Life Without A Tie

0:01 This program is designed to provide general information with regards to the subject matters covered. This information is given with the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. At the end of the day, it's not about what you have or even what you've accomplished. It's about what you've done with those accomplishments. It's about who you've lifted up, who you've made better. It's about what you've given back.

0:44 Denzel Washington, welcome to Inspire Vision. Our sole purpose is to elevate the lives of others and to inspire you. To do the same. Ray, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for inviting you all today. I really have you on now. Let the Fox know where you're at. Well. I live currently in the UK in a place called Glastonbury, which is famous around the world for the music festival that happens once a year. But I think that's its major claim to fame at least, But it's a lovely little. Town, wonderful. And you know what fascinated me is I was getting to know a little bit more about you. You talk about aka the Daily Explorer, and I know you have an amazing story and I'd love for you to share your story those aha moments, maybe you know, the key moments that changed your direction, but ultimately what brought you to this point.

1:41 Yeah, it's a great question. I'll give you the short version of. If there's anything you particularly want me to talk more about, you can let me. Know, Okay. Yeah. In two thousand and three, two thousand and four, I was a businessman living in London. I set up a company sort of in the deca previously, and my business partner was the woman I was married to, so we were a husband and wife management team. And to all of my family and friends, you know, i'd been successful in their terms, I'd sort of you know, done materially very well, achieved success with the business. I'd even been crowned Business Leader of the Year by the Daily Telegraph in England, so I had a professional recognition and so to the outside world, I think I looked on paper at least to be an image of success, but behind that facade. I wasn't happy or and things weren't working, and my marriage was breaking up. And one day my ex wife now came back from a meeting said I'm leaving you and I'm leaving the company. And it was very sudden, quite shocking. And at the same time, my father got very ill and he passed away. And so within three or four months, the life that I knew as normal had just completely you've operated. It was like standing in a bomb crater, you know, surrounded by destruction on all sides. And as a result of that, you know, I was really broken, to be really honestly dug and

3:14 friends of mine suggested to me, I should take a sabbatical, you know, just go away for a few months and have a reset and reflect on everything that had happened and sort of make sense of it and restart. So I thought that was a great idea, and I decided to minimalize my life. I sold my house in London and thought, I'll buy a smaller place when I get back from my sabbatical, I'll be gone for six months. It won't be very long anyway, to cut a very long story short. After six months, I wasn't quite ready to come back, because in the last week of that sabbatical, I did a passner met such silent meditation retreat in a Buddhist monastery, ten days of silent meditation, and that just like completely reconfigured my brain and had a big reset around that, and I thought, Oh, whatever this is I've discovered, I love it. I want to explore it more.

4:08 That I'd never thought about meditation or mindfulness or any of those things which are now so common in our language. And so I thought, I want to stay a bit longer and start to develop my practice around those things before I go back. So I stayed a bit longer in a place called chang Mai in Thailand, and there I made quite a few friends and saw things that touched my heart, like an elephant sanctuary that was providing a home for rescued elephants. And I went off to the Himalayas and organized a picnic for some kids at an orphanage in Nepal, and that really touched me, and I started to think I wanted to do something to support those local projects somehow with fundraising, I didn't know what to do, and so I met a guy in my travel was who was a marathon runner, and he talked about it, and as he spoke about it, gave me tingles, and I thought I was nearly fifty, and I said, do you think I could run a marathon to raise money for these projects? And I could start a fundraising organization? He said, yeah, I think so. He said, I'll tell you what you know, if you stay in chang My for six months, I'll train you how to run a marathon. And I said, okay, it's a deal.

5:20 So I did that and raised fifteen thousand dollars and ran the New York Marathon in two thousand and nine, and I've run four more since then. Anyway, this a baticle wasn't six months. It turned into fourteen years that I lived out of my backpack, and I returned in twenty nineteen to the UK. Oh my goodness, I can't even imagine. I have to tell you. As I've traveled, you know, back and forth around Asia, it fascinates me to see so many young people that are just you know, they're just living out of their backpack, and I'm going, how on earth do you do that? I'm saying, there with two or three suitcases, you know, making sure I've got everything I need. Uh that and particularly at the age. What age were you at when that was going on?

6:10 Well, I left, When I left the UK, I was forty five. I think I was then, okay, packer that I knew, you know, in Asia most of the people are half my age, all that, you know, I mean, yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. So anyway, go on. I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, that's okay, that's okay. I mean, so that's that's kind of the short version of the story. But below the surface line of the story, you know, all those things really changed my thinking so deeply. My thoughts about ownership, about status, about purpose, mission, all of these things were really shifting a lot. And I I knew I didn't want to return to the kind of life I had. I absolutely knew that. Whilst I was a competent CEO and I was good at that role and I could earn money doing it, I knew that I didn't want to do something different. I wanted to work one on one coaching people and do much more of that kind of interacted one on one work. And I kind of sort of sense that was where I read my heart lied with you and so, and so my journey became about really following what I knew as my now know as my true path. And I got inspired by a book by a lady called Bronnie Ware. I don't know if you've heard of her book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

7:26 I haven't heard it now. It's quite a well read book around the world. And she works in a hospice as a nurse, and so she has conversations with people in the last days of their life pretty much exclusively. That's all she does. So she spoke to well over one thousand people who and asked them the same question, what do you most regret about your life? And they all said the same thing. They all said, I wished I'd live my life true to myself and not the life that others expected of me. And I thought, wow, wow, I want to be living from that place, not the place I was living from before. And so that changed everything. Ever since then I've lived.

8:08 I still live a very minimal life. I still own one bag of clothes with twenty two kilos in it, a laptop, very minimal things. I have had to acquire a place to live in the UK because I was homeless when I came back, So that's pretty much the only thing I own is a small house. But I you know, I'm very minimalist now compared to how I was before. Well, and you know, it's fascinating to me two things you said number one, and I like it. You know, we tend to live our life as impostors, and by that it's like, as you say, we're living a life that other people expect of us, and it's such a challenge.

8:53 I know that as I've done some behavioral analyses for people and talking about the different types of lives that we have, one which is, you know, are really who we really are, our true self versus our social self of who we need to be based on that, it's fascinating to me how many people get stuck in that expectation life and really don't know how to become their true selves. Yeah, it's so easily done because the conditioning of society is so powerful. It's so surreptitious and unseen and powerful. You know, we're basically trained from a very early age to be consumers, to fit into a system of governance, to be compliant, to not really question authority too much, and to follow the rules and behave and get rewarded.

9:44 Cool. Yeah, well, I'm fascinated by your silent meditation, and by that, I'm assuming that means that it's only breathing meditation. You're not listening to music, you're not listening to anything else. And I can't even imagine how you do that. Now. I laugh, because when I was heading to Thailand last you know, last fall, Yes, my one of my sons says, Dad, you really should go to a monastery and just be there for a couple of weeks and do that. And I didn't do that, but I started meditating every day and I was talking to him one day and it's like, you know what, I didn't go. I didn't go to the monastery. But bottom line is I feel like I've done the same thing just in this culture.

10:28 Yeah, it doesn't matter whether you do it at home or in a monastery. The main thing is is that we, most of us, really take any time to quieten our thinking, the voice in our own head that talks to us NonStop about everything, that comments on everything, that judges everything, that has beliefs about everything. You know, that's good, that's bad, that's right, that's wrong, that's high, that's low, that's black, that's white. You know that that all our thinking minds do that. And so the purpose of meditation is really to find a place of stillness, a quietness. You can't stop the mind from making those kind of sounds, but you can tune out. You can train where you direct your awareness and attention towards other things. What you can see here, smell, taste, and touch the senses and to what I would call the voice of your inner wisdom, your intuition, your gut feeling, your wisest part of yourself, which that voice is not audible while we've got the noise of our thinking going on because it overrides it.

11:38 And so the whole practice is to train yourself to be quiet enough to hear that voice. Well. And when you went there, was that the first time you've ever meditated? First time? Yeah, that was in two thousand and six. So I would love for you to share because I'm just really curious about this. What was your experience. I mean, you started off and I don't know how long you meditated each day, but you know, as you went through that process, at what point, at what point in time did you actually started experiencing something different other than just the frustration of I've got to keep my eyes closed and so on and so forth. Well, it was I've got to be really honest. It was quite challenging for me because I'd never been silent for more than ten minutes. I mean, no, I did, but luckily at the International Dama Center near Suratani where I did my first pastner. I've done a couple more since, but that first one. They were really fantastic because all the participants for foreigners, and they do it for the foreigners, you know, mainly, so they're aware that no one's got this, you know, physical stamina for this sort of thing. So they break up the day into nothing more than about ninety minutes to two hour sessions at the most, and so the most you're ever sitting cross legged for would be ninety minutes for two hours. They'd break up the day with some walking meditations, because you can do silent walking meditation as well as a sitting. There's a little bit of chanting during the day, and they also have

13:09 one hour in the day in their program where they have a dharma talk where a monk will actually speak out to educate you about some of the Buddhist teachings and principles. That was incredibly useful to me because it started to open my mind and thinking to why we super so much while we have so much anxiety and stress in our society and the root of that is. And I'd never really seen it so clearly before, before I had this teaching from the monks about what they call the cycle of craving. Now that leads to anxiety and endless wanting and grasping and clinging to things that we don't have. Well, and two things come to my mind, And I'm really curious about this as you as you listen, I've tried to listen to the monks, but none of them speak English, so yeah, it doesn't help me at all.

13:58 I would assume he spoke English. Yeah there was. There were a couple of really Goodlish speakers. There were. But but you know, one of the things I find is there's so much conflict going on right now religiously, and and it's just not the major conflict that we see over in the Middle East, but but even here in the United States, you've got this group against that group, and so on and so forth. When you listen to him speak, did he ever come across as we are right and they are wrong type of attitude. Never, because the teaching is is focused always on what goes on inside you, in your you know, within your inner world. It's all about your inner world, how you think, how you feel, how you how you hold reality inside your own mind. It's never about what's outside well.

14:57 And and to me, that's what that's what really attracted me to that whole culture was the fact that there didn't seem to be adjustment. In fact, I remember as I was traveling to what area and I can't remember which city it was, and I'd love to go to take pictures of the temples and so forth. And when I went there, there was this other small temple right next to all these bigger temples, and I'm going, what is that And they go, well, that's an islam temple. That's a Muslim temple, and I'm thinking wow. And they built that for the people in the community because they knew there were enough people that would want their own temple that way. And I thought, how fascinating that there's this whole culture of being able to accept people for who they are, the religious beliefs, whatever that happens to be and not have all of this conflict that seems to go on.

15:49 M Yeah, it's amazing, absolutely amazing. Yeah, I so know. It was the answer to a question. They don't. The whole reason and that mindfulness has become so all pervasive now is because it gives you a chance to know where you are at any given moment in terms of what you're feeling and thinking, and observe yourself without judgment, because that's the critical part of being mindful, This the non judgmental part of it. Well, exactly, and how long did it take We're going back to your meditation experience. How long did it take you, how many days, how many weeks, whatever, to the point where you actually started to experience that inner sense of peace and got rid of all those external faces that keep coming through your mind and really able to do that silent meditation in a way that you started to gain that inner wisdom.

16:45 Yeah. Well, I'll give you an answer to that question. It was pretty much immedia. As soon as the retreat was over, I felt like if I'd had a round knob on the side of my head with the volume, it would like someone had turned it from a ten out of ten down to maybe a two out of ten during the ten days I was, so it was already silent, it was already much quieter when I left. And then I found that the more I continued my own practice of sitting meditation every day, the more quietness remained and the stillness remained. But then if I stopped practicing for a couple of days or didn't do it, and always would go up again, and then I need to do more to bring it back down and be still again. And so it's one of those things. It's a bit like physical fitness. You know, if you don't exercise regularly, you don't go to the gym, you start to put on way and get a bit out of breath.

17:36 And it's kind of similar to me in my experience of it. Well. And you know, you talk about as minimalist lifestyle, and for me, I have found that fascinating. Obviously I'm not living a minimalist lifestyle at this point in time, but what I found was when I was over there, you know, you find a place to rent, it's very minimalist, there's no question about it. And as you watch people and where they live and so forth, it's also minimalist. And as I was coming back, I was telling my kids, you know what, I've got to really declutter. I've got to just get rid of all of this jug that's at the house. Yeah, what do you find the value of minimalist living is? And how do people get to the point where they start to value that type of concept?

18:27 And did that come from your experience with Buddhism from a standpoint of getting rid of that ego and not wanting all of this stuff, or how did that come about? How it came about initially was that I lived in a pretty big property in London when I was married, had three flaws with all bedrooms awfully furnished, you know, And so when I got divorced and decided to sell the house and go away for sabbatical, I thought, what am I going to do with the stuff in the house. There's loads of it, you know. So the cost of storing that per year in a storage unit was high in London. And I spoke to as many people that I could find through my network who'd been expats, who'd lived abroad for four or five years, and ask them about how they felt about coming back to their stuff, And virtually everyone I spoke to with almost no exceptions, had said, do you know what we wish we'd just got rid of it from the start. We didn't want most of it when we got back wepent. We spent tens of thousands of dollars on storage every year. It was a waste of money. And so I thought, okay, okay, I'm just going to either sell or give away the stuff then, because if I need more stuff in the future, I can get by new stuff. And I don't know where I'm going to even be wanting to live, so why would I want to keep it. I might not even want to live in London anymore. So I decided to minimalize everything in the beginning before I sold the house, and so I had three or four months or in ebaying,

20:02 circulating the pictures of all the things in the house to bread and saying as a yard say, oh do you want to come and get some of this? Do you want any of these items? You know they're all up there, all available, And eventually it got rid of everything and just left myself with the bagger, clothes and the laptop, and it was it was immensely satisfying. I've got to say, I've felt so light because I'd reached the age of forty five, and my whole life had been about accumulating all that stuff that I just got rid of, and so now I was having like a complete experience of restart from zero, but with the wisdom and experience of my life in the bank and some money as well as well as wisdom you had to live from for a while.

20:46 Well, you know, you talk about restarting, and I think about that a lot. How many people go through their lives with that living the life of someone else's expectations. Yes, And at what point in time, how are people able to come to that level of awareness that they actually realize that's what's going on and then get the courage to say, you know what, I'm going to go on a new adventure. I'm going to reset my life and find an adventure that really is for me. Yeah. I mean it's a great question. I can't say I've got a great answer because I don't know how it works for everyone else, So I only know how it worked for me. But I would encourage people to really, you know, go within and trust that in a voice.

21:36 I mean, that's one of the big lessons for me that happened in the shift from being materialistically comfortable, affluent consumer living in London to being a minimalist, light, nomadic traveler, you know, being less tied. I started to trust my intuition massively and not my logical mind anymore, because I sort of, after a year or two, kind of almost deprogrammed myself on consumption. I had no compel compulsion to buy souvenirs or clothes or anything that I didn't essentially need to carry with me to keep the weight of my pack down. So I became really just down to what do I really actually truly need a toothbrush, some clothes and whatever it was, and a laptop to work from oran and that habit now it deeply ingrained in me.

22:30 So I even though I lived back in the UK and I live on what looks like a more regular way of living, I still don't buy anything unless the item that I currently have for that purpose breaks or wears out. I just bought a new USB stick yesterday because the one I had broke, and that's it. That's one of the first. Things I bought. In months. I have been the same T shirts and clothes that I carried around in my pack so, oh, that. Is just fasciinating to me. And you know, as as you were being taught the dharma, as you know, as you were listening to that from the monk, did he get into this whole concept of suffering is cause because of our desires and and you know, I don't know that I've ever heard them refer to the ego. I read an interesting book by Ekartol talking about a New Earth where he talks about how that ego literally causes us to want this, to want that, to want this, to want that, to just appear more successful whatever that happens to be. Uh. I'd love for your thoughts on that as far as how do we get to the point where we realize that all of these things that we want in many respects and in most respects are just really an effect of that desire, that ego, and that there's a way to overcome that.

23:52 Yeah, it's a really really good question. How I've come to understand it from all the teachings that I've been received from from a months over the years, is that we've all got a kind of a gap inside us. It's like it's like what Toller refers to as the pain body in his book. But basically, we're in pain because we feel our life is missing something, it's not complete. There's always something not quite right in our life. And because it's because it actually that that thing that's not right is within, is inside of us. It's it's it's coming through what the Buddhists would call ignorance. It's that just the failure to have the awareness and understanding of what's going on inside of our system. We think that we can fix that pain feeling by acquiring something or somebody or some something happening outside. Like we go, well, I'll be happy when I've gone shopping and bought some new clothes that will make me feel better. Or I'll be a much happier if I get a promotion at work, or I'll be happy when when the house is decorated and it looks nicer. Whatever it is, we somehow think if we do these things outside of ourselves, it will fix this emptiness inside ourselves. And so we do those things and then for a few minutes, it does temporarily address it. That's what they call the monks called it.

25:21 You get some cessation of desire for a short period, But then what happens then is our mind then attributes our happiness to that thing that we've now consumed or had, and it says your mind starts saying, well, that's wearing off. Now what you're going to do when that wears off? Because the effect that's paring off, you better find something else to fill the gap that's going to be left when that thing wears off. And so your mind then starts focusing on the next thing that you need in order to build the gap. And that's the cycle, and it never ends, there's no ending to it. The ending is when you under a stand it that cycle from a deep place within yourself and except that that's what's running in your show, and you decide you don't want to live out of that cycle anymore. You want to live in a different way, from a different level of consciousness.

26:16 And how as you talk about that deep you know, abyss, whatever it is within us that is causing that, Yeah, what has been your experience? Because I assume you've been able to actually minimize that and you know, I know it's an ongoing thing, but what were you able to do to minimize that to where that's not affecting you as heavily as perhaps it once was, or as it affects most of us. Yeah, for me, it's been a journey of a huge amount of non attachment, the practice of non attachment. Like I'd like this outcome to happen, but if it doesn't, I'll still be okay. You know, I'm okay. I'm always okay.

27:00 This is an empowering belief. No matter what happens, I'll always be okay. If this happens, I'll be okay. If this happens, I'll be okay. So kind of having a non attachment perspective to what outcomes do come. So, for example, if I I'm trying to think of a recent example around that, you know, like I do some associate work for a company as a coach, and so if they win a contract and ask me if I'm available to do the work, I can say, yeah, I would be available on those dates. They may or may not choose me, they might choose someone else, and so I have to be okay if they do choose me or if they don't choose me. My happiness isn't dependent on them choosing me to be the person. And if it was, I'd be really in serious trouble because I'm basically appointing someone externally to me to run my happiness, you know, and that's not going to work.

27:55 So how do you find your happiness? So happiness comes through literally non attachment and accepting of the way that life is flowing at any given moment. So, you know, I look at I take the view which is, ah, I didn't get that work. I accept that life is always guiding me to my highest potential, and I didn't get that work. So either something better is coming or life wants me to do something else which is more fulfilling. That's that's how I deal with it. And you talk about present time and what I have found as I've studied you know, the Buddhist culture is is he really talked about being in the present moment and forgetting about the past, which obviously causes most of us a lot of stress, either subconsciously or consciously. Don't worry about the future, although there has to be some element of proactivity about the future, but just live the present.

28:59 What has been your experience and what did you learn as you went through that process. Wow, that's a great question. That is definitely one of the things that I've benefited from being able to integrate into my own system because when I was a businessman, I was so driven by my goals. We're going to achieve this so I can get to this point in future and be happy for this financial accomplishment, right, And so what I was doing was I was so driven. I mean not in a good way, but I was kind of pushing all the rest of my life out to the sides to be focus on the forward momentum towards this achievement and just really ignoring eighty percent of my life pushing it to the sides, So missing birthdays, missing events, not paying attention to key relationships my partner and my friends, and missing the things that you really can't buy with money and that are the real source of connection and the fulfillment and happiness in order to achieve something material, which I'm with delusional thinking as the police call, you actually believe that is what's going to deliver your happiness, But of course it's completely the opposite.

30:15 And so I realized that. So without with the new understanding that I've managed to integrate, I'm now able to know what's truly valuable. So now I you know, I want to spend time with my friends, with my family, with my partner, and I don't want to do some of the things or be driven in the same way that I would have been ten fifteen years ago. And it's nothing's changed on the surface, because I still like spending money, I still like doing certain things, I like eating in nice places, et cetera. That those things are the same, but now I'm just so less attached to those things. As as a way of deriding being happy. Now I'm just happy if I go to bed at night thinking, did I show up in my best self today with my friends and family? Was I loving, caring, kind, compassion?

31:05 Was I was I you know, of service to my community? And if I can say yes to those things, I feel deeply happy. It's not about what I own or how much I've spent or what I've consumed well. And it's interesting that you can approach purchasing things moving forward with a different mindset, with that mindset that I don't need it, but this will make my life more enjoyable. I'll have more fun today. But if you don't get it, it just doesn't make that much difference. Now you've written a book, You've written a book, let the audience know what your book is, and I know that you have six rules that you've written in your book about happiness.

31:48 I love for you to share those. Yeah, I will, I will. I must say before I speak about the book makes me laugh because when I left in two thousand and five, I was just a broken guy, you know, try to heal himself from some catastrophe. I had no interest or intention of writing a book about the journey. I wasn't an author particularly, But as I met people, you know, in the monastery and on my travels and as a fundraiser, and everyone asked me why I'm doing everything, and I told them the story of what had happened and more stories about these different things. They all said to me afterwards, Ray, you know what, if you ever write a book about that, I'd really definitely want to read it. Could could you email me if you.

32:28 Do, or something like that. And I got to about I kept saying, now, I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to do that. But I got to about fifty people who had asked me over three or four years, and then it became one hundred after five years, and I thought, gosh, I don't know the universe wants me to write a book. Obviously, I keep getting asked over and over and so eventually decided I would write the stories down and put them into a book. And that's how Life Without a Tie became born. This is the book. Okay, out a tie, and the tire is tie. Yes, it was life without a tie because at the time I left, I was a tie wearing.

33:09 Suit. But it was also it seemed occurred to me through this journey that there are four ties that keep all of us living the life that others expect from us. And the ties that sort of tie us to society's structure, which is the tie to our partner or spouse, the tie to our career, the tie to our home, our physical home, and the tie to our friends and families. And those four ties, for me riple were like the four corners of a tent being pegged to the ground. And I think if you just people will tell you if just one of those ties gets removed, like you break up a relationship where you have a divorce, even if the other three remain, your life becomes slightly unstable for a while. If it's two. At the same time, it's now quite stable free out for It's like almost keeling over. What happened to me was all four of those ties got cut in one instance in the sense, and so I was sort of literally drifting into a completely new existence, which I had no idea what that would look like. And so I was really wanting to really describe the transition from being in a tiede life to an untied life. Now, my life's a bit more tied again. I've got a house now, and one or two things like that. But I went to the other extreme to see what life being untied would feel like, would like sound like. And I've so got a direct experience of that too. And so in the book I wrote,

34:40 you know, I wrote as many examples as I could have, what i'd learned, what wisdom I'd gained, and some of the things that really struck me that come with that kind of experience of going through transitions like that. Well, and you know, you talk about Tyson as you say you're back in now with you know you've got your house. I assume you've got a relation and so on and so forth. And yet there's some advantages just to move away from that for a bit. So here's my question, because I think ties are necessary you know, and how do you get to the point where you approach those ties in a way that you still are not living someone else's life, that you're really experiencing your life, your joy, your happiness, your piece, and still experiencing some of those ties. How do you mindfully and mentally approach that in the right way based on your experience?

35:37 Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. How it occurs to me that you do that is you apply some kind of rules to your life, and so, like the first rule in the six Rules of Happiness that I wrote in the book would be build a strong foundation or core within yourself so that what that would look like would be you spend time reflecting deeply and using your imagination and visualization to consider what is my vision for my life? Where am I actually trying to get to is What are my values? What are the things that are most important to me that if I don't feel every day, I'm not going to feel good about being aligned?

36:21 What is my purpose for being here? Why do I do what I do? Why do I do? Why do I want to do? X? So? Values? Vision? Purpose? When am I in my element? This is a lovely term that Sir Ken Robinson a teacher came up with is an amazing man died about a couple of years ago, and he said, when you've got your strengths, what you're really naturally good at, and your passions, what you really care about, and where those two intersect, you are spending time in your element. You're doing what you're brilliant at and what you really care about. You said, people who are in that zone, and let's say, I don't even ever feel like i have a job. It's not work, even though I've made my job. I just love it. You know that they're really in their element, you know, of course, So how do you get to spend more time in your element.

37:14 Whatever that is? And that's step number one, that's Stubb number two. Step number two would be to look at the extent to which you take full ownership for everything that happens in your life. Because one of the ways in which people leak away their power, if you want to put it in a better phrase, I can't think of one, but one of the ways that people leak away their power is through blaming others for what's happened, through waiting, hoping, making excuses that they can't do certain things, being at the effect of their limiting beliefs about things. So they're not taking one hundred percent ownership for what they do, what they choose, what they want, what they need. They're they're allowing life to do things to them.

38:04 Yes, okay, number three, Wow, okay, So number three I'm going to have you go through all sex real quick. Yeah, okay, okay, So number three I'm just going to make sure I've got them in the right order. From the book. Number three would be to do with having becoming your own observer, is what I call it. And so this is the power, the power that is unique to human beings because no animals have this ability as far as I understand, human beings have this amazing ability through through consciousness to step out of oneself and be the observer of oneself. Like you and I. We can go, Oh, do you know what, Doug, I noticed, I'm having a thought about the weather outside. I noticed that I'm thinking about the weather.

38:55 Yea. Now that's not me just telling you what the weather is, because that would me being in the thought. I'm actually stepping outside to a helicopter view and watching myself thinking about it. Yes, And what that does is it creates a separation from what we consider to be us, which is not really us. We are not the thoughts that we have. We are the consciousness that is aware of and noticing those thoughts. We're not the thoughts themselves. And this is a this is a kind of thinking that's not made clear when we are very small. We're conditioned to believe that we are a certain way, we think a certain way, and that is who we are. It's one of the most delusional thoughts that we hold as humans, because that takes away all the power that you have to choose different thoughts and to hang out with thoughts that are much more useful and productive in your life than the ones you do hang out.

39:55 And I love that concept of stepping outside yourself and observing. All right, but that was number what three? That was number three? Yeah? Yeah, And so number four is what I call creating powerful, purposeful and sustainable relationships, you know. So what I mean by this is I look back at my life and all the things that have happened and all the luck that I've enjoyed where someone's come to me to offer me something I need without seemingly having a plan, And I call it luck. Serentipity, but then it's happening because I've invested in creating really deep connections in all the relationships I've had. Like a great example was when I left England in two thousand and five to go on this journey. I had to sell the company and hoose the business now, and I had a very young lady working in my team in her mid twenties who was going to be I could tell was going to be a future star, an amazingly bright and intelligent, capable woman, but young in and beginning her career. But I knew the right thing. She never asked me to do this, and I have a value around integrity, and I knew the right thing for her was to find her a really good job to move to before I went off on my travels. I just knew it was the right thing.

41:15 She'd been really loyal to me and really helped me. So I went to her and I said, if I could help you get another position somewhere else in a similar company, would you be would you want that, you know, because I'm really happy to try it, And she said, yeah, that would be great. So I went to one of our rivals, a competitor, and I knew the owners. We were sort of friends, even though we were rivals, and I told them about this lady and said, she's been our highest performing person. She's brilliant, so I think she's got a really bright future, you know. And if you don't mind me saying I think you'd be crazy not to hire her, you won't regret it, I promise you. And so they did. They hired her, and it worked out brilliantly. They were absolutely thrilled. Obviously, my friend who got the job was thrilled, but they were also thrilled with all the value she bought. And she was for ten years and grew into a woman and became very astute as a businesswoman and everything. And then I lost touch with her because I was away for a long time.

42:09 But after thirteen years of being away, I had a reason to call her, and I said to her, you know, I'm just calling just to see how you're doing. Because she'd got marriage, she had two kids. Now she now was in an early forties, a grown woman, and she told me all about her life and I listened, and I was sort of deeply happy it worked out there. And there's a at the end of that conversation. I said, oh, I forgot to ask you. I said, what are you doing for work professionally? She said, oh, I've been working with this company for the last ten years, but it's now been sold to a much bigger organization and so I don't want to be involved without any further And so me and the other lady who founded the company, we're thinking of building a new business. You know, this is she described the idea. She told me what it would do. It was to serve emerging leaders and give them some coaching support and skills that they would need.

43:04 And she described it to me and I just had this strong resonance throughout my body. She was talking. And at this time I was living in Poland, in Warsaw, in Poland, and I knew I could easily fly back to London and be engaged with that kind of work if I needed to. I wanted to, So I said to her, you know, I'd love to be a coach on the team, if you're putting a team together. And she said, oh, that would be interesting because I was you were my boss for ten years and now i'd be your boss. How would that feel? I said, honestly, I have no pride about that. I will be fine with that and she said, okay, I'll bear it in mind. And then when they launched the company, they called me and said you're on the team. We want you in this first cohort in London. And I've been working with Emma's and associate ever since and I'm now, you know, an integral part of the team. And I love my work with that company and they loved having me on the team. And so it's been that's pure. That's the sort of stuff I'm talking about.

43:57 Well, and then that's wonderful and the other ones. I want the audience to get your book to find out what they are, because obviously we're running out of time. I talk forever, Doug, because yeah, they're all six are in the book. They're all described in the in the back in the final chapter of the book, the six. Yeah, life without a Tire. So so as you as you think about what your experience has been and if there was something you could say to the people that are listening today that might make a difference in their lives, what would that be. The one thing I would definitely say is spend time considering what your path looks like, what your vision of life looks.

44:43 Like for you. It doesn't need to be the same as anyone else's. In fact, the more original it is, perhaps even the more feeling it could be. But that would be my encouragement because if you can identify that and tap into what that is, looks like and feels like, and then start taking the little step by step by step towards that vision, life just reconfigures itself in a way that I can never explain, but it will start to bring to you the people, places and things that you need to have that manipest. Oh, and I love that, you know. I talk about adventure and I talk, you know, to my kids and to other people saying, you know, life is an adventure, and it is when you find yourself not enjoying life, it's time for a new adventure, and particularly, as you say, one where you really start to do that introspective work, the meditation, all of those types of things, because I don't think people understand the reality of what is inside of them, the goodness that exists there, the intelligence that exists there, and if they can just tap into it, they will gain inspiration and guidance from inside.

45:56 That is going to make an entirely difference effect in their lives. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You've got it. You've nailed it well. Ray, Hey, thanks so much for being on the show. I really appreciated that. This has been great folks. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Get a hold of that book. I think you'll find it worthwhile. And your website, what's your website? Life without a Tie dot com? Okay, life without a tie dot com. So, folks, thanks, have a great week. This is a doctor Doug saying, Noma stay Thanks