Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan and this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, like us. How are you doing?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m okay. I feel like I’m okay. I feel like I’m trying to figure a lot out.

Martha Beck:
Yes. We should make a podcast about that.

Rowan Mangan:
What a brilliant thought. Let’s do that. Let’s totally do that.

Martha Beck:
We’ll figure it out later. Seriously, what are you trying to figure out? Seriously, really?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I’m always just trying to figure out Karen, our beloved Karen.

Martha Beck:
Oh, me too today. Okay. Let’s hear what you’ve got.

Rowan Mangan:
So we’ve both got Karen things, do we?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s an enigma of a human being wrapped in a riddle and neatly tied with confusion. So, not too long ago, at the time of recording, we had an advent calendar for our daughter. It was a little wooden thing, a reusable advent calendar with little drawers. And this is all new terrain for me as a new parent. So I didn’t really know. I didn’t know what to put in there. So I got some Hershey Kisses chocolates, but it didn’t feel quite enough for the size of the draw.

The drawer was still small. So, in the end, the only thing… this is probably terrible parenting. The only thing that would fit in the drawers were little plastic farm animals.

Martha Beck:
Why is that a bad thing? Were you supposed to give her gold or something?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know. I don’t know. It just seems odd now that I’m having to verbalize the whole process. But anyway, look, they fit.

Martha Beck:
Tiny plastic farm animals are universally appealing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, actually that is held up by the story that I’m about to tell. So, every night through the advent period, Lila would receive a small chocolate and a farm animal. It’s kind of like build your own nativity scene in a way. Not that we’re Christians, but…

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
You know what I mean?

Martha Beck:
Well, I’m trying to remember if there were chickens in the manger, the holy manger, whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
There must have been.

Martha Beck:
There must have been chickens. They never mentioned ducks, geese. What about the wild… What about the fowls? Were the fowls completely left out of the Christmas story. I think they were.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. Interesting. We should look into this further at a later date. But anyway, so one night after going through the ritual of opening the little drawer and finding the little thing, that night Lila was lucky enough to receive a goat. A small goat.

Martha Beck:
A goat? There’s not a listener out there who wouldn’t love a tiny plastic goat.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, I’m wondering where that goat is now. I’d like to go find it.

Martha Beck:
I have it.

Rowan Mangan:
But see, here’s what happened. Inevitably, Lila would get much more interested in the chocolate and the farm animal would be enjoyed for a short period of time. But anyway, this particular evening Lila was motoring around on her sugar high following her Hershey’s Kiss. Is that what they’re called? Hershey’s Kiss. And I just caught Karen thinking she was unobserved and she was sitting there on the couch by herself. The lights were dimmed in the way we like to do in the evenings in winter. And I just heard her say, “Oh boy, that’s a nice goat.” She’s looking at the little plastic goat.

Martha Beck:
It’s the way she thinks about it. Like she’s by herself, unobserved, high focus, high level of focus. The whole mind and heart and soul brought to bear on one issue and it’s like, Wow. Oh boy. That’s a nice goat.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s the oh boy, there’s something that is so sweet 1950s about Karen. I’ll tell you another thing about Karen that I’ve observed in my time is that when she’s on the phone doing tasky, businessy type things, I don’t know, hiring a plumber or something. One of the things she says that she never says in her non telephone life is super.

Martha Beck:
Super, super.

Rowan Mangan:
Have you noticed that? She says super.

Martha Beck:
She does.

Rowan Mangan:
Super. Okay. Super.

Martha Beck:
Super.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe she’s talking to Superman.

Martha Beck:
And that’s his nickname. Super plumber. Super washing machine repair man.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just Karen. I’m trying to figure her out. I don’t think I’ll ever get there, but boy, it’s a, “Oh boy. That’s a nice goat.”

Martha Beck:
Super nice goat.

Rowan Mangan:
Super.

Martha Beck:
Super.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
I have the same, I have a Karenism as well. But it’s more to do with, and again, animals. Always with the animals. In this case, it’s about our small black dog. He’s not the tiniest black dog. He’s 30 pounds. He’s a substantial cockapoo. And he is… Get your mind out of the gutter listeners. He is… I just think the word cockapoo lends itself to all kinds of obscene interpretations. So that’s where my mind went and I called it back.

Rowan Mangan:
No one disagrees with you.

Martha Beck:
Okay, so he’s shaggy and black. So Karen bought for the spot where the dogs run into the house after they’ve gone outside. They’re not in the snow. Oh no, not in this time of climate change. It’s always mud outside in Pennsylvania in the winter. So she puts down this rug to absorb some of the mud off their paws, and she chose a black shag rug, two by three foot black shag rug. Bilbo enjoys soft things-

Rowan Mangan:
He does.

Martha Beck:
And new things.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yes.

Martha Beck:
So, each and every member of our household has at some point walked across that rug and felt it go, “Ah,” because it is Bilbo Baggins on the rug. He’s invisible. I mean, we well did not know when we named him Bilbo that he would be invisible.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s amazing.

Martha Beck:
I also have a black-

Rowan Mangan:
We didn’t realize when we gave him that old ring that had been lying around the house.

Martha Beck:
I have a black fleece blanket that I also love. And every now and then I pick it up and realize it has a pulse.

Rowan Mangan:
Sometimes I talk to it lovingly.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. Yeah. I’ve had whole conversations with the blanket. “You’re a good boy.”

Rowan Mangan:
“What a good boy. You’re staying so still.”

Martha Beck:
It’s a blanket. Anyway, so poor Bilbo is getting trampled by the masses. It’s not just happened once or twice. It’s a lot.

And that shows you how much he loves soft new things because he won’t stop lying on it. So I said to Karen, “We have to do something about Bilbo being trampled to death.” And here was her solution. She’s going to go get him groomed and hope that where the hair is growing out, the shorter hair-

Rowan Mangan:
So when he gets groomed, he gets his haircut?

Martha Beck:
He gets his haircuts because cockapoos don’t shed, you have to mow them. Not with the lawnmower. Especially not a tractor mower. That would be wrong. But you do have to groom them. And so Karen’s solution was, she would basically get him shaved and she said the hair growing out is probably more gray, so he would be visible. So she has him shaved that it cost of God knows how much.

Rowan Mangan:
Wait, wait. I just have to clarify. So her thinking was that as we started to walk towards the place where that rug is, we could check if part of it was salt and pepper and that would solve the problem.

Martha Beck:
I mean it’s a good point once you get some color variation, but her estimation of Bilbo’s aging was wrong. So she gets him shaved at a cost of, I don’t know, nine guineas. I never knew what a guinea was, but it sounds big. So she gets him all shaved at a great-

Rowan Mangan:
It’s fowl. They’re fowl.

Martha Beck:
It’s a what?

Rowan Mangan:
Fowl.

Martha Beck:
It’s a fowl?

Rowan Mangan:
Guineafowl.

Martha Beck:
Oh, it’s a Guineafowl. Back to fowl coincidence?

Rowan Mangan:
Definitely.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So there’s Bilbo shaven and shorn black as knight and still getting stepped on and she’s like, “He’ll age,” like that’s the only solution. We couldn’t get another blanket.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just say, this is what’s really interesting to me about this story is not even so much the psychology of Karen thinking that way, but the psychology of Bilbo who is so devoted to absolute comfort that he will enjoy any amount of kicking and being tripped over and being in pain in order to further that comfort. Isn’t that weird?

Martha Beck:
He’s devoted. He is devoted especially to things on which he can put his head. He goes into these bizarre gymnastics to try to reach soft things with his chin.

Rowan Mangan:
And so it’s this contour, it’s this deep discomfort in the name of comfort.

Martha Beck:
He’s a very committed artist. I think for him it’s an artist thing. I think his way of expressing himself in the world is performance art. Look at me, disappear on this black rug. What does that say about the nature of my existence?

Rowan Mangan:
Interesting. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Listeners, if you met Bilbo, you would know him to be an old soul. He looks deep into your eyes and he thinks things like, “You’ll die before I do,” or something. He is thinking something.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So yeah. But I’m trying to figure out Karen’s process of just expecting the dog to age out of his natural color before we trip on him again.

Rowan Mangan:
Brilliant.

Martha Beck:
So there ya go.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. I have a favor to ask. You might not know this, but ratings and reviews are like gold in the podcasting universe. They get podcasts in front of more faces, more eyes, more ears. All the bits that you could have a podcast in front of, that’s what they do. So, it would help us enormously if you would consider going over to your favorite podcasting app, especially if it’s Apple and giving us a few stars, maybe even five, maybe even six. If you can find a way to hack the system, I wouldn’t complain. And a review would be also be wonderful. We read them all and love them. So thank you very much in advance. Let’s just go out there and bewilder the world. Let’s move on to the topic of today’s podcast.

Martha Beck:
An actual topic?

Rowan Mangan:
I believe so.

Martha Beck:
What is our actual topic, Rowan?

Rowan Mangan:
So there is universally acknowledged a truth which has been brilliantly put by Glennon Doyle and everyone back in their podcast. “We can do hard things that people have to do hard things.”

Martha Beck:
I know, I hate that.

Rowan Mangan:
People have to do hard things. We’ve been listening to Glennon and Abby a lot, and Amanda, we love them. And so we want to do them well. The hard things that we have to do. You just have to do hard things.

Martha Beck:
But see, in my whole life coaching thing, what I really want to tell people is you don’t have to do hard things. Everything is easy. That would make people so happy and –

Rowan Mangan:
And they would pay you money.

Martha Beck:
I know. And I’ve come perilously close to promising people, “No, you never have to do anything hard.” And then damn it, I end up having to do hard things. The government makes us.

Rowan Mangan:
The government.

Martha Beck:
It is. It’s like, “Pay those taxes. Ooh, get voter registration. You need a passport to leave.” And to get a passport, you have to, I don’t know, take a lot of livestock and hand it over to the government for exchange.

Rowan Mangan:
I think that passport is a lot more about the coming back than the leaving. But that’s another topic. So yes, the government is trying to trick us into having to do hard, boring things.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
True. So what we wanted to discuss is how do we go about doing these hard things? Because there must be different ways to do it if we just acknowledge that we have to. Let’s be creative about it. So give me an example of the kinds of hard things we have to do.

Martha Beck:
Well, so I would say that aside from the government, even if you were living off the grid, we just spent four days in a two-bedroom apartment with a toddler trying to get work done, keep her happy, keep her from destroying everything immediately, reassembling everything as she destroyed it. The child is using power tools at this point, and she can climb any-

Rowan Mangan:
Pure devotion to chaos is astonishing and it doesn’t waiver.

Martha Beck:
Never. It does not blink. It does not sleep. She just disassembles everything.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. If it can spill, it will be spilled in the most inconvenient place. If it can be broken, it will be broken. If it can be smeared, my God, it will be smeared.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yes. She poured a pound of salt on the floor. She pushed a chair over so she could get up and get the ceramic bowls to smash. And when she had a diaper to be changed, and I mean really needing to be changed, it took both of us full strength for 20 minutes to get that diaper changed. She was so committed to smearing.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no. Yeah, yeah. They don’t need that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You don’t need that image, and boy, it’s burned into my brain, but-

Rowan Mangan:
It’s burned into my nose.

Martha Beck:
I’ve talked before on the podcast about how strong she was and that’s when she was two months old. She’s formidable.

Rowan Mangan:
This isn’t just an excuse for us to bitch about having a toddler by the way listeners. We’re going to move on soon.

Martha Beck:
And it was also hard to get things to the recycle. Big cardboard boxes have to be taken down in the elevator. I mean, there are all these things, you have to do them or your life will be-

Rowan Mangan:
Stupid.

Martha Beck:
… stupid and intolerable.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean the things, paying bills, paperwork, making those phone calls with the press 9 for… all those things.

Martha Beck:
All those things. Going to the doctor getting… Gosh, you go to the doctor, you have to get a referral from one doctor to go to another doctor and they have a list of a million. It’s hard.

Rowan Mangan:
I will say that that’s harder in this country than it needs to be.

Martha Beck:
It’s very hard.

Rowan Mangan:
But let’s not go there. So, there’s a lot of culture in the like, “All right, so let’s just take off. Should we have to do it or not?”

Martha Beck:
Okay. All right. That’s too much. But in the how of how we do it, the culture has some idea, doesn’t it?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Very strong ideas. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s like, I think that this is one of those areas of the culture, those weird, unspoken little corners of cultural thought and training that is so nuts. And we don’t think about it. We don’t see it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So how would you describe the way that our culture thinks about how we go about doing hard things?

Martha Beck:
Basically the phrase don’t spare the horses, which is, you probably have never had occasion to spare a horse or not in your life, but that’s a way that the culture talks about before there were cars, you’d get your horses out and you’d say, “Get the North 40 plowed and don’t spare the horses,” which meant don’t be kind to the horses. Don’t do what the horses want. Whip the horses, make them work harder. So now we are the horses and the culture encourages us to push beyond our limits of pain and tolerance into genuine suffering. And it’s like, “Yeah, now you’re getting it done.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. You have to be your own beast of burden.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And it’s so strange that it’s like when you said this was before cars, not that I think they were plowing fields with cars, but I don’t really know about these things.

Martha Beck:
I would.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like don’t spare the horses before cars, but it’s like it is this thing, again, of every biological entity must be treated as machinery to be used at maximum speed, at maximum turbo drive until the job is done.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, we can do hard things and it’s better, and by the culture standards, not Glennon and Abby’s, if you break your back getting it done, that’s better. It’s better to do it that way than any other way.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s funny, I was reading a newsletter that I really enjoy, a Substack newsletter. It’s called CAFÉ ANNE. You should read it. And there was an interview in that recently with this stockbroker guy in New York. And this is not something that Anne herself endorses, but I had to write it down because I couldn’t believe that this sort of thing is still spoken. So this random person who’s a stockbroker, not saying that that’s anything in particular, but just mentioning it. So she had asked him, “What’s your advice for those who are looking to sleep less and accomplish more?” Because this was all about-

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, “Sleep less, accomplish more.”

Rowan Mangan:
… this was all about winter and hibernation and everything. And so this is what he said, “You have to have more that you want to accomplish than is conceivably physically possible so then you are always feeling under pressure!”

Martha Beck:
This is a quote you’re quoting?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I’m quoting, I’m quoting. This is verbatim. “If your list is never all checked off, you’ll always have something to do.” And she says, “That flies in the face of all the self-help advice out there.” And he’s like, “My self-help is hard work.” And I just thought that that is the voice of the culture. That is actually how push in everything in your life, push yourself as hard as it is possible to your push yourself. Don’t think about yourself, your quality of life. Think about that list.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s right. The list comes before quality of life.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Oh, speaking of self-help, because I am a voice for that self-help. And one time, do you remember the first time you came with me to a speaking engagement?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah, yeah.

Martha Beck:
And it was for, I won’t mention the company, but it was for a yoga clothing company.

Rowan Mangan:
Well known athleisure gear.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And so-

Rowan Mangan:
If you’re wondering if it’s the one you’re thinking of, yes, it is.

Martha Beck:
I was one of two speakers-

Rowan Mangan:
Three.

Martha Beck:
Three. Oh, right. I don’t really remember the dude. But there was another woman that I will never forget because our two speeches flew directly in each other’s faces. But I went first. So I get up there and the yoga company had left a set of clothing in my hotel room for me. And they said, “Please wear this.” There was one thing we forgot-

Rowan Mangan:
We didn’t know what it was.

Martha Beck:
It was just a square with two slits on this side. It looked like a tent or something. And I spent all this time, they wanted me to appear on stage in this, it’s nighttime.

Rowan Mangan:
Like putting one arm through, one leg through the other slit.

Martha Beck:
Oh, thank God, you were there because you Googled how to use this new garment they’d invented. And there were all these different ways you could wrap it and knot it and stuff. So anyway, I put on my yoga clothes. I went out there in front of thousands of people, the lights come up or whatever, and I’m in my yoga clothes so I did a little dance.

Rowan Mangan:
Of course you did.

Martha Beck:
That seemed fun. And then I told them how much I loved their clothing because it felt like I could just lie flat in it for the rest of my life. And basically, why should we do anything else? Let’s all just enjoy each other’s company and have a good time and love each other and do as little as possible.

Rowan Mangan:
This is at a company event to motivate staff to work harder? Is that right?

Martha Beck:
Yes. So then there was a dude whom I forget. Sorry dude. And then there’s a woman who paralyzed me with fear. She got up and she was not wearing the yoga clothing they have given her. She said they were too tight. She was wearing those aggressively business-like heels, high heeled pumps. And she gave a presentation on grit.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you know who she would be played by in the movie? You know the British woman in Ted Lasso, the blonde giant woman who’s amazing, she’s a west end star?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know her name, but she’s a brawny giant beautiful woman.

Rowan Mangan:
Picture that brawny giant woman as this speaker.

Martha Beck:
So this was a brawny giant in business high heeled pumps. And she got up there and had a PowerPoint presentation on grit. And it was, “What you’ve got to use is grit.” And she had a film of Kerri Strug, the gymnast running and vaulting on her broken ankle and nailing the landing to win the gold for America. She’s like, “If you’re not working that hard, if you’re not working that hard,” maybe I remember it with more of that voice. She probably said it in a normal voice. But she’s, “If you’re not working that hard, you don’t have grit and you don’t deserve anything.” And everybody clapped for me and then they clapped for her. And I kept thinking, “Do we go outside later and fight?”

Rowan Mangan:
Everyone was like, “Well, this is a lot to unpack.”

Martha Beck:
So I was thinking she could stab me and kick me with her high heels, but on the other hand, I’m very mobile in these yoga clothes. I can take her down using a soft style martial art while she tries to hit me with an ax. The ax of grit. Yeah. It was a weird experience, but it was like she came roaring with the culture’s voice.

Rowan Mangan:
Amazing. I love it. I’m having so much fun remembering that event.

Martha Beck:
I’m not. I’m afraid.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I tell you something else about that event?

Martha Beck:
Yes, please.

Rowan Mangan:
It was the first time I’d ever experienced room service.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you remember? And I didn’t know what to do and I was so anxious and I was like, “You do it. I know how to –

Martha Beck:
“Clean the room. They’re coming.” They understand that we have clothes. It was a good time.

Rowan Mangan:
Good time.

Martha Beck:
But see, that’s the thing. You’d always done the grit way. You’d never just ordered someone to bring you a falafel or something. That’s not grit. There’s grit in some falafels, but-

Rowan Mangan:
There’s grit in all falafels.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. The whole point for me was, “Oh, look how easy they’ve made this.” And boy, I got my head handed to me by the grit lady-

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s so funny.

Martha Beck:
… the next day.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s a lot to unpack here as those athleisure employees might have said. How do we figure it out Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, I’ll tell you in a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
All right Marty. So we’ve seen a little of how the culture wants us to go about doing hard things. As people like to say, “What would Jesus do?” I like to say, what would nature do at such times?” So tell me. So nature does incredibly hard things. I mean, the chemistry at work in a plant is extremely difficult.

Speaker 3:
Talk about that slime mold.

Rowan Mangan:
The slime mold.

Martha Beck:
That’s just one example. Okay. Tokyo is one of the most complicated cities in the world. The streets are tiny. It’s been there for thousands and thousands of years, and it’s just unbelievably circuitous. So the subway system is very complex and it’s not very efficient. So what a bunch of Japanese people did was on a board, they put little dots of oatmeal in all the places where the major stations of Tokyo would be. They basically made a landmark map of Tokyo with oats.

Rowan Mangan:
Isn’t it great that people do these things? I love people.

Martha Beck:
Yes, I know. And see this is a hard thing. But what fun. So then they took a slime mold. I forget the Latin name.

Rowan Mangan:
I wouldn’t have known what a slime mold was if I hadn’t watched a-

Martha Beck:
Oh yes. A slime mold is halfway between a fungus and a plant. It wanders around like an animal. No, no. It’s halfway between an animal and a plant. So it wanders around like an animal, growing finding its way, and then it hardens and becomes fungus like. So what this slime mold did was it roamed about the oat landmarks and then it hardened itself into the most efficient transmission pathway between all the different points in Tokyo and they actually made the subway system more efficient because the slime mold figured it out. Hard things, easy ways.

Rowan Mangan:
How can we apply this to the toddler spilling the salt? No, you know what? That’s too hard. Let’s pull back.

Martha Beck:
It’s a bit of a jump.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s a bit of a leap. It’s much harder than the Tokyo subways, isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
But animals and plants alike, animals do hard things all the time, but they do it. They’re not forcing themselves. They don’t appear to be forcing themselves. They don’t have that kind of psychology. They’re doing things with a minimum of effort and yet they get very hard things done. So I think that the natural state of nature is peace and generosity and kindness. So what if the way plants, slime molds, animals and so on, what if their whole motivation is not discipline, but kindness?

Rowan Mangan:
What the very obvious thing that it makes me think of is that, because I’m picturing this slime mold moving inexorably towards oats in the model, which I myself have been known to do on a cold winter morning.

Martha Beck:
Irish slime mold, they all go for the oats.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Oh, I love those oats. Everything that we just talked about the culture is that stick. Being driven, being whipped. And what the slime mold and potentially all of nature does is just move towards something delicious. Is that fair?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I would say it does. Whatever is most delicious. If you need food what’s most delicious is hunt or forage. If you need sleep – what’s most delicious is to stop hunting and forging and get some sleep.

Rowan Mangan:
I love sleep.

Martha Beck:
Oh, me too.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, so great.

Martha Beck:
It’s not the kindness that we’re talking about, is not the refusal to do anything difficult.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, right. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
It’s choosing things that are most motivating to you in any given moment and then adapting your whole life to allowing yourself access to those things. So understanding yourself and then adapting to any situation in a way that makes it kind to yourself.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. But also where there are, you don’t have an option the thing has to be done to also find the delicious in the method by which you go about it in how you’re going to do it. Where sometimes we just think, “I’ve just got to sit down and do this.” But I wonder if we could connect with our wild nature, we would actually look at the space between me here, feeling a certain way, having certain preferences, that thing there that has to get done. Sometimes there are things that have to get done. And just looking at that space between and going, “Okay, so let’s be creative in that,” rather than saying, “I just won’t do it because it’s not delicious right now to say.”

Martha Beck:
The hard thing is the space you have to go to before you get to your oats?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, exactly.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So you’re going toward things you love and then there are pathways to traverse in… because you’re doing the hard things in order to get things for yourself or for your life that are nourishing and delicious. And so, if you think of it not as a hard thing I have to do, but as a pathway to the most delicious thing and you talk to yourself that way, now you’re thinking like a slime mold.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we’re talking in two slightly different metaphors and I’m not all that surprised because it is a very weird metaphor to be using. I think what I’m talking about is looking at that space between and seeing if there’s any way to add oats to the space between.

Martha Beck:
More oats in the picture.

Rowan Mangan:
Hey, there’s always room for more oats in my picture anyway.

Martha Beck:
So you’re focusing heavily on reward. One of the problems that I’ve seen come up with people and with myself when I try to do this, is that we push too hard, we get exhausted and then mistake kindness for self-pity. “I shouldn’t have to do anymore. This was hard for me.” And so kindness is I’m just going to sulk or give myself something that isn’t healthy as reward. Too much indulgence in different kinds of-

Rowan Mangan:
Say more about confusing kindness with self-pity. I’m not clear on that.

Martha Beck:
Kindness would be-

Rowan Mangan:
So I have to do something and it feels too hard.

Martha Beck:
Right. It feels too hard. I noticed that it feels too hard. Kindness says, “Let’s look into this and see what’s hard about it and see if we can make it easier.” Self-pity says, “I deserve to spend more money than I can afford on trinkets because that makes me feel a little better. “I’ve suffered for this and now I get a reward.” And that can get really dysfunctional. And I see this happening all the time. I wrote this book about, I called it Thinner Peace, and it was about food and the psychology of food. And people kept telling me, “Without consuming something: food, alcohol, cigarettes, shopping, there’s no joy in life. I can’t get myself to do anything.”

And to me that meant they were way out beyond the limit where kindness would ever let them go. Kindness would never have put them in that place at all where they felt sorry for themselves because they should feel sorry for themselves because they’d been their own beast of burden.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. So it’s just the kind of rubber band snapping back effect.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. If you push too far into the harsh forced discipline, what you get as a snapback is self-pity.

Rowan Mangan:
So maybe it’s noticing that self-pity comes up or that particular feeling of, “I deserve something for this. A compensation prize.” Is that what it’s called? Compensation prize. Yeah. If you didn’t win. You start giving yourself things. Maybe that’s a sign that you’ve been buying into the cultural story before that too much.

Martha Beck:
I think it is. I think self-pity is a signal that you’re off base because nothing in the wild pushes itself to a level where it feels self-pity. Which is what W.H. Auden said in his famous short poem called Self-Pity. It goes, “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself,” which is a terrible image. And I don’t think you should drop frozen from a bough. But his point was that it doesn’t indulge itself in fear of what’s to come or in justifying how it should behave in ways that aren’t healthy for it. No matter what happens, it’s just like, “Huh, well this is interesting. What’s the kindest thing I can do? I will drop dead frozen from the bough.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I think they’re extrapolating a lot into the thought process of that cold bird that I feel deeply sorry for right now.

Martha Beck:
Oh God, I feel so sorry for it now. This is all wrong. My imagery is all wrong. So what I want to do is bring in better imagery. And the way I’m thinking now is that you manage to do things with kindness as a parent with no pity and with no harshness. And yet you get Lila to do things that are hard. So you must be using kindness. What is your secret? Tell me, because I think we can use this on ourselves.

Rowan Mangan:
Last night I was thinking about this because, and it’s probably not something that I’ve come up with by myself. What I’ve probably done is read it or heard it somewhere and then forgotten the source. So I’m not going to claim it. But when I have to get her to do something that I’m pretty sure she’s not going to want to do, what I’ve been doing is instead of… well, one of the big mistakes we all make in our family with her is going, “All right, you ready for dinner? All right, do you feel like going upstairs?”

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, don’t ask.

Rowan Mangan:
No, don’t ask. So the options can’t be either do it or don’t do it. And so what I tend to do now is, and I’m sure this is probably just received wisdom, I never know, but to give options, but of two different ways to do the inevitable thing. And I just feel like with this topic, the thing, there are those inevitable things. And it’s amazing, Marty, isn’t it? How often things with parenting work so well on just how we deal with ourselves in this world. And so at night when I’m getting her in ready for bed, I need her to climb to get up on her changing table because trying to chase her around the room with bedtime diapers and pajamas is just-

Martha Beck:
She fleet of foot.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s fleet of foot, she’s strong of body, she is willful of constitution. And so she has to get up on her changing table to do that. So what I say to her every night is, “It’s time to get up on the changing table. Do you want to climb up by yourself or do you want me to lift you?” And it’s very effective because I guess it’s just how humans respond. You are being given agency and that’s really powerful and it does work on myself. If I just say, you’ve got an annoying work task to do. That’s life. So I can say to myself, “Given that this has to happen, do you want to sit on an armchair or sit at your desk to do it? Or do you want to do it with some brown noise playing? Or do you want to do it with music playing?”

Martha Beck:
What is brown noise?

Rowan Mangan:
It’s white noise, only more browner.

Martha Beck:
Okay, fair enough.

Rowan Mangan:
And it made me think actually one of your coaching tools, you say it, the B one, the one with all the B words.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. I always say, is there a way you can bag it, if you don’t want to do it, if you want to bag it, just get rid of it. If you want to barter it, get someone else to do it. Or if you want to better it, and the bettering, I think is what you’re doing. Is say, “I’m going to give myself two options.” It’s interesting that just two options creates this sense of freedom. This is what I think, I’ve just realized this and it’s a huge aha for me.

The depravity, the cruelty of the systems of discipline that we’re taught to use for ourselves is not so much that they’re telling us to do things that are hard. It is the loss of all freedom. It’s saying, “I will not give you choice, I will not give you agency. It is my way. Do it my way.” And that steals from you, the agency, that wild things have to do it the way they want.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s part of that mechanistic thinking of the biological as-

Martha Beck:
It’s also part of the hierarchical ape thing. People who want control really want to insist that you do it my way and only my way. And we’ve all had teachers like that, bosses like that. For them, it’s a power game. It’s not I want the hard thing done, it’s want to make sure that I can force you. And we feel that as a lack of force, and then we import it into our own hands and do it to ourselves.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. Yeah, that’s so true.

Martha Beck:
Whereas what you are doing is, instead of based on control, it’s all about understanding. And basically when you say you can do this or this, whether it’s to yourself or to Lila or to me or whatever, underneath that is the idea, you are important, you are free and I care that you get a choice. I care about your freedom. That’s the underlying message no matter what the task is. And let me tell you something, when somebody sees me, understands me and wants my freedom, I will do a lot more for that person than for somebody who wants to control me. Being given freedom alone is motivating. And it’s the opposite of what people tell you. They tell you got to force.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. That give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. That idea is what we get told so don’t give anything because that worldview sees every interaction as a fight of a territory or something.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. There’s this guy used to be at Harvard Business School named Chris Ardris, and his whole idea was that managers are always trying to force employees to do things. Not to get the hard thing done, but to impose will and then there’s a war, then there’s a fight. And what he said is if a manager seeks to be disconfirmed by an employee, the management situation will go much more… they’ll be on the same team.

Rowan Mangan:
So say what you mean by disconfirmed.

Martha Beck:
Yes. So the boss in Chris Ardris’s plan would every single day, every single task assigned would say, “Is there a better way to do this? I could be completely off base here. I’d really like your opinion. Please tell me where I’ve made mistakes here.” And it’s the act of giving someone the freedom to choose to join with you instead of, I will force you to do it my way. That created all this high efficacy in business. And yet still people wouldn’t do it. They’d say, no, that’s, that’s just crazy.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, the people in the management position.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, Chris would go into as a consultant for different firms and they’d be like, “No, they would mute me. They’d run roughshod.”

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
Wow. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. God, that’s such a cool example. I love that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry to circle back to the parenting thing. I think the other thing that we try to do with Lila that works for me myself, for parenting my inner toddler who is also very strong and willful-

Martha Beck:
Apple. Tree. Not far apart. Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Is the sort of, thank you? I’m someone who’s very fond of a thank you. Am I not?

Martha Beck:
You say thank you more than anyone I’ve ever met. Like you will say thank you, and it’s like you go through your whole day noticing what went well or what someone did and just go… And you don’t have to say, “Hey, thanks for doing that.” You’re like, “Thank you for washing that cup. That is, “Thank you so much for closing the door.” And it’s genuine and it’s delightful.

Rowan Mangan:
With Lila, the equivalent. It’s funny, I read something in parenting that said, don’t say the conventional thing is good listening. Oh, you did really good listening there. But then it’s like there’s, they say, I mean this stuff can get so stupid. They say that then if you’re just saying good listening, it implies that you just listen to my orders. So, I’ve been trying to adjust that to good cooperating.

Martha Beck:
Thanks for cooperating.

Rowan Mangan:
Same, same. But it’s all like there’s been an impact of this and I recognize that as well after the fact. So, it’s about how you go about it. But then also I think we all want to, when we do capitulate, when we do something hard, we want someone, even if it’s just us, to say thank you.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the downside of your wonderful habit of saying thank you for everything.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, there’s no downside. It’s just all upside. It’s just my attitude of gratitude. There’s no downside. No, it’s just I’m just a really lovely person. I am just sunshine. There’s no downside. No, there’s no negative.

Martha Beck:
Until I’ve been basking in the glow of your gratitude for about six months and you finally went, “Could you thank me occasionally?” And I was like, “What ever for? That’s what you do.”

Rowan Mangan:
Did I say, can you thank me occasionally or do I sarcastically break out in a, “Thank you so much Ro, I really appreciate that.

Martha Beck:
That was more it. Yeah.

And so I learned to say thank you more often and it’s actually, it’s like a magic weapon is ridiculous how being thanked I can feel how you’re thanking me affected me. So I was pretty enthusiastic about learning to say thank you more to other people. And I do it much more now. I always try to remember to send a thank you email to people. Even if they’ve done a little thing, people need to be recognized.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just say that I find that to be true? And I just want to say something on the side, which is I just recognized in myself that that is me trying to manipulate people, thanking them all the time also, because I just say thank you and sorry, as a way of making sure that no one’s mad at me. And I just realized that. So, I’ll just pack that away for therapy and-

Martha Beck:
Another Pandora’s box.

Rowan Mangan:
Another Pandora’s box. Just when you think you get into the bottom.

Martha Beck:
Just when you think you are, but I think, so I’m taking away from this a few things. First is that giving people options and honoring their freedom and our own freedom, giving ourselves freedom to do things our own way, even if we have to do hard things, do it our own way. That is how to stay motivated. And then I would ask three questions when I go to do anything and choose the way of doing it is, and I would first say, is it meaningful to me? What does it mean?

If I’m going to get that passport? Am I thinking about the government that is ordering me to do it? Or do I think to myself about the free travel I’m going to have? The slime mold going between oats so that I can put a different sort of set of meanings on it. And the second thing I would do is I choose the way that’s most fulfilling, like that most matches my natural tendencies of how to do things like ordering room service, for example, instead of cooking.

Rowan Mangan:
Lying flat instead of running on a broken ankle.

Martha Beck:
Lying flat. And then the most important thing is, can I sustain this over time? Because if it’s something, Kerri Strug, God bless her, landed that perfect vault on a broken ankle, but then she didn’t have to do a whole nother floor routine. There’s a point at which the broken ankle becomes an issue I would say.

Rowan Mangan:
Agreed. Very, very much agreed. And if none of those questions work, you can always fall back on the old classic, what would a slime mold do?

Martha Beck:
There you go. That is the most intelligent, the most gratitude inducing, the most motivating way of doing hard things like a slime mold. So I think we’ve figured that out. There you have it. And stay wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
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