[MUSIC] Hey there, my name is Shane Kraddock and this is The Interage Podcast where I share a different take on how to lead and live a sustainable high performance life. Over the course of different episodes, I'm going to challenge the belief that tension, stress, and struggle are essential to success and creativity. My experience is that there's an easier way, there's a better way, and indeed there's an essential way that we need to explore for the times that we live in. So let's go ahead, let's jump in and explore. [MUSIC] Hello there, welcome to The Interage with myself, Shane Kraddock. I hope wherever you are in the world, that you are in good health and in good form and that you are happy on all the more reason because today we're going to talk a little bit about happiness and the title, as you would have read, is unhappy about being unhappy. And this has been sparked by a couple of conversations in my work with clients over the last probably month. But this, what I'm going to tell you is kind of, it applies to, at some point this will come into the conversation with pretty much everyone that I work with. And I am under no illusion that this particular episode, I don't think it's the easiest one to actually maybe get at a deep level and there's different layers of depth to this particular point. Just being honest about it, and I've seen this myself in my own journey on the inner world around this point, around happiness. So let's the key point, I will just get into it and explore it a little bit, but this is probably one episode that I might encourage you to come back and listen to because I think every time you listen to this episode, I bet that you're going to hear something slightly different, and particularly if you're having a down day or a down period, you might be listening to this today, and maybe you're in gourd spirits, and I just don't know, maybe it'll hit you a certain way, maybe it won't. But I certainly when you're having an off day, and if you're human, you will have an off day, you'll have a down day, maybe down days, or like me, you know, down months when I was in the midst of my depression journey. And this was a key point for me about coming out of that. So let me explain a couple of angles around with the key point I want to get across today is that to be happier, it's vital that you don't get stuck in thinking about being unhappy. So when you move into a down mood or you're unhappy, I think the mistakes certainly that I used to make, and I see it with a lot of my clients. So this applies to everybody, it's a high performance thing, it's about getting the best out of yourselves. You're a leader, you're a parent, you're just a human being looking to do better in your own world. This is a really, really vital point. So what I'm saying is to be happier, don't get stuck in thinking about being unhappy or reacting to being unhappy. So what does that mean? So one of the clients, and it's a very common thing amongst achievers who have got to the top of a ladder, the ladder being a particular journey, and I'm thinking of one person in particular again, it could be anybody really. But when I was chatting to them initially at a first session, I said, "What are the different problems that came out?" And then he came out with his phrase, "I'm actually unhappy about being unhappy." And I said, "Oh yeah, tell me more." And he said, "Well, look, I've been honest, I've got everything pretty much that most people would think you'd need to have a good health, a nice family, a great relationship with my wife, we've no financial concerns, we're debt free, we live in a lovely house, my business is doing fantastic and I'm still not happy." And I'm really unhappy with the fact that I'm unhappy because I swallowed, like it really does, the belief that, hang on, when you get what you want, then you're going to be happy. And of course, that is one of the greatest myths that the whole world has bought into, really. I did it, too. And the myth is that when I get X, then I will feel happy, or peace of mind, or whatever phrase you want to use. And the problem is that the mind, you see, will decide, well, when we get to there, then we will feel a certain way. And that is just not true. And most people don't believe us, they just say, "Oh no, that's not going to be me." When I get there, I will feel happy, but what they don't realize is that if they're still believing that you are your mind, then you're going to fall into the nature of the mind, which is that it always wants more. And then when you get unhappy as this client's, his mind then goes, because he's still believing in his mind, his mind goes, "Oh, I'm not happy, does something wrong, I'm missing something, so what's wrong with me?" And then it gets into analyzing it through the intellect, and it starts reacting to it. And because it's kind of taken that road or that path, it's going to create more problems. And that's why you end up getting unhappy about being unhappy, which will lead to you feeling perhaps stuck, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, because you're kind of going, "Oh, hang on, I did all this work, I worked all this, did all these things, worked hard, did X, Y and Z, made sacrifices, and I'm still not happy, what am I missing?" What's wrong with me? So the problem is that it's not an intellectual thing to solve. It's more of an awareness or an understanding thing of how your inner world works. It's why I'm so passionate about what I do, because it's really about awareness. That's why I wrote the book The Inner CEO, because to me, The Inner CEO is not an intellectual thing, even though you have to kind of cultivate and communicate with the intellect, so it kind of goes with you. But The Inner CEO is really the observer that might be called witness consciousness or almost just kind of a state of real mindfulness, and when I kind of saw that myself on my own journey, that allowed me to step out of my depression, because I didn't realize that it's one thing to feel down and everybody feels down. What was causing my depression for me was that I was unhappy about being down. I was reacting to feeling down. I was reacting to my thinking about feeling down, so it just made it worse. And if you believe that you're mine, if you believe that you're thinking, that's a problem. Once you realize that, "Oh, hold on. I have a choice. I don't have to believe that. I don't have to react to it." Then it changes the game. It's a total game-changer. For me, when I was coming out of that depression, my initial thing was, "Well, let's focus on improving my mood," which I will talk to clients about, because there's certain things you can do to improve your mood, like you can do more exercise, you can practice meditation, mindfulness, you can do visualization techniques, you can work on your emotional stuff, you can do some therapy, you can take yoga retreats, and all of that would help, and it did help me. But it didn't really solve the problem, because the problem was, I was still in my mind. I still believe there was my mind. So eventually then, at some point, because I'm human, the inner climate changed, and I got down again. But then I was thinking, "Well, hang on. I know all this stuff now, and at this point, I was probably working in the industry that I'm working in now, helping people, helping leaders." And my mind was like, "Well, you're the guy that's helping people stay up and be high performers. You shouldn't be feeling down." So essentially, I was now locked in my thinking about myself, about feeling down. Slow with me. This is what I meant about listening to this particular episode, maybe a couple of times or marketing for future listening again, when you moved shifts, but it was when I realized that I didn't need to react to my thinking about feeling down, that actually, "You know what? It's okay to feel down, and experience feeling down, and not react to us." And bizarrely when you're like that, it tends to pass through you quicker and move on. The weather, the internal weather, the inner climate seems to shift when you just experience your mood as is, and not get caught up in reacting about it, or get caught up in the thinking that sometimes comes with a low mood, or being unhappy. Again, like the mind will come in and say, "Oh, you should be up. You shouldn't be down." I mean, the reality is that being unhappy is inevitable, I think, feeling down is inevitable. I mean, for me, the game changer realizations, and I've seen this, thankfully, firsthand with my clients as well, is that when I realized that, "Okay, the biggest problem was when I saw that how I felt was directly related to my thinking, not to circumstances." That was the first thing that was a major game changer, realization. I realized that how I felt, how I feel, is 100% directly related to my thinking, 95%, not 99%, 100%. And then the second point, which you would have heard me talk about a lot over these episodes, was that I'm not my mind. I have one. I'm the awareness observing my mind. I'm the awareness observing my thinking, which, if you're new to this, would probably say, "I'm wacky," but to me, it's very practical. It's very human, and the bottom line is, it seems to work, because I see it working with other people, not just me in my deluded state. The reality is that if you're unhappy, it's because you're locked into your mind, and you're human. It'll still happen to me. I come out of it quicker, though. And what I'll always say to people is, "Listen, move into that inner-ceo position." What does that mean? Well, it's just to realize, again, that you're the observer of your mind, you're the observer, you're thinking, "Move into that position," you come to witness to it, and also realize that actually reacting to your mood or to how you feel, if it's negative, is actually a bigger problem. That's why I'll often say, "It's not so much situation, it's the problem," it's not even the thinking about your problem, it's the problem. It's thinking about your thinking of the problem, generally is what causes the issues. I did say, I did warn you, this is going to be perhaps a little bit confusing, but that's honestly how I see it. If you get unhappy about being unhappy, you're definitely going to likely get stuck in a very low mood. At the extreme, it could be depression, but for a lot of people, it just could keep a low mood hanging around, distorting, I suppose, the way you see the world, the way you experience your life unnecessarily, leads to cloudy thinking, lower-level thinking. It seems also to me that it seems to lower your IQ, you're not a smarter intelligent, and as I say, being okay with being unhappy or being down, bizarrely, that seems to lift quicker because you're not—it doesn't have a hold on you, and I think you see this in a natural way with kids, is that before they kind of get caught up with the conditioning of the world or how we see life as adults, you see with children that when a mood comes in, it'll come in and it takes them over, but then they very quickly move out of it, and that's something that's innate. So what about you? Have I lost you? Are you still with me? Or can you relate to what I'm saying? We—you're listening to this today and you're in a good mood, you're happy. The reality is at some point that that will change. Somebody will say something or something will happen that you don't like, so you will obviously get the chance to experience what I'm talking about. Or maybe you're listening to this and you're feeling down or you're unhappy about something or someone, and maybe you could experiment with stopping the thinking about them, and more importantly, stop thinking about your thinking, stop reacting to it, just experience it, let it go, see it for what it is. That's what a transient feeling that's been created by someone happy thinking. So I'll close that with this point that, look, everybody from my experience can be unhappy because they're human, we're human, but bizarrely, the more you're okay with that and don't react to it. The quicker you move back to, I think, your natural state, which is being happy. That's it for this week. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
