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THE CURSE OF THE SELF (Unplugged)

A conversation between Mark R. Leary & Moe Abdou
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The Curse Of The Self (Unplugged) Mark R. Leary!with Moe Abdou !

About Mark R. Leary & Moe Abdou

Mark R. Leary

Mark R. Leary, Ph. D. , Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke

University obtained his B. A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College and his
doctorate from the University of Florida. He is a fellow of the American
Psychological Association and the Society for Personality and Social
Psychology, and former president of the International Society for Self and
Identity. Named by the Institute for Scientific Information as among the
25 most productive scholars in psychology (1986-1990), Dr.

Moe Abdou

Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices — a global conversation about things

that matter in business and in life. moe@33voices.com

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Mark, one of the first things that has really intrigued me over the past
decade, in particular for myself, is this whole notion of the relationship
with my self. I have observed a lot of people, successful people, and the
people who are on the verge of great success. One of the things that I’ve
noticed is that most people have almost an abusive type relationship with
themselves but try to have great relationships with others.

So, your title, The Curse Of The Self really intrigued me. I’d like to get your
perspective on why does the self, for most people, continue to be a curse or
continue to be more of an abusive type relationship as opposed to the opposite?

It really is ironic because sometimes we think of human beings as being really

soft on themselves but you’re absolutely right, they are not. I had somebody
tell me once that if they talk to other people the way they talk to themselves
in their own head, they would be sued for harassment. There is a lot of very
nice people out there that don’t treat themselves very nicely.

There are a lot of reasons I think why the self as a curse. One of them I think is
our own insecurity in whether we’re doing okay or not. Because many of us feel
that the way to keep ourselves in line is to really hold our feet to the fire and
to beat ourselves up when things don’t go well.

Now, of course, you need to feel a little badly when you botch things up or you
hurt other people but the question is, how badly do you need to feel. How self
critical. How much do you need to push yourself. My sense is that the vast
majority of us, particularly professional people, push themselves far harder
than they need to. They are far more self critical than they need to be in order
to be maximally effective.

I think that the first step is to develop a way to have a relationship with
yourself that keeps you inline but without being punitive about it. It’s the way
that a loving parent would be in some ways. Yes, you want to treat your kid in
a way so they behave properly but you certainly wouldn’t be as abusive to
them as many others are abusive to ourselves.

I think as children, you mentioned children, as children, it seems like we

have a really great perspective of the world maybe because we’re not fully
developed yet. As we become fully developed and as we turn into
adulthood, we start to teeter the other way. We start to look at more the
negatives as opposed to the positives and we always seem to start with
our self.

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What in your opinion, where is that gap where between I’m an individual
who’s a baby or a child who’s curious about life and then I become an adult,
go to high school or go to college and I start to see the negatives in people
as opposed to the positives starting with myself, when does that shift take
place?

I think it begins in the teenage years when you begin to develop an uncertainty
about your social acceptability. So if I’m somewhat uncertain the degree to
which I’m a valuable and acceptable person in other people’s eyes, I have to be
very attentive to any opportunity that I might be behaving in some bad way
that would other people to dislike or to reject me. It’s as if we give a worst
case reading to the things that we do and to the things that happen in our lives
because we don’t want to miss anything that we might be able to fix to make
ourselves more acceptable to other people.

I think our modern society has exacerbated that as we’ve become more mobile
so that our relationships are more tenuous, schools have become more crowded
where kids can’t develop strong peer relationships. There are a lot of family
problems in the world. This society has just gotten so large I think our sense of
acceptability is often compromised. And because of that, we worry too much
about whether or not we’re acceptable, if we’re performing well enough, are
we attractive enough, are we liked enough.

And in order to make sure that we stay on the straightened arrow in each of
those areas we’re punitive. We beat ourselves to try to make sure that we’re
acceptable to other people. I think that’s where it really first begins. It then
gets worse in adulthood as the stakes get higher but the cause is the same.
We’re concerned about our own acceptability.

So Mark, when we start to think about it in those terms, our own

acceptability, are the majority of us running around in this world,
especially in adulthood, trying to continually prove ourselves to other
people really more so than to ourselves?

I think that’s absolutely the case. Some of that is okay. I don’t think that there
is anything wrong with being worried about what other people think of you.
Most of our positive outcomes in life depend on us being perceived in positive
ways by potential romantic partners and friends and employers and co-workers.
The problem is we get too consumed by it.

We do spend an awful lot of our mental energy and an awful lot of out thought
focused on how can I do this right so that I will be acceptable whether to my
family or my lover or my employer. That does interfere with the quality of life.

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It interferes sometimes even with you performance in each of those areas

because you’re more focused on making sure that you’re acceptable to other
people other than really enjoying life for its own sake.

Mark, when we get to that thinking level, aren’t we kind of getting away a
little bit from our true identity, the authenticity that we have within
ourselves if we’re continually on this treadmill to try to prove ourselves?

It’s such a fine balance because we do have an authentic core that we have to
be consistent with, consistent with our own personality and our values and that
things we want out of life. But yet we also know that there is a social world out
there that we have to conform to and we have to have relationships with other
people who find this acceptable. And so, I think much of life is a dance
between those two pressures of authenticity versus being what the rest of
the world wants us to be.

The big question then is, how do we walk that line? You don’t want to fall just
down on the authenticity side because you will just be sort of an unusual oddity
if you’re not careful that nobody really has any interest in. But you also don’t
want to fall over on the side where you’re pandering to everybody else’s
wishes about what they would like to have you be and what they like to have
you do.

So it is a struggle. I think that’s why everybody walks that line worrying about
falling off one way or the other.

I have a real belief that there really is a direct correlation between the
relationships we have with ourselves internally to the relationship that we
have with others. I tend to see the individuals who are much more self
accepting of who they are, to have not only much more authentic
relationships but much more real relationships with other people because
there is a lot of artificial stuff and artificial people out there. What are
your thoughts on that? Am I way off or is this just my personal philosophy
for me?

No, I think you’re absolutely right. The people who are most accepting of
themselves and most confident in their own skin are going to be able to be
more natural, more oriented toward other people in their needs. They’re going
to have better relationships. I think you have targeted that perfectly. The
people who have the difficulty are the ones who are so self critical that they
don’t feel like that they are acceptable to other people. That’s when it turns
you into a being truly inauthentic.

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I guess I need to make a distinction between being genuinely inauthentic, that

is presenting yourself to other people in ways that you know are not true. That
really don’t feel good to you. There is a difference between that and simply
calibrating yourself to certain interactions and relationships. We are after all
very multifaceted. We each have many different components in our
personalities some of which are even contradictory.

So we can be different things or slightly different things to other people

without being inauthentic. We can be authentically different to different
people. The problem is if you really have sold out so that you’re walking
through life feeling completely uncomfortable in your own skin because you’re
trying to be what other people want you to be and you know that it’s not what
you really are. That is a serious problem. You’re absolutely right.

I see it too in business. I see that there are a lot of businesses out there
who are a collection of individuals, who are kind of the accumulative
effect of these individuals and the individual’s beliefs of who they are as
people and as a company certainly to what other believed and view them
at as businesses. From a business perspective, I’m sure with your studies
and your mind really thinking the way you do, I’m sure that’s easily
observed for you each and everyday.

Yes. I mean people are each watching out for themselves. People have
commented on the fact that over the last 20, 30, 40 years that people have
become less communal in the United States in the sense of identifying with
their work organization, with their local town, with their state, even with their
country because we move around so much. Because our relationships are so
tenuous, we each look out for ourselves, first and foremost, sometimes to the
exclusion of others. That creates an awful lot of problems for us. No question.

Mark, I come to you now and I say listen, I read your book and now I’m very
intrigued by your work and the other books that you have. I really want to
start to make that shift. I want to make that transformation from being
hypercritical of who I am as an individual to somebody who is much more
accepting.

Coach me a little bit on where you would want me to start and what that
process would look like for me to go from where I am today to kind of more
self accepting. I don’t want to use the word transformation because it’s
overused. But to get to that level of thinking, what do I need to do?

What we would try to have you do is to develop a more self compassionate

perspective. We think of compassion normally directed toward other people.

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When they have failed or they’ve had a loss or they have been rejected, if
they’re suffering in some way. We know how to give compassion to other
people.

Most of us don’t know how to give compassion to ourselves. It’s not just a
matter of accepting myself for how I am. It’s also a matter of treating myself
kindly and compassionately when I’m struggling, like we all do in life. When
things go badly at home or at work. When I failed. When I’ve messed up. What
do I do?

I think the best way to think of it is how do you treat someone you love when
they’re struggling. When they’re feeling negatively about themselves. When
things haven’t gone well. You can sort of turn that around and do that to
yourself.

It involves three things. The first is to genuinely treat oneself kindly. As

kindly as you treat loved ones when they’re having problems. We don’t do
that. When things go badly, we often beat ourselves up and we make ourselves
work even harder. Things that if our loved one did that, we would say, “No,
back off a little bit. It’s okay, you had a hard day. Relax.” We often keep on
pushing ourselves.

Second, is to develop a sense that whatever problems we have and

whatever deficiencies we have, are not at all unique to us. I call it the
perspective of common humanity. We’re all in this together and everybody has
losses and failures and deficiencies and shortcomings and makes mistakes. And
to the extent you can understand that. It’s not that it makes all of these things
okay but it does mean you don’t have to uniquely beat yourself up for it
because it’s not just about you.

And third, is to approach the problems that you have and your deficiencies
and your shortcomings and the things you don’t like with greater
equanimity. It’s not a catastrophe usually when things go wrong. It’s not a
catastrophe that you gained that extra weight. It’s not a catastrophe that you
botched up that little project at work. Some things are more important than
others but if a loved on experienced those things, you’d help them keep it in
perspective. They wouldn’t deny the negativity of it but you would encourage
them not to get carried away with it. We let ourselves get carried away with
the bad things that happen to us.

So by treating ourselves with greater kindness, realizing that our problems

are just human problems that everybody experiences, and really working

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to maintain equanimity, we can have greater compassion for ourselves.

That’s the first step I think towards self acceptance.

That’s a great model. I’m assuming that you kind of have practiced all of
this stuff yourself. Right to do it for a week and two weeks and a month
and then kind of life takes over. How do you stay consistent with that? Are
there triggers, exercises that you do with yourself to keep that on the
forefront of your mind?

Every now and then you can just remember to remind yourself when you find
yourself beating yourself up to not do that anymore. Of course, I beat myself
up just like everybody else does. The other thing I found that helps is to talk to
other people in your life about this so that they will remind you.

I even have my students. I was agonizing over something I had botched up a

few months ago and one of my graduate students says, “Remember to be self
compassionate.” You go, “Oh yeah, I’ll work on that.” It’s a hard thing to do.
There is a virtue in our society that we somehow indoctrinate people with that
it’s good to be hard on yourself. To really push yourself and to be self critical
that somehow that’s virtuous.

We kind of understand where that comes from but it’s not really good from a
mental health perspective and it’s not even good from a social relationships
perspective. Because, as you said earlier, you can’t really have good
relationships with other people unless you also have a good relationship with
yourself.

I recommended your book to a lot of managers and leaders and even

emerging leaders, entrepreneurs and so forth. I think what happens
sometimes is that people take a look at it and say, how relevant it is to my
business.

As I was talking with somebody yesterday, I said, think about with you
being in leadership positions or in management positions. The relationship
that you have with people that are working with you and then working
along side your organization is really the most critical thing that you can
have.

What type of advice would you have Mark for leaders or managers who are
trying to improve the cultures within their organization by improving these
relationships they have with others which I think really still goes back
directly to the relationship they have with themselves.

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I think fostering a positive relationship themselves is probably the first step.

The second thing that I found is helpful is to recognize how many of the
problems that we confront in our businesses, in our work organizations are
really ego problems. They’re not really conflicts about things of substance.
They’re not disagreements about things that are all that important. They’re
conflicts among egos.

I think once a leader understands that, they can begin to call their
subordinates when they realized that something is erupting in the organization
that’s nothing but ego. And the way to do that is ask the question, does this
really matter for the organization? Does this really matter for the quality of the
people who work here or for our constituents, or our customers? A lot of times
it doesn’t. It’s just people insisting that they want to be right and that other
people are wrong and to elevate myself above other people. I think we have
promoted that in our society as well.

If we can begin to remind each other it’s a natural part of human behavior,
there is nothing inherently wrong with a little bit of egotism. But when it gets
in the way of success and happiness, I think it’s okay to begin to call people on
it and say, that’s just an ego issue. We’re not going to go there. Let’s get it
over here and really deal with the problem that’s at hand and quit battling
about egos.

Look at what’s going on in Washington. It’s just a gigantic ego battle or several
ego battles at once. If you could strip the egos out of everybody in Washington,
for example, think of what it would do to the political progress we could make.
I think that’s true also of any business organization in the country.

Mark, how would you start to strip the egos? Forget about the collective,
let’s talk about individually. How do we as individuals start to strip the
ego? I mean, that’s whole area, a Pandora’s box but what advice would
you have if people really are interested in that?

I think what began to help me with it when I began to read some Eastern
philosophy. It’s just the recognition of how maladaptive it is and how poorly it
suits my needs if I am always insisting in my own mind that I am the one that’s
supposed to be right, that that’s just actually a delusion. It’s insane for me to
think that I am right more often than other people are.

I talk in the book about all of these biases that everybody has to assume that
we’re better than other people, that we’re all better than average. We all
think we have the right perspectives on things. We think our philosophies and
our religions and our belief systems are correct. We think we’re better at

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things than other people. Sometimes that’s true. But most of the time, it’s a
bias towards egotism.

Once I realized just how insane it is, I think most rational people want to
believe that they’re rational. They want to think they have the proper
perspective on life. When you think about it, you’ve got to realize, I can’t be
right all the time. I have to be wrong at least some. And so what that does is it
allows me to be skeptical of my own beliefs.

In the book I talk about a term called ego-skepticism. That is just simply to
keep telling yourself that you know that you think you have the answer, you
know that you think your beliefs are right but to be a little skeptical of that
because everybody believes that. I think the first step is just to convince
people how almost insane and delusional it is to be so firmly rooted in an egoic
conviction that you are right all the time.

Once you can get a group of people to all buy into that as individuals then they
can begin to help each other. That’s what I think can happen in a work
organization. If everybody can believe we’ll better off if we can set our egos by
door, when the egos pop up, which they will, my ego flames out a lot. But
when there are people around me that say, that’s just ego there. That’s not
the issue we ought to be talking about then the whole system can begin to sort
of facilitate itself.

You talk a lot about this notion of rejection. It’s inevitable that each us,
each day of our lives, is going to have some component of that enter
specifically in business. It’s virtually impossible not to have rejection
and/or failure. It’s impossible for us not to deal with it. But yet, it is still
one of the most difficult things for people to deal with. When somebody
says no to you in a sales situation or when somebody says your idea isn’t a
great idea or when there is a fear for you to take a first step to start a
new business. This whole notion of rejection is crippling to a lot of people.
How do you address it?

The first step is for people to realize why it’s so crippling and why we are so
concerned about rejection. I take a very evolutionary psychology perspective
on this. During six million years of human evolution, we lived in these little
clans of hunter and gatherers, 30 to 50 people. Those were the only people you
really ever interacted with. You didn’t even cross other groups very often.

Your relationships with all of those 50 people were critically important. These
were people you lived with your entire life. If you had a bad relationship with

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anyone of them, or if they rejected you, it was a serious problem because you
had to live with them everyday. You needed the support of the group.

Well of course today, most of the people we interact with we’re not in
supportive relationships with. It really doesn’t matter if they reject us. But
because of the way we evolved to be so sensitive to rejection because it was so
critically important to be accepted out there wandering around Africa as
prehistoric people, we can’t discriminate automatically between rejections
that matter and rejections that don’t matter. So rejections sting no matter
where they come from but that’s because we never developed the capacity as
human beings to discriminate important from an unimportant rejections. They
were all important originally.

What that means is you have to learn to cognitively and consciously

override your initial reaction to rejections. To tell yourself just because it
hurts and it doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t mean it’s really all that bad in
everyday life. Now, of course it’s bad if my spouse rejects me or my kids
reject me or if I get fired, of course, those have implications.

But the fact that complete strangers don’t want to buy my product or
somebody that I sit down with on an airplane doesn’t want to talk to me, yes, I
have a pang of hurt feelings initially but then I can say, well, you know, I’m
programmed to have that pang. In reality, this one doesn’t really differ. This
doesn’t really make any difference at this point.

So when people realize that we’re just all overly sensitive to rejection and that
we have to work to override our reaction because there is six million years of
evolution behind it. I think it makes a little easier that those feelings don’t
necessarily mean anything.

Again, when you have to deal with that, and you start to think, I mean, I see
a lot of people now, a lot of entrepreneurs who have this vision and this
dream of starting a business yet have very strong apprehensions towards
taking the first step because of fear of failure. It’s going to look bad if I
don’t succeed. How do you help people deal with that?

I think we need to make the distinction between a fear of looking bad if I don’t
succeed which is bad. And a fear of all of the terrible true implications that
could potentially happen if I don’t succeed. I mean, if I don’t succeed and I
lose all of my money and I lose my house and my family is going to be out on
the street, I don’t say it’s a realistic fear because it may or may not have a
high probability but it’s reasonable to be afraid of that.

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A fear that just may be the action itself may lead to failure. It’s not really
going to hurt me any in terms of any real implications. I think we can deal with
that because we can ask ourselves is it really going to affect my important
relationships with people? Is it really going to affect my success in the future
because this one business thing happened to fail?

As I said earlier, we give worst case reading to these things. We’re

programmed to look on the dark side to make sure that we don’t do
anything that damages our relationships. So what that means is we’re going
to be pessimistic about the damage that’s going to be done by our behaviors.

I would just encourage people to sit down and be as dispassionate as possible

about whether this is really going to be a problem or not. Whether making a
bad impression through a failure is really going to hurt anything in the long run
other than our own self esteem and sense of competence, of course, that’s
affecting.

It’s a little bit like trying to get the teenager who has the one pimple and
doesn’t want to go to school, to realize, is this really going to make any
difference in the long run? I think it just requires sitting down and struggling
with that and realizing it’s going to be a struggle because none of us want to
make the bad impression. Impressions are very important.

There is a lot being done in positive psychology today. I know a lot being
done at Duke and you’re embracing positive psychology. What impact does
positive psychology having on our minds today as opposed to traditional
psychology that would focus more on the past and focusing more on the
hurt. I get the sense that positive psychology today is focusing more on the
good as opposed to the hurt.

Certainly, we have, in psychology the positive human experiences. We’ve been

focused on getting rid of disorder rather than making people happy and more
adapted to their lives. So positive psychology is really just that focus. What
can we do to move us from neutral to positive as opposed to move us from
negative to neutral which has been the model psychology is operated on.

I think it’s had a very positive impact in terms of raising the level of dialog
about the positive experiences in life and how to improve them. I don’t know
whether somebody who has written a book called the Curse of the Self can be
accused of being a positive psychologist or not. But it is true that the message
in the book is to take us all from where we live in this quagmire of self
generated suffering to move us up into a more positive experience.

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In that sense, it is sort of in the line of positive psychology. It’s been a very
positive development in psychology in the last 10 years, this new focus on the
positive experiences of life which is really what it’s all about. It’s just not
about running away from negative things. It’s also about fostering the positive
in our lives. It’s been valuable in that way.

I see a lot of problems that happen in the world. I think a lot of them start
with kind of the story we tell ourselves. I’m a believer that most of us are
telling a whole lot of lies to ourselves. How often do you think we as
individuals lie to ourselves?

That’s a great question. I don’t know how much of it is lying in the sense that
deep down we know the truth but we’re fabricating in order to feel better and
how much of it is simply that we just really don’t know the truth. If you start
challenging people in their self views by saying, how do you know that? What
leads you to that conclusion? People really can’t answer that question very well.

I would agree with you that a lot of our misery has to do with either incorrect
beliefs about ourselves or distorted beliefs about ourselves. It’s really difficult
to say how much of that really involves sort of self deception and lying,
certainly some of it. It’s also true that people hold unusually positive views
about themselves at times that are equally destructive. I mean, some people at
some times are unrealistically optimistic about their future. You say, “That
ought to be good isn’t it.”

I just saw a study the other day where people who are unrealistically optimistic
about their health. They think that they’re healthier than most other people.
They think they can take better care of themselves but in fact they often don’t,
actually end up with more health problems. Because if you think you’re already
healthier than everybody else, you don’t take as good a care of yourself.

So it’s not just about talking to yourself in bad ways that can be damaging. You
can also talk to yourself in overly good ways that can lead you down the right
path. The real difficulty is how can anyone of us really have a perfectly
accurate self view. That would ideal is to know exactly what we were like,
what we were good at, what our values were, what we weren’t good at. Then
we could make really judicious choices throughout life. But the number of
inputs that go into our self concept can just really confuse things. I think most
people wander around being somewhat unsure about what they’re really like.

Isn’t that the philosophy then of an empty mind is really the one that’s
going to be able to capture all the learning and everything that we observe
in the world. I mean, this whole notion of emptiness sometimes it’s

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misunderstood as being almost blank. I look at emptiness more as the

opportunity to be full of infinite potential. Do you see that kind of as
maybe one of the philosophies that people should start to think about?

I think that would help. I think that’s a big stretch for most Americans to think
of it that way. Maybe the intermediate step is to simply not concern yourself
quite as much with who or what you are. We are obsessed in this country with
people figuring themselves out. The problem is, and this is what you’re
suggesting, is once you think you have figured yourself out, then your decisions
are going to be based upon that self concept you have developed even if it’s
wrong. And even if it’s right, it puts you on a straightjacket that you sometimes
can’t get out of.

So the more empty your self view is, the more empty your mind is, the
more open you are to all kinds of potentials. Once I tell myself, why am I
somebody who doesn’t like roller coasters? Well, I’ll never go on a roller
coaster again. That absolutely may not be a true statement. I’m not somebody
who likes to take risks. As soon as I tell myself that, I’m not going to take risks
anymore. Risks in business for example. So there is a danger to trying to figure
yourself out and locking on to a really rigid self concept. I think we’re much
more versatile than that. Each of us has a very wide expanse of things that we
can do.

One of the recent advances in the field of personality psychology is the

realization that people differ as much in themselves, in their personality across
time as people differ from each other. In other words, we’ve always known
that people differ from each other greatly in terms of lets say how extroverted
they are or how sociable they are.

What we didn’t quite realize is anyone of us shows that same amount of variety
in our daily lives. That even though I might be mildly extroverted, there are
times in which I’m extremely introverted, there are times in which I’m
extremely extroverted. We show this entire range. But if you lock into a self
concept that labels you as a certain thing, it’s going to diminish that range.
That range is there and that gives you more flexibility than I think most of us
think we have. So yes, we need to be open to possibilities.

Do you believe in karma Mark?

Karma? I believe that people’s actions have consequences. I’m not sure that I
think there is some kind of a cosmic law that makes these consequences
inevitable. But yeah, people’s actions have consequences.

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When you see kind of your students — I look at them certainly as the next
generation of leaders entering the world today. What advice do you have
for them as they leave the confines of North Carolina and Duke to enter
the real world whether they’re going to start their own entrepreneurial
venture and create a business or whether they’re going to work for a
company?

I start the preface of my book with exactly that point. I thought many times as
I’ve sat through commencement ceremonies which I have now for 30 years at
various universities. I think about if I had to get up and give the
commencement address, the last piece of advice to these students going out
into the world with their degree, what would that advice be. I used it as a
setup for the book to say that what I would tell them is that you’re going to
have a lot of problems in life because life has problems. But most of those
problems you are going to create yourself, by the way that you think about
yourself, your ego involvement in things, your egoistic and egocentric
orientation on the world. That’s where most of your problems come from.

I try in my classes when it’s appropriate to talk about the ways in which the
self does create problems for people. And that if you can get that out of the
way, you’re going to have a happier and healthier and more successful life than
if you’re dominated by all of these negative self thoughts or you’re dominated
by ego.

So that would be my wish for the world, is that we could just turn down ego
and self centeredness and egocentrism. Imagine if we just turned it down 20%
in the world, I think all kinds of wonderful things would happen. We don’t have
to get rid of it. We don’t have to obliterate people’s self awareness. We
wouldn’t want to do that. Just get it turned down a little bit.

Mark, is there a question that you would like to explore with people? Is
there a big question right now that’s weighing on your mind that you’d like
to get feedback on from people who have the opportunity to read this
material, listen to this podcast or forward it to their friends?

That’s a really good question. That question came so quickly out of…

Out of nowhere. You could always think about it and send it to me. We’d
like to continue this dialog and this conversation and help you explore
areas that you’d like to dig deeper in. I mean, the goal is to try to capture
the essence of what you want to convey to people at the same time, I think
the way we keep the conversations going is for you to let us know what are

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some inspiring questions that are keeping you thinking right now that we
could get others to contribute to.

One thing I have wondered as I have talked about this over the last 10 years or
so is why some people are so resistant to it. There are people who are
resistant to treating themselves with self compassion. They think it’s a sign of
weakness.

There are people who are resistant to trying to tune back how much self
though they have. They think of their success as based upon always thinking
and analyzing and trying to figure things out and planning and setting goals
instead of just doing that a little bit and then clearing their mind and going off
and doing whatever it is they need to do.

There are people who resist the idea that ego is bad. It’s sort of like, how will I
succeed if I don’t have the sense that I’m better than other people or if I don’t
have the desire to compete with other people and to do better than them? How
is my business going to succeed? So there are beliefs out there that stand in the
way of the things I write about in the book. I’m really interested in trying to
understand the basis of those things. I can identify with some of them. I shared
some of them at one time in my life. I believed in those things.

But one thing I’d like to hear from people who would read the book or listen to
this conversation and don’t resonate to it. And say, no, I think my ego is good. I
think I ought to feel really good about myself. I ought to beat myself up when
things don’t go well.

I sort of like to know why. Because understanding the answer to that question
will give us some way to think about two things I guess. Is a lot of self good for
some people? Are some people really benefiting from being bad to themselves
and being egotistical? I don’t think so. Maybe that’s true.

Secondly, if in fact those things are generally not good for most people, how
can we work through their resistance to letting them go? I think if I could pick
one question I’d like to have feedback from lay people on, that is non-
psychologist, would be why would people be resistant to the idea of letting
go of the self to some extent?

Brilliant. My last question to you is other than your book, tell me what
book has had the greatest impact on you?

The single book — and this goes back 35 years. It’s not the kind of book that
you probably would imagine. That is a book by Carlos Castaneda called The

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Journey to Ixtlan. Carlos Castaneda was an anthropologist who wrote a series

of books that were supposedly about his interactions with a Mexican-Indian
sorcerer from which he sort of learned an alternative view of the world based
upon Mexican-Indian religious belief.

It turned out that most of the book is a complete fabrication. That in fact, he
claimed this was all absolutely real and in fact some of it he put in his
dissertation in anthropology at UCLA. It turns out to have been fabricated.

But at the time I read it, it was my first introduction to what were in fact some
rather Eastern ideas. That’s the reason I found it important. It really
challenged my view of how the world works and I guess more importantly, it
challenged my confidence that my view of the world was the right one.

There is one line in there where this Indian sorcerer says to Carlos, “Who said
that the world is the way that you think it is? Who gave you the authority to
decide that your view of the world is correct?” I thought to myself at the
time, “How do I know that my view of the world is correct?” I think that
started me off on a path of thinking about my own views much more skeptically
than I could have ever imagined.

So again, its’ not the kind of thing that most people would resonate with but it
had a giant impact on me that is even carried through here 35 years later.

I for one am glad you read it because we would have never had this
opportunity to talk about your work, your book. Mark, I am a firm believer
that this type of thinking is really — I think it is the missing link between
what we know about life and business and what we do. I think if we can
help people fill this gap and people like yourself who continue to help us
with the thinking on this issue, there is no question that we can make a
significant impact professionally and personally on anybody who is
exposed to this.

I want to thank you personally that the impact that it’s had on me and
hopefully, for the impact that it will have on many, many others that will
have an opportunity to get exposed to this.

I really appreciate that. Thank you for having this venue to be able to talk
about it. I appreciate that.

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