Stories Behind the Story with Better Reading

Stories Behind the Story: Mitch Wallis on fostering meaningful and empathetic conversations

Mitch Wallis talks to Cheryl about his personal journey, the challenges of vulnerability, particularly for men, and the importance of deep connection over transactional interactions. His latest book Real Conversations is out now.

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Duration:: 49m
Broadcast on:: 06 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

This is the Better Reading Podcast platform with stories behind the story, Jane's Be Better podcast, my book chat with Caroline Overington, and more. Looking for a particular podcast? Remember, you can always skip to it. Welcome to the Better Reading Podcast, stories behind the story brought to you by Belinda Audio. Listen to Belinda audio books, anywhere, everywhere. Hi, this is Cheryl Arkel from the Better Reading Podcast, stories behind the story. We talked to authors about how they came to tell us their story. Mitch Wallace, welcome to Better Reading. It's absolutely awesome to be here. Yeah, no, it's a real pleasure because this is a topic I'm very, very interested in, and for people that know me, is I'm a talker. Now, I don't know whether that's the right thing to be, but I love a conversation. So what do you think about you has drawn you toward a conversation being something that allows you to grow a relationship instead of shrink from one, because not everyone is a conversationalist, right? Not everyone wants to be seen and known, is that something that appeals to you? Now, I'm going to run the risk of sounding old here, and I am old, but I feel as though with modern technology, we are talking less, and I know you address some of this in your book, but even in the workplace, and I've got a great team, and I love them, but sometimes they're in a muddle through email, or they're in a muddle through text. Now, for me, pick up the phone. Let's get a conversation going, because I think one, it's clarity, and two, it's a human voice, that you don't get that tone in an email and a text. And also at school, I think every report had talkative, too talkative, talkative, too talkative, and I use that to launch my career. Well, there's a few things you're touching on there. One is that a lot of the time our curse is our gift, and our gift is our curse, and it's all about chopping the thorns off the rose bush as opposed to trying to rip up the plant from its base and throw it away. Like, for example, OCD, in retrospect, was the reason that I excelled in my previous career at Microsoft, and could distill infinite pieces of research to write this book down to a really digestible five-stage framework. So like yourself, talking is something that when not ushered into the right context and situation might be seen as a deterrent, a distraction, or something that you would get in trouble for. But it is, in fact, the launch part of your career, and probably the most infectious part about why your friends love you. Yeah, thank you. I think that that's true, actually. I feel as though, you know, I'm a good communicator because I talk, you know, but anyway. Firstly, I'm going to introduce you, actually. I like launching straight in. Right. Mitch Wallace is a leading psychology thought leader and founder of the mental health movement, Heart On My Sleep, which I've got to say, I just love the name of that because I use that term a lot too, because I do. I'm a crier. There you go. I'm just showing, for those that are listening, I'm just showing my tattoo on my arm of the heart on my sleeve. I think for me, Heart On Your Sleep shows that you have empathy. He also created Real Conversations, a program fostering emotional intelligence in workplaces and schools. An accomplished keynote speaker, Mitch has spoken at major companies like Amazon and Google and holds a master's degree in clinical psychology from Columbia University. He has over two decades of lived experience with mental ill health. So he's here today to talk about his latest book. It's called Real Conversations, and it's a five-step guide for how to better connect with people around you. It really is a topic that I like to talk about firstly, though. For me, you look like you're not old enough to have had this experience. You're so beautiful and young and fresh-faced. Tell me how you got to where you are. Yeah, good question. So to address that, just right up front, it's something that I went in with a lot of insecurity about to the corporate world because partners at KPMG have trained a thousand alone just in Australia. These are some of the most risk-adverse, intelligent, high-paid people in our country. I've also been flown around the world on multiple continents to take sea level execs through this program. When I first stand up in front of the room, I'm like, I know I look like Justin Bieber, and I'm here to talk to you about leadership. I think at the start, I have to prove myself pretty quickly, but I like that challenge. Hopefully, what usually happens is in the first five or 10 minutes, they go, this guy is not up himself. He's coming in from a humble lived experience. He's gone and done the hard yards with the academic side, and he just has proven track record on being able to deliver this at big brands with data to back the capability change. I think more than anything, sometimes people will say, you're a mental health expert, but you're not a registered psychologist. You only have a psychology degree. I said, well, 20 years of doing something every day is going to make you pretty good at it. I've been anxious and depressed every single day for two decades. In the book, I touch on in the first chapter how I had a life threatening moment where I was ready to end it all, but that wasn't just I was a bit stressed at work. I had an argument with my girlfriend. It was from the age of seven years old, knowing that something was very wrong, because my mum would see me doing strange behaviors around the house, like tapping things over and over and lights, which is. I remember one time, I don't know why this is etched in my mind, but I was sitting on my bedroom floor and I could feel the carpet beneath my toes and my mum had just dropped in my washing, my laundry to fold. There was this sock that I was folding on itself over and over and over again, and the intrusive thought was saying that if you don't get this fold completely right, your mum is going to die of cancer today. When you don't have OCD, because people think it's just like a straightening tendency, but it's actually the most debilitating thoughts in the world that make you believe that it is so, it's as true as we are speaking into microphones right now, and the consequence of not obeying this amplified dictator voice in your head is just catastrophic, so you are a slave to it until you end up breaking the cycle like I did eventually. What age were you diagnosed? Yeah, so I remember when my mum took me to the doctor, I remember the doctor's office, I remember exactly where I was sitting, when they first said you have acute obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety, and obviously as a prepubescent, I had no idea what that meant, I just walked out the front, looked up at my mum, who to this day is still my best friend, and I asked her why is my brain broken, and she just started to cry, because she didn't know what to tell me, and she didn't know what to do, she had me at 23 years old, she was a professional horse riding instructor, my dad and her got divorced when I was two, so she was a kid raising a kid and just knew to love me, and a lot of this book is devoted to her, because she was the ultimate psychologist without any training, because she didn't try and fix me, and any of that, she just loved me deeply, and that was eventually my life raft that would bring me to shore, and so a lot of this book is devoted to not underestimating how care is the ultimate service, it's the ultimate help, and how so often we walk away from these hard conversations, particularly when it comes to emotional pain, and we feel negligent if we haven't imparted the perfect piece of wisdom or solution, when in fact this whole book is 260 odd pages of me imploring you not to give advice, in fact it's the single thing I'm asking you to stop doing, and actually just lean in and sit in the mud with someone, because it's when people feel heard, understood, less alone and less confused, less guilty, that actually all their own capabilities and healing mechanisms will come to the fore, and they will get better, you just have to believe in them and love them. That's beautiful, so tell me about your career path, because when we're little, like you know, when I was little I thought I wanted to be a teacher until I realized I didn't like children, had to change paths, still a teacher kind of, you're an enabler of education through this podcast, yeah, yeah, but little kids, you know, and I mean that is a question often asked of children, I mean I know I do it myself with my nieces and nephews and whatever, but you know where we end up, like where you've ended up, where I've ended up, for me, well you're younger than me, but for me I think that I've finally landed in my last trimester of life, you know, I'm doing something that I love, and I really have embraced that and I feel very lucky, so tell me how you got to where you are now, from that little boy walking out of that doctor's office, to where you are now. The shortest answer from me, how did I survive pretending? I got very good from that afternoon onwards at putting on a brave face and making everyone believe that I was this kid who had his shit together, so you know, if we look at the Instagram lens of what would play out post that day, my mum would end up meeting my stepdad, we would move to Mossman, which is a beautiful part of Sydney, from having no money to now having a stable family environment, material affluence, at high school I had lots of friends, I was one of the popular kids. Were you a good friend? Yeah, I was a good friend. It's a double-edged sword, it's so funny, it's such a good question. On the way here I was reflecting on how I am not close to many of my high school friends anymore, and for a long time that hurt until in my late 20s and early 30s I found a new tribe of men who were probably a bit more heart orientated and conscious, and you know, we tell each other, we love each other all the time, how can we support our own business ventures, and whereas I think my high school friends, I was a good friend and they were a good friend to me, but as a young man who's sensitive, it's risky. I was at an all-boys rugby school, so... Did you play rugby? Yeah, and not very well, but I did. I was quite athletic, but I was more into like squash and other things, and performing arts, like speaking, musicals, etc. And so bit creative, sensitive kid, and I didn't know how to wield that at the time, and I think it was kind of weaponized a little bit against me, but despite that I still was kind of the life of the party, and yeah, in my HSE, I earned the marks to get into Sydney Uni, and I was doing an undergrad in commerce. So you studied hard? Yeah, I was always very academic. I was, you know, one of the... Does that defy that whole diagnosis? I mean, I don't understand that, like the correlation between that and being academic. I think the academic part was more, I felt completely imperfect and broken, and so because I had natural talent in the schoolwork, I could overcompensate from a complete lack of identity and complete lack of self-love by getting validation for hitting good marks. Yeah, wow. So it was... I didn't even think after a certain point I was actually that intelligent, it was that I got obsessed with feeling worthy from achieving. Yes, because there's a lot there with that, isn't it? Oh, so much. I mean, being in the corporate world, if I look around nowadays, most big companies are hiring specifically for a type overachieving neurotic perfectionists. They're the best employees ever because they're their worst enemy, so you don't have to drive them hard because they'll be driving themselves too hard. So yeah, I think, you know, high school was normal, quote-unquote, and then see in the university, I was DJing on the side, so I was kind of living this ultimate party life, and I was in... I can see you as a DJ. Thank you. Where's Wallace? DJ, where's Wallace? I love it. Right? Love it. So, funnily enough, because I found my love of marketing. And did you love where's Wallace? Yeah, I did. I did. And you know, last name's Wallace, so it's kind of like the trifecta. Yeah, I like it. But yeah, after the degree... Sorry, during the degree, I saw this internship come up at Microsoft, and I thought, "Wouldn't that be wild if I got a job there?" Because my stepdad had worked their decades prior, and my mum, in her tenacious way, wanting to get us out of a very little money lifestyle, being a horse rider, in her younger years applied to get into the technology industry in a sales role, where she kind of fought her way up. So, she worked at Microsoft too, decades prior. Is that where they met? They didn't meet at Microsoft. They met through a friend who worked at Microsoft. Okay. Yeah, so it's been incestuous, really, that company for me. But funnily enough, I was the youngest intern in Australia. I got the job and worked my way up, finished my degree, came back, went through the grad program, and then kind of just went all in. I was, again, talking to me about going to Columbia. That's to come. Oh, that's to come, right? Yeah. So, I went all in on the career part because of the complete thunderstorm that was happening internally. Now, I'm going to paint the parallel path after I've painted some of this external path. This is just what people were seeing, climbing the ladder. By the age of 25, I got tapped on the shoulder to move over to the states to be a global product manager. So, Surface, which is their computer, which was a big deal because Microsoft had always made software, and they were now going to go up against their partner ecosystem in HP and Dell and Samsung and say, "We're going to make the actual frame." But this was cool, because it was the new exciting team within this huge incumbent business. So, I packed my bags and went over there and got to work on some of the coolest, should-ever, like making a keyboard that's wrapped in Ferrari interior, and then flying to Milan. And I'm being responsible for driving that team at Design Week to host a party with Vogue, Italia, and insane. I was doing private demos to Robert Downey Jr. and insane life. I drove a sports car and flew business class, and I didn't even know who I was. The sports car. I like that. I just get just flew business class. Yeah, the whole package, right? Oh, I can see it. I can see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole, this is what I should be doing narrative as playing out on full blast. And like, you know, best life ever. Right. From the outside. Well, from the outside. Absolutely. I don't look at you and thought, "Oh, there we go." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so it was about the time in the States where I was a year into my stint at Microsoft. So, for chronological orders sake, I'm 25 at this point. I'm 34 in real time, but I'm 25 at this point in the story. I am really busy at work, and I'm living away from home. But more than anything, my coping tools were not sticking. And I think that was because your mid 20s is one of those windows where you start to have existential questions that become immutable, like who am I? Because you're looking for identity. Yeah, you're looking for identity. You're looking for purpose. You're starting to realize that what you thought life was, perhaps wasn't as architecturally accurate as you expected, because there's emotions that are supposed to be there, but they're not by that point. You know what I found too, when I was paving my way, and I was working at a big publisher, and I was marketing the DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. So, yeah, wow. But I was deeply lonely because I was working all the time, and I lost my connections. Yeah, to use that word lonely is such a massive issue at the moment. My charity heart on my sleeve is tripling down on that as a dedicated issue. You'll be happy to know that the New South Wales government just announced a royal inquiry into loneliness, and they're about to put it on the agenda. So, yeah, like many people. Apparently, it causes more deaths than smoking. 15 cigarettes a day, it's equivalent to. Wow. Yeah. And the misconception with loneliness is you don't have anyone in your life. When that's not true, it's that you don't feel understood. It's quality, not quantity. And a lot of this book, you know, when we come to it at the end, a lot of this book is about how to build quality in relationships and understand someone, not just for what they do, but who they are. And that nuance, you know, we were talking offline off air about the difference between talking and connecting. Talking is, what are you up to? What did you do today? Connecting is what's important to you as a human and why. And people can go an entire marriage without actually knowing each other. They just know what each other does, know who each other is. You can go 10 years working in a company and your manager not actually know what makes you tick or not actually know that you're feeling depressed because your dad just died or whatever that is. And I believe that the answer to the globe's greatest threat at the moment, which is suicide, more real connections, because scientifically speaking, supportive relationships are nature's greatest anti-inflammatory antibiotic and medicine. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile unlimited, premium wireless. Get 30, 30, get 30, get 30, get 30, get 20, 20, get 20, get 20, get 20, get 20, get 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month. So give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabyte CD tail. It took a lifetime to find the person you want to marry. Finding the perfect engagement ring is a lot easier. At bluenile.com, you can find or design the ring you've always dreamed of with help from blueniles jewelry experts who are on hand 24/7 to answer questions and the ease and convenience of shopping online. For a limited time, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more with code listen@bluenile.com. That's $50 off with code listen@bluenile.com. I want to go back to Korea path, but before we do that, do you think COVID played a part in that as well? Yeah, definitely. It pushed people into understanding mental health maybe for the first time ever. Am I anxious? Am I depressed? Am I lonely? Which was kind of a beautiful equalizer as much it was really, really difficult. It expanded the appreciation of the common person. However, I don't think we've taken the learnings from that and applied it. We've kind of gone back to BAU, which is a missing opportunity. I think we took nothing from it and we just went back to exactly what we were and we had an opportunity for change in so many ways, environment, conservation, so many ways and we did nothing. Yeah, I think people were looking for relief. They weren't looking for growth, which is a missed opportunity. Okay, back to Korea path. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm in America at this point and I'm sinking, I'm drowning and I'm in Seattle at this point. I'm trying to keep my head above water and I can't. This is the ironic part. So I was so determined to not seek help. I was so determined not to have a conversation about my mental illness and to hide and to keep up the bullshit show on the outside and the pretending. Tell me how it played out. I was so determined to do all that, that I applied to do my master's degree in clinical psychology so that I wouldn't have to talk to a psychologist. I didn't want to face the music. So I thought, I'll just lift up the curtains and figure it out. I'll help myself. Yeah, in the first hour of the first day of class that I took and you leave it from Microsoft to start this degree, I was like, oh, this is what I was put on the earth to do. Like without a doubt. It was it. I can still feel it in my heart today. It was this whole body realization that this is your calling. This is what your pain has been for. It's now your responsibility to transmute this into purpose. Now, I thought that would be this beautiful awakening and this golden path would unveil. No, no, no, I would then break into a million pieces. What I didn't, I thought it was the end, but it was actually the beginning because there was so much shit that was stuck in the plumbing that I needed to release if I was ever going to be helpful to someone else. And I slowly descended into a path of suicidality and psychosis after that moment. Okay, and then what happened? Well, in the first, in the first chapter, and on the first page of this book, I talk about that rock bottom moment where I was walking along the jetty in Portage Bay and kind of looking at my reflection, knowing that I could let go now. And this could all be over. And I heard this murmur, this ripple across the water that came from the loudspeaker of my phone where my mom said, I love you and I'm here. And it was another reminder that she's never left. She never will leave. And we've gotten through a million hard times before. And this is the defining moment around like, am I really ready for this challenge? Because something in my bones knew that it was all going to be okay. And I would devote my life to this. I just needed to hang on. And I stepped back from that jetty and I walked back across the road and I sat down and had another real conversation with my mom like we usually did. And that evening, the miracle happened where I found this video online that ended up saving my life of a guy in his bedroom sharing his story and wearing his heart on his sleeve. And it was the first time ever that I felt understood. And I realized that so much of the pain I was carrying was actually just shame. It wasn't OCD, depersonalization, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, all these things that I was going through were very solvable and manageable. The part that around that that isn't solvable and manageable is feeling like you're broken and feeling like you're crazy and you're a bad person. Shame, shame, shame, shame. And there's only one antidote to that, which is love and care. We've been shown so many times that third world nations have a higher happiness index than first world nations, despite a lower standard of living. But do you think that's about work as well, that you're working hard, you're working long hours, like expectations in terms of work, particularly pre-COVID, were really long hours. I mean, I remember working at this place and I was so miserable and a friend of mine came to pick me up one day after work. And she said, Cheryl, you know what, you're an abusive relationship with your workplace. And she said, yeah, because you can't say no. And I thought, that's so interesting, isn't it? Question, do you think it's you couldn't say no to them because of them or you couldn't say no to them because of you? Both. Well, that was the culture. People were doing those hours and I wasn't strong enough to push against that. And you're young, you know, at the time I was trying to find my way, I was trying to be something. Absolutely. I think, you know, what you're speaking into is the heart of boundaries, which is module five of this book, we talk about attachment style and how that's playing out in every conversation and interaction in your life, and that no is a full sentence. And we've never really given ourselves permission or our family or society has never role-modeled to us that we're allowed to have limits. And at what cost is the lack of limits playing out in our everyday life? It's huge. And I propose some potential ways to explore. Okay, let's go through your proposal. Let's go through the top line. Do you want anything more about my story? I would like more about the story. Okay, all right. You can keep pulling on it. Okay, I can. Okay. All right, let's go. Let's keep teasing it out. So I'm just trying to be mindful. That's all. No, no, no, I thank you. And we definitely will get to the book, but I'm also conscious that this podcast is about the story behind the story. And so I want to make sure that I'd love to. I'm giving you exactly that. Okay. So I mentioned this video, right, this guy, and what that guy, Harris, who I've never met or spoken to, this random gentleman on the internet, what he represented to me was the ability to let go of a false narrative that I'd been carrying for a very, very long time. And I always say that mom was like her real conversations with a life raft that kept me afloat. And Harris's story was like the wave that nudged me into the shoreline. By no means was it just this sweeping brush of catharsis, but it enabled me to get to dry land, stand up and then do the work that I'd been avoiding my whole life, which was going to therapy and working on my attachment style and putting things into perspective around a life narrative and understanding my childhood and giving stories back to the generations before me that I was holding on their behalf and making changes to my lifestyle and chemistry and starting an antidepressant. That's a lot for a young guy. Oh, I went through it. But, you know, I talk about this more in my next book, which is not around connection, but around resilience about how we think that the work is easy. It's not, you know, as a keynote speaker, I'm one of the top booked wellbeing speakers in Australia now, which is crazy because I come in and I give it pretty direct. You know, I'm not the guy that's like, walk around the block a little bit, meditate and drink more water, and you'll be fine. Because it doesn't work. The real, if it feels good, you're not healing. You're band-eating. Healing is hard. That's why I go into the gym and lifting weights. It sucks. Sometimes, you know, you have to tear your mind muscle in order for it to grow. And that's kind of what I began to do is that journey of truly inside out excavation. And the one thing I can say, looking back on my life and then what I validated eventually through my master's degree in psychology is that, yeah, connection is the greatest medicine that we have. And even if you look at PTSD patients, people who are more symptomatic in life and less symptomatic in life when exposed to the same trauma, the main variable of that will be how loved and cared about they were before, during and after that event, not the size of the event. When you look at quality of life and happiness studies, Harvard's 85 year longitudinal study showed that there was no bigger influential factor on happiness than who you had in it, who you had in your life, more than socioeconomic status, job satisfaction, purpose, all that stuff. I write in the book, go to your nearest cemetery. Look on the gravestones. No one remembers you for anything other than your relationships. So we have lost the art of connecting and we've just gone into this information exchange era from the head, not the heart. And what I'm trying to propose in this book is like, how do we get back to sitting in the mud with someone and not running away? And can I just interrupt there and ask you an agenda question? Yeah. And I don't know if I have this right, but just from what I've read, more young males suicide than young females, is that right? Yeah. So men take their life three to four times more than women, but women attempt their life more than men. And they suffer mental health issues at about the same rate. So essentially men go on to suicide mostly because they think more black and white and are less able to seek help early or see the nuances in hope and belief. Whereas I think females, based on the statistics, are better at looking at the nuance, being able to decipher temporary versus always on pain. And they're willing to be vulnerable to their community faster. I thought it was going to be more about, because I didn't know that, but more about connection, because I feel as though, and this is a gross generalization, but just with the group of people that I know, women are better at forming friendship groups than men. I don't know what the research is behind that. And anecdotally, what I would say is, men are really good at bonding around activity. Whereas women are really good at bonding around each other. I think the latter has more resilience salience to it, because it has a deeper sense of understanding. Like, if you take golf away, or if you take drinking away, if you take something away from men, this kind of convening entity that becomes like you're left with the vapour of a lack of true depth within relationship a lot of the time. Interesting. Okay. So to kind of tie a knot on my story, I ended up having one life goal after this massive breakdown, and this realization that psychology was my purpose, and it was to get well enough to be harassed, this random dude for someone else. And to then, after sharing my story, fulfill a lifetime of having a mum that was there for me indefinitely, and had real conversations with me and teaching people the magic moments in gold and dust from our relationship. So I went down to my local beach, got a video camera as I was crawling out of this hole on May 30th, 2017, and I stared down the barrel of it and said, "One guy's ability to share his vulnerabilities for the sake of someone else not feeling alone saved my life." And he is the same from me. Went to bed that night, woke up the next morning, that video had gone viral, and people around the world started tattooing hearts in their arms and sharing their story. And now we're a leading mental health initiative, which I'm happy to be the founder of. And off the back of that, I started creating the bones of real conversations six years ago, and delivered it as a workshop, and then it just grew and grew and grew. And it was time to put it into a book, and Pantera Press thankfully saw the potential in what this could do in this format. And I'm so happy for it to be finally on shelves, because so much of this content has been locked into the business world, because it's just been a program. Whereas the beautiful thing about a book is its legacy, and it will live and breathe forever to whoever. Well, and also, I think too, particularly about this book is the connection and the empathy that we feel, I feel, I heard your voice, right, in a nonfiction book. It doesn't happen, and without happens usually in fiction. Yeah, that's great feedback, especially from someone whose job is to be surrounded by literature. I'm glad that my tone and my personality shone through, especially like, I had no idea how to write a book. Well, it makes more authentic, that's right. I was just like, you know, I did a bit of a recce on what nonfiction books have really helped craft my understanding of the world and mental health, and looked at their tonality, their style. It's kind of like speaking, right? I've never had an official speaking course. I did it a bit when I was younger, but I'm a professional speaker, and I'm now an author. But I said this to someone at the end of the other night, they said, what do you do? And I said, I guess on paper I'm a speaker and an author and an educator, but they're just a byproduct of the means of expressing who I am, which is a psychology student, an explorer of the mind. It just so happened that I use these mediums to then get that vessel out to the world. So yeah, I'm pumped to see how this can help people. Tell us about the five steps, just people have to go out and buy the book. Yes, please. Just an overview. So September 3rd, it's coming out at all good bookstores in written version in print. And then in November, it's coming out as an audiobook. So I'm recording that in next week in Melbourne. That's fantastic. You know, you have to, for those that don't know, because I didn't know this, you have to audition to do your own voice on your own book. Well, but not everybody has a voice. But they're like, can you censor your rehearsal? And I'm like, I'm a professional speaker, and I wrote this. And they're like, well, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. And then they got the call. They're like, you successfully pass the audition. I'm like, thank God. I would have to rethink this whole thing. So the five steps is really a culmination of looking back on my life as someone who still lives with mental illness, but was suffering dramatically and taking first and foremost what parts of my mom's relationship with me really, really helped. And then triangulating that through basically all the most potent research findings on the area of attachment psychology, hostage negotiation therapy, et cetera, and boiling it down to as sequential order of how to usher someone through emotional pain. So module, the frameworks called ELSAB engage, listen, safety, action boundaries, engages about the proven principles of igniting a conversation with the right frame before you dive in so that people know this is a real conversation, not a transactional one. I want to go deep with you. I'm not going to try and fix you. I want to understand you. I want to hear you. I want to hear you. And you can trust me and how do you convey that beyond just words? That's all what module one is about. It's priming. It made me think with me, I guess, I've got a lot of friends. I'm really social. I believe that. You're a very likable person. But I am. And I enjoy it. I also like cooking, which I think makes you more popular. But there is, if I'm feeling unwell mentally, if things aren't going right for me, there is out of the handful of friends I've got. There's only a couple that you call on for things like that. And you're lucky if you even have a couple you can call on that you know will are willing to put on the backpack and Sherpa deep into the dungeon of the devil with you. And because it can get ugly and messy down there, it's really hard. And for someone to have the confidence and the willingness to be able to venture into those unknown territories and sit with you in that darkness is such a blessing that you have those people. And you know, if I was to distill kind of the number one learning from the first module of engage is your energy is everything. You know, you can say to someone a million times, come talk to me if you're not okay. And I'm here for you. And all that stuff. No one believes you until energetically you make them feel psychologically safe, which unfortunately is not an easy job and often requires you to do the inside out work. What biases are you projecting? What Tony actually emanating from your soul? Because people, even if they're not aware, they subconsciously are picking up on that, like the salience of it. And because you don't feel trust through your ears, you feel it through your gut. So a lot of it is about how do I genuinely love this person as non judgmentally as I can. And most of it takes care of itself after that. So that's module one, module two is listen, probably the most important part and the area of most at least like educational advancement in this book is the proven things to say and do that shows that you're listening, as well as what to avoid. You know, I tell a story in module two around my dad who's one of my closest humans. And I don't think anyone in the world loves me more than him, but yet he was the least present person when I was trying to have a real conversation with him. And I think because people find it hard, some people find it very comforting. Most people do. The lesson really to take out of module two is I say, excuse my friendship, don't prematurely eject you late, eject. So they're just letting you know that's not the word you're thinking of. But what I mean by that is a lot of people pull away from the climax or intensity of a conversation. They give it, especially in Australian culture. I mean, going back to our gift curse conversation, our gift in this beautiful country that we live in, in my opinion, the best in the world, is that we are really laid back. However, that's also what's prohibiting us from having these real conversations, because the moment there's actually some tears or some anger or some anxiety, we freak out and go, how do I get out of this moment? Because something happening is wrong, but actually you're heading to the right place. Yeah, we feel uncomfortable. That person's nervous system is desperately trying to purge and have a catharsis and you're prohibiting the witnessing of that, which is actually the medicinal moment. So really a lot of... It's time to be able to do it safely too. Yeah, safety is key. And I talk about how far my dads come from someone that couldn't sit in it with me, because of what I thought was a lack of care, but actually turned out to be his own insecurities. And now he's willingness to climb in the mud and say, "But that's how we're raising boys back then. Oh, man up. Yeah, you can do it." You know, like that we weren't giving them permission to do it. It's funny, shout out to Gus Wall, and he's doing a great job with Gotcha for Life on this man up thing. But man up, because I'm a fan, as much as I've written a book on connection, I have heart on my sleeve. You would say that I'm the emotions vulnerability guy. I'm also the resilience guy, which is knowing when to soften and knowing when to harden. And both skills are really important. I think the thing about traditionally manning up is actually repression and suppression. There's nothing courageous or strong or masculine about repression, because all you're going to do is end up taking it out on your loved ones, becoming aggressive, losing yourself in substances. It will find you. Manning up is the ability to confront hard feelings, work through them with grace so that you can be a grounded, stable object for people to hang on to. That is masculine. Module three is safety. Something I was really contemplating, whether I should include in this book, because even the publisher, when I was pitching it, they're like, "We want this to be…" And this isn't a shot against them, by any means. This is maybe something, because your listeners might be budding authors, to think about that you've got to really know who you're writing for. And for me, my audience wasn't just the self-help people, because this book would be easier to sell if it was, "How do we just create better relationships with anyone in any use case?" Which this will do. But my bullseye reader is for someone supporting someone in emotional pain, that situation. For parents supporting a kid with an eating disorder or anxiety, a people manager supporting a staff member through grief and loss, a supporting your romantic partner who has an addiction disorder and depression, that is where my book thrives. And so, it would be weird if I didn't talk about, if you're having a real conversation, it could get really real, where someone's like, "I don't want to be here anymore, and I want to give people the exact steps to be able to navigate that with confidence." And I've built this framework within the framework that lands so well in the workshop, that I'm like, "Now, this has to be public information." So, I'm glad that they backed me on going into the avatar of the person in emotional pain. Step four is action. How do you inspire people to take accountability and empowerment, I guess, for their own daily journey? I feel that that's the hardest one. Yeah. As a person that's having the connection, the conversation, getting the other person to actually help themselves if you like or take advice or seek help, that's the hardest. Really hard, really hard. It is. Until you read the book, when you realize there's actually a couple of questions that you can ask that prompts them, and to get into some of the tactics, one of the easiest ways is to get their consent, that they want you to help them brainstorm a way out. Like, "Hey, did you want my input? Or did you just want me to listen?" Just that question alone makes their ears perk up and go, "Okay, maybe this person has earned the right to see what next." And then say, "Well, what does success look like to you? What does a good outcome here?" And they're like, "Okay, you're not thinking that you already know where I want to be. Okay, well, maybe, again, you've earned more of a right to then populate a bit of a plan here." Because it's like talking to someone about their partner and how their husband or wife is just giving them the shits for the last month. And then you're like, "Okay, so here's the breakup plan." And they're like, "Fuckin' breakup plan. What do you mean? That's not success. That's not the outcome." So you have no idea what a North Star is, right? So I say in the book, get them to paint it done, like paint the North Star. And then you say stop, start, continue, which is the way of extracting their intelligence. But ultimately, that leads really nicely to module five boundaries. You can't force someone to do anything, including help themselves. And if you have a preoccupation with stepping in the driver's seat for someone, that's a conversation about you more than it is about them. What is it in me that can't have the emotional or psychological distance where I'm in enough that I care, but not in so much that their life is dictating the way that I feel in my own life satisfaction? We've got to go. We're almost out of time. But I just want to tell you, this year's ago, this is a long time ago now, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, I had a friend who was really heavily into drugs, really distressed about it. But I was more distressed. And I would drag him to rehab. I was desperate for making him better, right? And one time I took him through the night and dropped him off somewhere. And the counselor said, "I think maybe you need the help." I was taken aback. He said, "Because you want this more than he does." How did that make you feel? What was your next daughter's story? Well, I wanted to punch him in there, but I didn't. Well, I should have said, what was your next action? Was it a groin kick or a karate shot? But I did. It worked me out when I was doing bang. And he also said to me, "This is just at the counter, like we hadn't checked in or anything." And he said to me, "You need to wait until he hits rock bottom." So powerful, so true. I mean, it's so hard to watch someone hit rock bottom. But honestly, I try not to say this in interviews, because without the right context and framing, people might see that as unsafe. But within the right context, you sometimes do need to let people hit rock bottom, because it can be their trampoline. And he did. And then I saved him. There you go. And it was in the doorway to, "Okay, maybe I need help." Like that age-old thing is so true. You cannot help someone that doesn't want to help themselves. You just can't. I looked at the hard way. It's a force field, right? As you would have seen in your friend, it just bounces straight off. Yeah. Oh, Mitch, we could talk for hours. Yes. I love this conversation. Fantastic book. It's called Real Conversations, Five Steps to Connect with Confidence. Mitch Wallace, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. If you'd like more information about better reading, follow us on Facebook or visit betterreading.com.au. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Belinda Audio. Belinda audio books are available on CD and MP3 from online booksellers and book shops everywhere, or you can download from Audible, Google Play or the iBook Store. 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