Arno Ilgner

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:33:02
Unknown
Flow. Unleashed, unleashed, unleashed. Can you honestly pledge that no matter the situation, you can look adversity in the eye and bravely step forward into the mist? Do you have an internal way or philosophy that will guide you back into the light when you need it most?

00:00:33:04 - 00:01:00:16
Unknown
Welcome to Flow Unleashed. I'm Doctor Cameron Norsworhty, scientist and High-Performance coach to multiple world champions in this show, we unpack key insights and specific topics so that you are kept up to date with the latest science and practice of human performance.

00:01:00:17 - 00:01:06:14
Unknown
First of.

00:01:06:15 - 00:01:39:04
Unknown
Most successful people get to where they are, not because of 1 or 2 high performing moments, but because of who they are as a person and how they approach life as a whole. Over the years, I've had many surgeons coming knocking at my door, looking for help to pass their consultancy exams and live a high performing lifestyle. The field is fiercely competitive, and the culture tends to lead many of these professionals to burnout, leaving them despondent about all the years of effort.

00:01:39:06 - 00:02:07:01
Unknown
And one of these surgeons was me, once vibrant and highly motivated. This now frustrated woman sat in my office across from me, explaining how she was so close to quitting and taking up a new career. And for years she had given it her all but life simply wasn't turning out as she expected, and her career was just not working for her anymore.

00:02:07:03 - 00:02:32:19
Unknown
She gave me example after example of how she'd been wronged, or the difficulties of working with her colleagues. People seem to have it out for her. Even when she tried to do everything that other people wanted. It tended to backfire. She experienced injustice in the workplace and felt powerless to do anything about it, like no one would listen to her.

00:02:32:21 - 00:03:01:23
Unknown
And if she did, speak up. The fear of being reprimanded. And overall, she felt somewhat powerless to advance her career. It felt as if it was in the hands of other gatekeepers. She explained. She was clearly technically talented and very intelligent. She'd passed many years of training already, but it was as if she had hit a wall to her advancement.

00:03:02:01 - 00:03:33:10
Unknown
And it wasn't until we were able to converse outside these day to day struggles that she was facing, that she thought were responsible for stopping her, that we were able to examine how she was approaching life itself. And by delving into her opinions of both herself and others, and how she thought success was engineered, we were then able to highlight many opportunities for optimization and even transformation.

00:03:33:12 - 00:04:01:06
Unknown
So instead of delving into the specific details of each performance review and relationship that she had with this, her supervisors and gatekeepers, we looked at how she could optimally approach life itself. And in taking a closer look at how to approach life in an optimal manner. There are few who have both studied and lived this question as much as our guest on our own.

00:04:01:08 - 00:04:28:04
Unknown
Uno has spent the last four decades crystallizing Eastern and Western philosophies into a modern day approach that thousands have already embodied to summit their dreams in life. Uno distinguished himself as a pioneering rock climber in the 70s and 80s, doing bold and dangerous first ascents. His level of confidence and ability to deal with fear was highly respected within the world of climbing.

00:04:28:06 - 00:04:53:09
Unknown
So he began to teach other people, studied, and eventually created a framework that many still use and adopt today. He is perhaps most well known as the author of The Warriors Way, which highlights what it means to be a warrior in life in the global climbing community, everyone knows our name. He's perhaps the most famous climbing performance coach.

00:04:53:13 - 00:05:18:21
Unknown
There is, so I know. Welcome to the pod. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Cameron. Appreciate you inviting me to participate here. Glad to be here. So tell me, are you've written about the Warriors way, and I hear the echoes of the warrior mindset. And from climbers all around the world who talk about it. How do you explain to someone who's never heard of the warrior mindset?

00:05:18:23 - 00:05:53:00
Unknown
What is it? I mean, first of all, we're going to interpret something like that in a certain way. So it's helpful to explain it because it can be misinterpreted based on how we refer to it. We have a specific definition for what it means to be a warrior, and that is, warriors are people who have made a conscious choice to live life courageously, exploring their inner and outer worlds, so that when they die, they leave the world a better place because they've lived.

00:05:53:02 - 00:06:35:05
Unknown
There's some important components there. First of all, this consciousness, like we need to be really aware about moving forward through the stressors of our lives, and that takes courage. And warriors are known for needing to be courageous, to move toward the enemy, to move towards threats, to deal with it. But it's a two pronged approach. It shares an internal journey as digging into our own psychology and then also applying ourselves and external stressors so that we can, I guess, prove that we know what we can do in that external environment.

00:06:35:05 - 00:07:03:05
Unknown
That's the testing ground. Interesting. I also love the reflection on After You Die. Yeah. And being able to look back. Being able to look back on our life. Maybe in my late teenagers, I think first time I heard someone talk about meditating on death and I was like, man, this is morbid. And then the more I kind of sat with it and the more I thought about it, the more it made me appreciate the time we have before it.

00:07:03:07 - 00:07:27:01
Unknown
And I really like how you've sort of added that into it there. How do you find that affects someone? First of all, that last part of that definition where we leave the world a better place because we have lived, that's just speaks to our desire for our lives to matter. Like we we want to impact others in the world in a positive way.

00:07:27:03 - 00:07:59:03
Unknown
I think that's innate for all of us. Whether we are able to do it or not, that's another thing. But I think that is something that is part of how we want to live our lives and how we want to be remembered after we die. So I think that's that's why that's in there, because we want to live our lives in ways that are courageous, that where we're meeting challenges, that brings more meaning and purpose to our lives, where our lives matter not just us, but other people.

00:07:59:05 - 00:08:28:07
Unknown
But to get to your other aspect of this, it's helpful to reflect on that. We're going to die so that we don't waste the present moment, because we we do all have a tendency to think that we're going to live forever. And then we spend a lot of time on things that are not important. And we make decisions about our lives that are not really moving us in the direction of what is meaningful.

00:08:28:09 - 00:08:56:04
Unknown
And I did that for many years, like I was describing for 20 years until I finally said, no, I need to do something more meaningful in my life that I can add value to the sport that I love. And you might say, contribute to it in that way. Yeah. Interesting. What would be the example of the opposite of a warrior mindset like you talked about?

00:08:56:04 - 00:09:35:21
Unknown
I guess not having a strong purpose there. How might someone realize that they are actually not in in that warrior mindset? I don't know that they would realize it because, see, it takes consciousness and awareness first. But to answer your question more directly, it would be the victim mindset. Okay, where we don't take responsibility for the circumstances of our lives and we blame other people for those circumstances, and we never move our life in a direction that's, you know, meaningful to us.

00:09:35:21 - 00:10:00:23
Unknown
That would be the opposite. Yeah. It's an interesting kind of conundrum you brought up there. But like the chicken and the egg, that denial we don't know. We're in a place until we've shifted out of it and we kind of reflect back on it. Do you feel like it often takes an event for people to have that moment of reflection or that moment of, oh, I need to change here?

00:10:01:01 - 00:10:35:07
Unknown
Yeah, that moment that you might say an awakening, right? I think the short answer is yes. We need to be shocked out of our status quo, out of our comfort zone, to start looking for a new path, a new direction. Because I think the reason for that is we have this very natural, comfort based motivation that that drives us everything we do is motivated toward wanting to be more comfortable.

00:10:35:09 - 00:11:01:13
Unknown
Everything from using Google Maps, you know, to find our way to a destination. Looking for the easiest way to how we design a product, to how we designed a syllabus to teach students to how we climb. We're looking for the easiest way, and without a goal, we go to the easiest way. But we end up nowhere meaningful. There's nothing wrong with this natural, comfort based motivation.

00:11:01:13 - 00:11:31:02
Unknown
In fact, that's really important. And we need to have a goal to give us direction so we can point it in the direction of the stress that will actually create work for us, that we can learn from and learn through to achieve something meaningful, our goals. Yeah, humans are such fascinating creatures. If we're too comfortable when we're sitting on a desert island for too long, it feels fantastic for a month or two, or maybe even a year.

00:11:31:04 - 00:11:55:15
Unknown
He will say that eventually chaos and self-destruction take over. Without that endpoint, that goal, that something to kind of cohere our resources and focus our attention on. Why do you think that is? For what reason do we need to have an event that shakes us out of ourselves to sort of evolve and grow? I mean, we don't always need that.

00:11:55:17 - 00:12:28:15
Unknown
A lot of people can learn of other people, but often to really embed that, that lesson, it's got to be experiential. Why do you think we're wired like that? Well, it does need to be experiential, right? I mean, one thing that's really important to me with this material is to be able to look at the world around me, look at it around us and see how it's working, and make sure that we're doing our living our lives and doing our mental training in the same way.

00:12:28:17 - 00:13:01:13
Unknown
Okay. So when I look around me, I see things grow. Anything that's alive grows okay. And so are we. As human beings, we also have this innate need to want to grow. And we do it physically. But from a mental training perspective, we need to be able to go through stress in order to learn and grow. It's just that in the comforts of our society, you know, a lot of that stress can be taken away.

00:13:01:15 - 00:13:23:18
Unknown
We can bypass it too easily. I think it really takes some awareness of this need to go through stress and then choose the stress that you would like to go through. Like I chose rock climbing and developing mental training program. It's helpful if we can choose something that we enjoy doing, so that's a stress that we have chosen.

00:13:23:20 - 00:13:49:17
Unknown
But then then to focus on enjoying it and learning from it so that we can grow. What got you fascinated in human performance? Was there just a turn of the key, or was it more just a kind of a natural progression for you? I don't know that I was really thinking of it as performance, so at the time it was looking for more meaningful work in something that I enjoyed.

00:13:49:18 - 00:14:21:11
Unknown
So that was the start of it. But when I started teaching people the method and saw that it had this impact on them, expert my motivation for continuing to learn more about it so that I could improve the quality of what I was delivering. So that was the start of it. And I guess the reason when we developed something new, we have to make choices about how we're going to approach it.

00:14:21:13 - 00:14:54:09
Unknown
For example, for me, I was I took this eclectic approach, in other words, reading widely, researching widely. Philosophy, religion and psychology, business management, whatever. You know, I was looking for core themes for how how the mind works, for how the world works to develop the this program. That motivated me even more for figuring out how to create this program.

00:14:54:10 - 00:15:16:02
Unknown
But one thing that really like your. Yes. And like what was the start of the this the Rock Warriors way? We got this word warrior in there. Right. So so I had this eclectic approach, but I also was really intrigued by this concept of a warrior. I am a veteran, so there's an aspect of that in my past.

00:15:16:04 - 00:15:43:03
Unknown
And I also was in my research, was finding that it's really doesn't have to be a violent approach, like when we need to live courageously in our lives, we don't have to act violently. What's important is, and a lesson that we can take from like traditional warrior is, is that they move forward toward the threat instead of retreating from it.

00:15:43:05 - 00:16:15:20
Unknown
And so the threat is really just stress, like we feel threatened when we're facing stressors. So it was really intriguing about this mindset of the warrior for a basis for mental training and how we need our challenges. And how do you coach people or trade people to move towards that threat? We teach it by making sure that they know exactly what to focus their attention on.

00:16:15:21 - 00:16:43:19
Unknown
A lot of it has to do with motivation. So what we do in our trainings is it's an underlying thread that we want them to shift as they finish the training, and that is that they shift more toward a balanced motivation balance between achievement, motivation and learning based motivation because we all have a tendency to be more achievement motivated.

00:16:43:21 - 00:17:02:01
Unknown
And I've struggled with this for a long time. I'm still struggling with it in my business. You know where I have this idea that I can be work really hard right now, and then at some point in the future, I'll be able to achieve what I've wanted to achieve, and I can rest and be in my comfort zone.

00:17:02:03 - 00:17:23:19
Unknown
And so we all have this natural tendency to seek that comfort in the future when we get these achievements. So we have this underlying theme that we want them to be more learning based, motivated. So they're in balance, but also to know exactly what they focus their attention on so that they can use their mind in a very practical way.

00:17:23:21 - 00:17:53:19
Unknown
And for those who might have heard this for the first time, can you explain a little bit more what achievement motive is and what learning motivation is? Yeah, certainly achievement motivation is we have these goals. We set goals that we want to achieve. It's like climbing a mountain or scaling a cliff, like in Yosemite in California. It's in climbing is can be very definitive like that.

00:17:53:19 - 00:18:22:01
Unknown
I want to climb that mountain or that cliff. And so that's achievement motivation. We were, in a sense, in our comfort zone, thinking about things that inspire us, that we want to work toward to achieve. Learning based motivation is all of the work and a struggle that's going to be required for moving toward the top of that mountain, to be able to achieve it.

00:18:22:03 - 00:18:54:12
Unknown
So we have this external things that we want to achieve. I want to achieve that mountain. But the the internal things that we achieve are the learning lessons of, you might say, struggling, learning how to struggle while we're working our way toward the summit. It's really why we teach the students that it's really important to know when to use your motivation, those different motivations, achievement, motivation before action, and then be learning based motivated during action.

00:18:54:14 - 00:19:24:10
Unknown
I love it because I really empowers the individual to choose their response over and above that conditioning. Something I just loved hearing you say was that as a marker for after they finish, they've got to show that they did. They more naturally choose a more learning, motivated, orientated approach. And it's more of, I guess, an experiential benchmark as opposed to a knowledge benchmark that might be easy to learn or recite.

00:19:24:16 - 00:19:54:01
Unknown
I think it's beautiful with so primed as human beings to react under threat. You know, as soon as that amygdala faces a threat, the ACC goes into kind of conflict monitoring mode and sympathetic nervous system goes into mild fight, flight or freeze. And the limbic system and our emotions and feelings go into overdrive. And with physical logically wired to recoil, to avoid and move away from perceived threats.

00:19:54:01 - 00:20:25:19
Unknown
And the brain doesn't always distinguish between what's real and imagined. So people listening to this might intuitively feel that, oh, when things are challenging almost. I don't have a choice. I face adversity or I face difficulty, and my body and my mind responds in the way it does. And the way you've laid it out is a really nice way to, from my perspective at least, bring back choice and autonomy and empowerment into that individual under those stressful situations.

00:20:25:21 - 00:20:58:16
Unknown
Let me build on that a little bit, Cameron. A lot of climbers, they say they love climbing because they're so focused, like all of their daily troubles fall away when they go to the climbing gym or to the crag. So climbing does that for us because of the seriousness of the situation. You might say it like it forces our attention in the moment because we we might be facing a fall or something like that.

00:20:58:18 - 00:21:32:18
Unknown
And so that's not the way we want to be mentally directed. We don't want to be forced to pay attention. So what we teach is a very intentional approach to, taking risks and how we focus our attention. So in this stop move cycle that we were talking about, for example, there are five processes that we do to focus our attention so that we can be successful mentally and physically in the climbing process.

00:21:32:19 - 00:22:00:15
Unknown
So for example, when we're stopped, we need to rest. We need to think about the risk to gather information. And then we need to make a risk decision. Then we need to move to climb. And then finally we might fall. So each one of those five have very specific things to focus our attention on. So that creates a very intentional approach to something that's challenging.

00:22:00:15 - 00:22:31:12
Unknown
Instead of letting the external environment force us to say focus, we want volition. We want to take command of the situation, so to speak, so that we can be that you might say to authors of whatever we're creating and having trained so many people over the years, what helps flip that switch to become that author, to become the creator?

00:22:31:14 - 00:23:12:15
Unknown
Well, it starts by having a very specific, simple structure to follow. When we take them through this instruction, they learn this stop move structure to five processes. And also a really important aspect of how they apply it, and which is in small steps with falling practice. For example, we take them into the practice in small steps where they can be less stressed so they can focus their attention better and improve their falling skill, improve their ability to fall with quality.

00:23:12:15 - 00:23:48:18
Unknown
You might say, which then diminishes the fears that are associated with it. And what's foundational to it is they actually want to be in this stressful experience. So flipping the switch really is about getting them to have an experience that if they do this in small increments and focus on the way we're guiding them, then they can have fun and in the stressful experience and they actually want to be there instead of not being there.

00:23:48:20 - 00:24:29:02
Unknown
And I guess those stresses almost stop becoming stressors once we want to be in that challenge. And where I guess inviting that difficulty, they stop becoming barriers where we add friction and become stress and they start becoming complexity or things of interest points, avenues for learning. They do. And it's a long journey. Like we're habituated, you know, all our lives, the way you've been describing as human beings, we have this natural biological response to stress, physiological, but also the mind's natural comfort based motivation.

00:24:29:02 - 00:25:02:13
Unknown
That's all about recoil, that's ingrained over many years and in our biology. So it takes an a long ongoing practice. Again, very intentional, consciously engaging stressors in these rock climbs so that we start being new kinds of people. We're able to actually change our neuroplasticity. I'm not a neuroscientist, but that's what's going on. Like we're actually changing how the brain is firing and how we're thinking about stress and how we then engage it.

00:25:02:15 - 00:25:29:10
Unknown
Oh, and from a neuroscientific point of view, we will create new pathways if we repeat it and we value it and we prioritize it. And this I love this kind of learning based philosophy of intelligent risk taking. And I love this sort of the art or practice of learning how to fall in a way that you can enjoy.

00:25:29:12 - 00:26:07:21
Unknown
You know, I often think we have a very similar relationship to falling as we do sailing. And most of us, so crippled with our challenge is or our ability to self-actualize or our ability to be our best, or we limit our own human performance because we have this friction to falling, friction to to failing. And for those that can't come and see you or can't access, climbing gym, I've got this vision in my head of people watching this and getting a mattress out and putting it on the floor and then falling back on.

00:26:07:21 - 00:26:37:04
Unknown
It's just a sort of experience that that response of when we fall and we get out of that comfort zone, there is that reaction. And from what you're saying, we really can learn to override that almost primitive reaction. If we think about learning something, we have to get out of our comfort zone. If we use a graphic, like if a comfort zone is like this, then the stress zone is outside of that.

00:26:37:06 - 00:27:01:20
Unknown
So when we get into the stress and focus on, you might say, processing that stress in the comfort, we're learning, okay, that indirectly expands our comfort zone. When we're in distress, we're not going to know if we're going to be able to achieve it or not, like failure is going to be part of it. Making mistakes is going to be part of that process.

00:27:01:22 - 00:27:36:09
Unknown
So a part of a mindset shift around failure is that mistakes and failures are actually not optional. They're actually necessary for growth. The whole trial and error process, you know, the scientific method, you know, it's all about trial and error. Error is part of the process. If we can see failures in that life that they're actually necessary, then I think we can start detaching a little bit from being identified with them and feeling like failures ourselves.

00:27:36:10 - 00:28:20:05
Unknown
Yeah, I love this kind of interplay between the challenge triggers achievement and motivation, which then triggers, relationship with failure. And then that dictates often our response, I guess, is super, super fascinating. What else do you feel holds people back, like across the board, seeing so many climbers wanting to improve, wanting to be their best, digging a little bit deeper into the fear of failure as another aspect of it that really holds us back is tying our identity to outcomes like to making progress or achievement.

00:28:20:06 - 00:28:47:18
Unknown
In other words, I feel good about myself. If I'm making progress in achieving, I feel bad about myself or feel like a failure if I'm not okay. So when we tie our identity how we feel about ourselves to those external outcomes, then in a sense this is an aspect of the victim mentality. We make ourselves a victim to the external situation, so we need to do something about that.

00:28:47:19 - 00:29:07:06
Unknown
In other words, if it's tied together, we need to find a way to break it apart, to separate it now so we can see the outcomes more objectively. A tool that we use, you know, to help climbers do that is to ask themselves two questions after an outcome like, what did you do well, and what do you still need to learn?

00:29:07:06 - 00:29:36:16
Unknown
When are you going to improve on so that they can be more curious about the actual objective content of that outcome, so that they can be curious about creating a new plan and applying themselves differently next time. So that's a really important aspect of you might say, creating a more internal locus of control rather than having this external victim locus of control.

00:29:36:18 - 00:30:11:00
Unknown
So that's one another one that's just foundational to mental training is we have a tendency again, to have our awareness hook to our thinking. We think we are our thoughts. And so when the mind is thinking and like we talked about before, it's comfort based, motivated, we're going to have thoughts that want us to escape the stress. And then if we don't have any separation to be able observer thoughts, then we just react to them.

00:30:11:02 - 00:30:35:04
Unknown
An important part here is to have practices that help unhook thinking from awareness, so that we can operate more from the aspect of aware ness, of what's going on in the mind, in the body, and so forth. And then consciously, intentionally choose the thoughts that we want to act on and the ones that we don't want to act on.

00:30:35:06 - 00:30:57:09
Unknown
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00:30:57:11 - 00:31:20:05
Unknown
It has been our privilege to support people in their endeavors, be a professional sounding board and give people the skills to be their best. Getting a flow coach is invaluable and for many, it has been life changing and we are here for you too. If you want your very own flight coach to maximize your own performance and satisfaction in life, simply go to Flow center.org.

00:31:20:06 - 00:31:52:13
Unknown
Today. It's simple thing we can observe like throughout the day is, noticing that moment when we realize we were lost in thought. It's like waking up from a dream. In other words, when we're lost in thought, our attention is just going along those habitual thoughts. Because a lot of the thinking that is going on when we're lost in thought is just habitual thinking.

00:31:52:13 - 00:32:17:05
Unknown
That's what the mind is supposed to do, what the brain's supposed to do. It's supposed to think for us. But attention gets lost in that. But there are times when we go like, wow, what was I thinking about? And we wake up to get our attention more in the present moment of what's actually going on in it, in ourselves, in our bodies and in the external world around us.

00:32:17:07 - 00:32:26:02
Unknown
And more somatic way of focusing our attention on.

00:32:26:03 - 00:32:55:07
Unknown
Uno points out that much of our inability to embody, in a warrior is because we are stuck in comfort based thinking, which continuously and often automatically conditions us to avoid stress. Take Naomi the surgeon, for example. She felt that her inner warrior was long gone. She was on the verge of quitting, and felt that her career and her life was mostly out of her control.

00:32:55:09 - 00:33:36:08
Unknown
Her in A Warrior Has only describes was absent not because it didn't exist, but because she was deeply habituated in comfort based thinking, blinded by her busyness and her narrative of being the victim, she couldn't see that her people pleasing behavior had tainted her interactions, causing others not to trust her, and her lack of self-regard stopped others, believing that she was capable by reshaping her reality from an external locus of control, meaning that who we are and what we do and how we feel is a consequence of the world around us.

00:33:36:10 - 00:34:09:09
Unknown
To reestablishing her internal locus of control, Naomi slowly started to understand that Naomi and only Naomi had the complete power to affect her life. With this insight, she was then able to start affecting, then managing and then optimizing her day to day struggles. Hannah suggests that we all need practices to unhook our thinking from our awareness. If we are not conscious of our thoughts, then our thoughts will control us.

00:34:09:11 - 00:34:38:10
Unknown
We need to intentionally choose the thoughts we want to act upon. Otherwise, the internal nature of our lack of control will feel external and our success in life will eventually feel out of reach, not in the destiny of our own hands. What have been the challenges for you in your career in creating a mental training program? I've had plenty of challenges in climbing and, gravitated toward what came natural to me.

00:34:38:10 - 00:35:09:10
Unknown
Like I said, like, is first the sense that were required, a lot of fear management really enjoyed that, you know, and so, you know, I got known for being able to deal with fear, you know, and have this whole identity created around, this, this skill that I had. So then when I started dealing with the challenges of developing a mental training program, realizing this construct that I developed around my identity had a lot of challenges.

00:35:09:10 - 00:35:37:18
Unknown
And deconstructing that to where I could see more of an authentic person, of who I am, rather than this ego construct about these achievements or how other people perceive me. And and then because of that, how was perceiving myself. So there were a lot of challenges around applying. I was learning about mental training, you know, of course, to create a program that would help other people.

00:35:37:20 - 00:36:01:21
Unknown
And what it required was me, walking my talk, like being able to apply it in my own life, looking at this stuff, the dirty stuff we can find, you know, in the hard stuff that we can find when we start digging into our limiting tendencies. So that was extremely challenging for me. It's important to realize that, you know, I haven't arrived even though I'm getting older.

00:36:01:21 - 00:36:29:18
Unknown
I have not arrived. Or, I don't have these kinds of challenges anymore. And it's simply a reason for that is all my life and I still struggle with this. I've had this mindset that if I just work hard enough now, then I'll be able to be comfortable in the future. It's like this tendency to strive for a future I think is going to be better than today, and I have a really strong work ethic.

00:36:29:18 - 00:36:53:07
Unknown
So that's that can be really helpful to do the work that we need to do. But it it can turn into a limitation where I it for me, it turned into being a workaholic. You know, it's like I just gonna work work, work, you know, and I get out of balance with my work play work life balance. And I never arrive to thing.

00:36:53:09 - 00:37:21:03
Unknown
And I consciously know this, but I still have a hard time finding this balance. But I have gotten better at it through the years because I have been consciously working on applying what I've been teaching in my own life. But this is something I really been struggling with still is. Instead of seeking a comfortable, squared away life and a future, find a way to enjoy today.

00:37:21:03 - 00:38:00:16
Unknown
Relax into the stress that I've chosen to engage today. Live for today with a goal still of where I want to go. Obviously fascinating something and something I really relate to. Well, I think it's especially difficult in an achievement setting, like running a business. So when we we put ourselves in a scenario where we need to work hard and we need to, we've got goals and we want to achieve things, and we've aligned those goals with altruistic gains and gains beyond our lifetime and those sorts of things that it can sometimes accentuate.

00:38:00:16 - 00:38:23:18
Unknown
That monkey inside me who wants to become a workaholic and go, go, go go go and hustle, hustle, hustle and head down and forget the present and it will all be worth it. Coming back to your phrase of becoming conscious and you know, one I want to sort of touch upon of you also talk about accepting responsibility in a performance context.

00:38:23:20 - 00:38:56:07
Unknown
It's really important to to take that responsibility in order to then embody the choice value, the presence and value, actually what's here and now. And and like you said, we will never arrive. And actually this moment is the arrival. It's the arrival. And I can still work hard but enjoy myself more on that journey of doing it. It goes back to the this both and structure of reality, right?

00:38:56:09 - 00:39:47:13
Unknown
If you're out of balance with work and life like I have been, and I'm working toward diminishing, you actually lose things that are in your outside of work, like relationships, activities like I haven't been climbing, like, regularly, like I usually would like to. Right. So we lose things that when we're out of balance like that. And so the accepting responsibility is we're going to perform, I think, directly related to the amount of responsibility that we accept about what we because it's when we do that we're increasing the amount of focus that we can direct toward a challenge.

00:39:47:15 - 00:40:19:16
Unknown
And it's foundational with accepting the situation as it is. Like, accept ING reality as it is accepting an outcome as it is being honest with ourselves about it, so that then we can apply ourselves, respond to that outcome, and improve our performance. The with whatever abilities we might have to apply to it. So it's it's really foundational for being able to take action to perform better.

00:40:19:18 - 00:40:50:11
Unknown
How do you think we get lost in not accepting responsibility? What would be an example of that? Yeah, I mean, an example would be like the opposite of a like blaming. Make an excuses, pretending that we're really working when we're not. I mean, in climbing where we make excuses about why we fell off, we blame it on to blame or we blame it on the weather or we blame it on we haven't been able to train enough or we blame it on the rock climb the holds, the climb sucks.

00:40:50:11 - 00:41:26:10
Unknown
It's like we're we're shifting the responsibility outside our selves with again. It shifts it away from our internal locus of control toward the external environment. When we do that, we just give away our ability to do anything about it. I feel like I've faced this situation all day, every day, really, whether it's playing with my kids and they catch me on my phone or I, I'm not present to them or something, or, and I'm caught up in this, but I've got all this stuff to do.

00:41:26:12 - 00:41:51:11
Unknown
And then if I come back to this one phrase, which I love, accepting responsibility, I've got a choice here about the quality of connection. I've got the choice here about how present I am in the moment, how am I performing right now? And I think lots of people might associate the word performing with some kind of sports or being on stage, but I see performing very much as in our performance, very much as our day to day actions.

00:41:51:11 - 00:42:18:09
Unknown
We perform our muscles and our brain perform when we have a conversation and so forth. Am I taking responsibility for the quality of my performance in that moment? And we might often blame these things on being tired or not having enough time. Or there's other things pushing and pulling our attention, but are we really accepting responsibility for our attention in any given moment?

00:42:18:11 - 00:42:42:10
Unknown
How do you help people take that responsibility by the reins, as opposed to being a nice concept, but actually apply it? Well, I ask them to to ask themselves those two questions when they have an outcome, because a lot of times we tend to blame the situation, blame something when we have an outcome that, shifts responsibility away from us.

00:42:42:11 - 00:43:18:03
Unknown
But when we ask ourselves, what did I do? Well, and what do I still need to learn? When am I going to improve here? Then that starts moving them in the direction for accepting the situation as it is, and then developing a plan for how they're going to respond to it. So I think that's the first part, but I think also I've gotten this feedback from people, readers of my books, that they would say something like, I knew this stuff, but when I read it, it seemed like it was just below the level of my awareness.

00:43:18:03 - 00:43:50:00
Unknown
But when I read it, it's, oh yeah, I do need to become more aware. I do need to accept responsibility. And then they start. Their curiosity is piqued so that they start catching themselves. When they're making excuses, they start catching themselves. When they're blaming something outside of themselves. And so I think it's the peaking of their awareness so that they can then catch themselves and be able to move in the direction of accepting more responsibility.

00:43:50:01 - 00:44:14:04
Unknown
And I guess taking responsibility for that, stopping our thinking, like I, like all other humans, have a tendency if something happens to suddenly create a manifested reality around it. This person's looked at me this way so suddenly they don't like me, and that means this, and that means that. And so I'm not getting this. So that means I'm suddenly never going to talk to this person again.

00:44:14:04 - 00:44:51:01
Unknown
And suddenly we've gone down a thousand steps on a road because our mind has run away with itself, created this kind of perspective, created rigid structure around it, and we find ourselves with an opinion, a value or a feeling or a state that we don't want to be in because our minds just gone down a rabbit hole. I think in the past I've heard you talk about a body awareness practice that you work with to shift the tension out of that thinking, which would be perfect for when we go down those rabbit holes and into the body.

00:44:51:01 - 00:45:19:01
Unknown
Can you tell me a bit more about that? Sure. To start, if we reflect on it, we can't act effectively on a lie. So if we're lying to ourselves by making excuses and blaming others, pretending situation is different than it should be, then we can't act effectively. It requires honesty and acceptance as a foundation. I mean the body awareness practices and becoming conscious as part of this really.

00:45:19:01 - 00:45:56:16
Unknown
Because if we can have practices like meditation or some of these body awareness practices, we can start unhooking our thinking from our awareness to be able to catch ourselves, to catch our mind when we get lost in these kinds of thoughts. Body awareness practice can be part of. It can be like a meditation. First, I guess we should define it a body awareness practice is where we're focusing our attention schematically in the body, and meditation can be that we can focus on the somatic sensations of the breath, like the belly in a chest rising and falling.

00:45:56:16 - 00:46:29:11
Unknown
And then let that be our point of focus. And then redirecting at to that when we get lost in thought some more dynamic body awareness drills, you might say, is a yoga or tai chi, some movement practice, for example. For me, I really doing a tai chi practice in the morning where I'm focusing on this body awareness, which is it's two dimensional inward and it's outward.

00:46:29:11 - 00:46:52:10
Unknown
So when I'm doing it, I'm focusing on my breathing, my my body posture, in other words, how I'm doing the movement and how, my senses are engaged in the external world. So what I can feel on my skin, the temperature, let's say I might be doing it outside, there might be a slight breeze, or it might be chilly or hot.

00:46:52:12 - 00:47:22:03
Unknown
And then what I can hear and then what I can see. So that engages my attention. And you might say a double arrowed way. What's going on inside me as I'm moving my body and, and the external environment as I'm passing through it. And I just keep my attention there as I'm going through the tai chi movements. And of course, I'll start thinking it's natural and I just bring it back to that.

00:47:22:05 - 00:47:53:03
Unknown
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please hit the subscribe or follow button. Every subscription helps me to spend more time making this show even more valuable for you, so please hit the subscribe button now. Okay, let's dive back in now. I've also heard you talking a bit about intellectual knowledge versus experiential knowledge. Yes. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

00:47:53:05 - 00:48:17:02
Unknown
Yeah. We have a saying in the training and that is that, you know, something when you experience it, not before. So if we consider our comfort zone again, we can understand it as the level of experience that we have. It's the amount, it's what we know because we've experienced enough of that kind of a situation to know it.

00:48:17:04 - 00:48:38:02
Unknown
When we look at what's in the stress zone, then we do have some intellectual knowledge about it. So for example, in climbing, I might be able to be comfortable climbing a certain grade, but then climbing the next harder grade. I know something about it, like, well, the holes are going to be a little smaller. You know, it's going to be more exhausting for me.

00:48:38:04 - 00:49:15:06
Unknown
I I'll probably fall off things like that, like I know some things about it, but I don't know it enough. Through experience ence to be able to, know how to navigate that difficulty of a terrain, I think it's really important to base our knowing on experience. I guess another really simple example is like falling again where climbers make a big mistake when there, and this is usually because they have limited falling experience.

00:49:15:06 - 00:49:44:15
Unknown
They're on a climb, it's steep and they're getting tired and they're facing a fall and they look down and they say, well, I'm just going to fall into I'm not going to hit any obstacles. And they're making that assumption not based on the funny experience that they have in those kinds of situations, but because they look down and intellectually they see, well, when you fall, you obviously just fall straight down and straight down.

00:49:44:15 - 00:50:18:22
Unknown
I just see air. When they experience enough falls, they realize that you don't fall straight down. You fall in arcs. In other words, you there's a little pressure, a little push out from the wall as you're leaving it, and it creates a pendulum into the wall that could injure you. So intellectual knowledge is sometimes not enough, and many times it's like the complete opposite of what's accurate.

00:50:19:00 - 00:50:47:01
Unknown
Another example is without a lot of falling, experienced climbers think that a shortfall equals a safe fall, and it's exactly the opposite. A shortfall creates a hard pendulum into the wall that can break an ankle or something. Whereas if you let the climber fall a little bit more by giving a proper catch, then it decelerates them into the wall so that they can be less likely.

00:50:47:01 - 00:51:20:07
Unknown
The engine themselves. So that's really what I why I really have this distinction between intellectual and experiential knowledge. I think it's such a important point because we are so as a society and as a modern species, we're so consumed with absorbing knowledge. Even our education systems are built more around the retention of knowledge, as opposed to experiential learning that might have more experiential competence and experiential knowledge.

00:51:20:07 - 00:51:44:11
Unknown
And I just listening to what you say, you know, how does that play out in day to day life if you're not a climber? And I think about the footballer who might be one on one with the goalkeeper and their mind says, oh, I've only got a foot to shoot the ball into and it's six minutes left on the clock, and if I make this, we win.

00:51:44:11 - 00:52:10:07
Unknown
And if I don't, we lose. The experiential knowledge might say, I need to keep dribbling and pull the goalkeeper out wide, and then I'm going to have a couple of meters to aim for, rather than a foot to aim for. Or the salesperson then who talks to someone. They've gone through the buying strategy of the points for that individual because there's no connection between them and the individual.

00:52:10:09 - 00:52:33:05
Unknown
They don't get that trust, and they don't get that kind of value added to the product, and the sale doesn't happen or the person starting the business. They've ticked all the boxes and done the recipe of what they should be doing. They've met, they've investors, they've got the product. So they've been to an accelerator, all these sorts of things, but it's just not taking off.

00:52:33:07 - 00:53:02:10
Unknown
And they may have no experiential knowledge of running a business or growing a business. And if someone came up to you today and they said, I know I need your help, I've got this big go, I really want to achieve it. How would you help them with their goal setting? And I would first of all, want to know why they want to achieve it and want to know specifically what it is and then what inspires them to want to achieve it.

00:53:02:10 - 00:53:45:21
Unknown
In other words, I want to get to some roots of is it just an extrinsic motivator or is an intrinsic motivator like, is there any learning and growth you know that's motivating them to want to move in that direction? That's the the I would want to know that so that they can set the goal. And then when we create a plan, we would be able to make sure we're structuring it so that they're doing things for their own sake, like there's going to be a lot of work involved, like we've talked about before, we need to be able to be willing to be in a stress, like to struggle well, to do it for

00:53:45:21 - 00:54:07:00
Unknown
its own sake. So I would want to structure their plan with that kind of a motivation flow unleashed. And I thank you so much for your time. I imagine it's pretty late where you are, middle of the day where I am. So what's the pretty late where you, Yeah. No worries. Yeah. I really appreciate your inviting me.

00:54:07:00 - 00:54:26:09
Unknown
I can't believe you're 70. Still looked like 50. Almost 70. Almost this much shy. Thanks for having me, Kim. My pleasure.

00:54:26:11 - 00:54:31:07
Unknown
Okay.

00:54:31:09 - 00:55:21:14
Unknown
This conversation with Arno sheds a light on how to unleash, inner warrior and the importance of taking responsibility for our mind to power and direct our attention and subsequent thoughts and actions. His statement that we are only going to perform to the responsibility that we have accepted is hugely powerful. For Naomi, this was certainly true. She became ruthless in taking responsibility for her moment to moment approach, her motivations and the thoughts she engaged in, and in doing so, she allowed her in a warrior to flourish, Naomi passed her final exams and looks back at her transformation as one of the greatest journeys of her life.

00:55:21:16 - 00:55:45:11
Unknown
No matter how much life may feel out of control, times, remember that if you take enough responsibility, you're in. A warrior is waiting to help you on your way. If you want to find out more about UN Eleanor, please visit the show notes.

00:55:45:13 - 00:56:16:11
Unknown
Thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed. If you enjoyed listening, please subscribe to get notified when our next episode drops. The more people that subscribe, the better I can make the show for you. Equally, please leave a review. Your review will go a long way to helping others find this spot. Until the next time, thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed.