• Visit Greg’s website and connect on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Joe Sanok 00:00:00  I'm so excited to introduce you to the best website designers out there. We have a brand new partnership with session sites. It is where good therapy meets brilliant design, and they get your website switched over or built in less than two weeks. They fine tune your messaging, use science backed user experience methodology, and work exclusively with mental health professionals. In fact, new clients right now are going to get three free therapy marketing strategy calls with their creative director of session sites. If you book today, you're not going to want to miss this. Head on over to sessions. Com forward slash again that session sites. Com forward slash get the website of your dreams today session sites. Com forward slash. This is the practice of the practice podcast with Joe Sam. Session number 1213. I'm Joe. I'm your host. And welcome to the practice of the Practice Podcast, where we help you build a thriving private practice that you absolutely love. You know, we want both sides of that. We want you to thrive in private practice.

Joe Sanok 00:01:19  We want you to know the business side and the clinical side, and that you really aren't just, you know, living in poverty and that these things that we never learned in grad school, like marketing or business plan, that we actually know how to do some of these things. But then we also want you to love it. We want it to be something that you absolutely love, that you have. Just you show up and you say, I can't believe this is my world. I can't believe that I'm in solo practice. Or I see these types of clients, or I get to grow a group practice, and we do this in community through our membership. we have a huge community of people that are growing together, whether you're in solo or group practice. If you're not in that community, you can head over to practice of the practice. Com forward slash membership. We'd love to have you join that community as well. and today I am so excited to have Greg MacEwan with me. Greg is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism and Effortless, which together have sold 3 million copies and been published in 40 languages, and recently released The Essentialism Planner, which is a 90 day guide to accomplishing more by doing less.

Joe Sanok 00:02:25  McEwan is one of the most sought after public speakers globally, and has spoken to over 500 companies while traveling to more than 40 countries. He hosts the Greg McEwen podcast, which is ranked in the top five of all self-improvement podcasts and top ten in educational podcasts on Apple. Greg, welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast.

Greg McKeown 00:02:45  It's great to be with you.

Joe Sanok 00:02:46  You know your book essentialism? I think it came out around 2014 or so. I read it that year. It came out and it was like, oh my gosh, this guy is cut from the same cloth. I was already in the midst of creating a conference called Slowdown School where people just. We went hiking, we hung out on the beaches and then spent two days just ultra focused on the most important things within their business. And for me, I mean, I look back at these notes that ten years ago I took in the back of it, and so much of it I now have embodied, like even just that idea of make the essential the easiest.

Joe Sanok 00:03:19  When I think about my morning routine, where I make my matcha and my smoothie, I put all the supplements I take, I put like, oh, I put the Metamucil that my doctor said I got to start taking because I'm in my 40s. All these different things that are good for me are right there where you say it, just be my coffee. But now it's, you know, I have my matcha there. You know, I'm going to start with matcha. I'm going to have like the good healthy beginning to the day. Just that idea of make the essential the easiest thing to do instead of the hardest. I want to ask you, if we're starting with essentialism, was that always kind of how you thought, or was this something that there's a story behind it that you had to kind of enact this and learn this and dig into it to change something in your life. Like with something erupting, that essentialism had to kind of help you switch out of a mindset or way or or was it kind of how you thought all along?

Greg McKeown 00:04:08  Yeah.

Greg McKeown 00:04:08  I mean, I think life is about the ongoing perpetual journey of being less wrong. And and so of course, there was experience and learning that it sort of ignited, the pursuit of what ended up being essentialism and then effortless. And so, I mean, one of the origin moments and stories was when I got an email from a colleague at the time saying, look, Friday between 1 and 2 p.m. would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby, because I need you to be at this client meeting. And I'm sure they were joking. But as it turns out, our daughter was born in the early hours of Friday morning. And instead of being focused on that clearly essential thing, I was pulled in every direction laptop, open phone on, trying to do it all. And then, to my shame, I went to the meeting and even afterwards my colleague said, look, look, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. But the look on their faces didn't evince that sort of respect, and it was pretty clear that I'd made a fools bargain and learned the simplest of lessons, which was this if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.

Greg McKeown 00:05:32  And that seems to be something that, while it was personal to me, seems fairly universal. because so many people feel stretched too thin at work or at home, feel busy, but not necessarily productive, feel that their day is hijacked by other people's agenda for them. Or indeed, perhaps there's a different group that knows what's essential, but then somehow over complicates it just makes it too hard to actually get the right things done. And so essentialism is the antidote to that undisciplined pursuit of more and effortless, also an extension of the same set of, well, a desire to address those same sets of problems. Essentialism is, in a single word, focus and effortless in a single word is simplification. And so the idea is we have to figure out what the right things are to do. That's essentialism, but we need to do it in the right way. That's effortless. So all of this grew out of failure, out of getting things wrong. And in the end, I think the totality of what we actually know at any given point in our lives is the sum of all of the mistakes we've made.

Greg McKeown 00:06:59  Like, that's our real knowledge. So I guess that's an answer to your question.

Joe Sanok 00:07:04  Yeah. Yeah. Now, I know one thing that we talked about before we started rolling was, how therapists are uniquely positioned around listening, and that a lot of times it's the only field that's really taught deeper listening. And that's been something that you've been doing some research on. Tell us about the research around deeper listening and understanding and the intersection between that and discovering what's essential for our lives.

Greg McKeown 00:07:28  Back in January, I was on the Tim Ferriss podcast and, quite spontaneously got into this subject and then committed to millions of people, spontaneously to, to hold some live sessions, on this subject. it's, it's something of, I don't know, It's close to an unparalleled passion for me. you know, bordering on obsession and. And for the last 25 years. And so, so let let's sort of back up. I, I imagine an enormous amount within the idea of listening and far more than really is reasonable at this point.

Greg McKeown 00:08:19  it's grown into its own world, its own universe, an orientation, a a way of thinking, a way of living. and and it's as game changing as anything that's happened in my whole life. and so, you know, I didn't come from a family that was, prided itself, particularly on listening. You know, there weren't there weren't a lot of questions being asked or there's just a lot of statements being made. And and so it was not like I sort of learned by observing. but then I became friends with somebody who, when I was quite young, who was was really great listener even back then. And we listened to each other. And that was a very distinctive type of, experience that's lasted, you know, now 35 years. and, and so, you know, if we sort of get more to the actual core of it, almost nobody has been trained in, in how to listen. And that's, that's a serious problem, of course, because because so much is hidden behind that gate.

Greg McKeown 00:09:33  and at first, of course, you could say, well, just even at the surface level, you can't communicate, you can't even understand the basics of a relationship or an interaction without better listening. competence. And so it's a problem if you have, let's say hypothetically, if you had a, a whole society that not only had never been trained in listening, had been trained in how to read and write and, and, and in a certain extent, how to speak in a trained formal way, but had never received any formal training on this other capacity. I mean, that that that would be a problem. But then imagine this hypothetically, if you had a society that then was being modeled constantly, not only not only not powerful, competent, apex, radical listening, you know, like the one end of the continuum. Imagine if that same society had been bombarded for a decade, with with not not a phone because the phone in our pockets is, you know, whatever that is, it's not a phone.

Greg McKeown 00:10:38  It's a $3 trillion military grade, destruction machine. And it's designed very specifically to make the trade off of distracting us from the people we're interacting with in person, that is, the people we live with and would be listening to and talking with, for people who live a long way from us. So that's that is built into the algorithm of the technology tool in our pockets. The companies that have created that entire infrastructure, and I've worked with in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years, only make money when we make that trade off. So the consequence of that is that I keep pretending I'm speaking hypothetically. You also have a situation where, you know, so an entire society is only ever surface listening because they have a phone in their hands. And so that that is just that just forces our communication and interaction to the surface, so that none of the real issues are of being even even close to being addressed. Okay. Now imagine let's stay on this hypothetical. Let's one more level. Imagine if what they were having modeled for them in social media and, and and in mainstream media was huge amounts of what I would describe as not just surface listening but anti, you know, anti listening where you are listening a lie, you watch people arguing and they're not arguing.

Greg McKeown 00:12:16  Strangely, even with each other, they appear to be, but really they're just arguing with strawman versions of the other's argument. And so there's this massive amount of contention, but not around the real issues. So that's like just a lay of the land is what you have, I think is close to a, you know, is close to a, a crisis. but because, you know, as, any psychotherapist, you know, worth their salt, knows the nature of the nature of the psyche, but it's not limited to the psyche. It's true in every human system. That is, it's true in every relationship or every team or organization. And we could go beyond we could extrapolate beyond that. In all human systems, the nature of systems seems to be that there are well, to use the 1978 metaphor, the first time that was used at publication, the The onion metaphor, that that all human systems have less valuable insight going on at the surface. And as you go closer to the center, you get closer, you know, from, let's say one x, then you're getting to ten x 100 x.

Greg McKeown 00:13:30  And, and my experience is that you can go even further than that, that without any exaggeration, you could get to 1000 x leverage points to use the system's thinking language for it. that change everything. And indeed, surely this is the maybe not the primary, but but one of the primary drivers of of therapy as as a still really relatively new, field of endeavor is that is that if you can help people to get to those core subjects, to the things that are subconscious beneath to the meaning frames that exist only at the center, vulnerable but valuable, then everything can change everything but that in normal life they are not getting anywhere close to it in their own life, in their relationships or beyond. So. So to me, to me there is there's a a gold mine deserving of, of study, of, of codification And and then teaching this also to people, you know, broadly like a, like a movement.

Joe Sanok 00:14:47  You know, it's interesting. I've been listening to the Indigenous Knowledges podcast, which just came out at the time of this recording.

Joe Sanok 00:14:55  my partner Claire is one of the hosts, and, she's partnering with our local band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians to capture a lot of these, just like deep ways of thinking and something really, like profound kind of hit me as you were talking in an intersection with what I was learning there. And one thing they were talking about is how the typical kind of Western introduction is like, hi, I'm Joe, hi, I'm Greg, and very quickly we go to like what do you do. And so it's a status discussion of like, oh well, you know if you're really going to do it, you're like, I'm a bestselling author, I've done this and this and oh, well, I'm a lawyer or I'm a doctor, and people are kind of figuring out who they are. And then, you know, in this kind of tribes background, it always starts with like which clan are you from? So are you Eagle. Are you bear? Are you like. And then. Oh, I think I might know your uncle.

Joe Sanok 00:15:47  And they keep going back generations until they find a connection before they even start their conversation. And just that idea that at the very beginning of an introduction oftentimes is for us, you know, status and for.

Greg McKeown 00:16:01  Well, I want I'm only interrupting in aid of the point you're making to support it is is it's not just status what you're describing as corporatism. Yeah. There's all sorts of forms of status. That family could be a form of status, you know, longevity could be a point. I mean, anything can be a form of status, but but that question, what do you do? It doesn't mean what it sounds like it's asking. It means what is your job, your paid job, and therefore, how much do you earn and where do you fit into the into the corporate landscape. And so that's why I think that's a particularly such a trick of a question. But carry on with what you were saying.

Joe Sanok 00:16:45  Well, no, I just think that then you look at if that's your starting point for conversations, how does that then affect listening? You know, if you start with how are we connected already? Who do you know, Greg, that I know.

Joe Sanok 00:16:56  And it's like, if you and I spent five minutes with that intention, I'm pretty sure within 5 or 10 minutes we would find some overlap in our circles that there's someone that we're connected to. but that's not where oftentimes conversations start. And so I think then listening, then if it starts from a status or a positioning or who are you compared to, who am I? then you see what you're talking about, where you have this, this just kind of heroic archetype talking at you, instead of this deep listening. Yeah. How does that hit you as you hear that?

Greg McKeown 00:17:29  Well, I mean, one of the things that makes me think of is, is the the principle of the intergenerational Generational self, which isn't a well-known idea, but the research on it is is very interesting. Among other things, what what has been found fairly, fairly persuasively is that if a person has an intergenerational self meaning, a sense of their, you know, who their parents and grandparents and great grandparents were and their sense that they're that they orient their identity with that in mind, they're much more resilient.

Greg McKeown 00:18:09  That's one of the, the lessons. And and it's not hard to see as how that works, because among other things, you just know that a lot had to be resolved and a lot of problems had to be navigated in order for you to exist at all. And and so, you know, you can sense that problems have come and gone and that you're not in the worst scenario that's ever existed in the history of your family? No. You are dealing with challenges just like they have. And. And there's there's other reasons that that that the intergenerational self is, is worth developing. one of the you'd mentioned the planet earlier on the essentialism planner, which I started ten years ago and then then quit, said no to got out of the contract because I just didn't think I had something distinctive to say. And, and then after a couple of years ago, I thought, you know, I think I'm about ready. I've gone through so many iterations. I think I have something that's that is now useful and unique.

Greg McKeown 00:19:08  And so that's why I ended up creating it. but one of the tools that goes along with it, is the 100 year vision. And it's literally a process where you look a hundred years into your past and you envision a hundred years into your future, and, and and in that process, you can discern better between the trivial many and the vital few. Those key relationships, those key contributions that that if you invest in them now, can last, you know, beyond memory. because because most people I mean, most people cannot even name the first and last names of their eight great grandparents. It's rare to find someone who can. And and that will be true for you and me as well. A hundred years from now, that will be true for us, that they may not even know our names. But that's not the same as saying that our great grandparents didn't impact us. Of course they did. In many, perhaps we could say most instances. The language we speak, the country we live in.

Greg McKeown 00:20:20  and and that's just the obvious things. The way that we think, the way we operate in the world is hugely impacted by those decisions. And in the same sense, the choices and trade offs I make and you make and the listeners are able to make, shape generations after them as well. And so I think you sort of have this sense, this duality of, of not grandiosity, but a, but a sense of, of potential impact combined with a sense of humility because, well, they're not going to remember us, but our impact will be huge. And that's a good way, I think, to orient our choices in life. It's not for the ego, but still we have a sense of stewardship and responsibility to make choices that 100 years from now, will have blessed generations of people we may not even meet.

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Joe Sanok 00:22:47  So I think essentialism and tell me if I'm wrong seems to give tools and ideas of how to do it. And then the listening side of it is, you know, kind of training our brains in a different way to be present with those that do matter. When you think about good listening, what are some of the techniques or approaches that good listeners really are using to shift their listening to, to make it matter more and to be more present?

Greg McKeown 00:23:13  well, let's think about it like, the maturation process that a person might go through. so in, in level one, you know, maturation, Somebody isn't even aware that they have a mind. You know, a baby has no sense of, you know, there's no theory of mind that a baby is operating out of. and and that is the natural condition of all of us. Indeed, it is it it is the case that there are people who never get out of level one. So they literally go through life, and it's not the same as them not learning.

Greg McKeown 00:23:50  They can certainly learn. They will be learning. Of course they will be. But they won't have this this breakthrough shift of my goodness, my thoughts are are not me, you know, and the and the way I see the world is not at all how the world is. You know that these thoughts will not actually have happened for very, very many people. And, and and even so, level 1 to 2 would be, let's say, going from being locked, to being limited. we could say, like, locked, like a prisoner and with a prisoner of this system of our mind, simply because we, you know, we don't even know it's there. Well, that's the highest level of imprisonment that you could have. If you don't know, you know, if you can't see the system, it's already running you. and so the second level is limited because now you can start to see it. You're the observer, which is far, far superior to being the prisoner. But it's also brings on its own disequilibrium, because suddenly you say, oh my goodness, that isn't even me.

Greg McKeown 00:24:59  Well, what is that? And and you can see suddenly some of the limits of your own thinking, or you say, oh my goodness. Well, I learned all of this from my where did I learn it? To my family of origin and high school. Like that's it. That's what I learned, all these thought processes and systems and and so it can be really destabilizing, as every therapist knows, in their own journey. And then, of course, in their patient journeys, because, because now you have to confront it. You just want to go back into the safety of your thought process before. Or do you want to now do something? And so we could say, well, level three, would be would be like limitless. So you could have the locked, the limited and the limitless and and to begin accessing the limitless way of living. I think that this is where this is. This is one of the powers and advantages of, of, you know, of high competence listening, meaning? Meaning the ability to erase one's own mind in order to enter the world of another and and the shift to be able to do that, not just to become aware of your own thoughts, but to enter another person's world, to put your own aside, to actually enter there, to stay there, to be, to explore what's there.

Greg McKeown 00:26:22  I mean, that's, you know, is the richest, the most rewarding, the most alive. I think that we can be and and and so. So you were asking, well, tricks for it. And, I mean, I think that the I think beyond the, that maturity, you know, the maturity continuum I'm just describing there, I think that I think that one has to make a, a choice repeatedly. I'm not a great listener unless I choose to be, you know, like on a given day I can be very bad listener or I can be completely consumed in my own mind. Or if I'm in an argument, I mean, I'm I'm not. I am then an anti listener. You know, I can I can be as locked as can be on the same day as I'm also sort of in a limitless mode. So we clearly go back and forth. But there's a point of choice where we actually say like it's I mean different for different people, but the two second choice where you say, okay, I will put it aside, I will shelve the agenda, I will put my whole world.

Greg McKeown 00:27:27  The term erased my world came from a most extraordinary story, of Eric Maddox. who who is the least likely person, to to be put into Iraq and the least likely person put into Iraq to find Saddam Hussein. But that's just what happened. He is the person that found him in about nine months of being there, as compared, for example, like, you know, more like a decade for finding Osama bin laden. Here's the difference. The the people who were trying to find Osama bin laden followed the playbook, the traditional military playbook of interrogation through coercion and threatening and power plays. And that's just what Eric Maddox was also taught in. But he'd never been he'd never actually practised it. He was trained for a short time, and then he became a language translator. And that's where he spent his time, until they were looking for people that had just a very specific set of checkboxes, and he'd fit those check boxes. So suddenly, out of the blue, he is made an interrogator with no experience on the front lines in Tikrit in Iraq.

Greg McKeown 00:28:42  And he he all he has is this sort of training that he's been given. And so he starts doing it the way everyone else does it. He's doing these ten hour days with zero impact, nothing, just a waste of time. And he's just feeling so stressed. He keeps doing it. And finally he's like, okay, no one will tell me anything. You know, they just of course are trying to control the input and they're terrified and so on. And he said, my goal, my intent is going to change. My intent was it wasn't very high aspirational at first. It was. It was. I'm just going to try to keep them talking. And if they'll keep talking, then that's better than what I'm getting so far. And so he would try to keep people talking and talking and talking and talking, and he'd maybe have four hours, five hours and just talking and sharing. And he, he could he found that as he and this is the term as he raised his world and he entered theirs, he could perceive immediately the moments in which they were lying.

Greg McKeown 00:29:40  He knew it was obvious he didn't have to wrestle truth in lies. It was obvious when you're actually inside somebody else's world, when you're gathering and developing the narrative of their life and their world and what's going on and when they arrived and where, who their family is and everything. Like, you just actually have a narrative. So when they suddenly jump, cut and change something, he just knew he would always know he could get to the end of the conversation and say, okay, well, listen, these were the five things that you've said that clearly, you know, aren't true at all. So can we just talk about those like, you know, what's going on underneath this? He was able to collect faster than anybody else in the US military with enormous advanced tools and training and experience. He was able to gather this, let's call it like.

Greg McKeown 00:30:23  A 3D.

Greg McKeown 00:30:25  Map of everything that was going on and how everybody was connected. And as with all human systems, just as we were describing earlier, he was able to identify the leverage.

Greg McKeown 00:30:36  Point was a single person whose name kept on coming up, and when they found that individual, he got one night with them because they had closed down his operations. He was literally living on a plane. He was driving to the airport to leave Iraq, and they found they said they found him. So he came back for one night, did the same thing, the same kind of listening, this advanced type of losing himself in that story and because of that, identified Saddam Hussein. And that's why they were able to select him in nine months. It's unthinkable. It's impossible. The rate of success of interrogators is about 4%. Like internationally, international interrogation has a 4% success rate. His success rate as it went forward, because he then spent his time developing a team specifically in his way of operating and thinking. Is is upwards of 80 to 90% success rate. It's not it's not close. And so when asked, well, what's different about what you do? What really is it. He just said, look, we just learned a way of listening that's better than anyone ever gets listened to in normal life.

Greg McKeown 00:31:48  That's it. That's what we do. And so in some ways, while I'm obsessed and fascinated with listening, I sort of have a slight disgust of the word. At the same time, it's a strange relationship, because what other people imagine by the term is so different than what I imagine by it. I just think, well, we're not even we're not talking the same language. And so in some ways, I resist the idea of the word itself, Off.

Greg McKeown 00:32:14  Because really.

Greg McKeown 00:32:15  It's a way of thinking. It's a way of operating. It's a way of understanding. It's a way of visualizing. It's a it's a rapid way of being able to pinpoint the infinitesimally small but infinitely important things hidden way below the surface that, once identified, can be unlocked and then utilized to make precision interventions with disproportionate outcomes. I mean that in a sense, that doesn't sound like listening to me. You know, that's something else now. Yeah, I learned still through the gateway of that idea. There's just worlds.

Greg McKeown 00:32:52  Worlds beyond it.

Joe Sanok 00:32:54  Greg, what what does it look like in your life to enact these concepts? What are personal decisions you make in your business and your personal life that, like, what are personal habits that you have around listening and and really defining the essential for yourself?

Greg McKeown 00:33:10  Well, where those overlap.

Greg McKeown 00:33:13  yeah. I don't see a lot of. I don't see a lot of separation between those those ideas. but but, you know, like, I remember my, my teenage son saying to me, not that long ago, you know, I was sort of saying something like, oh, my goodness, I made so many mistakes. I've got so much wrong. I, you know, maybe you don't even feel that yet. I said, son, but, you know, in ten years you might you might look back and be like, oh my goodness, why, why, why would he? Maybe he could have improved this or that or the other. because I thought it was so important for him and all of our children to really have explicit permission for that learning and exploration, and that when they learn that and when we learn better, we'll learn it together and discover it together.

Greg McKeown 00:33:59  There's no need to pretend to have been perfect about everything. And he said, look, he said, the thing is that he said he said, none of that has mattered because any time there was any problem. I have known I could come to you and ask you to listen, and you would. And that was really important, because it wasn't like I'd even listened perfectly by any stretch. Especially once one expands its meaning the way that, that, that I think I'm trying to express. But it's such.

Greg McKeown 00:34:34  It's such a gift to be able.

Greg McKeown 00:34:37  To to to know both my wife Anna, and our children know if they say that. I just need you to listen. I will close it all down and be there and not surface level. And not from my perspective, but everything else we just described inside their world. And like, what can you say? Like once, once you once you introduce that everything else is different. So it's not one more thing. It's a different way of doing everything.

Greg McKeown 00:35:11  But because. Because now, the moment you have friction, you know what to do. Okay. Let's stop. Let's listen. What's going on? How do you see it? Why are you seeing it that way? What's going on around the corners? And it's not passive listening. And it's not that there's no sense of truth. There's no. There's no perception that. That the way we see things equals truth. Well, that's not that's not the case. So somebody can perceive something enormously wrong. So it's not that you have to whatever anyone says. Well that's, that's 100% valid because they say it and believe it and see it and think it, but it enables the possibility of so much better understanding. And this is it. This is this is the great, the what we say, the pain and potential, of, the term I'm looking for here. you know, it's, it's the pain and potential of of being misunderstood. You know, of missing the point. But there's so much pain in it for people.

Greg McKeown 00:36:14  But the potential is so enormous. Every every frustration I have with myself is really a problem in not understanding yet why I operate the way I operate. Something deep down has to be upgraded. Some meaning frame has me all limited and locked, and as I discover it, I can be unlocked. And that thing that's been plaguing me for years. Every frustration, people having a relationship is the same thing. I mean, I that's an oversimplification, but it's I think it's a very high percentage of the of what is actually paining people is, is the absolute hell of being misunderstood. I had doctor Sue Johnson on, on my podcast for days, days before she died, and I had no idea she was even ill. We had emails back and forth before we talked. Had an amazing conversation. Really great. I've been reading her books. We emailed back and forth afterwards. Anyway, she never mentioned she was. She was she was ill, that she had cancer, that it was fatal. Nothing.

Greg McKeown 00:37:26  the terminal rather. And then she died days after the last email exchange we had. I found out that she was ill when she died and it was reported in the newspapers. It was amazing. Interesting experience. But one of the things that she has become a world authority in is, is the attachment disorder as applied to all human relations. And, and so there's this idea that we all feel a primal panic about when we don't feel understood, and that we learn that because, well, this isn't her, her research. But I'm tapping into lots of different points. Of course, as we talk and, and there's, there's this idea that the first lesson of life is that if we are not heard, we will die, and that that is literally true. So it stays with us. This primal panic stays from cradle to grave. And and it's like, yeah, this is what's really going on in relationships is, is a desire to be heard, to be seen. If I need you, will you see me? Will you hear me? Will you be there for me? and so it's like the, it's the absolute core of, of the relationship challenges in life.

Greg McKeown 00:38:38  So it's like it's like what we're talking about here is, is it's not like a tool to put in the toolbox of parenting or, or relationships or or, you know, personal improvement. It's not it's not like one thing that just oh, it just that's there's 50 things and this is one good tool. It's, it's the, it's it's the pivot of everything else. Mills.

Joe Sanok 00:39:04  Yeah, it sounds like it's the entire posture towards life. Yeah. Just how are we? Yeah. Greg. the last question I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?

Greg McKeown 00:39:18  I mean, it's a pretty.

Speaker 4 00:39:21  That it feels it feels like, really.

Greg McKeown 00:39:25  Emotional.

Speaker 4 00:39:25  To try.

Greg McKeown 00:39:26  To answer that question because. Because the potential for good and for damage. Right. Both. That exists within, you know, the practitioners office.

Speaker 4 00:39:40  Is is so great.

Greg McKeown 00:39:42  It I don't know the emotion in me. It isn't quite anger, but it's it's something like that.

Greg McKeown 00:39:48  It's like sort of, I don't know.

Speaker 4 00:39:51  A sort of righteous.

Greg McKeown 00:39:52  Indignation about this. It's like it matters so much. But the but the damage is so possible too because we know not that all. Not that all patients turn up in the same in the same readiness to change. Right. Like, you know, somebody can just be a perpetual. Okay. I just come every week and I've been doing it for years and I'm not really making any progress. I mean, that that's one version, but there's so many people who do arrive and they're there because they are frustrated, because they are in pain. And I am ready to change, you know, like I want to do something because this isn't working. And for those people, it the risk of going through the motions in our discernment, I prefer the word discernment to listening. it doesn't have the same limitations attached to it. It's such a such a rich term. And of course, it comes from the Latin word that means to sift.

Greg McKeown 00:40:52  And so I think it's a I think it's a very powerful word. And to have the discernment as a practitioner to put aside Side one's own agenda. All the patterns that we've seen before, all of the remedies we're so quick to pass out, you know. Oh, this is one of these people. Oh, this is one of these systems. And we're not really doing the job. And and in that mode, we can do just so much damage. Well, not meaningfully obviously. We don't mean to I'm not talking about bad people. but but.

Speaker 5 00:41:30  I had a,

Greg McKeown 00:41:32  My daughter, a very, very sick one of my daughters when she just turned 14, we didn't know what it was, some neurological problem because her whole executive function was just in complete freefall, for weeks and then months, to the point that she was fast falling into a coma on the way to dying. I mean, like, that's. And no one could give us even the beginning of a diagnosis, and and there's sort of in hindsight, I can sort of look at these three archetypes of neurologists that we met with right there was there was the, well, there was the limited, which is almost all of them.

Greg McKeown 00:42:08  That is, they they were genuine and they wanted to help, and they were curious, but they couldn't make sense of it because they they couldn't connect the dots. All the tests were coming back in the normal range. And they, they just, you know, at least had the humility to just say, well, I don't know, shrug their shoulders. I just don't know. That's not very helpful. But at least they're not doing any damage. Okay. So that's one group. And then and then you've got Doctor Sanger who we suddenly met who when we met him, he he comes into the office, with a team like a Delta Force. You know, unit one's got a video camera, one's looking through the notes. He's completely focused on Eve. There is nothing else in the world. He's hours late, I should say, which I only share because my wife had the discernment to know that. Yeah, that's because whoever he's with, he's with, there's no problem. We'll wait here all day because once he gets here, this is how it's going to be.

Greg McKeown 00:43:07  And she was right. Exactly right. And he wasn't there going. Well, you know, come back in two weeks. We'll see what we think about it. He's like, we're solving this. We're here to really find out what is going on. And so within, after he's gone through a process for about 15, 20 minutes, he goes, okay, take this dopamine pill, Eve. Right. You're all going to go have lunch. You're going to come back and we're going to see what happens. Now, I've never had any doctor do anything like that. I don't know if you have. I never have even heard of anyone.

Joe Sanok 00:43:36  But, you know, only at the Mayo Clinic, I think I had back surgery there. They were just like, you know, I went from meeting with them to being done with surgery in six days. And so it was like Matt did the general Mayo Clinic, physical exam, then did the professional exam that afternoon, then had all the tests on Tuesday, Wednesday.

Joe Sanok 00:43:56  Met back with them Thursday, had back surgery Friday, was in the hospital recovering. Saturday they found some heart stuff they had to check on Saturday was discharged. I mean, they were insane. Other than that though. Yeah. Never see it.

Greg McKeown 00:44:10  Well, I mean, I just love that description. And and, you know, that just reinforces Mayo Clinic's world class reputation. Take the dopamine pill. Go back to lunch. We come back an hour later. I, you know, we're both looking, my wife and I looking hopefully for something. We can't see a thing different. But at least we got someone who's, like, means business here. And, he goes to this test. We've seen so many of them count down from 10 to 1. We've seen everyone do that. He does the same test again and he just turns around and he's like, I suggest immediate hospitalization for encephalitis or inflammation of the brain. So she is immediately hospitalized. And, and if it was a Disney story, right, like that would just be like, happy ever after.

Greg McKeown 00:44:56  but he was just the admitting neurologist. The treating neurologist. Doctor Jones or something like that. Because he just he was really good, intelligent, trained neurologist. But he had a completely he just he'd been trained as a geneticist. So every every problem was a genetic problem in his mind, you know. So he's just has a bias for that. And he's like expresses skepticism immediately to us. Like, I don't know why we're we're treating him for encephalitis. This is a waste of time. Resources. you know, but he does it anyway. And then and then a couple of days go by. And now, for the first time in four months, I can see. My wife can see our children can see a change for the better. The first improvement, which was like rosy cheeks. And then she could smile. There was a tiny amount of emotion in it because all of that had been completely collapsed. She'd gone from the picture of health To to someone in in in total mental disability and physical disability.

Greg McKeown 00:46:01  I mean like really radical change. And he still couldn't see it. And he still couldn't hear us. And he absolutely continued to insist that we stopped the treatment. And that we should, you know, manage it to the end because he's saying, you know, this is just going to be a, you know, this is a terminal genetic condition. And so we had to insist and and fight for it. And the treatment continued. And you know, she is, as of this conversation, completely healed. She is she is full. She is back and she is and she is thriving. but there they are. Those are the archetypes you've got you've got Sanger who's sort of this limitless. Not because he can do anything, but there's a limitlessness to the way he thinks and his process. And then you've got these all these limited neurologists, good people just couldn't connect the dots. This lack that additional layer. But then you also had someone who was locked and and that sort of a there's nothing really more terrifying, I think, than that kind of certain misunderstanding.

Greg McKeown 00:47:07  The combination like you can get it wrong all the time, but don't be certain about what you're wrong about. Yeah. And because the damage it was that's just not neutral then that's like that's like life and death you know. She wouldn't have made it if we'd followed his, you know, his insistence. And I mean, I would just say as of tying this experience up, I would just say I went back to Doctor Sanger and asked him, you know, well, what did you see? And and the change was the speed of her blinking eye, which, you know, I mean, that's I mean, that's his that's as literal as it gets, isn't it? You know, that in the blink of an eye, you know, a life is saved or not. And and so I think there is something in that story. I think there's something in that story about kind of humility that a disciplined humility or a disciplined discernment to to go. Look, I don't know. We don't know.

Greg McKeown 00:48:03  But we're going to try and find out, and we're not going to just go with our past knowledge. And we're not just going to fit this into some pre-existing mental model. We're going to listen to you, and we're going to understand your story and what's different about your story. And we're going to keep going till we find the precision pinpoint issue and lock it so that then we can address the real issue rather than just shooting at the wrong target, which I fear we do a, you know, more than we would like to admit in our lives and in our professions.

Joe Sanok 00:48:35  Well, from one dad to another. I mean, I'm sorry your family's going through that. I wish your daughter the best of health. You know, I've. I've had kids that needed heart surgery, and it's it's horrible to to go through that. And, you know, best wishes for your whole family, Greg. If people want to get your books, if they want to connect with you, if they want to keep learning, if they want to check out your podcast, where should we send them?

Greg McKeown 00:48:58  Well, if they want to be a part of this, this sort of listening revolution, whereby whatever name ends up being named, I would encourage people just to go.

Greg McKeown 00:49:07  Just go to Greg and Greg. In 10s, they can just sign up there for there's a free course called less but better. Very high quality course, completely free. Take 10s to sign up for it, and then you'll be in the path for these live sessions that we're going to, you know that now I'm publicly committed to, to, to to providing, and I would love to be able to, to continue to work with people who already have an understanding of this and also, you know, want to go to the next level.

Joe Sanok 00:49:42  So awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Greg McKeown 00:49:45  It's been my pleasure. Thank you Joe.

Joe Sanok 00:49:53  So as we think about doing less and we think about doing it better. I just want you to think about your own private practice right now. sometimes when especially if you're listening to this podcast and we do this, you know, 3 to 6 days a week, depending on the sponsors, depending on the guests. that's a lot of information for you to consume.

Joe Sanok 00:50:13  you know, in the same way, if you just consume food, and you don't ever, you know, exercise, move your body. Do anything with it. you're not going to get any results. And so rather than just consume, consume, consume, I want you to take some action and to edit the time that you're spending on one thing. Focus in just whether it's this episode or any of the other episodes. maybe you're going through one of the courses in the membership community. Find that one thing that this month you are going to focus in on, and you're going to double down. You're going to get extra help on it. and set those boundaries for yourself that we've talked about a lot here on the show. You know, we also couldn't do this show without amazing sponsors like Therapy notes. Therapy notes is the best electronic health records out there. They will help you switch over from your current EHR. They also give you two months for free or just money off if you use promo code Joe at checkout.

Joe Sanok 00:51:04  they are phenomenal. They help with automated billing. it's going to make it easier to outsource your billing. So many reasons to switch to therapy. You know, just head on over to therapy notes. Com read about it and at checkout. Just use promo code. Joe. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. I'll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band silence Sexy for that intro music. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers or guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.