Everyday Being: Recent Episodes
Gareth & Steve
Is there a way of understanding life and our experience that can bring greater levels of happiness and wellbeing? We genuinely believe yes! We know that’s a big promise but we whole heartedly believe it to be true. We believe it because its happened to us.
You are in for a treat in this episode. We were so pleased that Steve Chandler agreed to be a guest on the podcast.
He is the author of 30 books that have been translated into over 25 languages. His personal success coaching, public speaking and business consulting have been used by CEOs, top professionals, major universities, and over 30 Fortune 500 companies. He has twice won the national Audio of the Year award from King Features Syndicate. A popular guest on TV and radio talk shows, Steve Chandler has recently been called "the most powerful public speaker in America today."
Steve is also a master coach that has helped train thousand of coaches to transform many lives and businesses. Steve (from the podcast) has recently benefitted from the coaching and wisdom of Steve
He is a powerful ambassador for Being, and a supporter of Everyday Being.
In this episode we discuss the importance of staying on our own business. The things that we can take ownership for, and that are in our control.
It is so easy for us all to lose sight of this and get caught up in other peoples business or to try and take responsibility for how life is unfolding.
This helps us recognise what we do and do not control. We stay in 'our lane' by focusing on what is in our control.
If there are things out of our control that we do want to influence, we focus on how we engage in these to have the greatest impact.
Happy new year to you, dear listener x
How are you getting on with those new year's resolutions? How's the planning for 2024 going? Well, to help and inspire you, Steve and Gareth have some thoughts to share on the topic of Setting Goals, and how they play out from an Everyday Being perspective.
Both Steve and Gareth share their views and how they approach creating targets; Steve doesnt really like to do it and Gareth inevitably finds a way to bring it back to running (again!). There are a few everyday examples to help you think about your approach and what works best for you.
Let us know your thoughts and what reasonates with you
Email - hello@everydaybeing.co.uk
Instagram - everyday.being
With some trepidation we are responding to some listener questions about applying the everyday being perspective to parenting.
We share our own personal experiences. Gareth has two teenage children and Steve has three children in their 20s.
We share the everyday experiences of parenting. What we've learnt along the way and how we endeavour to live from the everyday being perspective.
In this episode we are joined by Ben Chapman who is a listener of the podcast.
Ben is a chartered financial planner providing advice and guidance on wealth management and planning. Here are some links to find out more about Ben and his services:
- His website: https://www.benchapmanwealth.co.uk/
- His book: Your Financial GPS by Ben Chapman waterstones.com
We hope you enjoy the conversation.
A part 2 from the last episode.
In this episode we explore some tools and approaches to navigating conflict with other people.
In this episode we discuss:
- why does conflict happen
- why disagreements are a natural part of being a human being
- how to understand it from an everyday being perspective
- what are the implications for how we navigate ourselves through conflicts
In this episode we share some thoughts on how an understanding of everyday being relates to mental health. How this understanding can help us live with higher levels of mental health and how it can help us navigate back to health when we are struggling with the challenges of life and our experience.
Losing our way in life happens to us all.
As Sydney Banks said: "Life is a contact sport". You cannot avoid the ups and downs of life.
In this episode we discuss the role of thought in the way that we experience life and how we innocently create expectations about how our moment to moment experience will unfold. Without realising it we can then get into a 'fight' with the reality we are experiencing e.g. "this is unfair...", "This shouldn't be happening..." etc.
We discuss how to be more aware of this so that we don't fall into that black hole and get stuck.
However we also recognise that sometime we don't catch it and therefore we have to have a way of navigating our way back to a healthier state. We share a few thoughts on practical ways to find our way again.
Matt is one of our listeners and the creator of The Big Feed Up HQ Podcast. He has been a nutritionist for a decade working in professional sport and private healthcare.
His podcast is about nutrition, movement and outdoor experiences. Please check out his excellent podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-feed-up-hq/id1336460775
In this episode we explore Matts experience in his areas of expertise and how this relates to Everyday Being.
We can sometimes find ourselves saying: "How can I...
- drop my thinking
- change my thinking
- not be so bothered by my thinking
- not be so judgemental
- etc, etc.
In this episode I briefly cover the nature of thought, how all thought is neutral and a gift from life
I then share some reflections on the implications:
- for navigating our thinking in our day to day lives
- how sometimes we need to inquire into our thoughts to uncover limiting beliefs and where we might not be seeing life accurately
- of how thought actually drops us rather than us having to drop it
This episode builds on the last episode.
As Sidney Banks said: "Life is a contact sport"
It is very natural that we find ourselves in a reactive mindset to the circumstances of our life. This is the story we tell ourselves through our thinking.
It can lead to feeling a victim of circumstances and other people. We complain and our language becomes full of "Should's", "Shouldn't's", "Its unfair" etc.
It is helpful to normalise this and to neutralise the problem by recognising the role of our thinking. The reaction is not a problem… it is the holding onto it that becomes a problem.
However we might still have something to deal with in terms of the situation or another person.
We can then pivot to creation. How do I want to be in relationship to this situation or person? What do I want to create in my response?
We are creating all the time. Everything we think, say and do is an act of creation.
What we 'do' in our life is a reflection of who we are being.
In this episode we discuss:
- how we can use the everyday being perspective to create how we live in the world
- how we pivot from reacting to things in our life, to creating how we take ownership in our response to situations
We also share our own personal statements of 'being'. How we created them and what they mean to us.
In a new approach for us here at Everyday Being, Gareth shares a couple bits of news and shares some of his reflections on episode 16 with Suzie. Let us know any thoughts you’ve had about this (and any other episodes) at hello@everydaybeing.co.uk
A big thank you to Suzie one of our listeners for sharing her experience of what everyday being means for her in her personal and professional life. We explore a number of topics including confidence and relationships.
Key messages
- How the delusion of the separate self is at the heart of the issue when we judge ourselves
- From this delusion we can never be good enough
- We get trapped in the negative impact this has on our confidence and sense of wellbeing
- How living from being is the antidote to this delusion
- We also discuss and explore imposter syndrome and how to have a different perspective on it
We reference the following people:
- Tim Gallwey. Who wrote a series of books on the Inner Game
- Phil Stutz and Barry Michel’s. They have written two books: The Tools and Coming Alive. There is also a Netflix documentary called Stutz. It is directed by the actor Jonah Hill who is a client of Phil Stutz
Key messages
- We don’t control our experience
- Understanding our lack of control is liberating as we tune into the flow of life
- We are a manifestation of universal mind that is the flow of life. Its nature is to create so that is our nature as well. We live as a creative expression of that universal intelligence
Territory for this session
What do we control?
- Two things we could say are very personal and important to us:
- Our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and state of mind. This is what creates our experience. We don’t control these elements
- Our most intimate or important relationship in our life. Neither party is in control.
- So we don't control two of the most important things in our life
Michael Singer, in his brilliant book Living Untethered:
- The moment in front of you has absolutely nothing to do with you. Look to the left and right there is another moment in front of you
- We bring personal preferences into impersonal moments and make them personal
- 99.99999% of the universe has nothing to do with us, but somehow the 0.00001% does?
- We actually bother ourselves about the moment in front of us
A sense of perspective:
- The earth has been here for 4.5 billion years
- We are here for an eighty year ride
- There are nearly 8 billion people on the planet – can we all be in control?
- Life rarely unfolds as we want it to
- Resistance creates tension and anxiety
- Only by accepting reality can we be within the flow of life
Is there free will?
- This has been a question that has vexed scientists and philosophers down the ages
- This is certainly above our pay grades… However, we do express a point of view:
- If we are not a separate self – how can you be in control
- I don’t control my thoughts
- I don’t control the thinking that says should I do this or that
- American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.
- Have you noticed how often something that you didn't want to happen turns out for the best in the end?
- And you never know how the other option might have worked out anyway
The extent to which we are in control
- Our intention?
- Our understanding of the nature of our experience
- You cannot separate what we know from our knowing awareness or presence
- You cannot have a thought without a thinking
- You cannot have an experience without I am..
- This is a valuable distinction when we are coming from the perspective of everyday being. A big thank you to Steve Hardison and Steve Chandler who pointed to this distinction.
- What is the value of judgements and expectations? Where do they take you?
- Out of the now
- Into past and future
- Lose your impact
- It is in the nature of thought to make judgements - this is very helpful in navigating our everyday experience
- Thought operates dualistically and creates time
- Being is non-dualistic. All awareness’s are the same
- It is interesting to explore whether we can make judgements without being judgemental
- E.g., “Would you like a tea or a coffee?” you can make a choice but you don’t need to judge the one you didn’t have!
- What does your own internal dialogue tend to consist of? - Judgements and expectations. This doesn't add to our enjoyment of life
- What do people complain about? - Judgements and expectations
- Expectations:
- are toxic
- people don't look forward to expectations
- resentful
- leads to anxiety
- kills performance
- leads to rebellion
- goes against a free spirit
- leads to disappointment
- less creativity and energy
- Two consequences
- We/they don't live up to expectations
- disappointment
- they meet it - so what!
- Alan Watts - one requirement before marrying a couple. If one of you expects the other to change, I will not perform the ceremony
- Inner game of tennis
- A judgement is the act of assigning a negative or positive value to an event
- Judgements are our personal ego reactions to the sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts within our experience
- Self-judgements become self-fulfilling prophesies – we start to become what we think
- When we unlearn how to be judgemental it is possible to achieve spontaneous, focused play
- Neither to goodness nor badness ascribed to the event by the players is an attribute of the shot itself. Rather they are the evaluations added to the event in the minds of the players according to their individual reactions
- Expectations are a form of judgement:
- Jennifer Capriati when she was fourteen years old. At the time, she was playing in world-class women’s tournaments and doing remarkably well. The reporter was asking her how nervous she got when she was playing against some of the best players in the world. Jennifer responded that she didn’t get nervous at all. She said she considered it a privilege to play with these players, something she hadn’t been able to do up until that time. “But surely when you are in the semi-finals of a world-class tournament, and being only fourteen, with all the expectations that are on you, you must experience some stress.” Jennifer’s final answer to all the reporter’s probing for her fear was simple, innocent. “If I was feeling frightened playing tennis, I don’t see why I would do it!” she exclaimed. With that the reporter stopped her questioning.”
- Agreements
- courageous
- moves things forward quickly
- curious and interested in the other person
- encourages responsibility
- adult to adult
- sense of accomplishment
- What are the implications of the fact that we live in a perpetual now?
- Presence, awareness and being is a description of the fact that every experience we have ever had in our life was in the now
- We can only ever live in the now
- “I need more time!”. How can you have more time than now? It doesn’t make sense. So what can we do about time?
- Our thinking creates time. Our thinking is never completely in the now
- When people are involved in an accident why does time slow down?
- When you are at your best what is the quality of this experience? Presence!
- Problems with our mental health occur when our energy and focus drift into the past and the future. We spend time going back over things or worrying about the future. We get into a vicious cycle where our thinking just goes round in circles. We struggle to concentrate. We flick from one thing to the next to the next. We cannot live in the past or the future. This is where a busy mind takes us.
- We cannot change the past – however much we think about it it is not going to be changed. The psychotherapy world realised some time ago that constantly going back over troubling memories just re-imprints them more strongly
- We cannot predict the future. We can make plans, but the harsh reality is that we are not in control of life and the way that it unfolds. Covid has certainly proven that point
- How our state of mind is a critical variable to understand and to be able to navigate. When we feel overwhelmed the problem starts with the mind and not with circumstances. When we slow down we get more done with less mental effort
- It is now such a common mantra – ‘Live in the now’. Why is this such a popular message?
- We intuitively know that this is the key to living a happy healthy life. It is one of the main reasons why there has been such an increase in the interest in meditation. However, meditation is not a cure all if you try to use it to control your thinking – around 10% of people find their anxiety and depression gets worse
- Meditation is about being aware. The essence of meditation is simply to be aware of being. And as we are always aware of simply being, meditation ultimately is not something we do. It is what we are. Not about trying to control the mind and our thinking
A big thank you to Suzanne who is one of our listeners. We discuss and explore what everyday being has meant to her and the implications for her professional and personal life.
Key messages in this episode:
- Why is speaking in public so challenging?
- In our history being thrown out of the tribe was certain death
- Therefore the nature of public speaking is to be nervous
What can you be confident in?
- Your engagement
- Confidence in doing something is an outcome not a starting point.
Understanding the relationship between our Investment and our involvement is key
Fear and insecurity is the main driving force of over investment.
- Being judged
- Wanting other people to like us.
- Wanting other people to agree with what we are saying etc.
- Judging ourself - being in front of lots of people
Preparation
- What is good preparation?
- Your intention
- The only valuable goal you can have is doing your best in the moment
- What is unhelpful preparation?
Key messages in this episode:
- Relationships are one of our primary sources of growth
- We are social animals. One of the reasons we have survived and prospered in the animal kingdom is our ability to live in community and collaborate. Of course, the flipside of this is that when we can’t or won’t, we can be incredibly destructive
The territory for this session:
- Why are relationships so important?
- Health and wellbeing
- How reality is a shared phenomenon
- Collaboration the life blood of an organisation
- A healthy way to view relationships
- Complementary and incompatible are two conclusions about the same situation, two sides of the same coin
- Good will – the currency of relationships
- State of mind a critical variable
- Taking it personally vs impersonally
- ‘Being’ in relationship with others
- Focus on what you can control
- Have the ‘right’ intention
- Intention
- How
- What
- Being expectation free
- Investment v involvement
- Seeing difficult relationships as an Allie sent by life. For our understanding and learning
Key messages in this episode
- If we understand the way something works, then it has implications for how we apply this understanding in our lives
- What we’ve been sharing can be challenging because it is not an application. It doesn’t tell you what to do
- This is a reductive understanding - an undoing. Stop doing things that get in the way of the natural system
The territory for this session:
- What we’ve been sharing through these sessions has been a description of what is behind our experience. It is either true or not. The true test is your own experience
- We are pointing to a fact that our experience is being created from the inside out and not the outside-in
- We are not saying that there aren’t external circumstances
- Most people live in a mixed paradigm – so do we much of the time
- People who struggle in life tend to live outside-in. Feeling a victim of circumstances and other people
- However outside-in doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If it did, we would be affected by circumstances in the same way and so would other people. Both positively and negatively:
- When you get something new – how long does the feeling last?
- Does the mind ever stay in one state? Does one thought ever stay in the mind? No – our state of mind and thinking naturally ebb and flow
- Self-inquiry is key – reflecting and exploring:
- The nature of your own mind. How it works and how to creates our experience
- ‘I’ is the tenth most common word we use after ‘the’, ‘be’, ‘to’, ‘of’, ‘and’ etc. And yet we never really explore what we mean by ‘I’
- Despite the increased focus on mental health during the last few years the outcomes for people are not improving. Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong direction?
Key messages in this episode
- Through all of our previous episodes we have been pointing to the source of our mental health and wellbeing as originating from our ‘being’ and not from our ‘doing’. This episode delves deeper into this perspective.
- How this understanding can be used to help us navigate back to our own wellbeing
- As always we hope that you can relate to this from the evidence of your own experience
The territory for this episode:
- Fundamental question – is mental health something that we have innately? We are suggesting that it is, and this orientation has significant implications for the way that we think about and support our own mental health
- However, we also recognise that this is a tricky subject and there are lots of grey areas. It is very easy for people to take offence at this perspective:
- from a misunderstanding of what we are saying
- from a feeling that it is somehow blaming the individual who is struggling
- that it is somehow disrespectful of someone’s experience when they are struggling
- We share a few examples from our own experience and the experience of working with people who are struggling.
- We discuss understanding mental health as where we are not who we are. People often say things like "I am an anxious person" or "I am a depressive". We discuss how this is an unhelpful and an inaccurate description of our mental health.
- How the purpose of a mental health diagnosis is to help us get back to health
- How our state of ‘being’ drives our 'doing' not the other way around - with some examples
- One of the challenges is that this is a reductive understanding, i.e., what do you need to stop doing rather than what we need to do
- How when we settle back into our being we very naturally do things that support our wellbeing, i.e., taking action is often very helpful but only from a certain perspective
In this episode we explore applying the Everyday Being perspective to the challenging subject matter of confidence.
We look at confidence from two perspectives:
- Confidence in ourselves
- Confidence to do something
We start by discussing the most significant challenge for us, which is identifying the interferences that get in the way of accessing confidence - an innocent misuse of our thinking e.g.,
- Trying to control what others think of us - when meeting someone new we worry about what they might think about us and/or we try too hard to make a positive impression – we have absolutely no control over what they will think about us or how they will perceive us
- self-judgements - we have negative self-judgements about ourselves, e.g., someone who thinks that they are not very good at talking in front of groups, even though other people see them doing it and see them as very confident and competent
- Over invested in an outcome – our focus, energy and interest is on the outcome. We very rarely control the outcome of something. If we did, we would always have everything that we focused on. The problem is that deep down our unconscious mind knows that we don’t control the outcome. This therefore inadvertently creates anxiety. Paradoxically this has a negative impact on the very thing that gives us the best opportunity of achieving the outcome, which is our engagement. In sport the mantra is often focus on the process, i.e., your engagement and not on the result. In business and life you see it with the salesperson that is so focused on the sale that they don’t build the engagement and the relationship with the buyer. We are very sensitive to when we are being pushed.
We then go on to discuss how confidence in ourselves comes from our ‘being’. Young children before the age of around three don’t have any major problems with their confidence. At times parents might need to step in to protect them from themselves. As the sense of a separate self develops and we start to pick up messages about what is right, what is wrong, what we get rewarded or punished for etc, we become overly self-conscious. If you think about it this creates low confidence because we are so focused on ourselves that we lose the connection to our external circumstances.
As we’ve mentioned before being, present and aware are the same thing. We know we are always having an experience because we are being here now, at every moment of our lives. We have all had the experience of being completely present and in the moment.
How do you build on this so that it becomes part of your everyday life?
Doing the work on who you are being.
As we’ve mentioned before if you want to look at who you are being looking at what you are currently doing. How you are going about your life. What experience you are creating for yourself. What experience you are creating for the people around you.
This takes work. It is a creation and a daily recreation.
It is a personal inquiry.
Our experience is that when people first start to explore this, they find many positive qualities to their being. And they also find some aspects of their being that they don’t like or want. These often highlight some things to explore related to our book of law:
- The limiting beliefs we have about ourselves or others, e.g. I should be perfect in everything that I do. Other people should treat in the way I want etc.
- The judgements we hold about ourselves, others, and life. We start to see life in a very black and white way. We objectify ourselves and other people – seeing in a very one dimensional way – good/bad, right/wrong etc. Certainty about something is a warning sign
- Expectations of ourselves, others, and life. We start relating to life as it isn’t rather than how it is. As the spiritual teacher and author Byron Katie says you will only lose this battle 100% of the time. The words “Should”, “Shouldn’t”, “Must” betray these judgements
Clarifying your sense of ‘being’ helps you to focus on the qualities that you want to embody. It also helps you focus on the things that you can control
In this episode we explore what the nature of the mind. How it operates. Why there is a direct correlation to the volume and quality of thinking that is available to us and our state of mind.
How understanding that our mind works dualistically means that we use the mind for the job that it was intended, which is to help us navigate in an ever-changing world. However, it also highlights the fact that you cannot find peace of mind in the mind – trying to manage our state of mind and/or our thinking doesn't work in any way that is sustainable. Instead an understanding of the nature of the mind and the way it works has key implications for the way that we relate to our mind and our thinking.
We link back to previous episodes and describe how peace of mind comes from a quiet mind. It comes when we connect to our being. Our mind takes the lead from who we are being.
Our 'Being' is the one thing we know for sure. We are always having an experience. We are present. We are here now. That is the background to our being. When you enquire into the nature of this awareness you will find that it has no form, no boundaries, no beginning or end. It is simply our knowing presence.
This awareness is ever present in our lives. Everything we think, do and say comes through our being. In the pure essence of our being we are all the same. This presence is connected to the intelligence of life. It is why when we are present with someone and have a quite mind we feel so connected to them because in our essence we are the same. However the expression of our ‘being’ in the world is absolutely unique - there is and will only ever be one of you. Much like every snow flake that is unique even though they are all snow.
The nature of life is creation and expansion. Therefore that is our nature as well. Who you are 'Being' is your ongoing creation.
In this episode we explore our 'Being' and the implications for living in the world and navigating the ups and downs of life.
This episode explores whether our experience is created by external circumstances (outside-in) or by what is taking place in our mind (inside-out). For most of us we would recognise times when something inside of us is creating our experience (inside-out), e.g. in a difficult relationship where we know that we always turn up irritated before we even see or speak to the other person. However at other times it definitely appears to us that the circumstances have created our experience, e.g. someone being rude to us. What this episodes points to is that all experience is inside-out. This is not to deny external circumstances, but rather that understanding the true source of our experience gives us a better ability to navigate these circumstances and to not be defined by external events. This episode also makes reference to Steve's experience with depression and the suicidal ideation that this created and how he got past this time in his life.
There is a direct relationship between our behaviour and who we are being. Who we are being determines what we are doing. Lasting sustainable change comes from a change in who we are being