how to meditate and find transcendence, but it wasn’t mine to do. If you’re looking for it, the first thing I’d say to most people is they’re on their path and their path is perfect and you can’t hurry it up.

It’s just going to be what it’s going to be. And it’s going to take as long as it takes and you’ll get where you go. That’s actually true. Now at a practical level, I would say to people when you’re pursuing learning, there’s an ability to know sooner rather than later, whether you’ve exhausted this teacher, this mentor, this experience, this clan, this tradition, whether you’ve exhausted the learning. I tend to be a guy who is incredibly loyal so I can get into something and stay beyond the learning. Now again, at the highest level, that was my path. That’s what I had to learn. Now I do teach people. Have you gotten all the learnings that were yours to get out of that relationship, whether it’s an intimate relationship or a business relationship or a therapeutic or coaching relationship.

And I think it’s useful to ask, have I gotten all the learnings? And becoming skilled at knowing when you have gotten all or most of the learnings so that now you can move on to the next experience, the next clan, the next tribe, the next mentor, the next coach. So you get the learnings. I think there is something about that that can be incredibly useful to people. I just wrote a blog post on, are you completing or quitting in your life? And it’s a very delicate thing because quitting a relationship or a circumstance… Did I quit the job or did I complete the job? Did I quit my marriage or did I complete my marriage? Did I quit at that party on Friday night when I left or did I complete? I think learning the difference between quitting and completing is very useful to be a lifelong learner who really gets all the learning life has to offer. So that’d be an area of exploration.

Sean: [01:05:14] When did that blog post come to mind for you? Was that a concept, an idea you’ve been exploring for a while?

Jim: [01:05:20] Well, it’s like a lot of the stuff that I write or talk about. It starts to kind of exist as a thought in my head, but not fully formed. And then I start noodling on it a little bit. And then often there will be circumstances in life. Like the particular circumstance, here is a really good friend of mine who was in a forum. Our organization leads these things called forums. It’s a gathering of six to 10 people who get together to practice consciousness, leadership, and relationship. And he was choosing to leave the forum. And so he called me and it wasn’t a forum that I led. I was not connected to it. He called me to ask my thoughts about him leaving the forum. And that’s when it came to me. Literally, the words came out of my mouth. I said to him, are you quitting or are you completing? Quitting would be, I don’t want to face, feel and deal with something in the forum. Either a person, a circumstance or condition in the forum or the forum is inviting me to face something in my life, I don’t want to face. So I’m going to cut and run. Or have you completed it? Have you faced everything the forum invited you to face and you’re simply complete now? And then I started to deconstruct with him in a phone conversation, the difference between quitting and completing that I thought, oh, this is good.

This is useful. Usually something lives in me kind of as an inkling. Then I look back at my life because in my life there are so many times I’ve quit versus completed. And here’s the good news about life at the highest level. If you quit before you complete life, will re-enroll you in the class again… 

Sean: [01:07:04]  That’s beautiful. 

Jim: [01:07:08] So I quit my first marriage before I had completed it. And at that stage of my life, I thought it was all about my wife and all that, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which was utter bullshit. I hadn’t completed what I joined the marriage to learn and what we committed to learn. I don’t think she’d completed either. So I quit. Well, guess what, all the same stuff still shows up in my relationship with Debbie. The difference is for whatever reason, I’ve chosen to stay in it and complete it. I’ve quit jobs, I’ve quit projects before they were complete. 

Completion, by the way, isn’t a matter of duration. You can be complete…  I will actually check at the end of our time together. Am I complete with Sean? Now, it might mean that I would send you a followup email or something, or just say, Hey, can we have a five minute conversation? I’ve learned to live pretty much in a state of completion, so I would be complete. I think people who live free, alive, liberated lives learn to complete, not quit. So that’s kind of the way that blog post came about. 

Oh, and often I’ll be listening to somebody else and they’ll say something, it might be a major point, it might be a minor point and they’ll say something. And it’s like that little phrase that they said I can’t let go of or more importantly, it can’t let go of me. And then it just starts having its way with me, which looks like when I go for my walks, I’m thinking about that thought, I’m exploring that thought. That’s another way that ideas often come to me. I say all the time, I’ve never had an original thought in my life. And I really do think that’s true. It’s for a while I felt guilty about that because I would be around all these people who reported to have been original thinkers. I thought, fuck, I’ve never had an original thought in my life. I really do think that’s true. I’m not sure there are any truly original thinkers, but I’m not one, but I do populate my life with thought streams by people who I think are wonderful at exploring consciousness, relationships, and leadership. And then often a little phrase they say will stick with me and then it gets run through my system and maybe comes out in a different way than they said it. Which I’m perfectly happy with. I’m just a translator. I’m more of an alchemist. I bring a couple of ideas together that wouldn’t normally live together. Like I’ll bring up let’s say David Allen and Getting Things Done together with Sam Harris and what it means to wake up. Okay. And then that will become something I’ll say, or a blog post, something like that.

Obstacles and Impediments Versus Allies And Equals

Sean: [01:09:57] Oh, I absolutely love that. Do you have any idea how much you’ve impacted me, your work? A lot of the little phrases, … any idea which phrase of yours, … it’s actually one of the commitments that I could not escape. It was just around me. That’s actually, viewing everyone in this life as an ally. I was going through a certain business thing, it could have been a very difficult and a type of relationship in the business world, and I came across your work at the perfect time. And it was, oh, no, this person is an ally in my life to teach me the lessons I need. This literally is an absolute life changer for me. I still can’t escape it. I just love that one so much.

Jim: [01:10:35] It’s so beautiful. Isn’t it? And it actually broadens out beyond people. I say, if there are people, circumstances and conditions, so people are people, circumstance is a big category. COVID is a circumstance for example, or the weather is a circumstance. And then there are conditions like let’s say you have a physical condition that has a diagnosis whatever that is. People, circumstances and conditions. In my experience, I’m either viewing people’s circumstances and conditions as obstacles and impediments to me getting what I think I want, or as allies and equals. That “equals” is a really important piece. And in my experience, it’s actually a choice. Am I going to view the weather as an obstacle and an impediment, or am I going to view it as an ally?

Our mutual associate Josh Waitzkin one of the things that he talks about all the time is how he views weather. And this is really important, because he talks publicly a lot about how he has viewed the weather with his children. So, a lot of parents view inclement weather as a day to stay inside and do whatever you’re going to do inside. With Josh, when the weather is bad, he gets his kids and they go out into the bad weather because he wants them to learn there’s no such thing as bad weather. Weather is not an obstacle or an impediment. It’s an ally to “aliveness”. Well, think about that. So it’s really about how I am viewing all of life. Is life showing up people, circumstances and conditions as an ally that cheers for me and my learning?

Or is it showing up as an obstacle and impediment? Now what you always have to clarify, … if this has been one of your practices, it doesn’t mean that that person in that business circumstance was necessarily an ally for you getting what you wanted at a transactional level in the deal. When we say ally, it means that person was an ally in you waking up as a human being, to you becoming a more conscious human, to you becoming liberated from your egoic fixations and the identities that limit and constrain you. That’s what he or she was an ally for. That’s a big difference because people say, well, wait a minute, my boss doesn’t do performance reviews and they steal my ideas and they don’t give me credit, and then they screw me at bonus time. They’re not an ally when they might not be an ally for your career path, but they’re an ally for you becoming a self-aware self-actualized liberated human being. That’s the way you’re playing with it. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a game changer. Then you move into being with life more from gratitude. So again, if I illustrate it, Josh gets up in the morning, he looks at me, he goes, okay, Easter is blowing through, it’s going to be a shit storm out here. And he goes, oh my God, am I grateful? I get to get my boys up and go out in the weather and we get to learn and experience and grow. So now he moves from entitlement to gratitude. You in that relationship with that person, if you practice it, you stop being entitled for the person to be different. And you start being genuinely not fake, genuinely grateful for them being the way they’re being, because you get the learnings. Good changes your whole relationship to life.

Above The Line And Below The Line

Sean: [01:14:48] It truly does. It is transformational. It really does. Yeah. This is what I love. We can stumble across certain ideas, certain people, you being one of them for me and just little things. And another thing, I mean, this is like the huge part of your work is just the difference between above the line and below the line. And I would love to just cover this because I think this is another one of those just game changers, when we can actually be aware of where we’re at, are we above or below the line? I would love for you to just slightly explain this and just get your latest thinking around it.

Jim: [01:15:18] Yeah. Great. So yeah, it goes in the bucket of self-awareness. Do I have enough self-awareness to be able to locate myself. And the phrase we used which we actually got from Gay and Katie Hendricks, the simple model we use is above and below the line. But if you map it, it’s just simply this in any given moment. If I locate myself, am I in a state of fear? Or am I in a state of trust? Just start there. And it’s really simple. People can ask themselves, am I in a state of fear, or am I in a state of trust. Now for most people who begin this journey, they don’t even know what fear means to them. They think of fear as if they’re watching a scary movie or they are about to be in a car wreck, but we know that fear can manifest as fight, flight, freeze, or faint.

Those are the four ways that, and I guess fright is the new one. So some people, when I say to them, are you in fear right now? Or are you in trust? And they would say, well, I never get scared. I say, well, let me ask you this. Do you ever get angry? Do you ever get aggressive? Because anger and aggression are the fight side of fear. Now there’s a healthy anger, and there’s a healthy aggression and there’s a not so healthy one that comes because I’m not fully facing my fear. So at this moment am I in fear, or am in trust? Another way of saying it, at this moment am I in reactivity or am I in creativity? Reactivity means that I’m at the effect of the circumstances. Creativity like we said, the very beginning, it means that I’m fully present and all options are available to me. Another way of saying it is, in a relationship am I in drama? That’s below the line or am I in collaboration? That’s co-creation. Which state is our relationship?  One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that unless you can locate yourself in any given “now moment”, first of all, you lack self awareness. Second, you lack the freedom to choose to shift your consciousness if you’re willing to. And as you know, since you’re familiar with the book, my experience is that most people spend most of their time below the line in a state of reactivity, in a state of fear, in a state of drama. By the way, that’s not bad in my opinion.

And it’s actually natural and normal. They’re just trying to survive. Another way of saying it is, am I in survival mode? Or am I in a state of thriving? Those are very different energetics. So most people spend most of their time below the line. That’s okay. The first thing I want them to do is just to be able to identify that. You know, today is Wednesday, and I’m below the line. I’m in a triggered reactive threat, survival mode, super. Most of the leaders that I coach most days, that’s where they are. But then we start to map what’s available to you when you’re below the line. There’s certain things that are available when you’re in a reactive state, literally based on the chemicals, based on the physiology of a reactive state. Certain things are available there, but there are other things that aren’t available.

Like high level problem solving is not available from below the line. Well, what’s required of you right now is survival, instinctual, reactivity, what’s needed right now. Or do you need to be doing some high level problem solving? Intimacy and relationships aren’t available from drama. It’s available when we’re in co-creativity, in a high state of trust. What do you want in your marriage? Do you want intimacy or do you want drama? Some people actually want drama, but before you can decide what you want to be creating in your life and what you’re willing to create, you have to locate yourself and determine the consciousness that you’re currently in and what you can or cannot do from that consciousness.

Self-awareness And Self-acceptance

So the first question I ask people I coach is I’ll tell them to actually use an app, like mind jogger, randomly, remind me, and just program it to ask him seven or eight times throughout the day, “Where are you? Are you above the line or below the line?” And then what’s wild is the next question we work on after that is after you locate yourself, can you accept yourself? So if you notice that you’re below the line, which most people start to notice. Can you just accept yourself for being exactly where you are because high achiever driven people like you would all of a sudden start to say, well, it’s not good to be below the line, so I need to be above the line the majority of the time.

So when you notice that you’re below the line, you won’t accept yourself. You would judge yourself and criticize yourself for being below the line, but that doesn’t work. Because then you just go further below the line because of your own harsh, inner critic. So self-awareness in my experience needs to be followed by self-acceptance. Those two go together, self-awareness and self-acceptance. Or another way you might say that is, truth needs to be followed by grace because oftentimes self-awareness is truth. And sometimes the truth stings, it hurts. It undoes us. And that truth needs to be followed by grace, which is kindness, gentleness, love and understanding. And a lot of leaders need to grow in self-awareness, but most leaders need to grow in self-acceptance. 

Most great athletes didn’t become great athletes by becoming extremely self-accepting. You didn’t, you couldn’t tolerate mistakes. You couldn’t tolerate it if you made a mistake in lacrosse, you deconstructed it. You went back, you used that fuel, competitive drive, self-improvement to get better, better, better, better. I never had, let’s say a basketball coach who at a time out after I’d made a critical error in judgment, threw a bad pass, dropped my coverage in defense. They didn’t say to me, Jim, you just fucked up royally. Now, before we improve, can you just accept yourself for having made a mistake? What coach ever said that to you? Especially because whenever you’re below the line, you’re just scared. 

Fear

Even at the highest performing level, when you make a mistake, if you’re a natural human being, you’re going to feel some amount of fear. It could be fear about loss of control or fear about a loss of approval or fear about a loss of security. So underneath making a mistake, like if there was a time you should have, …  is it called a goal in lacrosse? I forget. Is that a goal? Obviously you should have scored a goal and you didn’t and you have a reactivity. It might be the first thing you feel is pissed off, but if we could pause right then,  stop the whole world and sit together as two men, I would say what’s underneath your anger, right now? And if you sat long enough, you would say fear. I’m afraid we’ll lose the game. I’m afraid I’ll lose the confidence of my teammates.

I’m afraid I’ll miss that opportunity the next time, I’m afraid I won’t get a scholarship to the college I want to go to, to play lacrosse. I lived in Baltimore for a while, Johns Hopkins was out there. And they, at least when I was out there many, many years ago, were like the high point of lacrosse. Really, really good. And I might not get a scholarship to Hopkins. Okay, good. Now again, what I’m seeing is once you feel that fear, imagine if a coach took you aside and said, Sean, I want you to know that it’s okay to be scared. Your fear is welcome here. This is one of the things that we’re not teaching in leadership for years.

The whole view of leadership was leaders can’t be scared and they can’t for God’s sake. They can’t tell their followers they’re scared. I think that’s crazy talk. Leaders are human and they get scared. And here’s what happens if a leader is scared and won’t admit that they’re scared, their followers can feel, can literally smell their fear. And then the leader becomes incongruent because they’re saying there’s nothing to be scared of. And everybody goes, you have your head so far up your ass, you can’t see straight because we ought to have fear. There’s healthy fear. Fear is good. Great leaders now can say to their followers, you know, based on our last quarter’s performance, I just want you to know I was awake at three this morning and I had some fear.

So if you’re scared, you make sense to me. You’re not crazy, but here’s what I’m doing with my fear. I’m not being paralyzed by it. I’m not being immobilized by it. I’m not going to the deep, dark cavern of fear. I’m using fear to make me pay attention and be awake. So I welcome your fear, and let’s use it to pay attention and be awake. If your coach would say, it’s okay to be scared, Sean, I just want you to transmute that fear into awakeness and get your learnings from missing that goal. Let’s get our learnings, we don’t have to deny our fear. So that’s what I mean by below the line, I’m scared. When I’m above the line, I’m in a high state of trust.

Flow State

I think that’s a transformational paradigm and every great tradition has a version of that. There’s nothing new. We didn’t invent anything. Everybody’s got some version of that. Are you in the flow state that would be above the line or not? That would be another way of communicating. You know what it is as an athlete to be in flow state, you can’t be in flow state from below the line. Flow state occurs above line because you’re actually in a state of relaxed trust. You’re trusting those 10,000 reps with your stick. You’re trusting your pattern recognition. You’re trusting the energy flow. You’re trusting your teammates. If you’re at the highest state, you’re trusting the goodness of life that it’s for you, whether you win or lose, that doesn’t mean you’re not a competitive killer, but you’re trusting learning.

Once you can relax into that trust, then the flow state becomes available to you. From a contracted fear state, you can’t possibly be in flow, then you become mechanical. Then you start trying to run a play versus pattern recognition. So this is why the triangle offense that Phil Jackson brought to the bulls was so transformational because it required a “flow state”. That’s what the greatest athletes know, the greatest musicians, the greatest artists and all that is, is another word for being above the line. So then I would just say, are you in flow right now or are you contracted into density? And what most people notice is they’re in density much of the time. What does it look like to be in flow state when you’re parenting your five-year-old?

What does it look like to be in the flow state when you’re making love to your beloved versus just mechanically having sex? What does it look like to be in flow state when you’re writing a blog post or doing this podcast? Are we in flow state right now? It’s really a good question. Not that the other is wrong, but until I can’t shift what I can’t notice and accept. So that’s what we mean by above and below the line.

Sean: [01:27:05] So many just amazing questions, you’ve brought up, Jim. I’m having one of those experiences where I feel like I’m kind of just levitating watching this conversation and just being totally absorbed in what you’re saying. This is beautiful. 

Conscious Parenting

I know we’re going to close up in a minute here, and hopefully complete this, but you just mentioned something that’s just top of mind for me. So I have two young boys under the age of three, you have mentioned parenting. I would love  just some parenting advice and wisdom for a young, new parent. How can we be better with our approach to that?

Jim: [01:27:35] Okay. Here’s a couple of things, top of mind. Number one, get clear what you say to the boys. Get clear that those boys have come here to teach you not the other way around. Now there’s some things you need to teach them. Like, they’ll probably be better off if they know how to hold a fork, they’ll probably be better off if they don’t stick the fork in the light socket. So there’s some things you need to teach them. But I’m telling you, most parents are way over invested in teaching their kids, especially because they’re teaching their kids in order for their kids to appear a certain way because their parents’ identity is invested in how their kids look, act, and behave.

This is why you get parents standing around four year olds playing soccer, screaming at the top of their lungs, “kick the ball, kick the ball” because underneath they’re scared that their kid who’s over there picking flowers and staring at the flowers is going to be a bad reflection on them. So disconnect, your kids have not come here to prove your identity of who you are in life. Let them have their own identity. Therefore, they’ve come here to teach you. Like your little kids under three, so what are their exact ages?

Sean: [01:29:00] My one he’s turning three in a week and a half. And my other one’s turning one in a month and ten days.

Jim: [01:29:06] Okay. So let’s just go with this. Your three-year-old is here to teach you how to say no. How to develop a separate identity and to like what he likes and to say no to what he doesn’t like. So he doesn’t like broccoli, so he says, no. He doesn’t like it when you say it’s time for bed, he says, no. He’s here to teach you about the value of saying no, because most of us have become socialized, we lost our no. He’s here to teach you about healthy rebellion. He’s here to teach you all kinds of things. Your one-year-old is still here to teach you about bonding and what it looks like to trust and to surrender in being helped. I could go on and on. So I’d tell you to quit looking at your kids as clay to be molded and start seeing them as the Buddha and Jesus who’ve come here to teach you. Just that shift alone… Like before you discipline your kids, ask yourself this question, what can I learn from what they’ve just done that is about my development as a human? If they’re painting on the wall, you might want to stop them from painting, then do your own timeout before you put them in time out. So you get all of your learnings and we can go on and on and on. Because another thing I’m passionate about is conscious parenting and what that looks like. There’s so much, like parenting our children from below the line is very different from parenting our children from above the line.

Sean: [01:30:46] When are you going to come out with conscious parenting?

Jim: [01:30:47] I don’t know. When I can not, not do it. We did a class on it and people loved it. It was really fun. 

Sean: [01:30:59] Jim, your work, you already know he’s just been so transformational for me. So this conversation is just, I can’t even speak to the amount of feelings positive that I’m getting from this, but I would love to know if you could have this long form conversation, just call it an evening over some drinks and a great dinner with anyone dead or alive, just not a family member or friend. Who would you love to sit down with?

Transformational Presence

Jim: [01:31:24] Well, it’s interesting. Somebody asked me that the other night and actually my top of mind answer was Sam Harris, of the alive people. Are you familiar with Sam and his writings? So what I love about Sam is…  what interests me is he brings together a deep commitment to total liberation. Transformational insight into the nature of the mind. So he covers off meditation, all that stuff and brilliance around things like neuroscience and politics and all that stuff. I think that could be a really fun dinner conversation. That could be a fun dinner conversation. So he would be top of mind, somebody that I would want to be in the presence of, and then dead or alive, but dead people would be anybody.

And this would include the typical people, Buddha, Jesus, Ramana Maharshi lots too. Okay. Anybody that we could have dinner together and a word would never need to be exchanged. And I would actually experience the deepest truth of reality from simply being in their presence. So there’s a list of those people. That’s actually my goal. I want to be a person,… even though I love words and I love articulation. I’m believing more and more that it’s being in my presence that creates change and transformation. My presence is that I’m simply a channel for the presence of love, whatever you want to call it. So I’d want to be with those people whose very presence was transformational, not their words. There’s no conversation I want to have. Sam would be a hell of a lot of fun. There’d be others that would be a hell of a lot of fun to talk to. But the thing I’m really looking for is people who by being in their presence, you would never be the same again, never ever. And they wouldn’t need to say a word to have that happen.

Sean: [01:33:18] 250 plus interviews, not one person has said that. And I think that’s the greatest answer I’ve ever heard of that question. You’ve literally just opened up a whole new portal that I want to explore in my life.

Jim: [01:33:29] Beautiful.

Sean: [01:33:30] This is absolutely beautiful. This is one of those conversations, believe me, I will not forget. Your big book, 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, has been a game changer. Of course we are going to have that linked up in the show notes, the website. Where do you want listeners to stay connected with you? I can’t imagine they don’t want to explore further around conscious leadership.

Jim: [01:33:48] Everything that I do shows up at our website, conscious.is. Everything is there, including if they want to reach out to me, they can do it through there. That’d be the place to go to know and do everything that I’m about.

Sean: [01:34:03] Fantastic. Well, Jim, I cannot thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.

Jim: [01:34:07] Sean, I can’t thank you enough for being an explorer, for being a passionate person committed…  You feel to me like somebody committed that excellence. Again, whether it’s excellence in lacrosse, excellence with your two boys, excellence in leadership, excellence in doing a podcast. And I can feel it both the manifestation of that excellence in you and the ache in your soul that has driven you to that level of excellence. Nobody’s as excellent as you are without an ache in their soul. So I can feel both and I honor both of those things on you, my friend. 

Sean: [01:34:45] Thank you, Jim. You guys made it to the end of another episode of what got you there. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you find value in this, the best way you can support the show is giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends and also sharing on social media. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.

 

Key Takeaways

 

Everyday practice: Morning Pages is a practice that Jim does everyday where he writes a few pages without stopping and putting down his free flow thoughts on paper. 

 

“What lights up your body, what gets you leaning in, what can you not, not, say yes to. What do you have to say yes to? Those are the things that I invest my life in” 

 

Being Fully Alive:

• Get a set point of what full aliveness feels like 
• Develop enough self awareness so you know when you are numbing and not being fully present 

 

00:47 Non Negotiables 

• Wake up between 5-6 AM 
• Makes a cup of coffee for him and his wife
• Does a quick run through of texts / emails to see if anything requires immediate attention
• Meditate
• Write 3 pages 
• “>Wim Hof Breathing & yoga 
• Connecting with his wife on what came up in their morning writing 
• Get meaningful physical activity at some point throughout the day – walking in nature, pickleball, and golf 

 

03:53 Morning Pages 

Morning Pages is a practice that Jim does everyday where he writes a few pages without stopping and putting down his free flow thoughts on paper. 

Jim talks about the meta themes and episodic themes that come up often when he writes his morning pages.

 

09:47 Being Fully Alive 

Jims definition of “Full aliveness”: Being totally available to this moment with his complete creative presence. 

 

• Get a set point of what full aliveness feels like 
• Develop enough self awareness so you know when you are numbing and not being fully present 

 

12:51 Developing Self Awareness 

Three ways that Jim has developed self awareness:

• Self reflection 

• Instruments (Meyers-Briggs test)
• Creating a feedback rich environment 
• Medicine journeys (ayahuasca, Psilocybin)

 

“A great question I like to ask people is, tell me one thing I could do or be that would cause you to trust me even more” 

 

20:58 The Power of Questions 

Jim has always been curious and loved to learn in a very specific way, which has caused him to always ask a lot of questions. 

“A lot of things don’t interest me but I’m very clear about the things that do interest me and around those I am deeply curious.” 

 

To learn about others, Jim asks: “What are two or three things that you are really passionate about?” 

 

25:11 Risk and Vulnerability 

“There’s a shared vulnerability, where we are trusting ourselves in the conversation and each other enough to successfully peel layers away to find deeper and deeper possibilities for co-creativity as well as connection.” 

 

“What lights up your body, what gets you leaning in, what can you not, not, say yes to. What do you have to say yes to? Those are the things that I invest my life in” 

 

32:50 Body Intelligence

Jim and Sean talk about how body intelligence increases with mastery. 

 

Developing Body Intelligence: 

• The level of skill that is at a subconscious level
• Pattern awareness & energetic movement 

 

41:48 Transcending Higher

Jim says that while some people are just gifted, there are other ways for everyone to transcend to a higher level. 

• Be open to transcending 
• Be willing to learn the language of energy 

“There are dimensions beyond the gross sensory experience, the material, that are happening. It requires at least being open to that” 

 

45:05 Skill Development

“I’m pretty good at talking with somebody for a short period of time, getting a glimpse of where they are currently at, getting the possibility that exists for their future self and then deconstructing their learning down to a couple of the next steps in order to get themselves set up” 

 

50:35 Jim’s Mastery 

Jim ranks his three interests in terms of the level of mastery he has with each one: 

1. Consciousness 
2. Relationships 
3. Leadership 

 

54:50 Childhood Reflection 

When Jim works with leaders, he dives into what was driving them since they were a little kid. What he finds with many people is that they struggle to see themselves as valuable beyond what they do. 

“What is the question that your soul is hungry to know the answer to?” 

 

1:00:45 Jim’s Life Path 

“The thing I’d say to most people is, their path is perfect and you can’t hurry it up. It’s going to be what it’s going to be and it’s going to take as long as it takes and you’ll get where you’re supposed to go” 

 

1:04:08 Completing vs. Quitting

Jim has recently written a blog post on the difference between completing versus quitting. 

Ex: Did you quit your job or complete your job?

Check out the blog post here

 

“Here’s the good thing about life at the highest level, if you quit before you complete life will re-enroll you in the class again” 

 

1:09:53 Everyone is an Ally 

“View everyone in this life as an ally” is a phrase of Jim’s that has impacted Sean immensely. 

Ally = that person was an ally in you waking up to being a more conscious human being. 

“It’s really about how am I viewing all of life, is life showing up, people, circumstances, and conditions, as an ally that’s here for me and my learning or is it showing up as an obstacle and impediment” 

 

1:15:00 Above or Below the Line 

In the realm of self-awareness, Jim uses the phrase “above and below the line” 

Ask yourself, in any given moment, if you locate yourself are you in a state of fear or trust? 

Below the line = State of being scared

Above the line = High state of trust 

1:27:26 Jim’s Parenting Advice 

• Your kids have come here to teach you rather than the other way around 

“Your kids have not come here to prove your identity of who you are in life. Let them have their own identity” 

 

1:31:17 Jim’s Interview Choice 

If Jim could sit down with anyone dead or alive, just not a family member or friend, he would choose Sam Harris.  

• Jim also said that the conversation he would want to have is, “ One where a word would never need to be exchanged and I would experience the deepest truth of reality from being in their presence.”

Connect with Jim

• Website
• Book – The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
• Additional Conscious Leadership Resources