Automatically transcribed, so expect the odd wrong name or word.
Hey squad, welcome to the Virtus Performance Podcast. Yet another week of laughter and joy and fun and excitement and scary stuff and conversation. Today's episode is a little bit different. Both of the guests have been on before. We have Daniel Acheson and Simon Cooper. Today's chat was just kind of a dive into how everything's been going. We spoke about perspective a lot. We spoke about karma, Buddhism came up a little bit. We spoke about challenges and communication and kind of the drive to understand yourself a little bit better and have that self love but also
move towards a place of loving others and caring for others and helping cultivate environments and communities that can grow and talk to each other and figure out all this stuff that we are trying to figure out. So yeah, I hope you guys enjoy the next hour or so because I certainly enjoyed having the conversation. If you have been enjoying it, if you have been loving the episodes that you've been listening to, please share, subscribe, do all that fun stuff. If you could leave a review, that would be absolutely exceptional. If we get a couple of reviews a week, I don't care if it's the same person, just say the same thing.
Make sure they're five stars too. If you want to leave a shit review, don't leave a shit review. If you want to leave a good review, you can leave a good review. Yeah, that's what I need with the reviews. Apart from that, let's get into the episode. Cheers to you all. My personal and business goal is to be just a little bit better every day. I believe everyone, especially normal people, have a story to tell. The Virtus podcast exists to help us all find small ways of consistent improvement by discussing the journey and experiences of each of our guests.
Mr. Simon Coober, we're back. Lachlan. It's good to see you. It's good to see you too. Question for you. Go. What's your word for the moment? Word for the moment. There's so many words. Presence. Elaborate. So, I've been thinking a lot about mindfulness. And I think a big part of that is being present. And I think to be mindful, all you need to do is just to be mindful of your present moment, be present in where you are, what you're doing, and just finding that sort of stillness. Do you think presence and mindfulness and stuff can be overvalued sometimes?
Definitely. I think people overthink it. Yeah. I think it's not as hard as you think it is. Yeah, true. But I also think that it's important to, if we want to be present, that's great, but sometimes we need to be omnipresent. I don't know what that means. It's a cool word. We need to look like, we need to look forward to the future and plan as well, and we also need to look back at the past. And we can't just live in the present moment all the time because then we won't get any shit done.
I think that presence and mindfulness has its value is when we are thinking too much about the future and the past, and being overwhelmed by all that, and feeling the stress of that. I think it's like a strategy or a tactic to overcome that monkey brain. Oh, good. Yeah. Speaking of monkey brains, Daniel, how are you, mate? Let's go. I'm very well. I struggled with my presence here. It turns out that when you live in the mountains for 10 months of the year, you forget that driving anywhere at 8.30 in the morning takes six times as long.
True. There's a lot of kids getting dropped off at school at the moment. What's your word for the moment? My word for the moment? Curveball. Curveball? Relaxing? Nice. Relaxing? Good. Let's go with that because I'm attempting to do that. I'm just getting bored. It's a fine line. It was meant to be relaxing, yes. You're in a bit of an interesting part of your year at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. It's not your standard kind of year set up, I suppose. It's why it gets weird. For those listening at home, for those playing at home, you would have met Daniel if you listened to episode "The One That Daniel Was On."
That's what I'm talking about. Lived a little bit of a different life to most of us. Travels and follows the snow. What's it like being home for a month? Different to what I imagined it would be. After six months of quite a long and stressful season for all of us that live up there and do that gig, you get to the end and sort of feel as though a big, big long break would be amazing. I looked at Bryony and I said, "I want to spend a few weeks just doing absolutely nothing. I just want to chill out, relax."
She's like, "I might get a little bit of work. I'm like crazy." I've been here for a week and I'm a little bored out of my veins already. I tell myself that it's going to feel different. I think coming back, I have this idea that everyone else is going to want to have a break and some time, but everyone else is just living the regular normal grind. I've just come from my grind which just happens to be in a different place with a different group of people. Just trying to find a little bit of what's
funny and I say this because this is what we spoke about last time, but feel a little meaningless and a little bit without purpose when I'm just sitting here doing nothing and everyone else is rolling around doing their thing. At the same time, I want to relax. I don't want to spend four weeks in full-on mode, go, go, go because it's only a month before we fly back to Japan and start it all over again. Do you think it's a dangerous mindset, living that whole season of going, "I can't wait to have that month off"? Has that been your mindset?
Yeah, I suppose it depends on how things are going at particular times throughout the season or throughout time. I try to avoid that mindset of, "Oh, I can't wait for the end of the season," because I think if you're at that point, you really got to question whether or not you're doing the right thing because it just becomes a matter of you just ticking along doing it because it's what you feel it should be doing as opposed to what you want to be doing. I've got to a point in doing seasons now where it's a
little bit different for me to what it used to be as for what it is for a lot of people in that I spend between six and seven months working the Australian winter season, have three, four weeks gap and then I fly to Japan and repeat and I do the same at the end of the Japanese season. That's not the same for everyone. A lot of people will only work three months in Australia and maybe three months in Japan. So, they've got six months as well in a year or a lot of people just won't do both.
They'll just do one and only spend three months doing it. And I actually had an interesting conversation with my boss, Beck, who's also a really, really big mentor of mine and she reminded me that it's okay to be in the space that I was getting towards the end of the season just because of the weird dynamic that you have by bouncing back and forth and back and forth and not having much time in between. There's a lot of us that do it and I think that everyone would have their challenges in their own way but
at the end of the season, for me for example, I haven't 100% known what my job is going to look like when I get to Japan. I didn't have my flights booked, I didn't have a lot of things fully organised and you literally, you're locking in the next phase of your life, if you're lucky, months. As the most likely weeks in advance and that just keeps repeating. And I guess sometimes it brings out inside me that wish or that hope for which I can have at any point. That's the funny part about it, a backyard,
a garden, a regular place and a regular group of people around me, consistent, which I think hopefully I'll love even more again when I get it back again. I think that would be super challenging, leaving those six months at a time and then you upend and move half way around the world to live six months somewhere else and you're doing that even though you're consistently doing it, like you've done it for how many years now? Like seven years, going up to seven years. So there's a big chunk of your life. But there's still that sort of instability between, you don't know what's next, right?
Yeah absolutely, and there's a lot of people within each of those communities that are in the same position as well, but they're also in different positions, so a big chunk of the people, it may only be their first or their second season, they might only be doing it for a short amount of time or they might be just going back to the regular, normal world that they lived in back in Australia after Japan or whatever. So their experience and the things that they're feeling along the way are completely different to what you've got going on, but you're living under the same umbrella as them.
I guess it's like anything, like when you're in a workplace and when you're at work everyone feels like on an even footing, so you treat everyone the same and everyone, you assume the same. You realise everyone's at different stages. Someone's a mum that has three kids at home that has a whole lot of stuff going on, someone's got a sick brother or all these different things and everyone's got different things going on. I was thinking about it the other day, after I was talking to Coop about uni, it's kind of like when you finish up uni you have that period of time where you're like, "Okay, fuck what's next?"
It's almost like you live that every six months. Kind of. Yeah. It's pretty hectic. There's an interesting phase where you're just looking forward to them, you're looking ahead to the next thing and there's kind of an element of the unknown, you don't know what is next. Do you have tools or little things that you do to help you come back to being, Coop spoke about at the start, being present and being a little bit more mindful about how you're thinking and where your mindset's at? Probably not enough. Have you tried, like is there stuff you've tried and hasn't worked?
Going to friends in similar situations I think I've found definitely helps a lot, but again, those conversations are dependent on the people that you hopefully can talk to and what they've got going on and their outlook. If a friend's struggling with the concept and I'm struggling with the concept and they come to me hoping that I'm going to be able to give them some light, I might only have negative things to give them, like, "Oh, why are we doing this, this is silly, we're not doing anything good for ourselves," or then the next week I
might be like, "Actually, we're living in a beautiful place, our backyard's amazing, we get to do it with love all the time and still earn a keep and put a roof over our head," but I will admit probably could do with a little bit more. But I guess I blame it, I put it down to it, you just accept that's the way that it is while you're doing it. It's a stressful environment, it's a stressful way of being. I mean, life is in general, but it's just another level of weirdness and that mountain environment. I don't know what else to compare it to.
Well, even though you have ways to connect, you're kind of separated from the world in certain aspects because obviously most people use that as a holiday destination or as a escape, but there escapes your reality day in and day out. We do the same thing when we go on holiday somewhere, if you went over to a little island off the coast of Cambodia or something, all these people live there and that's their normal and you're going in and trying to escape, for lack of a better term, from your normal, which is really interesting. When I
went to Bali, that's a great point because I went over in July with Salian and we had this cab driver, and I remember this, he was asking us about our holiday and how often we get away from home and all that sort of thing and we asked him, "When do you get a holiday? Where do you go for your holidays?" And he responded that this is his life and he doesn't feel like he needs a holiday, so he doesn't, this is just what he does. He doesn't go away, he works, he spends time with his family, there's no sort of, he doesn't need to escape from his life because he's just happy and grateful for what he has.
I think it's an interesting construct that we have in our society in Australia. Need to escape. We need to have four weeks holiday per year too. Oh, I need a holiday. Yeah. Why? I like to think that I don't need a holiday, but wanting to explore the world and wanting to do cool shit and wanting to, and some weeks I'm like, "Fuck, I need a holiday." But I always come back around and feel like very grateful for the life I get to live. I think we live basically at a holiday destination, like the peninsula, for
a lot of people is a holiday destination at the end of the year, so whether it's on the mountain or whether it's down in front of the beaches of the peninsula, it just takes a slight shift in perspective to be able to enjoy it for what it is. One of the things that's really helped me enjoy it is meditation lately. So I set myself a target of making sure I meditated every day. When I went away earlier in the year and I did that and then kind of fell off the bandwagon for a couple of months, and it's probably the last six to eight weeks, I've jumped back on it.
I've been hitting 20 to 30 minutes a day consistently, and it's forced me, because I don't like just meditating in my office or in the gym or whatever. I'll go outside and sit next to a tree or lay in the grass or walk and meditate or whatever. It's made me enjoy the environment around us significantly more. I took Dan to one of the little spots I go fairly regularly at the beach the other day, and it's just like the sun was out, water was flat. It's just, yeah, we live here, and it's an easy thing to forget sometimes.
It's funny that all the examples you just gave them of where you go to disconnect and spend time being mindful is in nature, and you are just spending time in the natural environment and being appreciative of that. It's funny how you just use the word disconnect, because I look at meditation as a way to connect. Interesting. Even though I'm getting out of the bubble, like my bubble and connecting with nature or connecting with myself and just letting my brain just do its thing without any expectation or intention. My expectation is I'll feel better afterwards, and sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but I look at it as a way to connect.
I was just about to ask you to explain to me how you go about meditating, because it sounds like I could do with it. I stop. But just through what you just said, it occurred to me that it's a big part of what I already do anyway. Yeah. Especially when I'm in the mountains, one of my favorite things to do when I feel amazing the moment that I step out is leaving the resort and going touring about country and just sort of like going away. The moment that I can't hear the chairlifts or hear crowds, and I can't see anyone, it just feels completely different.
And if I'm with people, I'll literally look at them and be like, "How good does that feel?" Can you hear that? Yeah. Because normally those people that I'd be with, they're on the same page, or they haven't experienced it before. And that's really, really cool when I get to take friends or people. We did it. Yeah. When we were in Japan, I was jeered. Probably thought you were going to die for a moment in that powder, but... Yeah. It was deep, but we got there. And that was a moment, I talked about it in an
earlier podcast, it was like one of my moments of the year was like boarding back down with Bryony after, of just like this sense of accomplishment and excitement and the fact that I'd done something that I didn't think I'd be able to do five days earlier. And then I think it might've been the day before that when the four of us were riding through the top trees and snow was coming down and we're all crossing over and smiling and laughing. And it was just like the perfect moment. I remember how I felt in that moment.
And I think, I remember that as one of the most mindful moments I've had this year, because I was just being and I was just within. This year does not feel like this year. Yeah, it's been, man. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I was reading the other day was how much we can actually accomplish in a year. And I look back and I've traveled to eight new countries, I've had all these new experiences, like I've done that in Japan, I've been to Machu Picchu, I've seen Iguazu Falls, I've been to Patagonia, we've grown the
business, we've done all these, played a year of footy, and there's so many different things that we can actually accomplish in a year, I think it's really important to be able to stop and look back and kind of go, "Wow, that was pretty bloody cool." And I think so many people feel like the days are just passing day in, day out, but when you really stop and go, "Okay, what's actually happened?" You realize, "Holy shit, I've actually done a fair bit and I've accomplished a fair bit and I've connected with new people and made new friends," and things like that.
I was reading an article the other day and there were four questions in it, and I'll run through them quickly, but it's basically about how much your life can change in 90 days. And the four questions was, first one was, "Looking back over the last quarter, what are the things that made you the proudest about what you have achieved?" So you kind of write down the things you've accomplished and what you're proud of. So they suggested spending two minutes on each of these questions. Second one was, "When you look at everything that's going on today, which areas of focus and progress are making you the most confident?"
So it's about being in the now. And then it was around, "Okay, looking ahead at the next quarter, what are the things giving you the greatest sense of excitement?" It's like, "Okay, what am I looking forward to?" And then it was like, "What are the five new jumps, the five things that you can achieve in the next 90 days that no matter what else happens will make you feel like it's been successful?" And like I'm the kind of person that looks for progress and growth and stuff like that. And I can look back at, I
can look, or I can stop and being in that shitty head space and go, "Well, fuck, I haven't really done much in the last 90 days." But then if I actually write it down and look at it, I'll go, "Okay, stuff happened. We did some cool things." Like even heading up to Hotham for a couple of days a few weeks ago, I could have not done that. So many of those little decisions we make to either stay home and live a regular weekend or go and do something extraordinary. It's funny that whole stay home and
live an ordinary weekend, one of the biggest and best parts for me of, I guess, coming home is just going and sitting on the couch with my mom and my brother. So I look forward to that so much in the next few weeks. It's not glamorous, it's not thrill-seeking and things like that, but it really, really means a lot. I think that that gets overlooked, for sure. When everyone else is doing all these wonderful and beautiful things and posting all these fantastic photos on Instagram about the glorious places they are, which has its own merit, absolutely.
It's part of it, right? Yeah, I think if you go a long time and go, "Oh, hang on, I didn't ... I haven't appreciated those little things." I think it depends on the phase or stage of life that you're in as well. Season. I was going to say season. I can see you're twitching. Like for you, Dan, you're in a season where you are appreciative of all the small things and you're not seeking grand adventures and where you have gratitude for spending time with your family and building those connections again, where someone else may be
in a season of expansion and growth where they're chasing down things and they're seeking these new experiences and they're going to be doing a whole lot, they're going to be busy doing things and that will be part of their inspection of what they've done and what they've achieved, but that's not to say that it's any less good than what you've sought. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. There's no right answer, right? No. And it doesn't mean that just because your list is a little bit small and someone else's list doesn't mean that it's any less meaningful. Yep. I
think that kind of comes down to being critical of everything, but being less critical of what other people are doing, of what you're doing yourself and just accepting that someone else might be doing, it might not seem glorious or it might seem over the top, whatever. That's what they feel like they need to be doing at that particular point in time and the same applies for you, so that's it, to compare that, if I compare what I've got going on right now to what you've got going on, it's so, so, so different. That's it. Like comparison, why even compare yourself to someone else because they're in a completely different path?
Because we're taught to compare ourselves to each other. It doesn't make sense. But I spent 12 years comparing myself to a school full of people, didn't I? Yeah. I don't know, that's a big rabbit hole to get down to. It is, it is. But I think that we're bred to compare, but when you did step away from that and go, "Well, hang on, let's not compare. Let's just, oh, that's awesome what you're doing and I should be, or feel awesome about what I'm doing." That's kind of where it needs to end. Where does that, so
obviously we know we don't want to compare, but it's really easy to, so where does that understanding of I'm on my own path, this is what I should be doing or this is what I should be looking at or whatever, how do you figure out that that's your path and you're not just chasing someone else? Is it just introspection? Is it trying to understand yourself a little bit better? It's really hard. Yeah. Really hard. I think it comes down to having a vision of the person that you want to be and what you want to achieve and then...
The lifestyle you want to live. The lifestyle you want to live and then taking these steps to realize that vision and understanding that everyone has their own individual vision and it's going to be completely different to yours, so you can control the things in your life that's controllable, the rest is outside of your control, so why bother stressing over that and understanding that everyone has their own perspective on their vision as well, I think, like they'll tell you what their best self looks like and it'll be different to what you perceive that best self to be.
That make sense? Yeah, this came up, I can't remember if it was a book, it might've been a book I was reading. It was about that you're the only person that sees you the way you see you, so the version of who you are, so the version Coop has of me in his head is different to my version of me and same with Dan and everyone, so every individual person thinks about you slightly differently and I think it's really important for us to have our own identity within ourselves before, not that we should worry at all, but before we worry about what everyone else thinks of us because that's going to determine who we are on a deeper level.
I wrote a thing the other day about no one knows your story, no one knows anyone's story of their own, so I can spend six hours a day with Coop for ten weeks but there's still 75% of his life that I'm not spending with him unless we hung out a lot more. I'm okay with it. Yeah, cool. I just think it's a really interesting one because we have perceptions of what other people think of us but we're never really going to know on a really deep level, we understand people will respect us and appreciate us and love us and things like that, but if it doesn't come from ourself first then it's kind of meaningless to a point.
That's really, really hard to wrap your head around, it's something that I've kind of like tossed over in my head a lot more than I used to recently as a way of sort of like thinking about the way that people behave and act and how you behave and act and how it's all based on your perception of your reality and that's completely different to the person next door to you and how that influences us to do things and it's that really big one and I've got some people around me at the moment that are helping me understand this in a big way.
Let's say you see a friend that's going down a path that you think is out of character for them or is not healthy for them or at what point do you try to help them with that, to what degree? Do you go, "Hey, are you good? Is it enough to just ask, 'Are you okay? Are you going okay?'" Or do you need to grab them by the scruff and they can be like, "What the hell are you doing? Where does that line cross? Because we're all adults and we're all responsible for what we're going to
do," and if someone gets in your face and shakes you and you change your behavior because of that, is that you changing your behavior for the right reasons? Or you're doing it because someone thinks you should. Or is it that person's perspective that's wrong, like that person's got it wrong? It's so hard. How do you get clarity on that? Because the more I read and learn about psychology, the more you start to realize that what people see in other people is the things that they see in themselves. So whether it's something they like or don't like, they project what they're feeling on you.
So if someone's worried about what you're doing, then maybe it's something within their own life. I don't know. I think it's just a matter of asking, if someone's struggling and it's not, "Are you okay?" It's, "What's going on?" Or it's asking the question that allows them to open up and talk about it, and then having that relationship and that care for that person so they know they can open up and talk to you. And I think if you're open and vulnerable about who you are and what you're doing, it attracts people to feel comfortable to ask you for help.
I definitely think that, as a society, we don't ask for help enough, as individuals. And that can be people around us or professionals or whatever. Like the start of I'm seeing a psych for the first time, and I was chatting to a couple of people about it. And there's still that little stigma around doing it, around talking to people like professionals. And I'm doing it as a bit of a way to learn a little bit more about myself and what's going on in my head and what's working and what's not, and how I can understand me a little bit better.
Because I think that'll help with every area of my life, and I thought it would be cool to do it from a place of someone that doesn't know me from a bar of soap, because it's really easy to have similar conversations with the people we spend a lot of time with. This is something that's super out of my comfort zone, and it makes me nervous, but it's also exciting to see what comes of it, if anything. I think we don't need to wait until something's going wrong to have those conversations. There might not be anything
that necessarily comes from it, just the process of telling your small story or whatever is running around your head to a different person, I've definitely found the benefit of it hugely. Someone asking different questions as well, like the people you surround yourself with, you can anticipate the questions that they're going to ask, so having someone that you can go to that's going to ask the unknown, you don't know what they're going to ask you, and you don't know what things they'll pick out of your story and what they might want to dive deep on. And
you might not have dove deep on that before, you might not have gone down that rabbit hole and been able to articulate exactly what that rabbit hole looks like. Yeah, it just gives you another piece of string to dove on. Making that, I guess, it's so much harder to go, "Yeah, actually I'm going to have that chat to that person and try to understand my head a little bit better, because I'm a little bit confused. To everyone else around me, I look like I've got it all going on, but my mind's just playing stupid things at the moment."
But it's easy to just be like, "Oh, everyone's just telling me that I'm killing it and going on really well, so I'll just go move on with it." But making that step to just have a chat with someone, it's bloody hard. There's different avenues. It's a really good thing. We're constantly told about Lifeline and these different Beyond Blue and all these different things. But I guess I feel like the stigma around that is you're in a really, really bad place. For example, the company that I work for, I would imagine that there's a lot around. We have an employee assistance program, and that's literally no questions asked, anonymous.
The company doesn't even know about it. Just ring your phone number and you can talk to them. It's about anything. It literally can be like, "I've got no money, and I don't know how the hell to manage it, and it's making me anxious out of my brains." And they put you in touch with someone that can help you through that, versus how hard is it to open up a Yellow Pages, obviously Google now, and go, "Financial support, this is hard," you're just not going to do that. Yeah. I think as far as we are so
flush with resources for any problem that you have, I think the more difficult thing is identifying what that problem is, and getting yourself out of your head, and figuring out, "Okay, what's my actual problem, and how can I find out a way to help with it?" And in my own finances, it doesn't take much to jump on Google and start chasing some financial advice. "Barefoot Investor" has been a book that's been thrown around a fair bit over the last couple of years, and a lot of people that I know have been able to save for a house by following those steps.
So I think it's really easy to not do anything about it, but it's also easy to jump on Google or grab a book and start teaching yourself and start learning. It's breaking down those barriers to entry, making things easy to look up. That system at your work is amazing because all you need to do is pick up the phone and dial the number, and it's anonymous, so it's not as if there's not going to be any expectation or there's not going to be any sort of, what's the word I'm trying to say, I can't think of the word.
Read it? No, they're not going to, there's no expectation of, oh, I'm not sure what I'm trying to say. In terms of expectations of them trying to fix your problems, it's just, okay, I get this off my chest, so I actually talk to someone and maybe work out what step two is, maybe work out what step three is. Yeah. There's not going to be any sort of barrier to you picking up that phone and finding the solution. Yeah, their job is to help you and there's no, I'm trying this word and it's still in my brain.
Damn it. It'll come to you as soon as, yeah, well, I'll finish this podcast. That's awesome. Yeah. I guess- Have you used it? I have. Good. Yeah, and it was actually recently and it's something I'm in the process of at the moment, to be honest. Yeah. And it's, obviously, I'm out of seasonal employment at the moment, but they still had no problems with sort of rolling it through and it's all fine. And I'm five hours away from my job at the moment, but they sort of have resources all over the place. That's good. That's sick.
And it's, yeah, I don't know, I guess for like kind of like what you said, just to get a little bit more of an understanding of what's ticking over in your brain, because yeah, everyone else can have a certain perception of what's going on for you, what's going around you, and then you have a perception of that and then your perception is influenced by the other people around you and then all of a sudden it's like, "Well, hang on. What's up? What's down? What's real? What's not?" And then yeah, just to get a little bit
of clarity on exactly what you're thinking, because it's not all as big and ugly and as convoluted as what your head makes it out to be. Oh, we make things so much worse in our head. So much worse. Like lately we've been, I've been getting kind of comments like, "Oh, it looks like you're killing it. It looks like it's going really well." I'm just like, some days I get those comments, it's like far out, I feel like I'm pushing shit uphill. I feel like, I feel like nothing's working and I think it's important to take
everything to the ground itself because some people, sometimes people say that and I'm feeling shitty about the way things are going and I kind of stop and assess everything a little bit more critically and go, "Shit, yeah." More people are training in the gym, like, you know, our sole goal is to make everyone's world a better place and if more people are coming into the gym and being more consistent and achieving the things they want to achieve, then yeah, we are killing it. We are doing pretty well but it's really hard to miss that and
it's, you know, that search for what, like, it's that fight for being happy with what we have and still searching for more at the same time. It's interesting that you say that and I think that if you are listening, go do this. Just that small, like, go and pay a compliment. Don't just think it. Just think something, say it out loud and an example of this for me is I've recently become really, really engulfed in following a lot of photography and I've found quite a heavy passion for photography myself, kind of just coming from this
past season that I've really gotten heavily into it, just getting me involved with some photos and some videos and some media and seeing how some really great professionals do it. A couple of guys that I got to work with up at Hawthorne, Chris and Finn, and what does that mean? Is that five minutes? Shout out bell. Shout out bell. Oh, there you go. Okay. Yeah, sort of opened up some really cool opportunities but gave me a little bit of a passion in a new direction. Long story short, there's a girl by the name of Sarah
who's a very, very accomplished photographer and she spends a lot of time moving between different mountains and different places around Australia and around the world, takes some really fantastic photos. I met her towards the end of this season and I genuinely really love the work that she produces and I said, "I'm sure that you hear this all the time but I think your photos are unreal, different to what anyone else is doing." She's like, "Oh, thanks so much." I'm like, she's like, "I actually don't get that all the time." I was like, "Are you kidding me?"
She has 100,000 followers on Instagram and all these different things and all this and all that. In my head, I guess you like that's a lot of feedback and a lot of good sort of validation but it genuinely seemed as though when I said that, that's not something that she gets told regularly and I know that if I get told something along those lines at some point, it warms your heart a little bit and gives you a little bit of confidence in what you've been doing, whatever it is, the most simplest thing in the world. Someone might be sitting there being like, thinking, "I'm not killing this parenting thing.
I'm struggling." Someone walks up and goes, "Your son or your daughter have fantastic manners. It's a real compliment to you." Hang on. I'm doing a few things really, really right. To loop back around, give someone a compliment, tell them that they're doing something really good and mean it. The best idea. It doesn't take much to get down right. And just telling someone they're doing really well. I guess we see it in the gym a little bit where people can be really unkind to themselves by comparing themselves to other people but you see faces light up if you get one little like, "You're doing really well."
And that's all it takes, like a couple of words. It's being genuine as well, I think. It's too often that we go through the motions of saying like, "How are you? Good to see you." But what does that mean? We need to have that genuine connection with people and mean what we say. One of the things I've been trying to do over the last couple of months is when I ask someone how they are and they give me good, you just follow it up with a, "Really?" Or like, "Tell me more, fill me in." Why is it good?
Then you start to understand a little bit more about people. One of the things I've tried to do for the last couple of years is create more content and put more things out there. And it's funny how I can send an email a week to a podcast a week, put up a bunch of Instagram stories of things that I'm going through that I feel as though help other people. Every now and again, you get like a week and a half or two weeks where no one will reply to anything. It's just like, "Is this really making a difference?"
Then you'll get one day where you'll get 15, 20 replies, "This is what I needed to say," or, "This is what I needed to hear," or, "I feel like you're in my head," and little things like that. Okay, cool. Everyone is paying attention. I think it's really easy to do that podcast or do that Instagram post or do that, chuck a photo up or do a compliment to someone in person and get that feeling of, "Okay, I'm doing a good job," and it's really easy to pass that on as well. I think we communicate really well sometimes with the people around us and sometimes we communicate like shit.
I think it's important to be able to stop and have those conversations, whether it's online or hopefully the people who are listening feel like we're talking to them. You can tell as well when someone is genuinely fostering that connection between you or whether it's just a shallow conversation and it's just meaningless small talk. One of the people that we follow, Logan Gelbrich, talks about high-performance communication. This is more in a team context but when we think about how we communicate with people around us and communicate with people in our workplace, do we just communicate using
meaningless words and meaningless phrases and small talk or do we actually say what we mean and mean what we say and get to the point and foster that genuine… It's just connection, right? Yeah. When we think about high-performance sport teams, do we think that they take part in small talk on the field? No, they get to the point and they are doing it for the greater good. One of the examples he uses is like, "We don't really have it." I don't know. I'm assuming we have it here but people talking around a water cooler, it's like, "Oh, yeah.
You look fantastic today. By the way, if you could get that thing that I asked you to do on time, that would be fantastic." And, "Oh, yeah. I can't wait to have some drinks with you on the weekend." It's that like bullshit sandwich that he uses. Yeah. It's like you give a shit compliment you don't mean and then you follow it up with, "Oh, I really need you to do this," and then you follow it up with a shit compliment you don't mean. I think communication works so much better when you just direct about, like, "Yes, I genuinely give a fuck about what's going on in your head," or, "Coup, get that fucking ad up.
Sort it out." I think it has to – it's coming from a place of truth and it's coming from a place of love. Yeah. You're not being direct to be rude. You're being direct to get a job done and if we're talking about paying people compliments and creating a meaningful connection with someone, then we're getting to the point of trying to connect with them and appreciating them and trying to understand where they're coming from. Yeah. It goes flip side. I think it needs to go flip side too, right? Like, say, we use a work example because obviously we got on fairly well but we're also working together.
And then I say to you, "Dude, you did a really good job on that post you put up today about – like, you wrote a post on progress and it was fucking sick. It was a really good job." And then next week, you're a bit flat on it. "Okay, dude, what's going on? You've been super flat this week. How can that help?" I hit that. One is a compliment that comes out of love and appreciation. The other ones are – it's almost like a – I don't know what I'm looking for, but it's like a dive into, "Okay, you're not delivering what you need to deliver.
How can I help?" It's coming out of love as well. So like even though one is – effectively, some people look at it as positive and some people look at it as negative, it's really easy to only do one side, to only focus on negatives. And I think it's important to – if I get feedback from Coop that like, "Dude, you haven't been properly setting yourself up for meetings, so there have been shit-outs," or "You haven't been communicating well," that's coming from a place of love and that's just as if not more important than the, "Hey, you've been along this week.
Keep it up." I need to come from a place of like acceptance and know that it's not a dig at me or it's not something that I need to take personally, it's feedback that I can use either positively and improve or I can take it to heart and get offended and be sad about it. That could be really hard though to not take those things to heart and be offended because the moment – especially if you think you've been doing a really good job or – the wording that you use and the way that you
deliver something in that way, if you can make it feel as though a bit of concern or not feel but genuinely be a bit of concern or you actually want to support, "I've noticed that this is going on, is everything going all right?" Not just assuming that Coop's being lazy again, he's just on his phone playing games. You could assume that way but actually Coop hasn't been sleeping because he's dog-sick and he's up at night but he hasn't wanted to bring that to work and bother anyone. Do you need to go home and like –
do you need to be at home today like, "Oh, you have no idea how much that would mean a world of good," and all of a sudden it starts to help to repair things. He's back on top and looking – I think as individuals, we have a responsibility to have that desire to search out disconfirming information and the things that we're not doing really, really well. Too often, we just look for validation on the shit that we're doing regardless of whether it's good or not. We want people to tell us that we're doing a good
job and I think we talk about high-performance teams and high-performance mindset and stuff and I think it's really easy to just get stuck in, "Hey, you're doing a really good job. Keep it up," when they're not really being that cheerleader friend. I think it's important to be able to call people out on their bullshit, say, "That was ace. That sucked. What do you need from me to help you improve that?" And it's Coop's responsibility in this example to be able to let his ego take that hit, take a breath and go, "Okay, this is why Lockie wants me to improve this," rather than being, "Fuck that guy.
He's doing this and this and this wrong." Too often in relationships, we see you come with something of concern or something that's not working and you end up just banging heads against each other because you're just throwing out all the shit that you don't like about what's going on. When one of our mentors mentioned to us once, he used the term "open loop." So if you're upset about something someone's doing and you don't talk about it, you're left with an open loop about that issue in your head. And then when it comes time to communicate
something and ego spikes up and you start having a little bit of an argument, all those open loops all come out at once and none of them get closed and you end up in that cycle of, "This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong." And I come to you to talk about it and you've got all these open loops about the stuff that you want to have here with me. And we just throw open loops at each other. And shit hits the fan and no one achieves anything. And the idea around that is that if you have an issue, you communicate about it, close that loop, and then move on to the next one.
Because it's easy to get into that position with all those open loops, like how do you overcome that? Does it take one person to be the bigger person and let some things just play and give water under the bridge? It's almost like you sit down and it's really hard in a relationship in terms of partners and friends and colleagues, it doesn't matter what relationship it is, family, doesn't matter. It's almost like you need to sit down and look at, "Okay, here's one issue. We're staying on this issue that's going on. We're not going to talk about the other 17 things that you're annoyed about."
Because it's really easy. It's like an emotional hand grenade, right, you're talking about one thing and you decide to throw something else in the mix because yeah, this is going to help my argument. And when he taught me about it, I kind of drew a bunch of like half circles, a little arrow like that, and it's just like, "Okay, what are the loops that I need to close and who do I need to close them with?" And some people I was able to close them with, some people I'm not, and there's still open loops that
haven't been communicated properly and there's probably still a little bit of frustration from my end and probably from their end because there's still open loops. I think something that we really need to understand is that we're all trying to figure out how to close the loops even if we don't necessarily understand what the loops are and what they are. So once I'm sure everything at once, especially at a time where Coop's dog's sick or he hasn't had much sleep or something like that, then it just adds fuel to the fire and it's why so many people struggle to communicate with people.
I wrote a quote down that is like anyone that's been to Tassie has probably been to Mona. So the guy that opened Mona, David Walsh, his book is exceptional. It's called Bona Facts. It's an awesome book. One of the quotes I took from it, it's "We struggle with ourselves and the biggest struggle is the failure to understand that everyone struggles. We aren't special in our pain, that's universal, and it helps to know that." I think when we come from a place of understanding that, "Yeah, I'm going through some shit at the moment but so is
every other individual on the planet," and we take the focus maybe away from what we're struggling with and how we can help others not struggle with the things they're struggling with, it helps us fix our struggles. It says struggles like 15 times in that sentence, but you get what I mean. We get it. I think to bring this around full circle, I think this comes back to perspective and being mindful of taking the time to practice mindfulness ourselves and then being mindful of everyone else and the people around us. I think it's super important to intentionally take time to practice that mindfulness in our day.
It only takes 10 minutes. I love what you just said in that there's this big circle and I might have missed the next train or whatever living away in the hills, but be mindful of yourself. Think about yourself, sit down and be mindful and all these things, but we don't live the sedentary life. We live amongst other people and being mindful of what you just said about being mindful of other people's places is just as important as your own because all those interactions rely on that. We can't all just be mindful in our own selves and then have this beautiful connection with each other because we're not acknowledging or considering what someone else's mindfulness is and that's pretty important.
I think mindfulness is like mindfulness of self, of relationships and the connection you have with other people and then of our environment, so the environment that we cultivate around ourselves to foster all this connection and growth and feedback. If we take time to intentionally think and ponder these three areas, then I think we can build a world that is going to be better. It starts with you, but it can't be just you and I think that's an issue with a lot of mindfulness practices and a lot of wellness retreats and things like that. They're so focused on self-love that I forget that you need to love everything else as well.
It goes too far and it's like a selfish mindfulness and it's important to be selfish, don't get me wrong. That's an important part of it, but if you just focus on yourself and just focus on self-love and, "Oh, this doesn't serve me," you forget that you're meant to be serving other people and the rest of society as well. It's a big problem that's kind of been perpetuated by a lot of the Buddhism practices and I kind of spent a big chunk of this year diving into a lot of Buddhism and understanding what it actually is
about and we've kind of like, as a Western society, we've taken parts of it that are all the selfish, self-love, self-compassion parts of it and left all the, "Yeah, but this needs to serve the greater good." Could you say the sexy marketable parts? Yeah, we've taken, yeah, 100%. I'm just going to go out there and say that. Well, that's spot on and it's like, and yeah, we can say, "Okay, yeah, the Instagram generation and the #selflove and yoga has definitely been a proponent of pushing that side of it. There's definitely a lot of yogis and
a lot of parts of that industry that push the other side of it as well, which is fantastic, but I think, yeah, too many people dive into the, "Okay, how can this help me?" When you realize that, "Okay, yes, I need to help me, but then by helping other people, yeah, I get that warm, fuzzy feeling and it makes me feel good. The world's a better place and everyone wins." And then, I don't know if I believe in karma, but I believe in energy in some way and if you put things out, like if I
spend a whole heap of my week supporting Coop for the stuff he's going through, then down the track, he might spend a whole heap of his week supporting someone else who then maybe supports someone else who then supports me back. And it's like, I think if you put out positivity, oh, this is like the lamest thing that I've ever said. If you put out that positivity and that love and stuff, it'll come back to you. Thanks. I want to come back to that, because you mentioned that selfish thing that you just said. We need to have that selfishness, but we need that selflessness as well.
And those are two sides of the same coin. We should just reiterate what you said. You said it better. I just... I'm just pandering. I just encapsulated it all into a single sentence. Shit. Alright. This is awesome. Finish this off, I want both of you to tell me what you're most excited for. And think amongst yourselves at home in terms of like, okay, what... I've been using the term a little lately, like, what sets your soul on fire? What really deep within you gets you excited for the next however? And it doesn't mean you're not enjoying today and tomorrow and stuff, but what are you like?
There's lots of events and physical things I'm looking forward to, but the thing that sets my soul on fire is to keep having these sort of conversations and to keep bringing this mindset and these meaningful conversations to more people. Because I think this is like, it starts with awareness and what we're doing, what I like to think that we're doing is making more people aware of this story. And I think the more people that get told the story, then they can pass that on. And then it's like what we said about, like what you're saying about the energy, like you're passing that on to make the world a better place.
And I like to think that we are telling a good story and I want to keep telling it. Oh, good. It's just our perspective of that story too. Yeah, that's not to say that it's the right story, like it's our story, but I think it has value. That's probably a bit deeper than what you were expecting. No, I like that. I'm going to say one internal, one external thing. The internal thing is that I genuinely want to think about a lot of these things. And it's cool for me that I didn't expect to be sitting
here with you guys today, but there are a lot of things that I have been pondering over a little bit recently for various reasons and just a few of the things that you've said have definitely given me ideas and made me feel like I can go and be a better friend, a better family member, a better boyfriend, in a lot of different ways and just generally be proactive in a few of those, as opposed to just dwelling in a few of those areas, which that gives me, it's not your normal kind of excitement that I'm
used to have, but it's I think a pretty important excitement when you, especially when you can be stuck in a bit of a hole, so that's exciting. But one thing that I am very, very excited about is moving back over to Japan soon and this season's going to be, and knowing that things are going to be a little bit different this season, it's very, very accessible to get over there and very cheap and there's a lot of people from my home community, yourself included, that are going to be visiting and that I get to share
my experiences with in the coming months, which for me, living in that remote away environment, having friends come and getting to share those experiences with them is pretty awesome because one of the difficult parts, and I know that it's just experienced by heaps of my friends, from their family, from everyone, that people don't understand what it is you're doing, so the opportunity to get to show people in your life what it is that's going on for you is pretty cool. It's a big part of your life, and they're a big part of your life as well, so to bring them into it is definitely awesome.
It's on a big scale, having to go to a different country or going to the mountains or whatever, but we don't often get to see the inside of what some of the closest people in our lives, what that looks like, what their day at work looks like, or what their life looks like, so for me, that's super exciting to get to share that with my friends and family. Sick. I like that a lot. That you're welcome. I should have thought of an answer while you guys were talking. It is your question. I think I've been
diving into a big, the last couple of years, especially the last 12 months or so, I've dived into a big growth, personal expansion, personal understanding, professional development phase, trying to give myself a bigger container, a bigger capacity to be able to do what I do, to be able to give and stuff. In the last probably month or two, I felt a little bit lost in terms of what I'm trying to do and what I'm trying to learn and where I'm headed and stuff like that. I've come into the realization that whenever you learn something, you
realize how much you don't know and you realize how much more there is to learn, so understanding that I've progressed significantly over the last 12 months, even though I feel like I know less, so I'm excited to be at peace with that and I'm excited to be okay with the fact that every time I learn something, I'm going to feel like there's more to learn and there's more that I don't understand and just understand that it's just a process and it's a journey with no ending, but it's a journey that even if I feel lost and feel like I'm struggling and feel like I don't know where I'm headed, that I'm moving forward anyway.
So yeah, I'm excited to learn about myself, which I know will help me connect with other people, it'll help with my communication, it'll help me move forward with what I'm doing, it'll help me figure out what we want to do with Virtus and how we want to utilize that platform to make the world a better place. Plus I'm excited to go to Japan with KP and share some of those moments and some of those experiences with her and Kyle baby again and you two. I read one of my emails that I sent after Japan last
year a couple of days ago and it's cool to see where my headspace was at 12 months ago or 12 months ago, 10 months ago compared to now and it's going to be exciting to see where my headspace is at next time we're there. Yeah, awesome. Excited to be more and do more and have more. Good, you'll be. On that note, thanks lads. It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for the chit chat. [Music]
