Steve Taubman: Buddha in the Trenches

Transcript

[0:00:29] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Dr. Steve Taubman, author of Buddha in the Trenches. Are you constantly dealing with stressful business situations? Well, Steve has dedicated his life to showing people how to use mindfulness to get through their biggest challenges. By the end of this episode, you’ll have the tools you need to live a more balanced life. Free from neurosis and empowered to accomplish your goals. Now, here is our conversation with Dr. Steve Taubman.

[0:01:23] Steve Taubman: I was a chiropractor for many years, I had a professional chiropractic practice and I did that for 14 years and at one point, I realized it was time to move on. I was tired of doing what I was doing, it was a very wonderful profession but some reason it wasn’t for me and I ended up selling my practice, it was a very deliberate significant change in my life. What I ended up doing, led me to becoming a stage hypnotist. I got to a point where I was pretty popular, pretty successful at that, I was the official hypnotist for MTV Spring Break.

[0:01:55] Charlie Hoehn: What? I was not expecting that.

[0:01:58] Steve Taubman: It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it, right? I always pause and give you a chance to get the visual, right? I’m out on the beach, I’ve got 2,500 college students out on the beach, and I’m using semi loosely. I’m doing all the things that I would typically do in a hypnosis show. You know, got to milking a cow and conducting an orchestra. I got one guy who thinks he’s pregnant, got another guy, thinks he’s the father and in the midst of all this, I decided to try something new. I took one of my subjects and I said, “When you wake up, three things are going to happen.” “Number one, you don’t believe you’re hypnotized even though you are. I said, number two, this is the worst show you’ve ever seen and you are pissed at me. Number three, there’s an invisible wall three feet in front of you.” Now, bear in mind I’ve never done this before, this is a brand new experiment in the middle of a very good show. I wake everybody up and I say, how’s everyone doing? Everybody says, we’re great and this one guy screams, “You suck!” Thankfully it was him, right? I say, “What’s the problem.” The guy says, “This show is terrible.” I say, “Well then leave” and then the guy gets up and he starts taking a few steps forward, he hits the invisible wall, he just smacks up against it, his hands go up and he starts pushing and pushing and he can’t get any further. He finally sits back down and he crosses his arms and he starts to tap. I say, “What’s the problem?” He says, “Nothing.” I said, “Are you hypnotized?” He goes, “No”. I said, “Are you having fun?” He said, “No”. “Well then, why don’t you leave?” He thinks for a minute and he finally says, “I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.” I realized in that moment, something profound. I’ve been studying meditation and I’ve been working on a lot of personal development material for a long time but in that moment, a lot of things came together for me. What I realized was, that’s all of us. We all have a place we want to go. You know, a hope, a dream, a desire, a destiny. Something that kind of produces a sense of joy and possibility in our lives. We start moving towards it and then we hit our invisible walls. Our invisible walls are the subconscious, unspoken, unsought of beliefs, attitudes, mental habits, frames that we’ve created for ourselves, programs that exist inside of us that keep us from moving forward. Instead of getting where we want to go, instead of getting to the point that we want to get to, we move towards it and then we hit this point of resistance and the resistance is all internal, it’s all an inner game. It all has to do with how we’re thinking, how we view ourselves, how our emotions are triggered by certain actions that we’re taking. But we don’t usually recognize that we’re responsible for that sudden stop in our momentum, we start pointing our finger outside of ourselves, we start blaming others, we start coming up with excuses, like this guy did, for why we’re not getting to the results we want. What I got from that was in a very real way, we’re all hypnotized. In a very real way, we’ve all been programmed over the course of our lives to live inside of a box. A box made up of our beliefs, of our attitudes, our preconceived notions, our judgments if you will. All of that conspires to keep us the same, to keep us doing things the same way, feeling the same way, reinforcing the same beliefs and that’s all of us. We’re all at the effect of that and the only hope, the only possibility that we have for arriving where we want to arrive with our souls intact, is to address those walls. Is to learn what it means to observe and dismantle those invisible walls and that is really – it’s an inner game. It’s self-hypnosis, it’s meditation, it’s gaining a certain level of awareness so that we’re no longer being held back by things that we don’t understand. I think we’re all – isn’t it like – we’re all affected by that little guy sitting on our shoulder whispering to us.

[0:06:11] Charlie Hoehn: Steve, let’s make this a bit more concrete. Your book is really for high stress professionals, right? What are some of those invisible walls that those people commonly deal with that are causing their stress?

[0:06:25] Steve Taubman: When I wrote this new book, Buddha in the Trenches which exactly that, it’s about developing unshakable performance under pressure, being able to live under stressful situations and thrive under those conditions. The very first wall, the very first presumption or notion that most people live with is that their emotional state is derived by their circumstance. In other words, “Of course I’m stressed out, have you seen the work I’ve got to do, have you seen the volume of my work, have you seen my boss? Have you seen my coworkers, of course I’ve got to feel this way.” The first wall that needs to be dismantled is the notion that you’re powerless to change your attitude, to change your mood, to change how resourceful you can be. That’s number one. That in fact, there is such a thing and well beyond the woo-woo, new age kind of pie in the sky attitude, there is such a thing as unconditional happiness that you could walk into difficult situations and maintain mastery and happiness and joy and humor if you arrange your mind in a certain way.

[0:07:37] Charlie Hoehn: Sounds like there are many walls, what are some of the other ones that you mentioned in the book?

[0:07:41] Steve Taubman: We’re talking about, first and foremost is making that commitment that it is possible that there is no circumstance under which you’re absolutely required to be miserable. That’s step one, right? Step two is we’re talking about the idea that we believe that freedom is the right to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it. We tend to live our lives in a state of entitlement and freedom that often works against functioning at very high levels. Let me give you an example. You know, you say to yourself, “I’m going to start losing weight.” Let’s go to The Four-Hour Body, right? All the things that I learned from reading your book and Tim’s book. About being more disciplined about what I was eating and keeping track of it and keeping a food diary and becoming mindful about my eating habits. Becoming disciplined, living by a code. Creating a set of actions that are invaluable, I’m not going to not do it, even if I feel like it. It’s very easy for all of us to say, “You know, I’m going to stop eating chocolate and then when we feel like eating chocolate.” We say, “Well, I’m going to eat it today because I’m free, I’ve got freedom.” Freedom’s a funny thing because the question I ask people who are embarking on a journey of being more successful is “Yeah, you’re free to do whatever you want, the question is, are you free to not do it?” You know, have you developed the freedom to be able to be free of your own urges? That’s a huge wall, there were constantly experiencing an emotion, a longing, a craving and we give in to it because as far as we’re concerned, that’s our birth right, we can do whatever we want to do and that’s true, you can. Of course there are consequences. There’s something that’s so profound and powerful for us, if we can learn how to live a set of predetermined beliefs. If we live by a discipline rather than by what we think is freedom. The way I see it, the way that I dismantle that wall, is to say that discipline is freedom. A degree to which you can develop a discipline, is a degree to which you can let go of this thing that you call freedom, which is really bondage to something you feel like you need.

[0:10:04] Charlie Hoehn: That’s interesting, I like that a lot. Just a quick footnote. For The Four Hour Body, what you’re referring to is Tim Ferris’ book and Tim lays out in that book that you have certain rules that you follow throughout the week where you’re disciplined for six out of seven days of the week, on the seventh day, you can be free to choose whatever you want but maintaining that discipline frees you up, it frees up a lot of your mental energy. Seems that you’re talking about and just another side note. I did not write that book, I helped edit it. Just in case there’s any confusion. That’s what you’re really referring to, right?

[0:10:50] Steve Taubman: That’s exactly what I’m referring to. I’m glad you brought that up because that’s built in to our system is that you know, discipline, commitment, motivation, these are all finite right? It’s impossible to stay that disciplined with no break in the action.

[0:11:07] Charlie Hoehn: Literally, it’s decision fatigue if you’re constantly giving yourself the freedom to make a thousand plus decisions at any given moment.

[0:11:15] Steve Taubman: There you go. If you know in advance that you’ve got Saturday to just cut loose, then it makes it easier to do the right thing Monday through Friday. Mindfulness or a sense of self-awareness, a sense of non-judgmental self-awareness, is something that you want to bring to every situation. In other words, you’re better off eating the wrong thing mindfully than eating the right thing mindlessly.

[0:11:43] Charlie Hoehn: That’s interesting. Can you explain that a bit more? Why is that better?

[0:11:49] Steve Taubman: Because you have the ability to monitor yourself and because you’re less likely to have a push back from yourself. For example, let’s take a really heavy example, let’s take alcoholism, okay? Very bad addiction. It’s more than just chocolate or the desire to over eat. It’s a really bad addiction. IF you look at the cycle of addiction, most of us think that an alcoholic is an alcoholic because they drink and that drinking is the addiction. Drinking is really only one piece of the addiction, right? The addiction is a cycle. The way it works is that you want to drink, so you drink. And then you feel bad about the fact that you drank and then the fact that you feel bad pulls you down, it makes you feel all sorts of negative feelings, then you think, “Well, if I want to get rid of my negative feelings, I better drink.” You’re in a cycle and the cycle includes the emotional reaction to the thing that you did mindlessly, all right? You’re coming from a place of being disempowered all the time, you never have – you’re never in control. Even in the part of the cycle when you’re not drinking, you’re still not in control because now you’re not in control of the emotion that was generated by your action. That emotion becomes the next trigger to drink again. Now, take somebody else who says, I mean, I went through this with a non-alcoholic but I mean, if there were such a thing as somebody who was drinking as much as an alcoholic but was completely under control of alcohol or somebody who decided they were going to break their alcoholism. I’m going to get a lot of pushback from all the Alcoholics Anonymous people but the reality in my experience is that, if you break the cycle by first breaking the attachment to guilt. You can still break the cycle. Rather than stop drinking, your first move could be to stop feeling guilty about the fact that you started drinking, that you started drinking. Let me take that to a less charged example. If I decide that Saturday is a day that I’m going to cheat and I’ve got no guilt about the fact that I cheated because I’m conscious and mindful about the fact that I’m doing it, I’ve made it okay to do it. Now, I’m not going to wake up the next morning and feel horrible about the fact that I did it and then have less power to make the right choice the next day. That’s the power in Tim’s approach.

[0:14:10] Charlie Hoehn: Why does this really matter for the listeners Steve. I mean, A lot of people I’ve come across say, “It’s my worrying that keeps me on the straight and narrow, right? It prevents these bad things from happening.” It’s this constantly being on and that maybe feeling bad about themselves that’s just so –

[0:14:32] Steve Taubman: Yeah, well okay. The short answer is that’s complete bullshit. It’s something we’ve sold ourselves, we’ve sold ourselves the idea that the only way for me to monitor my own behavior, the only way for me to act appropriately is to be hyper vigilant, anxiety ridden, stressed out and low self-esteem. That’s the only way that I’m going to be able to survive and trust myself to act appropriately. That’s complete nonsense. I hear this all the time because as a hypnotist, I am constantly like on a daily basis, helping people get rid of fears and phobias. The biggest complaint you hear from people to fear and phobia is “I don’t want to not be afraid of that because if I’m not afraid of it then I might, you know, if I’m not afraid of snakes then you know, I’m going to get bitten by a snake.” “If I’m not afraid of spiders then I’m going to end up you know, bringing a tarantula to bed with me.” Of course it’s not true, I’m not afraid of spiders, I’m not going to have to go out to get a tarantula to go to bed with me. The reality is that we have the resources, we have the ability to avoid acting inappropriately without having to bring negative mental energy to the table. We don’t have to be hyper vigilant, we don’t have to be worrying, that worrying does you no good at all. There’s a wall right there, that’s one of the invisible walls, is that we don’t even stop to think whether that logic is logical.

[0:15:58] Charlie Hoehn: Would you say Steve that this is sort of the biggest takeaway from your book is addressing these internal narratives that we have that are holding us back?

[0:16:06] Steve Taubman: Yeah, one way to say that is don’t believe everything you think, right? You know, behind all of that, behind the ability to question your kind of paradigms, these thought processes that are pulling you down to a state of negative emotion and making you less resourceful, behind all of that is the idea that you first have to become more awake, you have to become more conscious.

[0:16:32] Charlie Hoehn: How do we do that?

[0:16:33] Steve Taubman: Okay, that’s the third step in the book. The first step is, just say choose happiness which basically doesn’t mean put on a happy face but rather, make a commitment that there is in fact the possibility that you can change your thinking and aspire to a happier perspective. That’s step one. Step two, we said is live by a code. You know, create discipline, operate within a framework of morality and consciousness, right? Then the third step is to sharpen your focus. Focus is a close cousin to presence. Eckhart Tolle in the book The Power Of Now talks a lot about presence, about being present, be here now. Rom Das calls it. Be here now. Most of us are sleep walking through life, most of us are hypnotized, half awake, we’re not really present and because you’re not present, all of those voices in your head get sway over you.

[0:17:26] Charlie Hoehn: How can you tell if somebody’s sleepwalking through life or if you yourself are sleepwalking? Is it this underlying sense that you are?

[0:17:36] Steve Taubman: Well, it’s a pretty simple thing really because you know, whether I know that you’re sleepwalking through life or not is important as whether or not I know I’m sleepwalking through life, right? The reality is, if you’re upset, if you're in a state of emotional turmoil and is lasting or it’s repetitive, you’re hypnotized, right? That’s it, that’s the answer because people who have figured this stuff out, people who have learned the power of focus which is this third step that we’re going to talk about in a moment a little bit more. That when you begin to understand that you have this incredible power that you’ve never really used, then you stop suffering, you just stop. Now, that’s not to say that you don’t feel pain, right? I think it was Morokami who said that “Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional”, right?

[0:18:31] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:18:31] Steve Taubman: What that means in real layman’s terms is that, in every day of every one of our lives, there are going to be things that happen that irritate us, that aggravate us, that piss us off, that maybe make us feel insecure, those things are going to happen because we’re all human beings and we’re sort of hardwired to react to experiences that occur in our lives. But, the insightful person, the wise person, the enlightened person, the person who is doing this kind of work. What they’ll do is they’ll notice the moment that they fall off that sort of centered point. The moment that the emotion begins to arise within them and what they do in that moment is very different from what the rest of us do in that moment. The reason that they’re able to do something different in that moment is because they have emotional strength that they’ve developed over a period of time.

[0:19:27] Charlie Hoehn: What do they do differently in that moment?

[0:19:29] Steve Taubman: They’re different because in any one moment, I mean, any one of us have been in that situation where we say, “I shouldn’t say anything and then you say it,” right? We’ve had that moment. You know it was the wrong thing to do but you just can’t stop yourself. This is very true in high pressure situations and work situations where there are constantly things happening during the course of your day where you know, there’s your higher self-battling with your lower self. There’s the right way to handle the situation, there is the wrong way to handle the situation. Most of the time, we end up coming to what our emotions tell us rather than what really good critical thinking skills we tell us to do. It’s a question of necessary strength and necessary strength comes from this third step which is exercising your focus muscles, your ability to bring your focus back to a particular point. Again, this is why people meditate. Those who meditate, those who use mindfulness meditation practices, what they’re doing is they’re strengthening their ability to take their attention away from the story that they’re telling themselves. The kind of the way that they’re sort of spinning themselves into a state of be more upset, they’re able to pull their attention back the center because by meditating, what they’re doing is they’re constantly pulling their attention away from whatever’s distracting them. You know, Charlie, if I said to you, “I want you to focus your attention on your breath or I want you to focus your attention on the physical sensations in your body” and I would just say okay, go ahead and do that. You know, there would be about three second gap between when you start and when your first thought arises. Then when your first thought arises, now we’ve got a moment of choice, are you going to go down that path, are you going to continue to think the thought or are you going to think about the fact that you’re thinking the thought and beat yourself up for thinking which is what most people do when they start meditating. “I can’t believe I’m thinking a thought, I shouldn’t be thinking right now.”

[0:21:21] Charlie Hoehn: Stop thinking, yup.

[0:21:23] Steve Taubman: Just stop thinking which is just more thinking, right? There’s so much humor in this really. Or, the third option and the functional option and the one that we train ourselves for and what you know, when I work with like high level executives or with a police, people on the police beat who have to learn how to bring their attention back, what I’m teaching them is that as your attention wonders and you notice the thought, just be aware that a though happened but then bring your attention back to the point of focus. Again, whether that be your breath or your physical sensation, whatever it is. But that repetition, we like to call, bring the puppy back to the paper, right? Training a puppy to – paper train a puppy, it’s going to wonder off and you got to pick it up and bring it back and it’s going to wonder off and you got to bring it back. A thousand times before the dog finally gets the idea. It’s like that with your mind. Strengthening your focus muscles is what allows you the necessary strength that when you’re in the field of battle, when you’re on the battle fields of life, you have the capacity out of having trained yourself to bring your attention back to the physical reality of the moment, rather than to the stories you like to tell yourself that help you get more and more upset. Therefore, if you're finding yourself getting upset, especially if you’re getting upset about the same things over and over again, you’re hypnotized, you’re not awake, you’re not acting in a conscious way.

[0:22:52] Charlie Hoehn: Is the goal not only to become more awake but just to be none-agitated by yourself?

[0:22:59] Steve Taubman: Yeah, funny that you said, by yourself because that’s exactly the reality, It’s by itself. You’re less agitated by yourself, your focus is more clearly available to you so what does that mean also? It means that you're more efficient, it means you’re a better listener. It means that you have greater access to your own creativity, it means you’re more resourceful about problem solving. It means that you’re more effortless in your movements and now with all the research that’s out there about mindfulness meditation, we know it also means that you’re smarter. You’re thickening parts of your cerebral cortex. You’re increasing the relationship between the nerve endings that go from your lateral to your medial cortex, so that when you experience something that feels bad. Rather than that nerve connection going from the I feel bad to the lateral prefrontal cortex which is your – which makes it feel very personal to you. It links up more to the medial cortex which makes it feel more just like something to solve. It’s just you know, just a problem to solve, no big deal. You’re more resourceful, you’re more effective and you’re less flappable, less shakable.

[0:24:10] Charlie Hoehn: Steve, how long did it take you to reach – and not only how long did it take you to reach this point but what was your personal journey of getting to this state that you're talking about?

[0:24:23] Steve Taubman: I was in anxiety ridden, depressed, low self-esteem mess. I mean, I grew up in a very dysfunctional family, I was bullied as a kid, I had everything you could have that makes life miserable about when you were a kid, like glasses, braces, bad skin, bad hair, you know, just the trifecta you know? I grew up feeling pretty badly about myself and at the same time, one thing that I was always good at was school, right? I excelled in school and I became a physician and I ran a very successful chiropractic sports medicine practice and from the outside, my life looked really good. I was very successful, I made a lot of money. I treated a lot of people, I helped a lot of people and I think you know, a lot of people could relate to that, you know, on the outside, I look good. On the inside, I was tortured. I felt horrible and I would feel that way, unless I was perfect. I mean, if I had a patient who was like getting better really quickly and thought I was amazing. Well, then I was okay, then I was all right. You know, it’s funny, there’s no physician on the planet who is 100%. You know, if I could successfully help 85% of my patients, that’s pretty good. It still means it’s going to be 15% of people that I haven’t helped. That would keep me up at night. That would make me miserable and it would make me feel bad about myself, and then I’d be in a treatment room with a patient that wasn’t getting care, getting the help from my care as quickly as I wanted him to. I’d feel secret suffering, I would be feeling unworthy and guilty and all sorts of other really bad things. That would burn me out, just wore me out. I was forced to start looking at what am I doing to myself? What am I doing inside of my own head, I went through all the typical western psychotherapy and a lot of talk therapy and none of it really made that much of a difference for me. Then I discovered this whole area of mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation and I started realizing that the answer for me anyway didn’t lie in talking more and telling my story more, it really lay in being able to get quiet on the inside and be able to sit and witness my own misery, to witness my own discomfort. In doing that, I started to reframe it. Not that it all went away all of a sudden, I still get anxious and I still get depressed but my relationship to it is different. I no longer feel like I am an anxious person or I’m a depressed person. Now it’s just an energy that’s kind of washing over me and then it washes past me.

[0:27:12] Charlie Hoehn: Like stormy clouds.

[0:27:14] Steve Taubman: Yeah, exactly. You know, it’s funny. When it’s stormy outside, we have a hard time knowing that if you would get up over those clouds, it would be bright and sunny, we just don’t see it. Now, after years of practicing these tools and techniques and teaching them to other people. What I realize is that we got to our salvation lives, our salvation lies in our ability. First of all, as we go kind of recapping our steps. First realizing it’s possible to be happy. Secondly, placing value on the idea of discipline and third, strengthening my focus so I had the mental toughness, the mental strength, the critical intelligence, our critical thinking. To see my own emotional stuff in a different way. To change my relationship with my own misery. I wasn’t adding to it. I think most of us, what we do is we add to our own misery because we keep throwing logs on the fire by thinking those same thoughts and convincing ourselves that whatever we’re thinking is true when in fact, mostly, what we’re thinking is programs. The fourth part of this formula for you know, as I outline this in Buddha in the Trenches is that if you develop the strength of character and the strength of focus that these tools give you. Then you can start leaning into the pressure of life rather than running from the pressure of life. This is a really interesting shift that happens. That there comes a time when something would – in the past have led you to feel miserable and made you go into fight or flight mode. You now can just sort of sit with the feeling, allow it to wash over you, allow it to kind of pass by. You start embracing those negative moments instead of running from them. Again, you know, it’s counterintuitive because we always, who wants pain? Who wants to feel bad? It’s this idea of leaning into the pressure, leaning into the stress, leaning to the reality of the moment that actually moves us through it more quickly

[0:29:28] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Steve, tell me a story about the first time you remember really leaning in to the negative?

[0:30:17] Steve Taubman: I’m glad you asked me that because sometimes this is an esoteric point and it’s easier if I could give you an example of it. I did a 10 day silent meditation retreat. That’s hard work. I’m not suggesting that everybody go out and do a 10 day silent meditation retreat, it’s life changing and remarkable but it’s hard work, right? What it means is you’re going to sit for 10 days and you’re going to meditate and you’re not going to talk to anybody, you’re not going to watch TV or read a book or make eye contact with anybody, you’re just in your own experience. I’m sitting in this meditation hall and I’m meditating and in the middle of meditating, I get a foot cramp. Now, you know what it feels like when you get a foot cramp, it’s excruciating and it usually induces a certain level of panic because you could start feeling it coming and it starts – it’s almost like – you could feel it kind of making its way toward you and what you want to do is to try to stop it and to stretch it out. If you're just walking down the street and your foot starts to cramp, you might start jumping up and down or screaming or you might try to stretch it and notice that that doesn’t really work. It usually requires a certain fan fair. But when you’re sitting in a silent meditation hall and you get a foot cramp, a lot of those options aren’t open to you anymore, you can’t jump up and start screaming. You’re supposed to be quiet and you’re supposed to be motionless. More than that, you’re supposed to be observing the reality that meditation is meant to reveal to you and that reality is that everything is in permanent, that things pass of their own accord. Now, here I am, sitting here with this cramp in my foot. I think, well part of me thinks, “Ouch! What am I going to do?” It’s painful right? It hurts. And oh my gosh, what’s going to happen if I let it keep going? And another part of me says, “Okay well if this meditation stuff is true then it should be true now in this moment so let’s see what happens” and so what I did is I said, “Okay, I am not going to resist this cramp. Let’s see what happens. I am going to just lean into it, to embrace it. I’m going to just observe it without adding any fuel to the fire,” and obviously that’s not something that comes naturally to any of us. So I started feeling the cramp getting worst and I felt simultaneously the panic growing but I was in a very meditative state so I can watch myself panic and I can watch myself going into a deeper cramp and what I learned from that experience was fascinating because what I can now tell you with great authority is that here’s what happens when you get a cramp. What happens is that it gets worse and a little worse and a little worse and maybe even a lot worse. And then it stays at the height of its excruciating-ness for about 30 seconds and then it releases and it starts getting better and better and better and then it goes away and it’s gone. You know that’s something that if you don’t lean into the pain you would never know, you would never let yourself get close enough to that experience.

[0:33:26] Charlie Hoehn: Yep and you know it’s funny, have you ever read the book, Letting Go?

[0:33:33] Steve Taubman: I don’t think so, who wrote it?

[0:33:34] Charlie Hoehn: I can’t remember. It is a fantastic book, it’s worth reading but he talks about that we don’t do this with our emotions. That cramping in your cases of physical pain that you want to avoid but we do this with our emotions and instead of releasing them, we carry them with us indefinitely whereas –

[0:33:59] Steve Taubman: And feed them.

[0:34:00] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:34:00] Steve Taubman: We’ve got to feed them on a regular basis if you want to keep them.

[0:34:03] Charlie Hoehn: Yep, exactly and the reality is if you just let them go, it would take at max 20 minutes to get rid of them and we’re talking about – I mean personally I can speak to my own experience of going through dozens of hours of therapy and finally hitting a point where I just broke down and cried about an incident that had happened a decade ago and the emotional release lasted about 10 to 15 minutes. It was a lot of crying, it was sloppy but after that I felt a weight had been released. Like nothing I had experienced in a very, very long time and I just felt so foolish for not addressing that so much sooner and it’s not a one to one comparison here obviously but I think that is sort of what you are getting at is if you lean in rather than running from or avoiding, the pain goes away like a storm.

[0:35:09] Steve Taubman: Yeah and that’s exactly what I am getting at. So I think it is one on one. You know the physical experience that I have taught me a lesson about the impermanence of things and then I was able to apply that lesson in situations that were more emotionally based rather than physically based and came to realize the same thing that when you take away the story, when you take away the food that you give that emotion and you simply lean into it. You simply allow it to be, you kind of embrace it and sometimes with emotion like you did, you have the cathartic experience and sometimes in a more dispassionate way and I’ve had that experience as well where I just deliberately sit with the feeling and I take my attention away from the thing it caused the feeling and put all of my attention on the physical sensation of the feeling, that eventually, you are almost melting it in the warmth of your own observation. That’s a metaphor but you understand what I’m saying and it releases and in the book, I tell the story about going to Disney World and seeing, I think it’s the Hollywood section, I don’t remember what it’s called but they got this light show at night where they have a big fountain and it throws out this big spray of water and they project images like movie images onto the spray of water. They project like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice with Mickey Mouse and it is a very scary stuff if you are a little kid. These big looming images of monsters and dancing brooms and the loud music all projected on this giant wall of water but if you were to walk up to that wall of water you could walk right through it. It’s insubstantial and yet we don’t get close enough to realize how insubstantial it is. We are afraid of our own emotions and so leaning in is one of the ninja skills that top executives, top athletes, top performers learn to use. I mean the Navy Seals they say, “Embrace the suck” okay? So that is the fourth step in the process and the last part of the process we call assemble your life boats.

[0:37:17] Charlie Hoehn: Well just before you get to this Steve, I wanted to just add to embracing the suck, leaning in to the suck. I learned a very similar if not the exact same lesson through improv – is constantly having to say yes to whatever is happening. You just eventually condition yourself in these scenes that “Okay, I am not going to resist any of this.” In fact it’s perfect, it’s scripted by the universe that this is the exact thing that’s supposed to be happening and that ripples out into your life. And suddenly, life is not nearly as stressful or tense or heavy. It just is what it is and it’s much more relaxing. So I just want to add to that point that you just made. So getting to your fifth step of the process.

[0:38:12] Steve Taubman: Yeah and before I do, I want to just want to go back at you because to me I think that improv is probably the most spirituality advancing, non-spiritual practice you can do.

[0:38:23] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. Yeah, I would completely agree with you.

[0:38:26] Steve Taubman: Yeah.

[0:38:26] Charlie Hoehn: It is something that most people will never do because it’s seems like a nightmare or they have this – the perfectionism kicks in and they’re like, “Oh I am not a very funny or witty person” and it’s not about that at all.

[0:38:40] Steve Taubman: Yeah and I would say to that is welcome to one more of your invisible walls. All those things that you say to yourself that stop you from getting close to the discomfort because you don’t know how to lean into the discomfort because you never gained the necessary strength to walk through it, now you are constantly living, you are cowering in the face of something that you don’t need to cower from and when you step into something like improv, what you’re doing as you said, one of the great exercises of improv is yes. So yeah, I totally agree with that. So yes, getting into the last part of the formula in my book is where we call it assemble your lifeboats and it starts with the presumption that everything in life is about necessary strength. You’re either strong enough or you are not strong enough to withstand the situation you are in, right? Now physically we know that. Physically we are all in agreement, we say you know there are some people who are physically strong because they were trained or maybe they were lucky. And grew up that way or they’re genetically predisposed to it but there are some people who are physically strong and other people who are a 90 pound weakling and the reality is from an emotional standpoint most of us are 90 pound weaklings. You know we are not emotionally intelligent. We are not good at critical thinking, we are not capable of withstanding our own emotions. We are not likely to do the right thing if our emotions get the better of us. And so everything that I have taught up to this point in the book is about gaining necessary strength. However we have to realize that everyone of us live in a continuum, every one of us are somewhere on a continuum from being very weak to being very strong and if we are doing our work, we’re gradually graining strength but in all likelihood, we are encountering situations that we haven’t yet gained the strength to master and so if I were to ask you to swim the English channel and you were untrained. Chances are, you would drown but if I said swim the English Channel or we are going to put the rest of your family to death, you would give it a good try. But you would be wise to have a lifeboat standing by, right? You would be wise to have some way of dealing with and preventing yourself from drowning and in the same way in our lives what do we have in place to prevent us from drowning in our own emotions? What do we have in place to prevent us from letting tense situations get the better of us until we are finally strong enough not to?

[0:41:18] Charlie Hoehn: I love this by the way, I love where you are going with this. That’s all I have to say so keep going.

[0:41:24] Steve Taubman: All right, yes so how do we do that? Well what we do is we prepare in advance. What the wise do is they prepare in advance. Smart people, successful people, world-class performers, one thing that they have that most people don’t have is they operate on objective reality. They don’t delude themselves into believing they are better than they are or stronger than they are. So if you are wise, you know that they are probably going to hit some of these walls. You are probably going to be ill-equipped to handle. So you prepare in advance, you prepare your lifeboats in advance and so what are your lifeboats? Well your lifeboats are other people and other systems, right? So one life boat might be the kind of friend that knows how to help you move through your emotional turmoil and that’s not most of your friends by the way unless you are very lucky. Most of our friends they are really good at helping us add more fuel to the fire, right? You are upset about something that Becky did and you go to your friend John to tell him that you are upset about Becky and John says, “Yeah Becky is really you know what”. So John just helps you reinforce your stance, right? He helps you throw more logs on the fire so he keeps your upset around long or you feel more justified, sure and it feels good in the moment but it is not growing you consciously.

[0:42:45] Charlie Hoehn: Right, so I mean how do we find friends who can be good lifeboats or can we train our existing friends? Like I had a situation where one of my closest friends, I was going through something. I was really worried about the outcome and I was like, “I just don’t know how this is going to turn out. This is really tough” and he did exactly what you said except he made it worst. He was like, “Oh man, I couldn’t even imagine being in that situation like I don’t envy you at all”. And I was like, “Dude you are making things awful. This is not what I need from you right now” and I told him the types of questions he needed to say but after that it created a little bit of tension between us because it was kind of a fight, you know? So what do you recommend? Do you recommend we stick with certain friends or that we have or how do you go about it?

[0:43:41] Steve Taubman: Well it is a multi-tiered process I think. I mean first of all, I think the more conscious you get the more conscious people you attract. So if you are doing some meditative and mindfulness work, chances are you are not hanging out on a day to day basis with victims, people who see life like they are victims of life. You’re probably already around people who have a certain level of consciousness. So then from there, it just becomes a matter of training your friends and basically saying: “Listen, you know there’s…” and I talk about this in the book and even given some scripts for this purpose but basically the idea is, “Hey listen Charlie, sometimes I get in over my head, sometimes I realize that I get self-righteous and I get angry and I get insecure and what I am going to be looking for when that happens, I’m going to be looking for people who can just be a space for me. Just be there while I am being that way and not buy into it”. “Not tell me I am right, not tell me I am wrong either, just give me a chance to maybe vent” but you know, the people who are really good at this they can almost smile while you are feeling miserable and not because they are laughing, right?

[0:44:49] Charlie Hoehn: Right because it’s just funny.

[0:44:51] Steve Taubman: It’s funny, it’s just stuff right? And if they have that kind of compassion and love and humor and you can train people to put that in the forefront, be compassionate, be funny, don’t be afraid to joke with me about it. I will give you an example because this is my favorite example from cinema. My very favorite example is there is a movie called Steel Magnolias. I don’t know if you ever saw the movie but in the movie Sally Field’s plays the mother of Julia Roberts. And Julia Roberts has a disease that ends up killing her and at one point of the movie, towards the end of the movie when Julia Roberts has died and we’re at the cemetery and Julia Roberts is in the ground and Sally Field is just as upset as a mother could possibly be of course and she’s screaming and crying and she’s wailing and she’s just venting and with her are Olivia Dukakis and Shirley MacLaine. Now Shirley MacLaine plays this very cosmogony woman. Everybody loves her because they know her but she’s a grouch and her name was Ouiser and in the middle of the scene Sally Field is like, “I can’t believe this. How could this possibly happen? I am so mad I just want to hit someone. I just want to hit somebody so they could feel as much pain as I feel” and Olivia Dukakis grabs a hold of Shirley MacLaine and says, “Here hit Ouiser” and Sally Field stops in her tracks in the middle of this wailing, crying, just sloppy painful moment and starts laughing hysterically. And it’s that magical transformation that is possible when the person who is hearing you out isn’t buying into the grief but they know you are sad, they feel you’re saddest with you but they’re bigger than that and they know you are bigger than that and they are able to help you step out of it.

[0:47:04] Charlie Hoehn: Yep. I like that, I like that a lot.

[0:47:09] Steve Taubman: So you know there’s that and then there’s of course the systems too. I mean sometimes there is nobody around but you may also design systems for yourself, when I feel this way what? What do I do? When I feel this way, I listen to an inspiring song. When I feel this way, I find a funny joke on the internet. When I feel this way, I say this mantra to myself. Whatever it is you know plan it in advance. Have your lifeboats, assemble your lifeboats. So that you are not coming up short in those moments when you just don’t have the strength to withstand the emotional onslaught. Be ready.

[0:47:45] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so you have stuff not only in your schedule that keep you disciplined but also situational habits.

[0:47:57] Steve Taubman: Exactly, there you go situational habits. It’s your bag of tricks and you know this is part of what our training is all about. You know when people enter this world of this Buddha in the Trenches concept, the idea is let’s create a support environment where people can share ideas of what’s worked for them where you can read some things that have done and created great strides for people who are stressed out and who then are able to go on to be masterful in situations that used to really pull them down.

[0:48:28] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so tell me about some of the – at the time of this recording the book isn’t out yet but I assume since you are an accomplished trainer-speaker that you’ve seen some of these transformations that you’ve had in communities, in companies that you’ve worked with. Can you tell me some of the things that you have seen?

[0:48:48] Steve Taubman: Yeah, well usually because this is a soft skill. You know every time you are doing work in the soft skills arena, you’re not measuring the things the same way. I can’t say with certainty that, “We came into this company and therefore they increase their sales by 37%” because I come in at the same time but 10 other things happen.

[0:49:07] Charlie Hoehn: Right, exactly.

[0:49:08] Steve Taubman: So we can’t really know that but we do know from hearing what CEO’s say and hearing what entrepreneurs say about the experience of entering this inquiry with us and getting some of these tools working for them. You’ll see people who just seem to have shed layers of heaviness and wittiness and they have a greater sense of humor and some of the stuff that we now see in companies as a result is less conflict. People are more cooperative with one another. Some of the long-standing fights stopped and people start kind of saying, “You know let’s bury the hatchet. Let’s start again” and those are the things that really give me the greatest joy.

[0:49:54] Charlie Hoehn: That’s great and I can tell you Steve just from running in similar circles and hearing stuff from other folks who have done similar work. I forget the name of the company but this company was doing $50 million in sales pretty consistently which is amazing, right? They started putting their sales reps through mindfulness practices, some of the stuff that you have been talking about and they were able to increase their sales from $50 million to $250 million a year and the CEO attested that it was completely because their sales reps stopped being afraid of a negative outcome.

[0:50:40] Steve Taubman: Yeah. That is a very typical experience. I am working with a guy by the name of Steve Sebolt right now. Steve is the founder of an organization called Mental Toughness University and it’s based on critical thinking, emotional intelligence and mindfulness and the process that we are bringing into companies and he’s been doing a lot longer than I have, that really speaks to a lot of what we have been talking about today, the process he’s been using in companies has increased sales for – Like he’s got this, I don’t know if it’s the CEO but one of the folks from Johnson & Johnson, from Coca-Cola, Glaxo-Smith client, Toyota, many tens of millions of dollars increase in sales while going through these programs because as you said, you’re removing things like the addiction to the approval of others or just out now discouragement. You can’t overestimate the power of the right mindset, you just can’t.

[0:51:35] Charlie Hoehn: No, you really can’t. Now as a bonus to listeners of this podcast, we have a lot of authors who listen and a lot of them basically would love to have a similar career to one that you’ve had. You’ve had a really remarkable speaking career in getting your ideas out there to really big companies like IBM, GE, American Red Cross, State Farm and you’ve done over 2,500 presentations, which congratulations that is incredible. What are some of the things that you would recommend to authors who listen to this, who are just starting out in their speaking career, how can they have a good foundational next 12 months of their speaking career?

[0:52:27] Steve Taubman: Well of course the first thing is get right with yourself. Make sure that you are coming from a centered place and you are not getting yourself get emotionally exhausted in the process.

[0:52:34] Charlie Hoehn: Right, read Buddha in the Trenches first.

[0:52:36] Steve Taubman: Read the Buddha in the Trenches, that’s step one. Step two is nail your branding, what is it about you that is different? What is it about your message that’s different? And really be clear on that and then step three is as you make your way out into the world of marketing yourself, realize there are a lot of other people trying to do it at the same time. There is just a lot of that going on and so how do you rise above the clutter? Well one thing is don’t be just sending out kind of canned emails to a bunch of people? You’ve got to personalize your marketing process and you’ve got to find ways in the door. So leverage what you have already got, go to the people that you have already success speaking to and see who they know and who they can introduce you to and start developing a network of referral partners who are willing to share the value of what you do. So that you’ve got other agents out there working on your behalf.

[0:53:35] Charlie Hoehn: That’s great advice.

[0:53:37] Steve Taubman: And then get mentors, find mentors. There’s no question that you’ve got to accelerate your growth and I have done this and I will continue to do it. I will spend a lot of money working with somebody that I think knows something that I don’t know that I am not going to find out any other way. They have proprietary information. I just spent 30 grand working to work with somebody and I am happy to spend it because the knowledge I’ll gain from that is going to make me so much better at what I do and give me knowledge I never would have had before. I am okay with that and so I would say one thing that if you are out there and within your means naturally but don’t be stingy. If you are going to spend money, spend your money on growing yourself and think of it as an investment.

[0:54:17] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it will come back to you if you put it out there in a good way so thank you for sharing that. Now what kind of trainings and speakings are you going to be doing around Buddha in the Trenches?

[0:54:33] Steve Taubman: Some of that is a work in progress and I can’t tell you with absolutely sincerity how it’s going to play out but we’ll tell you that we are just days away or weeks away from major launch of the book. What’s going to come along with that is we’ll be offering people an opportunity to get the book, kind of lower the bar on getting the book and then what we’ll offer on the back end of that on what’s going to be potentially available to the general public, will be I want to start doing some book study groups. I think that this material is best done in a community and so we will create some book study groups and I will actually join a few of them in the beginning myself. So people have the opportunity to literary share some time and space with the author. Man, we’ll probably do an eight week book study groups. As far as out there in the corporate world, a lot of these material is going to be rolled into or folded into the mental toughness process and we’ll continue to build out our marketing channels. To get more of these large corporate gigs where we do full day long trainings and follow up interactive online training programs and then for me, just for my own joy because I happen to love being in front of people and I’ve got the background as a stage hypnotist and a magician and doing comedy. So I’m always looking for opportunities to put this material in front of people in keynote form too. Just an hour long talk where we drill down in some of these concepts. But also often what I’ll do is I’ll tack it onto an experience at a convention. For example, I just spoke to the Higher Real Estate Investors Association last week and they had me come in and did a stage hypnosis show, hypnotized a bunch of people, had a lot of fun, made a lot of people laugh but then the next day, did a keynote speech talking about the implication of hypnosis and the implications of how our minds work and what we can do to get beyond our own personal hypnosis.

[0:56:28] Charlie Hoehn: I love it. So this has been a fantastic episode and just to wrap Steve, could you give our listeners a challenge of some sort. What is something they could do today to have some of these principles instilled into their routine?

[0:56:49] Steve Taubman: So I would recommend that if you are going to do one thing today and on the preface by saying you’re not necessarily going to be successful at it but it’s really an experiment. It is something to play with and that is the next time that something occurs and if you’re like most of us, it’s going to happen within the next 24 hours, something is going to be irritating or aggravating to you, I am going to suggest that you welcome that experience. As if you are thankful that something aggravating happened and because what you could do with that is the moment you feel aggravation and irritation and you could say, “Wow this is exactly what I was looking for. I was looking for a moment where I can sit here and notice with mindfulness what my brain does with this. Do I get pulled down the rabbit hole of thought? Do I start to justify? Do I feel like a victim or can I bring my attention to just the physical sensations in my body and allow myself to just feel what does anger feel like in my body?” And then be thankful that the feeling arose so that you could have that experience. Try that and see what happens and again, you know because you’re not meditating regularly, you don’t have the necessary strength. Chances are you are going to probably get pulled in, you’ll probably going to end up getting angry and you know screwing up the whole thing but that’s okay.

[0:57:57] Charlie Hoehn: I would say they don’t have to fail and I love that you recommended this because this is something that I’ve recommended as one of the simplest most powerful things that somebody can practice and the way that I recommended it, isn’t necessarily through mindfulness or meditation because like you said, if they are not practiced they’re likely to go down that path. I recommend it through journaling where you write out everything you’re worried about or stressed out about or angry about. And you say, “I am grateful for blank because…” and then your mind just automatically comes up with the reason you’re happy about it and that exercise alone can leave you just sobbing. So I completely agree with that exercise. That is a fantastic recommendation.

[0:58:48] Steve Taubman: You know it’s funny that you brought that up because in the back of my book, I’ve got an appendix filled with sentence stems and I learned about sentence stems from Nathaniel Brandon, The Art of Consciousness, many years ago and found them to be exactly that. You know sentence stems meaning that you start a sentence and then you start writing steam of thought and the sentence. So for example, I am just going to open up the book at random here to sentence stems. And so one example might be, “I feel most present when I…” blank, right? I feel most present when I – and then you just write that on top of the page. “I feel most present when I…” and then you start writing for two minutes straight and you don’t stop and you don’t edit yourself and all of a sudden, wow you discover things that you don’t even realize that you were thinking– bubble up from your subconscious. Powerful tool.

[0:59:35] Charlie Hoehn: True, very, very true. So Steve, what is the best way for our listeners to get in touch with you or just to follow you along your journey?

[0:59:48] Steve Taubman: Well I’ll give you the two most easiest things to do right now, one of them is certainly my website. It is my name, stevetaubman.com and if you join one of the pages, you’ll find that there is a place to put your email address in and your name and then you’ll be on my mailing list. So you will be, when I write a blog post or whatnot, you’ll be able to get that information and you will just become a part of my world so that’s one great way to do it. And by the way, I think the first 40 pages of my first book on hypnosis when people join my mailing list. So that is a little thing that we will be able to jump on right away but right now we are also suggesting that people join, we have a Facebook group that’s specific to this new book and so the Facebook group is called Unshakable Nation. So if you just look through groups on Facebook, Unshakable Nation, what that will do is by putting you on Unshakable Nation community, you will be made aware when the launch is going to take place. You might even get a little free snippet of the book. There are a few benefits to that not the least of which is just the fact that you are part of a community of people who care about the same thing you do. So those are the two things.

[1:00:56] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. Well this has been great again Steve. So thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about this stuff. It’s really, really helpful.

[1:01:04] Steve Taubman: Oh absolute pleasure. Thank you so much Charlie, really fun talking to you.

[1:01:09] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Steve Taubman for being on the show. You can buy his book, Buddha in the Trenches on amazon.com.