How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want

stuckness always means you're about to be transformed tell me one of the scariest thoughts that comes up when you let your fear speak you are about to do something stupid the opposite of the most painful thought in your head is your next step toward Awakening I would say you're about to do something really brilliant feel that yes we're going to do time travel okay so it's 2034 you're going to wake up on a day that is an ordinary day in a perfect life what do you hear I hear waves and I hear little kids laughing

look at the room look for the pictures that have that have been taken in the Years between 2024 and 2034 uh two weddings wow um grand babies M can you feel that you are creating this future as we got go through this mhm you are out of anxiety and into imagination and the tears in your eyes tell me it's real yeah you're finding your purpose right now thank you for um changing my life hey it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast I am thrilled that you're here we're going to experience something

so extraordinary together and if you're brand new I want to welcome you to the Mel Robins podcast family this is the perfect episode to be listening to right now because we're going to be digging into the topic of purpose of discovering your power you're going to learn so much from our guests today this is a woman that I have admired for 19 years she has changed my life she's going to change yours today and the fact that you hit play on this episode tells me that you're the type of person who values your time and

you're also interested in creating more meaning and purpose in your life and I love that and today you're going to get that because we have the number one life coach on the planet who is here today to help you make your life better if you feel stuck if you're looking for some guidance if you want to figure out what your next step is or if you just have this feeling that something that you're doing it just isn't working you're just not quite where you're supposed to be well you're in the right place right now you're

supposed to be here with your friend Mel and you and I are in for the coaching session of a lifetime and let me just give you the context for how amazing is if you wanted to hire the person who's in our studio today you couldn't book a session with her like that is how renowned she is but today she has hopped on a plane and flown across the country and she is here for you Dr Martha Beck is the number one life coach in the world and she's here to speak with you and me and

to help you live your best life Dr Martha Beck is a world renowned life coach who holds three sociology degrees from Harvard she's a six-time New York Times bestselling author she is famously known as Oprah's life coach and she's also been my life coach for 19 years but from afar and this is the very first time that I'm meeting her in person through her books her conversations she has helped me get clear about what I want and has inspired me to take bigger and more purposeful risks and she's here for you to share her best

tactics tools research and insights that are going to help you have the Breakthrough that you need and deserve so please help me welcome the extraordinary Martha Beck to the Mel Robins podcast I just have to say I am unbelievably thrilled that you're here I just I I can't believe that I'm sitting across from you actually am like pinch me pinch me I feel the same way I feel like I know you because you've been in my life for so long and I just am eternally grateful that you got on a plane and you are taking

the time to be with me and the person who's listening wow I just I am so honored to be here and it's like uh we're just looking in the mirror here because we've both had parasocial relationships with each other like I feel like you're talking to me all the time and it's just such an honor to be here I am so excited that you're here because there are just so many different topics that I cannot wait to learn from you about from how you find your deeply personal sense of purpose to how you can use

the tools that you write about in your new book to manage anxiety to learning how to live a life that's truly authentic to you and I thought a lot about how I wanted to start our conversation and I'd like to start it by telling you a personal story so it would have been early 2005 okay and I was a young mom with two M and I had left the practice of Law and I had studied and become a life coach and I had a small business coaching individuals and people that ran small businesses and Oprah

Winfrey was doing a big like event uhuh and it was at the Boston Convention Center oh that's right yeah and yeah and I thought well what better place to go to prospect for clients who feel stunk than at an Oprah Winfrey conference and I walked in and I sat down in a chair and a woman that I had never seen walked on stage and she started talking and it was you oh my goodness and there was something about you and I don't even know what the hell you were saying you were talking about purpose and

I remember just feeling the stress of having two kids and trying to grow this business and my husband had just been laid off and uh he wanted to go into the restaurant business and you were up there and there was something inside me and you talk I'd never thought about it as peace but everything went quiet and I don't even remember a word that you said but I remember feeling I want to be doing that and wow I didn't even know what that meant and so when you walked off stage I picked up one of

the magazines and I learned about you and I started reading your column and I said to myself I'm G to just figure out how I can write books or how I can speak to people and this was before I gave that tedex talk it was before I had ever done anything wow and it was you that's incredible and um I remember I um was sitting there one night and somebody forwarded me an email and I was up late at night kind of working and the kids have been put to bed and this email comes across

my um inbox and it's from a friend and she said hey Mel I I you know I work in PR in New York and I see that somebody is looking to interview a life coach for an article in this magazine so I scroll down and I notice oh well this is two months old and oh I have none of the credentials and oh um it looks like uh the deadline's already passed and then I said well what would Martha Beck do ah and I hit reply and I responded and it was the kind of beginning

of everything changing in my life and it all began with that moment that I had an experience with you oh oh my goodness and I've been waiting 19 years to meet you oh my heart is just like exploding right now I just you know I I remember going out in front of crowds and I'm te I had terrible performance anxiety but I would always stop and think somebody out there feels the way I did once yeah and I would just think whoever it is and I'd just say please speak to them and I don't know

what the hell I said either but it's like throwing a message out in a bottle and just wondering did anyone pick it up and then to have you say I found the message you left in the bottle and I picked it up and then you come back to me and it's it's an answer to my prayers to feel heard and seen the way we all want to feel heard and seen and it's talk about full circle moments this whole day has been just this deep magic and I really I love you for bringing that to

life and putting it out into the world well I I love you for starting the spark and one of the reasons why I was so excited Beyond just my selfish desire to have the full circle moment and to meet you and thank you is that you more than anybody in the world helps people get unstuck oh wow it's true like so much of your work is truly about finding purpose yeah and learning how to find your way especially when you have no peace especially when you don't know what comes next or life has thrown something

at you can you just expand a bit about your personal background and how you got to the point where you were writing all of these New York Times by selling books because there was a lot of personal history that led up to where you are now I would just love for you to share a little bit about your background sure in case the person listening is getting the gift of meeting you for the first time oh hello it's so nice to meet you yeah I I was privileged enough to have some fairly difficult things in

my life and and one of the hardest probably the hardest was growing up in the heart of very Mormon Mormonism with a father who was one of the great luminaries of the Mormon faith he defended the faith um it's called being an apologist so he was very important to Mormonism and I think it made him crazy and part of his crazy was that he sexually abused me and then I grew up and um after I was having children and trying to not tell any lies the the moment I decided one year not to tell any

lies the memory of the abuse just erupted if you've had that happen to you call someone you need Community um so you had suppressed all of the memories of it and then it erupts when you're you were actually at Harvard at the time right yeah I was finishing my PhD yeah um but yeah I had I mean it literally um I had so much scar tissue in my body my body wasn't working very well because of all the scar tissue in sensitive areas so um I had surgery for that as well and it that blew

it wide open um and I started having what they call intrusive flashbacks but at the same time I was looking at is this religion like I I look I love my father he's passed on but I love him and I really think made him crazy to try to wrap his mind around telling people that something was true when it wasn't it just there were things that were not true that he found a way to say oh they're true so I never hated him but um I realized that without speaking the truth and living in harmony

with my truth I couldn't survive psychologically I would have I was very close to taking my own life couldn't do that to my kids so I decided to like get therapy do other things and at that point I started my family was like in communic like no this did not happen um they tried to shut it down I started getting scary messages um from unknown people saying you've been spreading rumors about your father you need to you know I'm going to you know drag you behind my truck and tell you tell the truth that kind

of stuff it was like just from strangers yeah and then 10 years later I waited 10 years and then I wrote a book about it called leaving the Saints how I left the Mormons and found my faith because it was about how I had been set free by the experience of dealing with that and that lo and behold I decided I believe that there's a Divine Consciousness that loves us all and is always taking care of us so when that book came out yeah my family tried to take legal action to have me put in

prison uh um I lost every friendship I'd had growing up because everyone was Mormon in that community and going against the church and leaving the church is considered the only sin worse than murder well and you not only did that but to live in your integrity yeah and to live your truth and to set yourself free you also wrote about it yeah in a book that became a massive New York Times bestseller I was hoping no one would read it I knew I had to write it yes but I was terrified and pretty much all

the things that I thought would happen happened you know my Publishers called me after the gys came out and said why didn't you tell us about this and I was like I tried they were like we're getting death threats I was like yeah I know don't rock the boat in that in any very strongly committed ideological Community right yeah so it was just loss after loss after loss after loss there was immense fear There Was Fear for my children whose lives were threatened anonymously by people sending me letters and stuff um had to leave my

home at the same time realized I didn't really like Academia so I left my job um realized I was gay oh so there went my marriage um just everything everything left and everything arrived everything painful that was so hard to lose I had to let them go and in the spaciousness that opened up the thing I call God moved in and there's just joy joy joy joy in letting go I want that for all of us I do too I want that so much I want that for every single person I want that so much

for you yeah how did you go from that experience in your life and in your career and in your marriage and publicly to then making this decision that you would put yourself out there even more and help everyone else find their way because you have and your work represents around the world a pathway towards purpose a a way to find your authentic self a way to truly find the courage to speak your truth I mean that's what you represent in the world oh thank you you know I was we're in Boston I haven't been back

to Boston for like 30 years really yeah and I was living in Cambridge which is right here when I was my son was prenatally diagnosed with Down Syndrome so I was six months pregnant I knew he had Down syndrome and I had never really experienced peace um and I was very very upset and I couldn't sleep I couldn't sleep I couldn't sleep and I remember being in my apartment in Cambridge curled over my big pregnant belly which terrified me because I didn't know what was going to happen to my life and to him and I

was under such a weight of grief that I did something and you your new book is like perfect because I just allowed what was happening to happen I I said let the world be what it is let this child be what it is and I sort of collapsed forward and I swear to God I felt arms go around me in that moment and it was as if something picked me up and I was curled on the floor but I felt as if i' been picked up like a baby and held and I don't know what

that was but it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced and I don't know how long it lasted because it was it felt outside of time and it was just overwhelming and after it ended my entire life was about I have to get back there and that is to this very day what I'm doing here well and that's the work that you do with people around the world you well I think you succeed in helping us come home to ourselves yeah I can't believe you haven't been back to Boston yeah it was it was a difficult

City for me yeah well then I are or at least you have't been around TOA you haven't been back to Cambridge I did today and it was really what was that like oh everywhere I went I was tapping my younger self on the shoulder because I was there from the time I was 17 till I was like 28 and I would just tap my younger self on the shoulder and say hey I'm from your future and I I know with 100% accuracy you're going to get through this and you're going to be happy and I

just kept telling my younger selves that all morning going around with my wonderful partner it was was time travel it was magic I had three social science degrees from Harvard and what they taught they taught me well it was a brutal education but it one thing was very true and that is I'm a social scientist by training you can't really know what another person's life is like for them so the only truth story you can tell is your own never presume to tell another person's story if I'm going to speak the truth I speak it

from my own experience because I will not impose that on you but if you're you're invited to come share if you feel the same thing but that's why I had to tell my own story because standing on some pedestal and saying I know these things because I'm a social scientist I know I found the way out of suffering because I was suffering horribly here's the path I followed if it feels good to you come with me I love you good luck and what's available to the person listening right now or to somebody that they love

if they're suffering deeply in this conversation today you're okay right now Mel and I we're here we got you there is a community of love it's invisible but if you feel it with your senses in your heart something will start to shift because we've got you and it's going to be okay just this moment a breath at a time we got you I believe you yeah it's true and and I also believe that you're going to walk us through exactly how we can believe it for ourselves too I that's that's my dream that's the Dream

well that's what we're going to do today and so I would love to have you just talk a little bit about how you think about the experience of being stuck yeah in life and even moments in your life where you have felt stuck yeah and we'll just start there oh yeah well the story just told you I felt completely and totally stuck I mean my advisers at Harvard even the doctors told me I was throwing my life away by keeping uh my son and I'm very pro-choice by the way but that he was diagnosed like

a week before my sixth month I had already really bonded to him so I felt stuck then and and here's the thing the release came from a surrender to what was but then being caught by some force that is not something we really talk about in our culture and over and over in my life when I've gotten stuck when I was you know the daughter of one of mormonism's most famous defendants and then I'm dealing with memories of sexual abuse and the whole religion is you know vested in keeping me quiet I felt very stuck

then and when my whole family and all the friends I'd had as a child sort of wrote me off and I've never spoken to them again that felt very I felt very stuck but I've come to to have a really delightful relationship with the feeling of being stuck and now I even know the brain science behind it when you have a really big need or desire and you're really feeling stuck I call it an impass this is when your brain the feeling of just bumping up against it that is the brain saying I'm about to

give you a big Leap Forward I'm about to tell you things that will blow your mind so be stuck get right down in the mud with it say I hate this I'm miserable and then say screw it and go for a walk or go for a ride in the car or if you can't get out of your house watch the birds outside your window there is a part of your brain that will actually take the the impass the stuckness and you will come eventually to an idea you have never imagined before like and I compare

it to the caterpillar cannot imagine being a butterfly but that is its Destiny stuckness always means you're about to be transformed so embrace it with both arms enjoy it lean in you're going to love it it's so hard to do though and I I mean and you literally coach people through this and I think about moments in my life where I have felt so stuck and also directionless right like I don't know what I should be doing next Y and so could you speak speak directly to the person who's listening yes that feels that right

now like they're not only feeling that frustration and is this all my life is going to be in the sense that there's something else but I don't even know how to access it yep okay so two things you have two best friends that go with you everywhere one is your body the other is suffering and these are your allies and our culture really discounts both of them we need to get a little Wilder as I say in my little online community called Wilder and the way you get Wilder is you sink into the body and

you feel for suffering so if you wouldn't mind I don't do hypothetical work so I want to just work it on you so what I do with myself and what I would do with you if I were coaching you I would say In This Moment is there anything in you that is not peaceful yes okay where in your body do you experience most of the not piece I feel it as like this tension in my chest like it's right between my breast it's almost like this like plate right in here o yeah okay and and

when you start to describe it you're you're actually will be using the language of the body okay this tells everyone in the world no matter what language they speak ah we've all felt that ah yes the the armoring of the heart the flinching away when you focus on that what emotion comes up and there are four categories mad sad glad and scared scared okay okay so breathe into that so now you have your friend suffering saying I'm afraid and you have your friend body saying it doesn't need words it's okay this is helping you find

your way through life so the first thing you do is in your phrase let it let it be okay let the emotion be bigger just let the the fear the scaredness be there let it be huge let it fill your internal space let it leak over into the world let that plate armor in your chest really really get as big as it wants to be it's like a nuclear Cloud now fantastic now it's like yeah okay let it let it let it you should write another book called Let It what happens when you relax into

it is you're no longer resisting the lesson that is coming from your you know fear is another word for anxiety so you're it's coming from your anxiety it's coming from Life circumstances so now if that were a being you loved and you asked it first of all say be yourself I have no resistance to you come in sit down with me the suffering yes be huge be yourself be huge be scary I have zero resistance to this yeah and then this will take too much time for the broadcast but you say you say to yourself

tell me every everything write it all down tell me everything you're feeling you know what's interesting about inviting the suffering in as a person and taking the feeling in your body and visualizing it into something bigger is the second that you said that the kind of tension in the chest mushroomed into this like nuclear Cloud yeah which ironically made it feel smaller well look at the amount of energy you had compacted into your chest when you let it go there's a kind of release yes you're not having to hold all that pain anymore you're just

letting it be and what ended up happening because this is a particular fear about something going on in my financial life okay is that the second that I kind of imagined it big and you invited it in to sit with me it immediately started talking oh really yes and it brought me right back to 15 years ago when I was on the brink of bankruptcy really and like I'm afraid because I've been in a place where I've felt out over the tips of my skis I've been in a place where I've been really scared and

struggling financially and it's not at all the same situation but it's triggering yes it is it and if we were um working this in person I would have you write down or tell me every thought that is causing suffering because here's the thing there are two two sources of suffering one is clean and one is dirty the clean suffering is like if I punched you in the head it would hurt that's just clean suffering but dirty suffering comes from our thoughts about events so then you would think she hates me why did she do that

did I deserve it she shouldn't have done that so there would be this storm of thoughts and we all have different storms but most of our pain most of our suffering doesn't come from events it comes from our thoughts about events m so as your pain tells its story you are un blending from it and you said it's not the same situation at all you're able to see that that means you have a little perspective but don't shut it down don't say oh you don't need to worry this is different no suffering is your ally

it will tell you everything you need if you let it speak and I'm going to ask you because you're good at this stuff tell me one of the scariest thoughts that comes up when you let your fear speak um that you've just spent 15 years getting yourself out of financial debt uhuh and making yourself feel safe because you've been really good about savings and you are about to do something stupid okay you're I'm GNA boil that down to you're about to do something stupid and all the alarm is attached to it right yes here's the

deal here's how suffering is your friend it always tells you the opposite of what you actually need to know so it's very specific it's not just oh let it go it'll be fine that thought that caus the more suffering it causes the more it's getting your attention but it's backwards so so what is the back like I can't even wrap my brain around this I'm like wait so what is backwards about it's about to I would say you know you've spent all this time getting yourself out of debt and now you're about to do something

really brilliant feel that yes yeah the opposite of the most painful thought in your head the opposite of that thought is your next step toward Awakening oh my God that's beautiful it always works can we try that with a breakup yes please so I watched my daughter go through just a wildly painful heartbreak this summer ouch and and the biggest fear is that it was two it was like I'll never find love again yeah or I've made a huge mistake and I blew it and so if we take this truth and wisdom and you invite

the suffering in and let's just take the statement that a lot of people feel I'll never find love again I'll never find somebody who loves me yep what is the opposite of that so you have to really listen to The Suffering till the point where you're sick of it because before that you're going to cling to this thought it's part of your ego trying to defend itself but as we know trying to cling to things to defend yourself is the way into misery so I'll never find love again it will sound radical but the opposite

would be I will always find love again now if you sit with that and start to look for ways it could be true oh I will always find love I love that tree outside the window I love my cat I love my mother I love oh there's just love everywhere when you say I'll always find love I'll find it everywhere everything starts to love you back try this try this go into a coffee shop or someplace you like to go to like have lunch go in thinking your most painful thought I'll never find love again

I'll never find love again and watch how people react to you okay the next day go in again but this time you have to repeat the opposite I'll always find love everywhere I'll always find love everywhere and watch how people react to you they will open doors for you they will give you free stuff they will smile I'm telling you people talk about me being woo woo it's just what happens go test it well I also think there's a lot of science to this there is yeah because aren't you training your mind to show you

what you're looking for like if you're AR you more open to it is that also because I believe in both the magic and the spirit wo and you can explain it and you do in your work over and over again about how this is also a tactic to reprogram your spirit and your brain to be open to this yeah selective attention you've probably seen that experiment where they have six people bouncing a basketball and you tell someone watching the film count the times they bounce the ball in the middle of the film a person in

a gorilla suit comes in and does a little dance and then leaves and people watching that film don't see the gorilla because they're busy watching the times the ball bounces and the gorilla is not subtle it is right in the middle of the frame it's big we don't see what we don't pay attention to so if you are constantly saying ah I'm not going to find love I'm not going to find love the only things you'll see will be things that make you jealous and hurt and sad and if you walk around thinking I'm going

to see love everywhere always it happens the other thing is mirror neurons other people's brains if if you took a sip of water my brain would actually have the same activity in it as if I had taken a a sip of water our brains are constantly moving to reflect one another so when you walk around going there's love everywhere a person meets your eyes and suddenly sees love everywhere you're giving them a different brain by going around thinking I'll always find love I just everything that comes out of your mouth is like oh my God

I I felt my chest collapse like almost like falling backwards like a trustfall when you said you're about to make the most brilliant decision yeah and I think you're right look how aware you are look how experienced you are of course you're going to make a brilliant decision but what I love about this conversation is that when you see somebody that you care about who's stuck or going through heartbreak yeah or who is afraid because they're taking a risk yeah when we see that person from the outside we credit them and give them the benefit

of all the things we know to be true which is yes this is breaking your heart in a million pieces and yeah there's love all around you and there is love in your life and you will absolutely find love again yeah and you will be loved but it's hard for you as the person stuck in it yeah is being stuck different than not having a purpose or very related yeah because people the biggest reason people consult me is a sense of losing of not having a purpose and they'll put that above things like heartbreak or

you know disease like not having a purpose is really a big problem and it's really related to being stuck because our our knowledge of the direction we want to take is informed by a sense of purpose and when we don't have a sense of purpose we have no way of knowing where to to go and that gets us stuck I do seminars in Africa and one of the things we do is we take people rhinoceros tracking because that's an obvious thing to do right if you don't have a sense of purpose the rhinoceros is your

purpose you learn to see every sign it leaves on the earth and everything and then we take them back to the camp and we say now you're going to track your purpose the way we track the Rhino and the way you've track the track of your purpose is joy in the body oh oh a sense of Joy lifting or lightness relaxation in the body is a track and it said it never says here's what you're going to be in 20 years or even 20 minutes it says here's your next step forward so with this financial

situation you're about to make a brilliant decision how does that if you say that what happens in your body I feel that freedom and peace and ease that you talk about so the Buddha used to say um and he said it a lot wherever you find water you can know if it's the ocean because no matter what it looks like the the ocean always tastes of salt and when you find Enlightenment you will always recognize it no matter what it looks like because Enlightenment always tastes of Freedom o not giddy Joy not Bliss Freedom it

can be scary as hell to serve your purpose but it's free you are free So when you say you felt lighter and Freer that's a track so now okay you know that that's what you're going to follow instead of the thing that says oh my God I'm going to make a terrible decision or I'm always going to be alone or or it's never going to work out for me or I'm never going to be good enough like that is one lane yeah and using these tools you're now accessing and flipping the suffering yeah and you're

tracking what brings you more freedom in the body more joy in the body so if you're making the decision okay I'm going to put this money in this account or in that account literally sit there and say okay if I make decision a what happens in my body shut down if I make decision B what happens in my body little bit lighter so I always say to people think of the worst experience you had and then feel that how that was in your body and give that a a score negative -10 on the happy meter

then remember the most peaceful and free you've ever felt that's a positive 10 and everything in between zero is neutral so you may make a decision with this financial thing where it's just a that's plus one that's minus three okay it might be subtle but as you learn to feel what sets you free what removes suffering and replaces it with that's how you know the next step and as the steps start to add up you go oh my God that's my purpose is everybody's purpose different yes absolutely you said that with such certainty yeah yeah

it's as individual as our fingerprints and how do you define purpose that which brings you the mo the greatest satisfaction and joy as a being on this Earth and that allows you to contribute the most satisfaction and joy to the rest of the world that's your purpose it's where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet a theologian said that once I think it was FR bner and how do you discover this you talked about the Rhino hunting and then you take people back and say okay we're going to do that exact same process

do you look backwards and start to look for tracks and clues in your past or do you look forward well you do you you re you realize what feels like the way forward and what is not the way forward and it's really simple if it sets you free even a little bit go there that's your purpose if it traps you if it makes you feel encased no matter how slightly that is what uh my friend Boyd who tracks with me calls the track of not there so we go through life banging into suffering and oh

my God and that is just the track of not there after you learn to track Joy you won't even pay much attention to all of that noise you'll be so focused following your joy and then you'll look up and go oh my God that's where I'm headed like think of your story of of being in the audience at the O you know I I I'm so glad we're going there because I I have been stuck so many times in my life and a lot of times and I know you find this with people too when

you're stuck you're stuck and you're pretty convinced you are yeah and you're scared you're going to stay there and when you hear somebody like you yeah say we got to track your joy you got to move toward Freedom when you're that stuck at sort of like what the hell does that even mean like I I I can barely get out of bed I don't like the job that I have I can't make pay my bills yeah so and that's kind of where I was when I was sitting in that audience and and you gave me

a taste of that oh there's something that feels different here I'm going to move toward this and that the simple tool I came up with was what would Mara Beck do and I'll just do that because the woman has life that feels different than mine and so I'm going to just kind of move toward that even though I don't even know what she would do I'm just going to guess what she would do and so if if the person listening yeah is in it with us and they're also like okay yeah but what do I

do when I wake up what do I do in my life right now to find these small pockets of joy in my day because I'm assuming that's where you start no actually it's not it's not in the day than God it's always in this moment and it's always was inside the self there is no such thing as an a circumstance that will set you free all your feeling of captivity is always coming from the Mind from the fear-based mind when you set yourself free in your mind like I was bedridden for 12 years with a

whole bunch of autoimmune diseases a lot of which they told me were uh incurable and Progressive I don't have any symptoms but that didn't start after like for 12 years I was in constant chronic pain and severe disability okay like I raised my kids on a king-size bed and I felt very very stuck and then I realized that the feeling of being stuck was torture and that I could shift the feeling so it always starts what am I thinking I'm thinking I'm stuck I'm stuck there's nowhere to go that causes suffering what's the opposite I'm

free I'm free I could go in any direction and then find a way in which that may be true even if you just find one little motive it in in what looks like a sea of pain once I got on a plane and I was at the airport and this guy started talking to me he was a professional hockey player he said here's the thing the net is small and the goalie is big in hockey but you can't ever look at the goalie you look at the five little spaces where the putt can go because

where your eyes go the putt goes so I get on the plane and the guy beside me says I'm a Whitewater rafter and let me tell you there are times when it just looks like all rocks and just a little tiny bit of water but you never look at the Rocks because where your eyes go the boat goes I was like okay something's happening I get off the plane I go take a horse riding lesson and my teacher says always look where you want the horse to go where your eyes go the horse goes and

I was just like I get it I get it my attention Goes My Life goes if you feel stuck I'm there for you tell me everything and when you're done telling me everything I'll say where are you free and when I started finding the places I was free one by one these incurable symptoms disappeared I'm 61 uh last month I I went on a walk in England and I walked 6 75 miles in 6 days um after being told I'd never walk again it's because I know how this thing works and we can use it

to lock us down or we can use use it to set us free no matter what what were some of the little things when you started doing this for yourself after being bedridden for 12 years yeah that were pockets of freedom for you just to give the person listening like a sense of what you're talking about I started looking at the things that hurt most because it was like having knives stuck in me these thoughts that I thought um and everybody has these I'm not good enough people you know this person doesn't love me I'm

life is a and then you die whatever it was I'd be like life is a and then you die all right I'll never get out of this bed okay that hurts I'll always get out of this bed that can't be true I'm lying wait wait I can read a book and be a million miles away I can go I can watch a show and space travel I can talk to a friend and feel everything they're feeling and be at the dance where they're dancing and I am free because the human imagination can do anything that's

where my attention went and that's where my life went CU everything else just hurt too much how long did it take I'm like I'm I'm sitting here asking these questions on behalf of the skeptic CU you want to believe that it's going to work right but your mind is so against you at times oh yeah that even when you get these little morsels where you feel like it is true if I watch a movie I'm no longer in this bed because my mind is in the movie yeah and it's a small way to find Freedom

and as I start to unshackle myself from these painful thoughts and I bring freedom into to my experience things open up yeah and the the thing to notice is just does it feel a little bit better does it feel a little bit Freer what's happening when people feel stuck is and I don't want to get all brain sciency but honest to God there's a little spiral that happens in a part of our brain that it's such a strange thing that part of the brain believes that it's stuck and also believes that nothing that contradicts it

is true at all so you get into this tiny I call it an anxiety spiral and it believes that only it is real and people who have like um strokes and they can only use that part of their brain they believe that half the world doesn't exist because they're only perceiving it with the anxious mind and nothing else exists but if you can go from I'm always going to be stuck in this bed to I'm always going to be free in this bed then part of your brain lets go of the anxiety and it turns

to the part of the brain that is creative and that is the part that a lot of people don't understand that the opposite of your worst thought is not this Serene Bliss or calm it is that you suddenly walk into the zone of the human imagination at its most creative and it can solve anything well that is the topic of your new seventh instant New York Times bestselling book beyond anxiety and I would love to have you explain that tool of flipping from that kind of anxiety spiral yeah to how you tap into the creative

brain because when you are stuck when you do feel like you don't know what your purpose is yeah anxiety does take over oh yeah because you're so worried what if I never get unstuck what if I never figure it out what if I die and I wasted all this time what if I never even figured out who I was or what I was meant to be and this is where all your work with people and what you've written about for years really helps people figure out and so what do you want us to know about

curiosity and creativity especially for somebody who's stuck here's the first thing you need to know anxiety always lies but only always and wait what does that mean but only always I just like to say it it's like um you know you're you're a thing that makes you feel entrapped is always bad for you but only always and it's just a joke it's a way of because people think ah yeah that's sort of no I really mean it all your anxiety is lying oh no it isn't I put that at the end of the book If

I put it at the beginning people would have said f you and just thrown it at the wall right because it feels so convincing that your most frightening self hating thoughts are the truth and it's lying so that's the first thing just hear me now under understand me later I'm stealing that I am stealing Hear Me Now understand me later that is amazing okay so you nailed it in your book let them because let them the a phrase where you you're you're in this tense State you're trying to control so the the the anxiety Spiral

goes fear control back to fear again and it just spins and it gets bigger and bigger and they attempt to control gets bigger and let them as a way out of the Spiral and it's genius it's genius so you know that it's genius you have it tattooed on your bodies you know so um let them kind of relaxes the spiral and then when you say Let me let me do something given that this person or this world event is happening the way it's happening MH Let Me Assume My response ability my ability to respond given

that my mind is free Okay so let me do what now you are using the part of your brain that creates and there's tons of evidence showing that anxiety shuts down creativity what there's not a lot of studies about is creativity also shuts down anxiety so if you can go into that creative space you will be you will go for three or four hours and then realize I haven't been anxious for three or four hours so when you sit down to write and and you um you know you shared with me that you have dyslexia

right so the written word has not always been your friend but you create these amazing books think about being inside that creative process I don't know how you do it for me it's always somebody sitting aside across from me who's in prison what do you mean well um I once met a warden from a woman's prison and this is when I was doing my Oprah Magazine column and she told me that when they tossed the cells the most common thing they found were copies of my column from Oprah Magazine and I remember crying going back

to my hotel room and crying because I was I I felt such tremendous empathy with someone sitting talk about stuck no options I think the part of me that was so trapped and found its way to Freedom has always been trying to find the trapped part of other people and say we're going to get you out of here wow yeah over the years you've worked with so many people what are the kind of top most painful thoughts like if you gave if you had like a list of ones you hear over and over and we

all kind of think we're the only one yeah right and so I think it would be very validating for someone listening to hear just some of the top things that are the most painful thoughts people have shared with you over the decades and how you flip it okay so number one off the charts is I'm not good enough I'm not you know I'm not valuable I'm not worthy and it can be imposter syn syndrome it can be jealousy it can be whatever but the root of it is I'm not good not even enough I'm not

good the biggest lie ever told go to a nursery in a hospital and pick up a baby and tell me which one of them isn't good if we knew ourselves to be that precious we would automatically live our purpose if we could experience ourselves as being these innocent creatures that are bumbling through life and I just I feel like the powers that be the Divine force of the universe is just going oh sweetie oh honey how could you think that don't you know I mean I remember looking at some horses once and going oh they're

so beautiful and and this woman who was with me knew horses and she said well that one's sway backed and that one and I'm like shut up they're all perfect they're all beautiful and I when you step out of suffering enough times you sit down and say I'm not good enough immediately flips to oh my God I'm so good not I haven't had to earn it it's not something I did my favorite spiritual teacher Byron Katie says if you understood how important you are you would shatter into a billion pieces and just be light and

she had that experience um and I believe she went beyond suffering and I've come out of suffering over and over again like someone surfacing out of deep water you know and taking a breath of the truth there is no word to describe how utterly precious you are you have no like Hear Me Now understand me later I had a near-death experience once what happened oh my God I mean I've written about it I've talked about it I wasn't dead I was in surgery for actually scars that were inflicted by sexual abuse when I was a

child they had started to I was getting flashbacks and the scar tissue had started bleeding internally it that happen that H it did with me it's it's actually not that common for post post-traumatic stress syndrome to reinli wounds that were inflicted on you at the time of the trauma wow to get your attention because suffering is always trying to say here here look here so I was in the surgery and um I opened my eyes I sat up I looked around and then I thought wait a second I'm lying down I'm my eyes are taped

shut what's happening and I looked at the surgeons and I was sitting up and my body was lying down and they were working and I was like I became very confused and I lay back down into my body and I looked up at the surgical lights which were very very bright and then in between all of them and you got to understand this was a time of Maximum suffering for me I was in physical Agony I three little kids under five all kinds of nonsense they say we only see a trillionth of the available light

spectrum and it was the whole thing it was the most beautiful thing even for years if I even read about somebody seeing this light I would just ball like a baby it is so beautiful and it started to grow and just Infuse things and then it touched me and I was utterly home I was utterly loved I was utterly I belonged I there was I had nothing to prove I was absolutely included in this love and it was laughing with me and it was like you said you wouldn't forget but you totally forgot this didn't

you and I was like yes I really thought life is a and then you die and that's all there is and I we were laughing together and I was so happy that I started crying and the one of the surgeons saw the tears and thought that I could feel the surgery but I was numb kidding and so he said she's in pain she's in pain and the anesthesiologist went to increase the medication uhhuh and later when I I said I want to talk to the anesthesiologist because I thought that might be a drug effect it

was not a drug effect and I wanted to quiz him and he said what happened in there and I sort of told him and he said I went to increase the medication and a voice said to me don't do that she's crying because she's happy and he was just haale because he thought he'd done the wrong thing and he said did I do something horrible I was like no no I said you know how many times that's happened to me in 33 years of practice I said no and he said once and then he kissed

me on the forehead and went away but when the light touched me and was and sort of suffused me it just said you're about to go through some really hard stuff and I was complete loss of all my family members my job my industry my home all my friends totally gone and it said and is that because you left the church yeah yeah I left everything and it said I just you're about to go through something really hard just remember I'm always always with you and I came out of that surgery and my it was

kind of like um the experience in Cambridge where I just said okay that light is with us I am going to live as if I can see it all all the time and then I had a son with Down Syndrome who told me at a friend's funeral that he can see it all the time he said life isn't so sad after the light comes and opens your heart and I was like who told you that and he told me that when he was 13 a light had appeared in his bedroom and filled him with peace

and told him I'm your teacher you can do this wow and I said you know I can see the lot I I said the light told me it's always with us even though we can't see it and Adam said oh I can see it and I was like what now you can he was like yeah can't you I was like no where is it is it up there in here and he said Mom it's everywhere it's everywhere you have this incredible um exercise that you walk people through that I do think can help you feel

and see the light and it's called ideal Perfect Day the ideal day yeah can you walk us through it sure it's really simple and now we're you got you're grounded in your body this is the track we have to follow the track this is how you track forward so we're recording this in 2024 end of 2024 how far would you like to go in the future we're going to do time travel so you I don't do hypotheticals I want to know what you're you're going to do um I I immediately thought a decade 10 years

okay so and is that a good thing okay 10 years okay so it's 2034 okay and think about you don't have to say it think about the age you'll be and the age your husband your children will be sort of move your mind forward like a calendar now here are the instructions your life is absolutely what it was meant to be every expression of your greatest joy and your greatest fulfillment this you're going to wake W up on a day that is an ordinary day in a perfect life in an ideal life so what I'm

going to do is I'll prompt you with a few things and I want you to let your senses answer these questions not your mind so your mind can't time travel it it will tell you it can but it can't only the body can time travel and this is how it goes you wake up on this morning and you don't even open your eyes you listen what do you hear on this day an ordinary day in your perfect life in 2034 what do you hear you want me to tell you yeah um I hear waves and

I hear little kids laughing ah okay so smell the air don't open your eyes it what what do you smell salt coffee I'm seeing a theme here all right open your eyes look at the sheets what color are they white look at the floor what what does it look like wood yeah it's a wide planked wood floor that's sort of uh it's kind of um it's not shiny it's like worn cool look over across from you in the bed who's there if anyone Chris loaded question okay great um look at the look at the room

what do you see the whole room um it's very um like uh like just kind of modern and unfussy and beautiful and are there photographs on the walls no there was a there was like a painting or a photograph okay what does it look like it's um it was like a a big beach scene ah this theme is strong very strong all right are there windows in the room uh there's one okay get up and go to the window and look out what do you see your life is perfect what do you see the ocean

okay it could also be like the Alps and the Sahara like you can see anything there are no rules here okay it's just imagination yeah but you see the ocean MH um is it like a tropical Ocean or is it Northern no it's sort of Northern okay Rocky or just Sandy don't think just the ocean cool all right so you go into your bathroom uhhuh it's the perfect bathroom look at the design of the everything in the bathroom and then look at yourself in the mirror and you are your healthiest most radiant um physically fit

self take that in you are looking fabulous yes and so you do your morning stuff take shower or whatever then you go to your closet and open the door this is very important the clothes in your closet reflect everything you do in your perfect life because you have to wear different things like so I always ask people look at the shoes what kinds of shoes do you have oh they're all like flip-flops and birken socks there's no like strappy sandals heel nope um hiking boots a not at this house woo you have more than one

house see how that came in this is fabulous so this is your beach house yes clearly and you do not do Formal Wear No at the beach house so what you're G to do now Chris is still in the bed maybe you go into the kitchen and you walk through this house look as you walk through the house see if there are pictures of events that have happened like like right now I can see a picture behind you of a wonderful family trip to the the ocean look for the pictures that have that have been

taken in the Years between 2024 and 2034 uh two weddings awesome yeah cool um wow um grand babies M oh good is it their laughter you can hear yeah Oh I thought so I love it I love that can you feel that you are creating this future as we got go through this MH you're you are out of anxiety and into imagination and the tears in your eyes tell me it's real yeah you're finding your purpose right now and the things that bring tears to your eyes are the real purpose forget career forget money forget

all that when you're dying it's the pictures of your grandkids you're going to look at like it's it's the the hugs they give you it's stuff that the society says isn't valuable because there's no money attached to it that's when I walk people through this we go through the whole day who's in the kitchen and walk all the way I won't do it now because it would take the whole session but you go through the whole morning and see I'll ask you what do you do in the mornings um well you know what's interesting is

um I walk the beach I have uh a big thing of water I uh practice yog yoga I read on the porch um who's there I'm just hanging my family and my parents a that's can you feel how free that is yeah like you because you've done so much in the world that says you know be a lawyer be that you go all that stuff that was harsh and cruel and sort of tried to knock the sentimentality out of you it was pushing you away from your purpose and into fear into anxiety because when we

leave the track of our joy a natural response is to be terrified and then we get stuck in that spiral and we can't come back but when you begin to create which you just did with your senses and your imagination not verbal mind don't be counting things and measuring how it's going to happen no that's all left hemisphere thinking senses and joy that's how you track your future and as you track it you create it I wanted to ask you about the senses yeah because what happens when you tap into that creativity and you really

navigate through a day like that using only senses because I did catch myself at times and I'm sure as you were listening and you were imagining your ideal day you caught yourself thinking too yeah and it takes you out of the feel yeah why do the senses matter and why do they help you unlock your sense of purpose and joy and tap into this creativity I'm so glad you asked and again I don't want to get all sciencey here but the left hemisphere of the brain which is glorified by our society that left hemisphere is

what talks and counts and measures time and thinks of problems and tries to like get what it wants and it's very fear-based so it gets stuck in anxiety when you go to the senses if I asked you you know imagine the taste of lemon immediately the the right hemisphere would start to light up the senses and our sense of being in place activate the right Hemisphere and so does imagination so and creativity like sums it all up so any artist is just in the present moment very much in contact with what we're making and not

stuck in fear at all the interesting thing is that after you come out of a session of that because your right hemisphere doesn't track time and you go back into the verbal left hemisphere it will say well that was nothing that that didn't even happen there was no time I don't know what you were doing what what is that about So when you say you know I say oh yeah pleas and white light and everything and you're like uh how does that add up it's the right hemisphere that gives us our sense of meaning our

sense of connection our sense of joy and the mind that goes no that actually is a completely different part of the brain but as I said anxiety shuts down creativity but creativity shuts down anxiety so while you were doing the ideal day how anxious were you zero yeah nothing yep just pure feeling yeah and that's how animals live you know they don't have I remember watching this movie about bears it was called bears and it there's this grizzly mama who comes out of hibernation she's got two Cubs and she's in the Sun and they're nursing

and she's like you know how I don't know if you nurs breastfed your kids you got oxytocin like squirting out of your ears it's the cuddle hormone and the narrator says the mother bear is happy but she's worried about her milk supply and I'm watching it I'm like no she's not she's most definitively not worrying about anything look at her face it's just language some scientists some psychologists set out to to discover why we have all species on Earth there's a certain proportion of us that take our own lives on purpose no other animal does

that that we know of and the answer to why we do that is language because of the way we think in language and time we can construct a future that is so painful to live with that it outweighs our fear of death a structure made of nothing but words and thoughts can torture us until we want to die and I lived that way for about 32 years and then I decided I was going to live in that the awareness of that light was that surgery the moment that you made the decision that you were not

going to live like that anymore pretty much I came out of it and that was when I took my first um what I call an Integrity cleanse I decided not to tell a single lie for a year not a lie of any kind what was that like like you know don't believe in My Religion there that goes okay those friends don't like me now they think I'm the devil okay bye that goes in because I wouldn't say to them you know I really you know I see why I would just go no what you're saying

makes no sense to me at all and so I came out of that with a a model which is burn every bridge but love like if there's a bridge that's connecting you to suffering and tragedy and pain and lack of authenticity it will kill you burn it I much more more gentle with clients I just say maybe for try a day where you don't lie at all and just notice the places where you have been lying and don't lie to yourself what do people discover when they even just go through a day yeah and they

don't tell a lie and I realize there's a difference between being harsh and truthful yeah and telling the truth with a little bit of compassion yeah you learn to be very gentle about the truth but what do people what do you find that when you go through a day of Integrity yeah and you tell not a single lie what are the things that come up for people over and over again over and over you notice that you are lying to fit in that it's all about what I call the Social self that um you know

not to lie about things like did I leave the stove on but when you're with someone who says um oh I just love you and you feel that they don't just noticed oh I would have gone along with that and kind of believed it before oh okay and I would during that year I was so clumsy so people would say oh I really miss you and I would say something like I miss the concept of you as a friend and and people were so put off and so offended but I was in agony and I

had to get out and every truth I told it they it's true the truth will set you free but it's the truth about little things like am I lying to make the other person feel good you can say what you're going to say but know that you're telling a lie yeah and don't tell it to yourself and that will set you free some of the work that you've done that has truly changed my life is about learning how to follow your Northstar and finding that true north yeah can you explain to the person listening and

they're in a place in their life where they don't even know who they are like I it's kind of an odd thing to say but I think it's a very common experience to go I don't even know who I am like or I've lost myself in this relationship I've lost myself in work I I I have lost a sense of what's actually important to me yeah yeah everybody gets lost and the thing is that we live in a cloudy world it's very hard to see the North Star if it's cloudy all the time and the

thoughts we are told to think are like clouds so if you think the thought I'm not good enough that's a huge Cloud Bank as long as you believe that you won't be able to see the stars so where does that leave you well it leaves you with several inbuilt compasses that are always turning toward True North no matter how cloudy it gets the most reliable one is your body you it will give you suffering as a gift to stop you from going any direction but Norm let me make sure I got this so suffering is

a gift because it stops you from going any direction other than your true north it's almost like it spins the compass it just says not North absolutely not North and so do you and what you've been teaching us is invite the suffering in and then tell and then flip it to the opposite and it will say pain pain pain pain you you hear it out and and then you get to the core of it and you say the opposite of that is North the opposite of that is my truth is My Destiny is my purpose

and I know it will be hard to imagine that it's very hard but just sitting with it the reason I wrote about anxiety is that I WR I'd written a book about integrity and people came to me and they said well I'm in total Integrity now I don't lie at all but I'm afraid all the time and I was like well you can't tell the truth and be afraid all the time but I only know that because I've spent like hours and hours and hours meditating and looking at every thought that scares me and saying

okay is that true right now the other day things were going on in the world that I didn't like and I was meditating and I was saying to whatever that's what I call God whatever I was like how can I be at peace even in the middle of this and AO voice inside me said you mean your bedroom come into the present moment come into what's actually happened come into the things you thought would annihilate you and notice that they all helped you be free and so then I wrote a book about anxiety because I

realized that physically in the brain people are getting stuck there and so you have to use creativity to pull yourself out and then you can see the truth because it feels wonderful so the body will go ah not North and you go what's a slightly improved thought I'm okay right now okay more North I've been okay A long time more North I'll always be okay even when I die oh do North you know I I have I don't know why this sense of someone listening that is really scared to either end of relationship ship yeah

or to quit a job and start something yeah or to do like you did and say this doesn't work for me and I'm going to tell you and risk having people say well then I don't love you anymore and they do and they do yeah um how can you use this true north to help you make the right decision even though in that moment it always feel so wrong you know what I mean like ites it feels scary it feels very frightening and you tell yourself a lot of stories about if I lose this if

I let go of this I will suffer it will be horrible and if you look back at like now I'm old enough that I can look back on the history of things that I thought would destroy me and I always thought if I lose this horrible things will happen and it turned into if I don't lose this horrible things will happen oh crap if I'd stayed in the things that I walked away from oh my God that was horrible and it also could be um if I go wonderful things will happen to me if I

let go of this amazing wonderful things could happen to me don't look at the at the goalie look at the spaces and feel in your body that your body is saying yeah that feels truer that feels more check your breath like if you're used to watching your breath in meditation you'll notice that when you say a true thought your body goes and your just literally expands that thought may go against everything everybody in your life has always told you where it all comes down is believe that thought against everything else it is so hard to

do it's so hard and that's why my most recent craze is community and you talk in your work a lot about the sense of community and separation from Community we are social primates we need each other a horse in catastrophe will look for a safe place a social Predator like us will look for a safe person a safe safe other and when I did that when I left everything I was very much I have to do this alone and I thought that was really true because our society is individualistic I have to do this alone

right and it was almost like a challenge I'm going to do this alone and it was horrible and it took me years because I had so little trust in other people because they did diss me they did tell me I was the Antichrist they did my family tried to have me put in prison like the people I loved most were doing these things and it was horrific and um I didn't trust Community for for some years after that and then over time I realized that I was lying to myself thinking I'm not securely connected to

anyone and then sitting with I am securely connected to everyone a part of me Rose up then that knows that and is looking at you in the audience and there are 3,000 people and maybe they everybody else is asleep but I am connected to you because we're all connected to each other and that it's not what our society tells us which is why my online community is called Wilder it's a Wilder way to be to know that you are securely connected to everyone and if they don't love you just look at them and say oh

sweetheart and let them and then you say let me know that I am connected to you and when you come back and a few people came back to me after 30 years or so I am loving you the whole way and then your heart never breaks in a way that feels toxic it breaks open um just beautiful a lot of people wake up in a life that just doesn't feel good to them oh yeah and what would you say to that person right now congratulations this is very exciting oh my God God this is the

best thing that could happen to you why because it means that you know I always wonder caterpillars they come out and they're like I'm going to get bigger I will be a bigger caterpillar Munch Munch Munch and then I wonder what what are they thinking the day they go wait I will make a tiny sleeping bag out of my own saliva and I will go in there and completely dissolve because that's what they do in there theyve they melt into a liquid some species if you cut open the Cocoon it's liquid inside and when it's

totally disaggregated when it's complete bug soup it triggers this response and the DNA starts reconstructing a butterfly out of those same cells but it's the caterpillar's gone and the Butterfly is not there yet when you think what is this life this is not me it's you knowing it's time to transform and I would say if you came to me let's make your cocoon we're going to create a safe space with safe people join something join a book club join a church join an online community join something because you're going to need a cocooning space and

you need people around you you can trust and those people are there find them your heart will lead you to them you'll recognize them mine were mostly authors of books who'd been dead for centuries you know but as a coach or as coaches we get to say we'll help you build the Cocoon and then we're going to watch you Mel you know which is it's about grieving the loss of the life you thought you'd have grieving the people you love who aren't coming with you grieving the loss of your identity grieving the loss of your

physical ident whatever and then when you're completely relaxed when you've said let them to absolutely everything something will go I think I'll change my hair it's always one of the first things people do is they change their hair really yeah it's because haircuts are one of the primary signs of identity this is social science so when people change their hairstyle it's a real um it's a signal to the rest of society in the world this is who I am now and then they start rearranging their Furniture then they start they sell their car and get

another one you're nodding has it happened to you the furniture rearranging when I have been the most stuck in miserable especially when I have no money yeah I literally rearrange the furniture wherever I live all the time yeah all the time yeah and it became like a joke in our family because the kids would come home from school and they'd be like how did you move the couch by yourself and I'm like I'm got a lot of energy really stuck right now so I'm GNA think my life will feel better if I push the couch

against that wall and look where you are right now millions of people listening to you guess what it's true you had a lot of energy you moved the couch you shifted the inside as you shifted the outside and this is what is happening right now which is pretty freaking awesome Mel well you know what I love is that you have so many tools because you're validating the experience and and actually applauding its arrival yes of being stuck or feeling like you your life doesn't fit yeah or having no purpose and Martha Beck is literally giving

you a standing ovation and saying welcome to the transformation it's so exciting and get ready for the haircut and the furniture moving around as you're shifting energy and recognizing this but even just that exercise of the ideal day yeah gets you out of the thinking trap and into what you write about in your book beyond anxiety which is asking what can I create yeah and that exercise through your senses and visualiz of the ideal day yeah you experience something different yes completely before it exists yeah and so if somebody's hanging on to every word right

now what is the most important step that they could take away from this conversation I think it's shifting from what do I do now to what do I make now what can I do now what can I make now the moment you ask what can I make you you awaken your creativity and your anxiety as you think it through just notice the anxiety will go to zero and you will start making communities you will start making art you will start making pies you will start making friends you will start making things because we are endlessly

generative beings and when we think in anxiety we generate anxiety when we think about danger and isolation we generate them when we think about invention and Imagination and sensory Delights and cuddles and puppies and like I mean it sounds so cheesy but let's make a world that is joyful and abundant and beautiful and we can do it just by saying instead of oh God what do I do now what can I make now and the moment you really literally like put something in your hands and start making something your whole brain will be different and

then your whole life will be different oh I love that do you have something that you recommend when you're working with somebody who just has a lot of fear yeah so you can do the visualization you can understand the true north you can truly keep asking yourself what can I create but then the fear and the anxiety and you're just so like like you and I have been right for years in our life yes decades yeah so the first thing it's not enough to say go get oil oil paints you'll feel good no there are

three steps and I remember them with the acronym cat k a t so a is Art making things and T is transformation and Transcendence but K is kindness and everything depends on kindness there's something I call kissed k i s t kind internal selft talk when you're afraid just say these things you don't have to believe them say it to yourself all day long I'm here it's okay you're all right I've got you you're GNA get through this I've got you I'm here it's okay maybe let's get a blanket would you like some tea tell

me everything I'm listening oh that sounds like it hurts you're loved I'm here you're okay that's how I got en out of the deepest like most horrific fear and let me tell you it was bad and that was the only thing that brought me back from the darkness and so when I'm working with people I used to be all like let's build your ideal life and now I'm like good we know your ideal life now tell me about your fear tell me everything you're going to be okay we've got you I've got you yeah you

know you you started by saying that you went back to Cambridge yeah where you were when you were 25 years old and we expecting Adam which is also the title of the first book of yours that I ever read yeah and um what would you go back and tell yourself at that age I would say not a single painful experience you're having will ever be wasted Hear Me Now understand me later nothing is ever wasted nothing you've never made a wrong choice you're only here to experience life as this sort of hapless little creature nothing

you do is wrong because you're here your soul is here to experience life and your soul is not afraid to suffer but it's Destiny will always be Joy and it will there will only be more joy because of everything you've suffered it's all precious it's all good you've never put a foot wrong wow yeah if the person listening who just spent a bunch of time with us takes just one thing from this and you could wave a magic wand and pick what it would be what do you want them to take away you're safe I

was listening to the sound of the planets these NASA spacecraft go by and they get R radio waves and can transform them into sounds you can NASA space Sounds go Google it it's great and my son Adam walked by and he did a double take and he can barely talk but he came into the room and he said what are those sounds I have those sounds in my body and we were like you do he was like yeah we said well that's the planets and he was like oh the message and he said like and

we were like what he said the message like the call we said oh message he said yeah and I said so the planets are sending us a message and he said yes always and I said what's the message and he said that we're safe we're safe I know it doesn't feel that way but you're safe you're safe even if it looks really dark and dangerous there is a deep deep way in which you are always safe always loved always held always cherished and there's a ton of us out here for you better believe it what

are your parting words I love you m I love you person I do I love you thank you for um changing my life oh thank you for changing mine you're beautiful and you're beautiful wow Martha Beck what fun what fun and um in case no one else tells you today I wanted to be sure to tell you what Martha told you to which is I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life and there is zero doubt in my mind if you take anything that Martha

shared with us today and you pour pour it into yourself you will and I also want to thank you for watching all the way to the end I cannot wait to see what happens in your life when you use all of the insights and the tools that Martha just shared with you I especially can't wait to hear the details of your ideal day and I'm excited for the people in your life that you share this with this was a really incredible conversation and I hope you truly lean into it and one more thing hit subscribe

it's one way that you can show me and my team that you really love the fact that we're putting up videos every day that we're giving you access to world-renowned experts like Martha Beck and that we're giving you resources that you can share with the people that you care about and I know you're the kind of person that loves supporting people who support you so thank you thank you thank you for being here with me thank you for watching these videos and sharing them I really love doing this and I love spending time with you

and let's spend some more time together if you want to watch another video this is the one that I recommend and I'm going to be waiting for you in it as soon as you hit play I'll see you there