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We'll be right back. I have spent years in conversation
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with people who are successful by every measure and still
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quietly restless, not broken, not lost, just aware somewhere underneath
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the noise that there is a version of their life
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that feels more honest, more grounded, more genuinely theirs. This
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podcast exists for those people, for the ones who are
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done performing and ready to go deeper. My name is Dr.
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Doug.
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Welcome to Inspire Vision. I'm glad you were here. Richard,
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welcome to the show.
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Thank you very much, Dr. Doug.
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I'm very happy to be here. I'm pleased to have
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you here. So, with the accent, and you're probably thinking
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about my accent too, but where are you from?
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Yeah, I'm operating just outside London in the UK this morning.
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Oh, wonderful. Okay. So, What I'd love for you to
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do is kind of share the audience a little bit
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of your background, just kind of briefly what your background is.
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Thank you. Yes, I currently work at a university as
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an associate professor, but I've been a coach and worked
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in science for 35 years. And yeah, I just had
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this unending curiosity with mankind, with humanity. with the way
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that people behave, the way that all of us behave,
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that in my own behavior, everybody else's. And that curiosity
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has just driven me in so many different directions. And yeah,
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it's come about and it's got me thinking a lot
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and it's got me working towards, yeah, some certain philosophies
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that we can explore a little bit today.
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Yes, and you work with, you're still involved with the university?
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Yes, still involved with the university, yes.
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And what area is your area of expertise with the university?
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Oh, well, yeah, it's actually in the sciences. It's actually
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in microbiology and things like this. But the coaching I've
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been doing has been alongside that and coaching colleagues and
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coaching people outside. So I've had this wonderful opportunity to
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be immersed in science at the same time as, yeah,
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following my own passion, which is exploring people.
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You know, and it is so interesting that I've developed
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something that comes from a very well-known business behavioral analysis,
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and I've converted it into something called what I call
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a personal portrait. And the reason I've done that is
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that so often, and you may identify with this, not personally,
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but with the people you've worked with, is so often
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we find ourselves in a profession that is not necessarily
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fulfilling those inner needs and motivations, and we find ourselves
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doing either something entirely different, not being happy, or doing
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something in addition to, such as what you're doing. And
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I find that so fascinating. For me, I'm not sure
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that I would have been doing this except I was
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no longer able to practice dentistry, and suddenly, All of
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a sudden, I'm trying to do something else. I did
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some business consulting and so forth. But ultimately, you know,
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something really came to me that said, you know what,
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you need to be doing something different. So that's what
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I'm doing now. But it sounds like you've gone through
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a similar thing. You're loving what you do at the university,
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but you also have this passion for helping people to
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understand themselves more.
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Yeah and dr d you're absolutely right and it's always
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been there and i think that a lot of people
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operate with these multiple identities um that that can express
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themselves in different ways and yeah i love certain aspects
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of science i love um i love the way it's
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structured i love the inquiries it generates but i know
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it has its limits and i've you know it's there's
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So I've always felt, do you know what? Having a
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foot in different worlds means you belong to either, but
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you can occupy all of them. And that's the way
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I think it's been a really useful way to live
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because it gives you so many different perspectives as well
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with which you can approach your experiences and the things
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that you learn.
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Well, and you know, one of the things that really
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caught my eye about you as I was looking at
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your biography and so forth and some of the things
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that you are doing and talking about is this concept
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of self-improvement to human becoming. And, you know, I've looked
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at that. I've done so many podcasts and, you know,
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so often it's focused obviously on self-improvement. But over the years,
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I have kind of come to a similar understanding the
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way that you just, you know, have you made that
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comment that, if we keep focusing on self-improvement, that's not
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really the goal. The goal is to become. And there's
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a big difference between self-improvement, trying to reach a certain whatever,
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and truly just beginning to understand, and what I call
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it is just acquire return to who you genuinely are.
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And you're talking about a human becoming. So talk a
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little bit about where that motivation and that thought process
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and that concept came up for you?
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Yeah, that's a great question, and I'm really glad to
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jump in on this one. So, yeah, the self-improvement, it's
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where everybody starts, and I'm judging from what I've listened
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to from this pod, Dr. Doug, I know that your listeners,
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most of those, will be enlightened, they'll be curious, they
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will be you know, informed in many ways. They've also
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looked and probably studied themselves. They probably understand themselves quite well.
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So that's all great. I mean, you know, the know thyself,
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the Greeks gave us, the self-inquiry, which psychology encourages, and
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the disattachment to ego, which they do in Buddhist countries,
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like the one you're living in. So all these things
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are great, but then when we get to there, when
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we get to this place of awakening, I could call it,
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if you like, What then? So what do we go
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from there? And I think that's where a second journey begins.
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And that's what we're talking about. You call it coming home.
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I absolutely love that. I call it human becoming as well.
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So what are we becoming? And I think this comes
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from the concept that life is still going to change us.
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We're still going to have experiences, seeing beauty, feeling awe,
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being rejected, grief, all these things that will happen. to
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us in this human existence and they're all going to
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change us slightly and then what are we going to
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do with that learning we get from that change and
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that's that's where i see us if we can find
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a way to integrate that um and become wiser then
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it we when we're growing um and what we're growing
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into i don't know but it's certainly it it's it's
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i think it yeah coming home possibly coming home to
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a unity which we we sense is out.
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There yeah and you know it's interesting um When I
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moved to Thailand and obviously started really being fascinated by Buddhism,
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and I come from an entirely different theology than that,
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but what I found fascinating was this concept of reincarnation.
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My curiosity and my approach goes to, okay, I understand
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what he's talking about based on his understanding of things,
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but what could it really be meaning? And I just
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wrote an article for Substack talking about the fact that
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we live many lives before we die. And we can
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be reborn so many times. And that's not a Christian thing.
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It's just the fact that we're reborn so many times
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in our lives. And I think that as you're talking
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about that, how often we find that as we're experiencing
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change in our lives, we're literally... starting a new life,
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starting a new process and a new experience. And sometimes
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it's for the good and sometimes it's not for the good.
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And I think the real question that comes to my
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mind and I want to ask you about and talk
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to you about is how do people start to choose
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to move their lives in a direction that is positive,
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that starts to bring about that sense of joy and
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peace rather than what we are seeing so much now
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is anger and frustration.
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Yes the the death and rebirth cycle i love that
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um stan groff talks a lot about that our life
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is full of those cycles and in fact even birth
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itself is a is like the death of the birth
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stage and the birth of the life you know it's
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we go through those um and it's interesting you mentioned
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about reincarnation i read something which really resonated me recently
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which was uh Why is being born twice any more
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remarkable than being born once?
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It makes no sense.
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But yeah, going back to your question, how do we grow?
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Because you can change without growing. but you can't grow
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without changing. So yeah, it does mean we have to
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let things go. It does mean little parts of us
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will die and we will be reborn. And there's obviously
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resistance and there's always fear with letting things go when
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it's part of ourselves. But we can do it a
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little bit at a time and we can grow and
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we can change. yeah, we can become more human and more, more,
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more of that coming home sense of unity. But we do,
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and we, it's very difficult to let go of everything
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at once. We can't do that. It's, it's not, it's
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too dangerous. It's too psychologically difficult. Um, but we can
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do it in stages. We can let go a little
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bit to ourself, which are not serving us. And I
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think that comes about through that self inquiry we've already
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mentioned and the, and the self improvement. Um, and there's
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loads of different ways of doing that. I appreciate every
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single one. Um, you know, whatever works for people, absolutely,
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but yeah, the knowledge of, even so simple as like,
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as you mentioned there, anger, okay, if we find ourselves
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getting angry a lot, then what is triggering us? Because
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it's no longer the world, it's now something in us,
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it's not out there in the world, because we participate
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in what we experience, and that's, that's very much at
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the heart of my interest in phenomenology, you know, the
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fact that nothing happens, we are not passive observers on
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a world, like we create the world which we experience,
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so yeah, it's down to us, so what do we
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want to let go of, what do we know about
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ourselves which passively we don't need anymore?
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Well, and you know, as you were talking, what comes
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to my mind is, I just did a podcast a
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few weeks ago, and one of the things that that
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he said that I thought was so resonating to me
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is that so often we say, I am angry. I'm this,
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I'm that. And the reality is that, no, that's not
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who I am. I am feeling anger. I am feeling frustration.
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And I think that as people begin to separate that out,
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it starts to separate that whole concept of who do
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I become? Because my emotions are responding, you know, You
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and I can see a similar event and you might
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just look at it and go, oh, wow, that's such
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interesting that that happened or it's a shame that that happened.
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And I can look at it and go, oh, get
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so angry about it and so forth. And it has
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nothing to do with who we are, well, to some degree,
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but it does have to do with how we have
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allowed our emotions to begin to control our response To events. Yeah.
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Yes, yes, absolutely we do. There's a wonderful book, I
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don't know if you're familiar with it, it's called The
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Presence Process by, I think it's Peter Smith, I think
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it's him. He talks about the triggers and he says
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you shouldn't see them as these triggers, you should see
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them as messages. Messages that there's something about you you
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still need to learn about yourself when you find yourself
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feeling the anger or feeling irritation or feeling jealousy or
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feeling you know any of these like emotions which we
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all recognize and as you say we identify with them
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very easily i'm jealous today or i'm angry or i'm
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irritated or i'm frustrated but if we look inside and
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look at the message what's the message behind that that
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that sensation and we can learn a lot about things
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of that maybe has happened to us in the past
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that maybe we can work through maybe we need help
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to work through and and eventually we can get to
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the place where well we're a I think that's a
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direction of human becoming.
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As well and you know I think that curiosity is
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so important I've had the opportunity to use NLP a
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bit with some people that I've worked with and what
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I find interesting is their responses to events or what's
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going on in their lives as we start to go
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back and identify where did that originate I had one
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client that called me, he just kept making decisions that
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he was not happy with, but he kept making them.
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He says, Doug, I really need to talk to you.
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And he's a good friend of mine, so I said, yeah,
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come on over. I said, let's try some NLP. And
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as we did that, we got back to his early
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childhood where he had experienced something in elementary school that
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was so unfortunate, but I think so many students experience this,
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that they've got a teacher that decides that they're going
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to decide the value of a child. And in his case,
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he was sent to the back of the room, told
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he was stupid, and on and on. And as we
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went through that, and as we started to reframe it
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and talk about it and say, you know what, was
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this about you or was this about that teacher? And
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the emotions that they were going through, whatever they're dealing with.
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And as we got through that, it made all the