Happierness: a fascinating interview

There are squillions of books on “happiness”

We think a better goal is to be happier in our life rather than “happy” in any complete or absolute sense.

Perhaps the interview on this page will shed light on how to be happier in your life 🙂

It’s a transcription of an interview with Arthur Brooks on this book, co-written with Oprah Winfrey:  Build the Life You Want

It was broadcast on Radio New Zealand’s National programme on Sunday 24 September

If you wish to listen to the interview, it’s available, with an introduction, here
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/2018908275/arthur-c-brooks-understanding-happiness

Here are they key topics:

  1. Finding happiness through faith, family, friends, and work.(0:00)
  2. Managing emotions and finding happiness. (2:46)
  3. Managing emotions through metacognition. (6:40)
  4. The distinction between “I self” and “me self” and the impact of social media on happiness. (12:45)
  5. Happiness, unhappiness, and resilience. (15:34)
  6. Sharing personal pain vs. sharing love for happiness. (21:06)
  7. Finding happiness through emotional profiling. (24:04)
  8. Finding happiness through serving others. (29:22)

AI Transcript (unedited)

Speaker 1 0:00
Arthur C. Brooks is a Harvard professor in its business school. And he’s a very well known American has audiences grown apart from a column and the Atlantic Monthly, how to build a life. And there have been 13 books, including The New York Times number one bestseller, from strength to strength, finding success, happiness and deep purpose in the second half of life, and also the timely Love your enemies, how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt. Now, there’s a new book written in tandem with Oprah Winfrey. And they’ve been doing the big media rounds to publicise its message. It’s called Build the life you want. It’s also a podcast with the two of them. How can we bring more happiness and achievement into our lives? How do we translate a yearning for happiness into the sort of action that will enable us to grasp it? How do we live now, in a less and less happy world, especially for the young men, all the stats are on on that? Let’s hear about the building blocks of life. Then, Professor Arthur Brooks, good morning from us.

Unknown Speaker 1:06
Good morning, it’s nice to talk to you.

Speaker 1 1:07
Lovely to talk to you. You know, the New Zealand singer, Lord, in that first big song she sang Royals, said, knowing in the song she would never be rich and Royal. She said, My friends and I have cracked the code. And she meant I think finding happiness outside celebrity and wealth. And so have you and your friends, notably Oprah, in this case, this the secret to better living and becoming happier isn’t money, power, pleasure and fame. It’s what please the secret as well. Yeah, just to say,

Speaker 2 1:40
I know the the four that you’re naturally tending to pursue money, power, pleasure and fame. They’re they’re wired into the human genome, mother nature wants you to pursue those things, because that helps you to survive and pass on your genes. But there’s a there’s the real four that will bring happiness consistently. And that’s your faith, your family, your friendship, and having worked that serves now I don’t mean faith in a traditional sense, necessarily, I mean, a sense of philosophy about life’s meaning. I mean, family relationships that are enduring, that are forgiving, I mean, real friendships, not deal friendships. And I think everybody listening knows the difference between real and deal. And I’m talking about work where you can earn your success, you know, you can create value with your work and where you’re, you believe that you’re serving other people with your work. That’s the big four. So leave behind the notions of of money, power, pleasure and fame for happiness and embrace faith, family, friends, and work and happiness is something that you’ll find a lot more of

Speaker 1 2:35
happiness, or another word at Harvard, just the other day, it looked like were You were onstage with Oprah, you used the word happiness.

Speaker 2 2:46
Yeah, that’s true. And the reason is, because the goal isn’t some ultimate happiness. We as human beings, we need negative experiences to learn and grow. And we need negative emotions, quite frankly, to stay alive, negative emotions which are produced, and in particular, parts of the brain actually occupy more brain space for their production than positive emotions do because, frankly, we wouldn’t have gotten out of a place to seen if it weren’t for negative emotions, like disgust, which alerts us to pathogens like sadness, which gives us an incentive to stay near our kin and not be separated from the people that we love, or anger and fear, which alert us to threats, we’re going to have those things in a full life, and quite frankly, it would be not only suboptimal, it’d be dangerous to get rid of those things. So the result is pure happiness, it’s just not going to just not gonna happen on this side of heaven. But what we can do is to understand the experiences negative and experiences and emotions to, to manage them appropriately, so they don’t take over our lives to learn from them and grow from this. So we can be in a, in a state of happiness, of progress of making, making progress toward the goal of being the happiest person that we can possibly be.

Speaker 1 3:55
And you’ve got the nitty gritty of the How to which we’ll get into status will never bring you the happiness that you seek. You said with Oprah sitting next to you. And in that moment, we raised an eyebrow. But as an aside, I mean acquaintance with you seems to seems to have made her more content, somehow from what she’s talking about. There seems to be a real humility in her and that’s true of her contributions to the book as well.

Speaker 2 4:21
Yeah, I mean, a lot of you know, I’ve had the opportunity through my last few books and just what I do for a living, of getting to know a lot of people who are very prominent very, you know, in on the world stage people that we would all envy because of the fame and the admiration and or just the money that they have. And the truth of the matter is that generally speaking, they can be happy only in spite of those things. And that’s hard to believe sometimes. You know, for example, fame is a perfect case of this. Oh, if I were famous, I would be so happy all day long. No, you can only ever be happy in spite of fame. And yet you don’t know that because Mother Nature obscures that knowledge from you unnecessarily. Mother nature wants you to To become a bit you know a better at propagating the species and surviving for another day by having a bigger place to the better place in the hierarchy of humanity. But the truth is that you want to be happy, but you’re not going to get it that way. And you’ll be frustrated if you do. So when I’m working with people who are really really famous. One of the things that I’m always working on with them is how they can develop better closer personal relationships, how they can have a better spiritual life a better philosophical life how how they won’t hunger after those things that the people think that are the source of their great happiness and, and what I find is no getting to know these people that they say no, right from the very beginning, I thought this was going to make me happy. And it it doesn’t quite frankly, Oprah is a very Oprah Winfrey is an especially Aquila braided figure because she knew these things beforehand. But the source of her happiness is not the great fortune, well, fame and prosperity that she’s had, the source of her happiness is the same thing is the source of mine. And then yours, which is her faith and her family life, which she cares an awful lot about her deep, deep friendships with others and, and the idea that she’s going to serve humanity through her work, that’s the source of her happiness as well.

Speaker 1 6:07
This, I suppose is going to be a scattershot approach to a book that’s dense with detail and advice. But hopefully, I’ll cover all the core precepts of it as we go. And you’ve just enumerated the basis of those. We can’t manage our emotions, although 1000 self help books Atha imply that we can.

Speaker 2 6:28
Yeah, I mean, managing our emotions is is a tricky business, because most people don’t even understand them. They tend to think that their emotions are things that simply happen to you. And so the best thing that you can do is just kind of look on the bright side and hope for the best. And that’s no management technique at all. That’s basically just I’m going to spend all my money without ever looking at my bank balances and hope that everything turns out all right, this book starts with a real serious science of emotions. It talks about the limbic system of the brain where from which all emotions emanate both negative and positive and talks about how once you understand that process, you can engage a management technique called metacognition, a very well vetted scientifically based self management technique that puts space between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex of the brain, so that you can experience all of your emotions consciously and the prefrontal cortex, the executive part, the most modern part of your brain, as opposed to simply being managed by your emotions in the limbic system. And the way that it basically works is to take time to observe your own emotions to not act immediately when you feel them through a series of techniques from journaling, to meditation to prayer, perhaps for some people even to to counselling or, or therapy. And we talked about exactly how that works neuro physiologically, and as such, how it gives you tremendous amounts of power over over your emotions themselves, so that you can manage them better than you did before and start to get happier.

Speaker 1 7:55
Okay, and they always sound like good techniques. But how easy is it to observe a feeling and discard the absorption, you haven’t that feeling or in a bad situation?

Speaker 2 8:06
Once you get a routine, it actually turns out to be relatively simple. So one of the things that I asked my students to do, and I teach a science of happiness to graduate students at Harvard University, so this is a pretty high level group. But still, they will say I mean, their business graduate students, so they can manage money, and they can manage the company, but they can’t manage their own feelings. And I said, Well, part of the reason is because you don’t know how to do it. And here’s how we start. I asked them at the end of the day to write down a list of the emotions that they felt to write them down. And so doing, you move the experience of those emotions to your conscious brain, you can’t write them down if you don’t, and you sort of studied them as if they were happening to another person, then you write down advice to yourself about how to deal with these emotions as if you were advising another person. Now this is important because you’re you’re treating your limbic system as if it did, it did, was possessed by another person. And giving yourself that advice actually gives you better technique of doing so now once people get used to it, they really like to do it, they find that they have a lot more emotional control, because when they’re experiencing negative emotions, they know that this is about to go in the book. And when it goes in the book, it will suddenly seem a lot less threatening. When you’re feeling angry and afraid about something on social media or something going on at work. And you actually write it down, it suddenly becomes a lot less threatening a lot less like a sabre toothed Tiger is chasing you. The reason is because your limbic system says it’s a tiger, but your prefrontal cortex says it’s just a just another little problem that you’re going to need to manage. Yeah, looking

Speaker 1 9:39
at your emotions as if they were happening to someone else. I thought that was a very clever notion. But not always easy, because processing emotions isn’t always easy. For some of us. There are years of mental defences that have been built up to mask them. You know, there’s overarching melancholy, maybe which we ascribe to genes and so on. And there’s what we learned as a child and all sorts of ways or was subjected into sometimes emotions, often immediate are described in simplistic ways, but they’re not simplistic.

Speaker 2 10:07
No, they’re not. They’re hard. They’re, they’re very complex. And one of the best things that people need to understand about their emotions is that they’re not good or bad. They’re just information. That’s all it is. Now the function of emotions in the limbic system is to take information about what’s going on in the outside world, and turn it into kind of a machine language that everybody understands. You and I are speaking English right now is the language we were growing up with. But there are people all over the world who don’t speak English, they have the same emotions that we do. Why because they have the same set basic set of experiences and what they see and they smell and they touch and they feel, and those experiences actually need to be mediated. So you know how you can actually react, one of the most important things that we can do so that we don’t feel emotionally out of control is to reclassify our emotions as simple information, I’m getting this information because it’s something that’s happening outside, I can decide if I can substitute a better emotion for the one that I’m feeling if I’m metacognitive, I can decide on the reaction if the reaction that I would typically have is, is not useful, I can’t even decide sometimes to disregard these emotions and just observe the outside world. But all requires that you put space between the emotions and and the experience that you have them conscious have of them consciously.

Speaker 1 11:23
Okay, someone’s listening right now and thinks that sounds smart that you can put distance between what you feel you can be meta cognitive, distance between what you feel and what you want to do and need to do. And you have a section towards the end called Getting Started. Because how do you start if I had 30 seconds with you at a social gathering before someone else came up to you to monopolise your company? And you bet you sense that I badly needed a starting point on the road to happiness? What would you tell me to do?

Speaker 2 11:53
I would start by telling you to understand, and then take one or two simple practices to practice these things in your life. And third, I would ask you to explain them to somebody else. This is how you will solidify these practices and it will become permanent to you. Understanding is critical. That’s the reason we wrote a book about this that has chapters about in layman’s terms, it’s not a technical book, but it does talk about how the brain is working, then it gives you actual exercises, how you can practice gratitude how you can get rid of the mirrors in your life, how you can choose better emotions in different cases. And last but not least, you need to explain these things to other people. You know, I’ll tell people I’ll say look at their, when they’re at my talks, I’ll say write down the five things that are striking you the most and explain these things to your family at dinner. And when you explain these things, you will own the information permanently and it can then it has a fighting chance to change in your life. There’s a philosophical idea that comes from the great psychologist and philosopher William James, which is the distinction between the eye self and the me self. The eye itself is me looking at the world and experiencing it and all of its wondering, ah, the me self is me looking in a mirror thinking what am I doing what other people think of me, that’s important, but it goes too far. And we spend most of our day doing that. We look at literal mirrors every at every possible chance. Why? Because we want to see our own reflection, we’re drawn to it. But there’s there’s virtual mirrors that are even more dangerous on social media then notifications that we get wondering what other people are thinking of us all the time. It’s just such a boring waste of time. But it also leads to a huge amount of grief that people actually get and, and they don’t enjoy their lives very much. And I have examples of this in the book, I worked I was working with somebody who, you know, he was sort of had the worst of the virtual nears he was a fitness influencer, oh man, he was somebody who on Instagram was you know, taking off his shirt and showing his abdominal muscles. And it was on the front of fitness magazines. And he didn’t eat what he wanted for 10 years. And he was miserable thinking about his looks all the time. And he realised that he was in shackles by this. So he did something pretty radical. He literally got rid of all of the mirrors in his house and showered in the dark for a year. So he couldn’t see his own muscles. And the result of that was that he was spending a lot more time thinking about what was outside of him and the world that was surrounding him. And he’s he solved his problem. He actually got happier now I don’t have the presence of mind to do the wonderful thing like that. I’m just not good enough. So I actually need more distinct exercises that I can do and books full of them.

Speaker 1 14:24
Yeah, and that’s a striking example build the life you want. And Professor Arthur C. Brooks is with us. I don’t suppose we’ve fully defined happiness. Clive James provided the definition that I’ve always subscribed to that it’s a byproduct of absorption. But when I read you it’s more than that.

Speaker 2 14:45
Yeah, happiness to begin with is ordinarily misunderstood because people mistake it for a feeling and happiness is not a feeling any more than you know the smell of dinner is your dinner. Happiness has feelings and those are evidence of actual happiness. When we break it down to its component parts, we find that happiness kind of has, you might say it has three macronutrients, which is the way that you would describe food in terms of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, all food is made up of those macronutrients. And similarly, happiness is made up of three macronutrients, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things that we need to work on that we need to focus on that we need to get better at. And none of those things is straightforward. On the contrary, all of those things are just rife with problems and, and, and bad practices and bad habits. I’ll give you an example. Most people think they know what enjoyment is. And they think it’s pleasure, but it isn’t pleasure is is a limbic phenomenon. And so it’s produced by the brain to simply give you information about something that might help you survive or pass on your genes, so you’ll be attracted to it. That’s why your caveman ancestors would have climbed up a dangerous tree to get a bright looking banana, because it’s going to be sweet and give a little bit of pleasure. That’s not the secret to happiness. That’s the secret to survival. And today, when you all you do is you search for pleasure, you won’t get happiness, you’ll get addiction, what you need for enjoyment is to take the source of pleasure and add in communion with other people and memory. And that actually makes it into something where you’re using your full brain, including your conscious brain. So one of the rules of thumb, especially for the young people listening to us is, if something gives you pleasure, don’t do it alone. If you do something alone and hit the pleasure lever again, and again, and again, it’ll give you addiction and not happiness. If you do something that you really, really like a lot with people that you love, and make memories, then you will get enjoyment. And that will lead to happiness, whether it’s gambling, or drinking, or whatever your thing happens to be. And that’s an example of how the science can really change your life. But you need to know, both the concepts, the theories, and the scientific practices that you can use to change your habits.

Speaker 1 17:00
And you also have to make your way through the challenges of this. And the pain. In some cases, probably most cases, I mean, in a way, I got the impression from the book that in terms of your day to day, in a way what you say is fake it till you make it, for example, substitute our pessimism and our worried look as we walk into the workplace, for a kind of me and a facade that disregard your actual inner turmoil.

Speaker 2 17:26
Yeah, well, that’s the idea of motional substitution. If you’re appropriately metacognitive, if you’re if you’re observing your own feelings, there are lots of times when there’s another emotion that you can, you can substitute for the one that you’re feeling that’s actually appropriate and better for you. A classic case is that a lot of people who feel a lot of melancholy, even a lot of depression, they learn how to make jokes. They’re using emotional substitution, humour, for pessimism in that case, or humour for sadness in that particular case. But you made another point that’s really important that we need to emphasise the sadness. unhappiness in general is not something that we should be afraid of, on the contrary, it’s part of a normal life, it’s part of a healthy life. If you never felt any unhappiness, you wouldn’t have any negative emotions, and you’d be hunted down and killed, and your ancestors wouldn’t have made it out of the Pleistocene era, you wouldn’t have made it 500,000 years ago, your line would have been cleared out isn’t matter of fact. And the truth of the matter is still today, negative experiences show your resilience, they give you a sense of who you are, they they make it possible for you to live a fully alive life. The problem is that we don’t need to dominate our lives with them, to be focused on them to be obsessed with them, we need to manage them. And that’s the reason that we talk an awful lot about how unhappiness is not your enemy, you just need to learn how to manage it.

Speaker 1 18:45
If we look back on our lives, though, and single out something that’s been the worst thing, the terrible trauma, and seek benefit from that thing, because what you say is a version of you know, no gain without pain. What if there’s no benefit? What if that thing has been, for example, a mental condition or physical blight? That just is, you know, anatomy being destiny, as Adler said, and that and that’s coloured everything, since your experience or your awareness of who you are? How do you find the benefit?

Speaker 2 19:14
Well, the point is that with these terrible circumstances that we really, really can’t change that are chronically lowering our quality of life. The worst thing that we can possibly do is to is to give in to the idea that this will lower my quality of life forever, that I’m going to be sad forever, that I’m never going to be able to get happier unless under some circumstances, the source of my unhappiness is withdrawn. On the contrary, we have to recognise that people all over the world, in the worst of circumstances have learned how they can become happier. If not because of the source of happiness. In spite of the source of unhappiness, I start the book Oprah and I start the book with it with a story of somebody I knew very well my own mother in law, who went for years believing that her the misfortune in her life was and which one is considerable. I mean, she and her husband had abandoned her with little kids without any money. And she was lonely. She was poor. And she honestly believed that those terrible circumstances made it impossible for her to get ahead and actually experience happiness until she realised she couldn’t change the outside world. All she could change was what was inside her own head. And the result of that is she went through a series of exercises where she doubled down on her religious faith, where she built up relationships with the close family with whom she still had these, you know, these close links, that she made new friends, she got an education, she wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise and to build friendships, people who, you know, decades later, were weeping at her funeral. And what she did was she realised that she couldn’t get rid of the sources of our unhappiness, but she couldn’t work on her happiness, even in spite of those sources of unhappiness. And those were really pretty considerable sources of unhappiness, probably beyond what Oliver have to endure,

Speaker 1 20:58
understood. And sharing those innermost thoughts helps. And we are in an era where people do what you say to do. We share our pain. And after a while, you get sick of the umpteenth account of personal pain. I mean, I hate to sound callous, but it’s it’s probably true, especially on social media, what was once phenomenal personal revelation is, is now commonplace. I mean, everybody has trauma that they’re airing, so we should be getting healthier.

Speaker 2 21:25
Yeah, you’d think right. And the truth of the matter is that we’re doing, what we’re doing is we’re rehearsing our pain in front of other people, when in many cases, we even make it into a form of theatre, it becomes self indulgent to the point that it alienates other people, and it doesn’t cure our own problems. Now, there’s nothing wrong with admitting when something is wrong in your life. The problem is, when it actually becomes the source of your identity, which happens more and more social media is kind of grievance theatre, it’s, you know, it’s kind of a source of virtuous victimhood, which isn’t good for anybody under the circumstances. And we talked about how to how to, you know, get beyond that with all sorts of metacognitive techniques for getting beyond that. But let’s remember that, you know, sharing your pain is, is okay for your most intimate people. But the way that you’re actually going to get better is by sharing love in your life, and you will attract more love to you, when you share the love that you have.

Speaker 1 22:17
Yeah, someone I admired greatly once, who was a real philanthropist in his local community said, have a different version of that if you want. If you want to have friends be a friend.

Speaker 2 22:29
Yeah, yeah, give the thing that you want to get. This is the iron law of, of how you can have attraction actually, is to think about all the things that you want. You want people to listen to you listen to them, do you want people to be patient with you, be patient with them? Do you want more people to find you attractive, go find people attractive. I mean, it’s just an amazing thing. You want more compliments compliment other people and this is just this law of attraction is nothing particularly cosmic, it’s how human beings are wired. And, and this really all comes back to the ultimate rule of love. This is the this is the rocket fuel of happiness in and of itself, that happiness is love, give more and, and don’t block it out in your life,

Speaker 1 23:09
and achieve detachment. Some of this is it’s a bit Buddhist, you talk in the book about not wanting things wanting less. You see, I’m kind of, I’m probably echoing, you know, the point of resistance and people and people listening in terms of changing their lives. So I don’t buy a new car. You know, it’ll just spy on me anyway. I’d I don’t replace my old headphones. I don’t follow fashion. I do what Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t wear the same clothes every day. But if I go to have social factions, and the suit I bought back in 2003, which is actually probably what I do. I know I’ll be judged. You know, I know I’ll be judged by the outside world, if I detach too much, and that will make me self conscious or the facade of shame attached, and then my happiness will diminish. It isn’t it is a conundrum.

Speaker 2 23:58
It’s a conundrum except that it’s pretty easy to solve ultimately, through sort of Prudential judgement our lives. Here’s the way to think about it. Enduring satisfaction doesn’t come from having more. I mean, Mother Nature says that if you’re going to be satisfied, you’ll get it with a constant stream of more and more and more and more and more, but that’s wrong. Mother Nature’s lying to you because she lies all the time. She doesn’t care about your happiness at all. real satisfaction comes from thinking about it in terms of this formula, all the things you have divided by all the things that you want numerator and denominator, you can get temporary satisfaction, a little blip and then just be on the treadmill running again by increasing that numerator of haves. But you can also you can you can increase your satisfaction in a more enduring and efficient way by decreasing the denominator by by wanting less by being detached more from all of the things in your life. Now, you can take that to a ridiculous extreme and make it impossible to live in modern society. You can take it to the point where you you’ve detached from bathing and people can’t still stand your smell under the circumstances. But, but that’s absurd. Of course, what we’re really talking about is the constant progress toward more and more and more and more. And you wouldn’t even be happy if you had literally every single thing in the world under the circumstances. Now, you need to be thinking, do I need this, if I’m going to get this, maybe I’ll get something a little less expensive. Maybe I’ll put off this particular purchase, maybe I don’t need that thing chipping away as opposed to adding think of your life not as a canvas that you’re filling up with brushstrokes until it’s dense with paint. Think of your life as a sculpture that you’re chipping away until you find the beautiful horse and rider or the Venus de Milo that’s within the block of granite. And the more that you chip away, the more beautiful it actually gets.

Speaker 1 25:41
Which sounds a bit like Marie Kondo, but you don’t mean literally discarding possessions all the time. Do you

Speaker 2 25:47
know I don’t, I mean, I’m really talking about not being attached to more and more and more and more and more, it’s really what we’re talking about. Because, you know, on the wheel of, of our, our commercial society, where we’re bombarded by, by messages that if you have the new car, you’ll be more desirable if you have a better wardrobe, everything all will be well, you know, in your heart is not true, and don’t so don’t fall prey to it. If you want to spend money, by the way that the research is very clear. As an economist, I will assure you that buying more stuff will not make you happier, make sure that if you’re going to spend money, use it to buy experiences with people that you love, or to buy more time by doing things that are not doing things that distract you in spending that time with the people that you love and, and giving it away to charities that you really honestly believe in. Those are the three ways to buy happiness, and none of those things actually leads you to more and more and more and more. On the contrary and makes you want fewer of the physical things in your life.

Speaker 1 26:46
Build the life you want. Professor Arthur C. Brooks is with us. What you do want more and more of is other people and friends. And you mentioned Edgar Allan Poe and here all I loved I loved alone. And actually for your interest. The man who wrote the English words to our national anthem in New Zealand wrote a poem not understood how many cheerless, lonely hearts are breaking how many noble spirits pass away, not understood, and millions and millions I suspect, character type, which gets us to character type, which as you acknowledge, must be a big factor in a lack of happiness. Can you tell us about the four profiles in your book?

Speaker 2 27:25
Yeah, there are four emotional profiles that we need to understand if you want to emote. If you want to manage yourself emotionally, you need to understand yourself emotionally. And that starts with, with a test that we actually have in the book called the positive effect negative effect series. One of the things that many people get wrong is they think that negative feelings are the opposite of positive feelings. That feeling happy is the is the absence of unhappiness, and that’s quite wrong. You can be an unusually happy and an unusually unhappy person. And there’s a test in the book to see what your profile is. Some people have very intense positive emotions and very intense negative emotions. These are mad scientists. That’s me, by the way, some people have intensely positive and, and not intense negative emotions. These are cheerleaders, which you know, everybody seems like they want to be, you have intense negative and weak positive emotions. That’s the poet. That’s the melancholy poet. And finally, you can have low intensity, positive and negative, which is a sober, unflappable, Judge, all of these are normally occurring in the population, one quarter of the population falls in each one of these buckets. You can’t manage yourself effectively until you know who you are. So I’d have to ask you, which are you?

Speaker 1 28:39
Yeah, I thought you might ask me that. It’s, it’s difficult to know, because as we contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman says, you know, we can be we can think we’re melancholic, and all of a sudden, we can think we’re actually a brilliant and that can change through our lives. And it can be a mix of metal.

Speaker 2 28:56
It can, it can indeed, but we have a salient personality profile, where we tend to, to reside, where we tend to land over and over again, and once we know what it is, then we can learn to manage it, we can learn to recognise it, we can even learn to be grateful for it and find people who compliment us and who don’t simply disdain the negative emotions that we have once they understand who we are, and our loved ones can appreciate who we are in the unique gifts that we bring to the party. But we have to start with self knowledge.

Speaker 1 29:24
You quote Mother Teresa saying we should all be looking to do small things with great love. You know? I’m I don’t know she was I’ve been we assumed she was happy. I have read that her early epiphany of the presence of Christ and her life and the certainty and purpose that accompanied that faded with the years but but she she so fed accounts true. I can’t vouch for it, but she looks she would have been

Speaker 2 29:48
struggled. Yeah, she wouldn’t build a great deal. She struggled with a tremendous amount of sadness later in life. She almost certainly had clinical depression, as a matter of fact, which is, you know, pretty interesting from a great saint who never never deviated from the path of great love.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

And because we’re using the free version of Otter AI, with a limit for any transcription is 30 minutes..  and this interview was 5 mins longer!