What's on Your Bookshelf?
“What’s On Your Bookshelf” is a personal and professional growth podcast exploring the intersections of passion, potential, and purpose - featuring multi-certified coach and leadership development consultant Denise R. Russo alongside Andy Hughes, Scott Miller, and Samantha Powell.
What's on Your Bookshelf?
73 - Solve for Happy - Chapter 12 - Love is All You Need Part 2
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Welcome to what's on your Bookshelf, with your hosts Denise Russo and Samantha Powell.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of what's on your Bookshelf. This is a life and leadership podcast where we are living out loud the pages of the books that we've taken off of our bookshelves. The book that we're working through right now is called Solve for Happy by Mo Gaudet. My name is Denise Russo. I'm here today with my co-host, sam Powell, and this is a part two of chapter 12 in this book, which is a chapter that is all about love. Sam, I always tell you in each of our episodes how much I love being with you. How are you doing today?
Speaker 1:Good, I'm loving that we're here and spending more time on love, especially because the next chapter is heavy, so the more time we spend on this one, the better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good stall tactic.
Speaker 1:Yes it's absolutely a stall tactic, but we talked a lot about last time, about just the you know, some of the claims that he makes in this chapter really that love is just there, right, there's this unconditional love, and that really is the fifth truth here, or, sorry, the third of the five truths here that love, unconditional love, just is and that it really comes with no expectations and therefore you can't be happy if you don't have this unconditional love in your life.
Speaker 1:And so then, today we're starting with what he calls love's instruction manual, which I love, yeah, this is good, yeah, and he says that, you know, love is such a powerful commodity that it requires some special handling, and therefore he follows three practical tips that he calls love's instruction manual, and I love the way he put that together. I just thought that was cute and sweet and, you know, really interesting, but so, yeah, so that's what we'll cover in today's episode is talking about the three things that are part of what he thinks of as love's instruction manual. So, yeah, I'm excited to talk about this with you.
Speaker 2:What's so interesting about that for me, listening to you describe it that way is you're like the systems and process guru, and so for you to describe it from an emotional angle was really cool, because what I looked at it through was the lens of what I thought you would have looked at it through, which is that he's got this manual. And I'm thinking okay, a manual is like a guide. The guide for the book is that we have these things that are illusions in our mind that cause us suffering. Then we have these blind spots in our lives that prevent full and complete happiness. And now we're in the section of the ultimate truths of life, which should be bringing us the essence of joy. And so, before we get into the manual piece of this, sam, I'm curious from your perspective, do you think there's a difference between the word happiness and the word joy, and how do you relate those two together?
Speaker 1:I think they fall under the same category, like if I was to categorize emotions, which they do, like, if you have, like the feelings wheel and things like that, if not Google, it got a nice visual for you. But they, they definitely fall under the same category for me. But I think when we think of joy, we think of something that sort of transcends this, like experience. Joy is just like that top level, right, it's the upper echelon of happiness to me, so like they're related for sure, but it's like happiness I feel more falls towards like the contentment angle. Right, it's like content and happy feel the same to me, like I can be happy and it's just kind of casual and beautiful and I'm, you know, just enjoying my tea while I look out the window, type of a thing, whereas joy is something much I don't know, bigger than that, more I don't know. Like joy talk to me, kind of gets down to like the essence, soul level, like, right, it's that kind of a thought process.
Speaker 1:I don't know like that's how I view them, like they're definitely related, but joy is top, top tier top tier.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like joy comes despite your circumstances, maybe, and happiness can come and go based on situations. It's almost like last week you were talking about the idea of conditional love versus unconditional love and how, if it's that you love something because of something else, then that's a conditional type of a love, and so one of the main parts in this chapter that I'd love to talk about with you is about the importance of us seeking joy and happiness by first loving ourselves, and so how hard that is to seek that. And yet, if you can get that, then you have peace. And I remember in November of last year or so, we sat down together you, me and Scott and we were talking about what do we want 2024 to look like? And I remember having that conversation with you guys and saying you know what? All I really want in 2024 is peace. And then it kind of evolved into saying, well, what does that look like? And that evolved into saying, well, happiness.
Speaker 2:But I think what it really was was to come into this awareness of what joy really is and that if you can let go of any expectations or any things that you put on yourself as a title of who you are or what you do, but not really who you are, that you could be seeking after all of these things that give you just that temporary hit, or that dopamine, like we talked about with Sanja Lyabomirsky's book, where you might be seeking happiness in elusive things like money, fame, title, relationships that are fleeting or whatever, and so if you can let go of the expectations you have in your life and you could love even negative people and still not let their energy bring you down, then you've separated yourself to only focus on you, which is your own emotional intelligence, positive intelligence of your own self. What do you think about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that and he and this is what he sort of sets up in this instruction manual that he's got His first thing is love everything and everyone. And then he goes into the love yourself, and I think we want to spend some time on the love yourself for sure, but the love your, love everything and everyone. I thought was interesting. And he had an analogy that I really really liked, or a little story that he really liked. He said, if you hate snakes, what you hate is truly just the story you made up about them in your brain, the story that says they're evil and slimy but they're not right. Like no snake out there is attempting, like no snake is out to get you or out to get people right. It's just trying to live its snake life and, like you know, survive and exist the same way we are. But I loved that thought process and it reminded me of you know, your like, our thoughts lead to kind of everything else in our life, but it's I don't hate the thing, I hate the story that I've created about this thing, right, and it made me think about, like, all of the polarizing, like dichotomy we have in the world, right, or whether it's religious or political or whatever you know, just these opposing sides, and it's like you don't really hate the other side. If you're on one or the other, you hate the story that you've created in your head or the story that you've taken in from the media or from other people or from your life circumstances or whatever. And again, it's like if you can step as he talks about he's talked about many times in this book, like if you can step into he talks about he's talked about many times in this book, like if you can step into that observer role, right, like I am not me, I am the observer of kind of the thing away from me.
Speaker 1:If you can separate a little bit, like you can really step into a place where you're able to love everybody and everything, because you realize that you know one. We're all. We're not that far apart. At the end of the day, we're all just trying our best, we're all doing our best. Doesn't all isn't always unharmful, like sometimes it is hurtful to people, but we're trying our best.
Speaker 1:And if we can let go of the stories that we've created about why I should hate, why I should dislike the snakes in my life, then we can get to this place where it's much easier, like it's an easy thing to love everybody if you can let all of that go Right and I don't know. I think that's a guiding thing that's really gotten me through a lot of my life of just, hey, you know you're doing your best, I'm doing my best, yeah, the thing you did hurt me or the thing I did hurt you, but you know it's, you know that doesn't have to turn into this insane story of I hate you or I don't like you. It's I just didn't like the action, right, I didn't like the thing that happened and you know, just it gives.
Speaker 2:I think it gives you a chance at loving everybody and everything, like he says. I think you're right. There's a really awesome book by Ricardo Gonzalez called the Six Stages of Cultural Mastery, and it kind of walks through this essence of if you are trying to master the way that you have a relationship with a person. It first starts at the ground level, which is just you're you and I'm me. What are similarities and differences? Okay, that's at the core. But then it moves through these six stages and the ultimate stage is what I think mo is describing here in the terms of unconditional love, which ricardo calls endearment, meaning that no matter if I agree with you, disagree with you, if I live the way you live or I don't live the way you live, or I look the way you look or I don't look the way that you, that the sixth stage is at the ultimate pinnacle of love, which is endearment for others, despite their actions or despite your actions.
Speaker 1:I really love that.
Speaker 1:And if I think about some of my relationships, like, there are people I love who have very different thoughts and opinions and you know life views than me, but endearment is a good word to describe where I'm at with them, like right, even if they say something that I'm like whoop, I don't know about that Right, there's still this. There is like I don't know this endearment towards the person of like cause I can step out of it, I can step out of no-transcript. Isn't that nice, right? Like it feels, like in deer bed. It's like, oh, I, okay, that's crazy, but oh, isn't that cute? Like right, isn't that? Like you know, and not in a patronizing way, but in a like, okay, I get it. Like I can, I could see that based on what you've been through. And yeah, again, like that thought process gives you the space to love everybody right To sit in this unconditional love, which is where happiness is found.
Speaker 2:And I think it has to come from within. So a couple years ago, olivia won this award from a man named Warwick Dunn. He used to be a professional football player and it's funny because he actually went to college at an opposing school from mine. So when she first won the award, I was like, oh, I don't want you to win this award because I don't love the school that this guy went to. But this guy went on to doing amazing things in the world, and so his story is that when he was going through becoming a very successful football player, he was still in college at the time. His mom was, I think, that his mom was a police officer, I think, and so. But she ends up she gets shot and killed, okay, and so he's left to have to raise his young siblings while he's going through college and trying to become a professional football player, and so years later, as time has gone on, he became very successful, like uber successful football player, played for the Atlanta Falcons and he started an organization where he was raising funds to build homes for single women who couldn't afford homes for their children.
Speaker 2:And Don Yeager, who's a friend of ours that we've had on our podcast before and is a sports writer and writes his own books on leadership development and a great speaker with the John Maxwell organization. He's friends with Warwick Dunn like six degrees of separation. I did not know this when Olivia won the award, but Dunn tells a story how there was a time that he was with Warwick Dunn and there was this incident where Warwick Dunn wanted to go to the prison of the person that killed his mother and made his life very difficult, to go to that prison and tell the person that he forgave them and that he loved them. And it was like an astounding thing to think how could this man who lost his mother and who went through a really hard time to have to raise his siblings, be able to forgive and love that person that killed his mom? And so it ends up.
Speaker 2:The long part of the story is that it's because work done has been able to do all these amazing things in the world and to provide homes and scholarships and money and awards and different types of things, because he has a true sense of love for himself and the love that he has that's the unconditional love of his faith. And so when I got to this chapter about this part in the chapter of loving yourself. It really got me to thinking about how Mo says how can you love anything or expect anything to love you if you don't love yourself? And so the first person I thought of was this man, warwick Dunn, that if it wasn't for the fact that he had love for himself, his siblings would have turned out differently. His career would have turned out differently. The homes that he's provided dozens and dozens for women and children that needed homes would have turned out differently if he had loved himself first would have turned out differently if he had loved himself first.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's funny that that quote that starts this section of this chapter. It reminds me of a quote that RuPaul ends every episode of RuPaul's Drag Race with, which is if you can't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love anybody else? Like that's his tagline and it's that's what he's saying. It's like if you really want to get to this space of unconditional love, that has to extend to you as well. Right, like the grace that you give other people, and you can do all this external work in the world. But if you can't come back and love who you are unconditionally right, it's not like I love myself when I lose 20 pounds. I love myself when I, you know, accomplish this thing. It's no, I love myself as the being, as the wonderful, magical, you know creature that I am really. And getting down to that level of, you know, of love for ourselves.
Speaker 1:And he says that we're systematically trained to not love ourselves unless we meet stringent expectations by society, essentially, and like how many of us, right, struggle that. I think that is all, all. That is the trauma, that is the pain that we are all healing ourselves from throughout our life. Right, it's all, what's all the conditioning that's happened to us. And then, when we're an adult, this is what turns into our responsibility as we go out into the world is to explore that conditioning, explore those stringent expectations, as he calls it, and unwind that pain, unwind that hurt and figure out how to show up in the world in a way in which you love yourself unconditionally and you love other people unconditionally.
Speaker 1:And that's the journey, like I think that's the journey of adulthood, that's the, that's the real journey of your life, of the experience, is really understanding how you get down to this unconditional love, especially for you, because you can't really show up in the world in a way that doesn't cause some kind of harm for other people if you don't hurt, if you don't unconditionally love yourself. Right, if you don't work on those things, because you will accidentally through some reaction, right, some protection, all the you know all the things he's talked about. Right, we're trying to keep ourselves safe, we're trying to keep ourselves protected from danger, and when you're conditioned that certain things equal danger, right, if I'm not pretty enough, then that's a dangerous place to be, and so I have to work on becoming whatever society deems as pretty in order to be worthy of this love. But if you can work through that and get outside of that like then you can transcend to this next level of joy, right, you can transcend to this next level of joy, right? You can transcend to real happiness.
Speaker 2:You know, I've, over the last several months, sam talked to people that had been laid off from their jobs, and this essence of pushing yourself unrealistically seems to be cropping up time and again for some people, where their job was eliminated in a very non-personal way and yet the way that the person digested what happened quote-unquote to them was in a very personal way. Like how many times have we heard people say, well, it's not personal, this is a business decision, but at the end of that decision is a person, it's a human person. And so how many people have you and I talked with my gosh that have said things like why did this happen to me? Was I not good enough? Was I not smart enough? Was I not valuable enough? Was it was? Was it about me? And at the end of the day, maybe it really wasn't about you, because a lot of companies haphazardly just put together a spreadsheet and it feels like they just pick names out of the blue or they look at some metric on there that they randomly, haphazardly do and I'm not saying all companies do this. There are some companies that do change and transformation initiatives smartly, but it seems that the trend is that it isn't that smart for many, because people leave feeling bad about themselves. And so when he's talking in this book about pushing yourself unrealistically and missing expectations and disappointment and causing suffering, how do you get to the other side of that?
Speaker 2:I remember having a conversation with Vincent when he was finishing up his exams last year, before he finished his school year, and we had a conversation and he, just at that particular time, was he takes after his mom. I guess he's in too many things. He's in a lot of clubs. He has to be an officer in all the clubs. He does sports, but more than one sport. I mean, you know, you, me, sam, and so imagine me as a boy that's been set.
Speaker 2:And so he said he was taking a test and he called me up and he said You're gonna hate me, you're gonna be so disappointed in me. Are you sitting down? And I'm thinking something bad was happening. So I said what's going on, buddy? And he said I, I hate myself, I'm an idiot, I'm stupid. And finally, after he got all that out of the way, I was like what happened? And he said I just didn't do well on this particular test.
Speaker 2:Well, it turns out he got a B, but a B for him was like failing, and so I had to help him to see that. Well, what did you do to lead up to that? Did you do your very best and put your head down at night and say I did the very best I could do? No, okay, why? Well, because I want to have a life, I wanted to have friends, I wanted to do activities, I wanted to do this. Okay, that was the exchange you made, that you were going to get a B in exchange for having balance. Maybe the B should have stood for balance.
Speaker 2:And so by the end of the conversation, I think because he knew I unconditionally loved him, that he was trusting enough that he could tell me that this is how he was feeling. And I felt so honored, sam, at the end of that chat with him, because I felt like you know, how many people would we not tell our truth to? Because we want to give an impression that we are amazing, that we're not an idiot, that we are successful, that it isn't about us, that we can achieve and climb every major mountain that there is and get to the other side without feeling tired. And so for me, when I thought about this part, this lacking of self love and missing expectations. If you can love yourself so much that you can love others unconditionally that need that love too. What would the world be like if people that were missing that in themselves could find it in you, whether you're a coach, whether you're a people leader, whether you're a parent, or even a friend or a spouse or whatever it might be.
Speaker 2:And so when I got to that part of the chapter, it really got me to thinking about how how might we in this manual if you will, accept ourself for who we really are Maybe we aren't the president of such and such, or we don't make a certain amount of money or live in the other house that the Joneses live in, but maybe that's not really what people should be striving after. I think it was Sandra Lerber-Mersky's book where she talked about how people try to find happiness in keeping up with the Joneses. I need a bigger house, I need to buy a boat, I need to have this title, I need to make all this money, and then I'll be happy yep, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And I think that, like, if you can get to the point where you're showing up for yourself, where you just love yourself for you know who you are at like, and there's no conditions to it and there's no this. And he, like, he says he says a line in here which I hear, I've heard a lot but, like I think people miss the point of it often is he says you know, love yourself for doing your best. But what we have to really be careful with with that statement is it's your best, it's not your best. Based on these stipulations, right, it doesn't mean that you have to have all A's and all you know like, and I think, high achievers, right, there's, there's a toxicity in high achievement that you know like.
Speaker 1:That's something I've had to unwind in my life as somebody who was like I do all the things like it is a failure if it's not a hundred percent right, and that's not it. Right, it's I did my best. The outcome, what like? Right, it's removing yourself from the outcomes which we've talked about, right, it's whatever the outcome is, is that? But you have to be careful with that statement of you know, love yourself for doing your best, which is true, but you have to, you have to qualify really what best is at the end of the day, and it cannot be the external, you know, know, things that have been put on us, and a lot of times we, those are, we've tricked ourselves to thinking those are our just driving forces, right, like, oh, I just am the high achiever, I am the person who's, you know, basically going for perfection when perfect does not exist at all right and it's, uh, you know, I think it's really loving yourself Period.
Speaker 1:Right, just love yourself as you are, as you show up, as you exist in this world, like you are just worthy of love, right as you are, without doing anything, you know, being anything else, like you know, and I think that's like if you can get to that level of love for yourself, then you can do. I don't know, that's an amazing world and that's a place that I would, I would love to love to live.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if we all did that. And then the very last thing, like we're getting close on time here, but he finishes this chapter with the third part, which is be kind, and so what did you think about this? Be kind part of this.
Speaker 2:For this part, I thought about being more kind to myself, and so a couple things struck me. The first is that I keep a gratitude journal, so every day I try to write down one thing that I'm grateful for, or one person I'm grateful for, and then I try to also, if it's a person, to make sure I tell that person. But what I haven't done is write down something that I'm proud of for myself and that that, to me, is that I find that the person I'm the least kind to in my life is myself. I volunteer for things, I, I, I go out of my way to say compliments to people. I write this gratitude journal and tell people what I'm grateful for.
Speaker 2:But what do you do when you truly love? You give, you give yourself away, but what do you do to give back to yourself? And so I think if you're a person who innately is kind to others or kind to the environment or kind to animals, that's amazing, that's awesome, that's great. But where do we fall short in being kind to ourselves? So I wrote a note in this part of the chapter Sam that just said don't give in order to get. You don't always receive, but be kind anyway. And so it's against this reciprocal, non-conditional thing again, where if you're doing something to be kind because you want someone to be kind back to you, that's the wrong reason to be kind.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah. And he says to love is to give all you can, right. So when he talks about kindness as one of the three parts of this love manual, here, it's about giving right. It's about giving kindness to the world around you, to the people around you, to yourself. You know. To like, you're part of the world, you exist here, right. So you know, giving that love is really what helps us get into flow. And he, he says let life flow, keep what you use and give the rest away.
Speaker 1:And it reminded me of John Maxwell's like be a river, not a reservoir. You know thought process, right. Like be the thing, be the person through which things flow. Right, as you learn, pass that on to other people. Right. It's one of my favorite things about being a coach. It's like, the more that I work on myself, the more that I, you know, the more that you and I spend time doing all this it's why I love doing this podcast with you the more I'm able to give to people. Right. If I can understand what happiness is, if I can get to this level of, you know, unconditional love for myself and for those around me, I can be a river that that flows through and that can pass to other people. And that is what real kindness is is being able to give these gifts of your time, your energy, your love, your thoughts, your, you know, whatever to the world around you. And that's what takes the love like. You're loving everyone, you're loving yourself and you're passing that love through to the rest of creation which is magical, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I have this client I'm working with, and so I asked her the other day if she could describe someone that she felt like was a great leader in her company, and she said oh, I know right away, it's Larry. And I said well, tell me about Larry. And this guy is maybe like two levels above her super senior level executive in her company that she works for. It's kind of like a small to mid-sized company, so not a huge company, and so everyone knows Larry. So she says just that. She said everyone knows Larry because Larry wants to know everyone. And so I said what is it about Larry that you love? And she said he's present, he listens, he never makes you feel like he doesn't have time for you. He's so kind, he's so pleasant and outgoing and always laughing Like he'll say a sentence. And as he's saying sentences, he laughs.
Speaker 2:And so I asked her in the course of our conversation has there ever been a time where maybe you were doing something at work and you were struggling or you didn't really achieve it the way you wanted to? And she said oh, absolutely. And I said to her well, when that happened, what was it like for you to have to share that with your manager. And she said, oh, I couldn't share that with my manager. And she said but what I did do is I went to Larry and Larry was like that manager's manager's manager. And I said wow, so you were willing to go to Larry about this thing? And she said you know why? Because Larry does what Mo said in here, which is that he chooses to be kind instead of being right.
Speaker 2:What the woman did was not good for what the incident was at her job. But Larry could have said, yeah, you lost us money, you lost us customers, you lost us credibility or whatever it might have been for the situation. But she said Larry came to her and he listened, truly listened, and instead of him just being right and saying the facts like the facts are you messed up, he chose to be kind instead and she said I decided that I will always be loyal to Larry. If he leaves this company, I'll follow Larry. If Larry asks me to do something outside of my work hours for the best of the business, I would do it. And isn't that also? What John Maxwell says is that people won't go along with you if they don't get along with you, and our job as leaders is not just to create followers, is to create more leaders. But if you are a leader who doesn't love you won't even have followers, right, right, right.
Speaker 1:That's how we connect. We connect based on love and like he ends this chapter, like he starts and ends this chapter, the exact same way, that love is all you need and I I don't know. Like I said, this chapter was a journey and by the end of it, I agree.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, yeah, me too. So so, sam, what are we doing next week?
Speaker 1:we are going into a new chapter well, next week's, next week's gonna be heavy. Brace yourselves, if you're listening, if you're binging these, we're going from love to death. So that is one of the that's the fourth of the ultimate truths here, and the chapter, interestingly enough, is called called LIP, which is a play on RIP. So tune in to hear what theL stands for. It's not rest in peace, it's something different.
Speaker 2:And it's not love, but love is part of it, so OK, so next week is going to be great. It's been awesome, of course, being with you here again today. Friends, if you're liking this, would you feel free to please share this with others? Subscribe, comment, send us a note. Scott gives all kinds of information in our show notes for how you can reach us out to us. We're almost done with this book. I can't even believe it. It feels like the year is zipping by. It's been a pleasure to go through this book with each of you. Next week is a little tough. It's chapter 13, but we'll see you next week, and so my name is Denise Russo and, on behalf of my friend, sam Powell, this has been another episode of what's on your Bookshelf.