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:
How are you doing Rowie?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m good. I’m as usual on a quest to try and get my life organized with a toddler degrees of success. But it’s going, how about you? How are you doing?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I am trying to figure out how to negotiate Lila’s extreme self-confidence around everything that I own. She’s become very confident. She’ll come in and go, “Okay, Muffy, I’m just going to take this picture you’re drawing. I’ll be straight back when I’ve fixed it.” Yeah. Trying to figure out how to not kill her confidence and yet preserve anything that I value. Life.

Rowan Mangan:
Life.

Martha Beck:
So seriously, in your life right now, what are you trying to figure?

Rowan Mangan:
So I think that there should be in life some sort of secret wink or hand gesture that you can do in conversation when you’re using incorrect grammar, with full knowledge that it’s incorrect, but just you don’t want to be an asshole about it. And so it’s like there’s this part of me that doesn’t care, and then there’s this part of me that’s pedantic and cares deeply, and they both show up at the same time and they don’t know how to navigate each other. So the big one in our family these days is that you are one of these people who says nauseated.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Unlike the other 99.9% of people who say nauseous. Now to be nauseous is to make other people feel nauseated. Right? I know this. And the fact remains, I feel like a fucking idiot when I say nauseated. And so I don’t say it. I say nauseous, and I sort of want to reserve the right to do that. But I feel like every time I do, I have to say to you, “You know that I know that it’s actually supposed to be nauseated.” And then part of the problem is that the word nauseated makes me nauseated.

Martha Beck:
Not as nauseated, as nauseous. Nauseous.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m sorry, how did we just pronounce that word?

Martha Beck:
Nauseous.

Rowan Mangan:
Nauseous.

Martha Beck:
It’s like you’re throwing up in your mouth as you say it. Nauseous.

Rowan Mangan:
Nauseated.

Martha Beck:
For me it’s-

Rowan Mangan:
Nauseated. I bet you could find a ASMR thing where it would teach you how does all the correct ways of saying things. But I know also that it’s correct to say like Susie and me in certain circumstances.

Martha Beck:
Right. That’s good for Susie and me. But people think you’re an idiot if you don’t say Susie and I, which is not right.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re an idiot. And I’m fine with-

Martha Beck:
I’m not.

Rowan Mangan:
I actually err on the side of being an idiot. Because I would rather not sound like a-

Martha Beck:
So you just said err correctly, but Americans say err, and it drives me nuts.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s just an accent.

Martha Beck:
Because err is correct.

Rowan Mangan:
An accent.

Martha Beck:
No, err is the way it’s supposed to be pronounced.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, good. Well, there you go. If I’d known that most Americans say err, I probably would’ve said err just to annoy you. Okay. So I worked for a library. I worked at a library in a university, and for many years, and if you want to encounter pedantry of the highest degree, you must go to an academic library, where there were two things that I remember about this place that people used to say, you know how there’s a work culture? And people get into that thing where once it occurs to them that they’ve been saying something wrong, they have to say it right, even though no one says that. The less annoying one was that everyone in the workplace said Wednesday.

Martha Beck:
Wednesday.

Rowan Mangan:
Wednesday, they just kneel down for a minute on the day there, Wednesday.

Martha Beck:
You just might as well go to vorstadt and get fully Nordic on it.

Rowan Mangan:
It was weird, but that was fine. Okay.

Martha Beck:
It doesn’t really matter.

Rowan Mangan:
None of this really matters. But the other thing that someone at some point had decided that the best way to speak to other human beings when they wanted to pluralize the word focus.

Martha Beck:
Oh, don’t tell.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So you would have grown up Australian human beings talking about the various foci.

Martha Beck:
Foci. Oh, they said foci?

Rowan Mangan:
They said foci. Maybe they were wrong. Oh, that would be so good if they were wrong. I’m so sorry-

Martha Beck:
I thought it was foci.

Rowan Mangan:
… if you’re one of those people that I used to work with. I love you all.

Martha Beck:
No, no. I can resist that one. I see it coming. I had it off. I’m fine.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and I think you’re supposed to say obsessed by something. I’m always going to say obsessed with. I just wish that when I did it, say you’re talking in a circle of people and then I would just like for the two that might know that it’s not grammatically correct. I’d just like to do a little chicken dance move or I don’t know, pull my nose or pull my earlobe or something to say, I know, but I don’t want to sound like an idiot. Like trying to sound like a smart person.

Martha Beck:
I think you want to just lightly slap yourself in the face. Just lightly. Boom, boom, maybe with both hands.

Rowan Mangan:
That should clear up…

Martha Beck:
I like the chicken dance. For me, by the way, I’m listening to a book right now by a good scientist who keeps talking about this data. Data is plural.

Rowan Mangan:
It doesn’t matter.

Martha Beck:
The word is this data. What?

Rowan Mangan:
It doesn’t matter.

Martha Beck:
Okay, but look, this data, see, I’m hurting myself, and that means I know how much this hurts you. If it’s incorrect. I think that’s-

Rowan Mangan:
It doesn’t hurt me if it’s incorrect. That’s my whole point. I just want credit for knowing it, even though I will refuse to say it, because it does sound dumb to say this data.

Martha Beck:
Maybe you could just put up a rabbit ear or behind your head or something.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a good idea.

Martha Beck:
I like this.

Rowan Mangan:
So anyway, I’m still, obviously it’s a work in progress. That’s why it’s what I’m trying to figure out. But I just feel like in society there needs to be this thing. And I’d like to hear from our listeners about what we should do when we’re in that situation. Sometimes I just want to say less. I know it’s fewer. Hold my nose, wiggle my bum. Okay. I know it’s fewer, but I just want to say less.

Martha Beck:
Maybe it’s air quotes. I get that it’s less.

Rowan Mangan:
That has a different-

Martha Beck:
That in itself.

Rowan Mangan:
… resonance. Yeah. I don’t know. I’m going to keep working on it. I’ll get back to you.

Martha Beck:
Please do. We need this. The culture is not something we live by all the time, but it needs this.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it does. It does. So apart from Lila’s confidence, what are you trying to figure out these days?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You’re just doing God’s work. I have to say.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
You’re so welcome. Well, I have been wondering lately about the etiquette and protocol when dealing with a really bad psychic. So I do not customarily go to psychics, but there have been a couple of times during our relationship, the time we’ve known each other that you and I have both consulted psychics because why not, right? If you can’t solve the case and you’re sitting around the house, you might as well call a psychic. The first one was in Sedona. Do you remember this? We went to Sedona like five years ago, and this guy gave me a tarot card reading and it was-

Rowan Mangan:
Well, first of all, hang on, set the scene.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
We go to this big barn that is just a barn of psychics, because this is Sedona and it’s tourism. And so it’s like walk into the barn of psychics and choose your psychic for the time. And you go off to the little psychic’s room. It’s like a clinic of psychics.

Martha Beck:
Well, it’s a barn. They’re breeding psychics in there. They have psychic eggs they collect every morning.

Rowan Mangan:
Except they’re crystals. Psychics are born from crystals.

Martha Beck:
They are, when the crystals hatch, out come the psychics. And this one guy-

Rowan Mangan:
I just need to be really clear, I’m not a psychic. I’m a sidekick.

Martha Beck:
Do the gesture. Hit yourself in the face, do the chicken dance. Okay, so here’s the thing. I have got to give this guy props. You and Karen and I each went off to our own stall of psychic, right?

Rowan Mangan:
That’s correct.

Martha Beck:
And the guy who read my cards, I’m going to give him something. He did not throw out the widest net that they use. “Oh, I see that you sometimes don’t feel well, but other times you feel better. Also, you have relatives who are male or maybe female, and somebody that you know or know of once died of a heart condition or maybe a stroke or cancer.” It wasn’t that kind of reading. He was very definite. He was very confident and I don’t think was right. He said to me, “I am so sorry that you have never left your house, that you have never accomplished anything that you wanted to accomplish in the world, and that you have reached midlife, because this was a couple years ago. “You have reached midlife with no accomplishments of any kind, and all you do is sit bitterly in your house, thinking of the opportunities you passed up and collecting welfare checks or something.”

Rowan Mangan:
My problem is less with his psychic ability and more with his business sense. That’s just not a smart way to treat your client.

Martha Beck:
And thus, I was in a dilemma, Rowie. I was in a dilemma because here was a man who was plying an honest trade. He was reading those cards the way he saw them. He was not trying to butter me up, and I kept going…

Rowan Mangan:
It’s hard, because then you are in the position of having to kind of validate them because you have to say something. There’s these silences, and then you’re like.

Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
I can [inaudible].

Martha Beck:
I know. And then we came out of our respective stalls where the psychics were now pawing and chewing on the edges of their crates or whatever. And you and Karen, you were like, “The psychic told me, I’ve got a child that’s coming.” True enough, good psychic. I forget what Karen said. Something like, there’s chocolate in your future, something safe. And I was just like, “Me? Me?” And you were so incensed. You drove me all over Sedona trying to find an emergency psychic at night.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I confused my psychic. I just need to put in, because she was there and she was feeling it, and she was connecting with the spirits. Because I was like, “Do you think I’ll be able to have a kid?” And she’s like, “Have you committed to one?” And I said, “Yes, I have psychic lady. I sure have.” I’ve still got the recording in voice memos on my phone. And then she goes, “Have you committed to two?” And I said, “Oh God, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. Absolutely not.” Ixnay on the ongsay. No, one.” And she looks really taken aback. If she wants the kid so much, she should want two more. I wanted two a lot less.

Martha Beck:
Oh goodness.

Rowan Mangan:
Did we find an emergency psychic? I feel like we didn’t.

Martha Beck:
No, no. You all had to just hold my hand through the night.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we bought you some crystals to make it better.

Martha Beck:
And I was just like, “What? The cards spoke badly of me.” But then years later, we were sitting around, it was the dead of winter. We’re in pandemic lockdown. Nothing good is happening. And we were desperate for something happy. So we looked on Yelp, and we found a psychic.

Rowan Mangan:
I rushed to reassure the listener this was Marty’s idea.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. And I’m like, what can it harm? So it just went to psychics near me. So we called this woman who had glowing reviews on Yelp, all written by the same person. And she said to you, and the reading was for you, because you were having a difficult day, and I’m like, “I’m going to get some reinforcements here.” And she said to you, “There’s a man in your life who’s doing you wrong.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, she did.

Martha Beck:
And you were like-

Rowan Mangan:
I was like, “I mean, oh, sometimes Bilbo.”

Martha Beck:
Bilbo the dog.

Rowan Mangan:
Rolls in something.

Martha Beck:
Adam is overall a quiet man, but maybe he’s thinking things in his room that are offensive to you. Maybe he’s using the word data incorrectly.

Rowan Mangan:
Correctly is my problem.

Martha Beck:
Without doing the chicken dance. Anyway, in both these situations, we were hard-pressed for protocol. You can’t just say, “Wrong, try another, throw another hand of cards, dude, because you are all the way off-topic.”

Rowan Mangan:
But you remember when she… There was some, I don’t know if it was the same thing about men or women. And I sort of just went, “To be quite honest with you, love, I don’t really have any men in my life.” And that in itself is not a problem. Because then she tried to go down that route. “Oh yeah, There’s a man waiting for you.” And you’re like, “I hope not.”

Martha Beck:
Please God. No.

Rowan Mangan:
But then when it got really strange is when she said, “Well, it’s a man on the card, but these cards are very old.”

Martha Beck:
And she was getting a little desperate. She’s like, “It could be different. I mean, these cards are old.”

Rowan Mangan:
Is it like it was a man, but she hadn’t come out as trans yet or something. You know what I mean? It was just like, how does the age of the… Well-

Martha Beck:
I don’t think it would be because that’s more sophisticated. I think these cards were simply losing their ability to see clearly what the other person was presenting as their gender.

Rowan Mangan:
They’ve just-

Martha Beck:
We’re getting Demide.

Rowan Mangan:
The funny thing was that from what she said, you were telling me what cards she’d drawn. She was trying to tell my future. And you were like, “Oh, I see. Because she’s got that and she’s interpreting it this way.” I don’t know why you didn’t just read my card.

Martha Beck:
And for our more new agey listeners, somebody gave a deck of tarot cards, and I have pulled decks for people a lot. And I always say, “These are just pieces of cardboard. “There’s absolutely nothing like remembering my Sedona experience. They are oddly accurate sometimes. So I’m not-

Rowan Mangan:
And yet off you go to Yelp.

Martha Beck:
Off I went to Yelp. Because the thing is you want someone else to tell you. That’s what we do. We turn to cultural sources. We want an authority figure, even if it’s some crazy woman who has to write her own ads on Yelp and then blame her cards for being old and overused when they go completely off. Yeah. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I feel like this might be a good moment to turn to the topic of the show. What do you think?

Martha Beck:
I think so too. Yes. Because that is a really weird way to turn to culture instead of nature.

Rowan Mangan:
It is, yeah. It’s worthy of you.

Martha Beck:
If a Yelp psychic says it, it must be true.

Rowan Mangan:
If a psychic in a Sedona barn said it. We’ll be right back with more Bewildered.
We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener, and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean, if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep bewildering new souls, and you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously, the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven. And we read everyone and exclaim over them, and we just love you all.

Martha Beck:
All right. All right.

Rowan Mangan:
Come on. Let’s do this.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
So on this show, it seems to me that we often talk about, or something that comes up a lot as we’re grappling with the issues we grapple with, is that culture often seems to be saying, be productive. It seems to mindlessly be saying, be productive. Be productive. We talk about the factory sort of mentality.

Martha Beck:
Materialism.

Rowan Mangan:
Showing up like a factory to serve, like a factory worker or a factory product isn’t nature. It doesn’t feel like our true wild nature. But what we want to talk about today is the fact that that’s not to say that in your nature, there isn’t a place for dogged, determined work. And I mean, even when it’s not fun, I don’t mean the passion, I mean, the crap. And I think that’s a little bit counterintuitive because of the ways we tend to talk about culture and nature. We can sort of get so carried away and really just lie down. Just lay down. That’s what the animals and the trees do.

Martha Beck:
They just lie there. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So today we’re going to talk about the ways that we work hard. And sometimes I want to say gruntingly.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that works. Gruntingly works for me. Do the chicken dance.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll do the chicken dance.

Martha Beck:
Gruntingly. Gruntingly.

Rowan Mangan:
Gruntingly. Do you ever want to take a word that ends in L-Y, like an adverb, and then extra adverb it? So, quicklyly?

Martha Beck:
Yes, extraordinarilyly.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s it. That’s exactly it.

Martha Beck:
There you go.

Rowan Mangan:
So that’s what we thought, I feel like we created a little gap in our own universe. And today we’re going to fill that gap.

Martha Beck:
And we’ll talk a lot about how that there’s actually that stage of anything that is like a life’s work passion. Anything that’s really, really important to us has the likelihood of a period when we will have to work gruntinglyly.

Rowan Mangan:
Is there any chance that you would have an animal related anecdote to illustrate your point?

Martha Beck:
How strange you should ask that of me? I have no interest in animals whatsoever.

Rowan Mangan:
I am reminded of many things. I actually had to cut it down from three stories here to one-

Martha Beck:
But you know what? I’m pumping it up one. I didn’t even mention this story to you, but I’ve got to tell you now because people can Google it, and it is a bit of a cliche, but cliches exist for a reason. And what I want you to Google is indoor – Oh goodness. I just realized how this is going to sound.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
Indoor beaver.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, Marty. Oh, honey.

Martha Beck:
I mean a little beaver. An animal with teeth. Oh dear. This is getting worse, isn’t it?

Rowan Mangan:
Vagina dent harder Anyway.

Martha Beck:
No, no, no, no. Okay, so, I just-

Rowan Mangan:
Guys, sorry folks, listeners, I just have to tell you that there was a brief period of time in our lives when Marty’s phone Chrome was signed in as me, which meant that whenever I went to Google something and I put my cursor in the search field, I would be greeted by Marty’s most recent Google searches, and man, I mean, I won’t even say them because you wouldn’t understand the context, but they were all like this. And it was always looking for animal videos.

Martha Beck:
Always. So I just want you to Google what happens when they rescue an orphaned beaver from the wild and raise it in a human house. Because what they do is they build dams, damn it. And they will pick a hallway, they will pick a really good spot for it, and they will bring everything in the house, stuffed animals, barbells, literally a Christmas tree in one video. And this little animal is dragging all this stuff and making a very effective waterproof dam inside someone’s house. Those animals are geared to work. But my favorite example, and we are going to actually provide the link for this because it is so delightful. If you have not met Stoffel, the honey badger, who lives in South Africa with his human family, then you need to get to know him. So honey badgers are very determined creatures. They will fight a cobra to the death and they’re ferocious.

But Stoffel, the honey badgers shows, I can only say a kind of Olympian fervor for getting out of the enclosure they made for him. Now, the thing is Stoffel’s not in a cage. Stoffel is in an enclosure that keeps lions out. They had lions, he got mauled by lions. So they built him an enclosure as a protection. He didn’t see it that way. He started climbing out. So then they moved everything away from the walls and made the walls higher. Stoffel climbed trees and jumped over the wall. Then they started putting locks on the door. He started going out the door. He learned to open one lock, then they put another lock higher up. He would unlock the first lock and have his mate, there was a female in there with him. She would climb onto his shoulders while he stood there and she would open the top gate and off they would go. They never ran away. They just got out.

So then they took the trees out of the enclosure. Stoffel took a rake that he found, propped it against the wall and used it as a makeshift ladder. They took all sticks and poles were removed. He made a stack of rocks and climbed out. They took out the rocks, and Stoffel, the honey badger made mud from his water dish, dirt, he dug up himself, created mud balls, waited for them to dry, stacked them up and got out of his pen.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s ingenious.

Martha Beck:
I love Stoffel, the honey badger. But that is some hard freaking work, and there’s no culture going on at all. So-

Rowan Mangan:
We will put a link to Stoffel, the honey badger in the show notes.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I may have gotten some details inaccurately. I haven’t watched it for a while, but I think I’m right on the main. So yeah, animals work.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s funny because it feels like a natural escape instinct, but it’s just what he felt like.

Martha Beck:
He never left. It’s just like-

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m going to go out.”

Martha Beck:
I’m going to go out. Maybe those lions maul me again. I don’t care. I’m getting out.

Rowan Mangan:
So I doubt you’ve seen this cartoon that has been circulating the internet of late, and it’s about this sort of how animals must react to their own instincts when the instincts come. And this is about a bird and it’s process of reproduction. So in the first little, what do you call it? Of a cartoon?

Martha Beck:
Panel?

Rowan Mangan:
Panel of the cartoon. There’s a bird sitting in front of a little nest, and the bird says, “I made this for some reason.” And then in the next panel, she’s sitting there and the nest is full of eggs. And she says, “These are my smooth round children.” And then one of the eggs hatches, and a little bird head comes through and the mother says, “Oh no, now it’s loud.” And then all the rest of the eggs hatch, and they’re all little birds. And the mother just says, “Help.”

Martha Beck:
Oh Lord, that rings so true. And the reason people are laughing at that, and that it’s funny, is that a lot of people are raising families and it is not easy and something still makes us want to do it.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. I think maybe there’s a slight distinction to be drawn what we’re sort of getting at today is that process whereby in the service of a dream, those waystation dreams that we spoke about recently, there is hard work that is going to be part of that journey. And yet, even though the work itself isn’t enjoyable, it’s still our nature to pursue it. And there’s some fine distinctions in there. So we thought we’d play with it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they seem fine these distinctions, because we’re actually not taught to recognize them at all. We’re just taught that hard work is hard work, and Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill. And it’s the same to push the rock up the hill when it’s in your nature and when it’s not. But Camus said, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” He thought that the labor of life could be intrinsically gratified. So it’s the same action, and that makes it subtle. But there are people who are out there doing good hard work every day, just trying really hard to do what they’ve been taught and serve the culture, and their dreams have been left in the dust.

And there may be someone right beside them doing the same work, who is being pulled by an energetic team of wild horses toward a dream that they’re building. They could be doing the same work, but for totally different reasons. So the distinction I want to make today is the distinction between work that we force ourselves to do because of cultural cues. I need a sailboat and a white picket fence or whatever. And the hard work that we go through when we’re slogging our way towards something that is our true heart’s desire, and it’s worlds apart once you learn to recognize it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah.

Martha Beck:
So in my case, for example, I literally don’t know why I run, why I’m called a life coach or run a life coach training company. I just couldn’t stop it. It just wanted to happen. I was trying to be a writer and got a job teaching business school. I’ve told you all this before. And then the students wanted to talk about their lives and careers, and I could not turn away. It was, I remember going for a walk in the desert. I lived in Phoenix at the time, thinking, why am I obsessed with figuring out what these people’s lives should be like? Why am I obsessed with figuring out what I can do that I can transfer to other people? Never. I’ve been doing this for 30 years now, and never once, Rowie, has it been an external goal for me, not once when I had to speak at the, I didn’t have to. I was invited to speak at the American Federation of Lifecoaches long, long ago. I’d never met another life coach. And they said to me, “What’s your marketing strategy?” And I said, honestly, concealment and evasion, I was trying to get-

Rowan Mangan:
It does not work for you.

Martha Beck:
It hasn’t worked. I was trying to get away, but the moment there was somebody who needed to talk to me or who seemed to need to talk to me, it literally was like being pulled by a strong magnet toward them. And then my mind being pulled by something like a strong magnet to understand them and figure out ways to help them. It looks so ordinary and people set out to do it, but for me, it was absolutely weird and involuntary.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s funny actually that you mentioned the life coach training because the curriculum of that training as it now stands, has a strong connection to what we’re talking about today because you talk about the four squares of change, and we’ve done a couple of episodes in the past where we’ve looked at a cut at what you call square one, which was Bug Soup, a recent episode, and then we-

Martha Beck:
Where you just dissolve all your plans.

Rowan Mangan:
And then little while ago we did one called A Space for Dreaming, which was about square two. But this time of what’s often struggle in our process to transform and the different ways we transform at different times in our lives is it’s sort of not very sexy to talk about just the hard work of it time. But I love how you always use with the change cycle, you use the metaphor of butterfly and the caterpillar. Can you talk about that now?

Martha Beck:
Thank you. Yeah. The term bug soup refers to the way some animals that metamorphose dissolve into a liquid inside their chrysalis before the cells in there are recreated into something completely different, like a butterfly as opposed to a caterpillar. So that dissolving process happens to us psychologically when a massive change hits us, and then we have to stay inside the chrysalis and new dreams have to be born, and that’s why we called it A Space for Dreaming. But once you’ve got a clear dream, it becomes a scheme, and then you’re ready for the next phase, which is analogous to the butterfly having been fully formed but not yet achieving its full size, cutting the top off the chrysalis and struggling to get free. And this is a time of maximum physical vulnerability for the animal. It’s very vulnerable to predators.

It can’t fly yet. It can’t run. It’s stuck halfway out of the chrysalis, and it is not easy to get out. But they’ve found that if you cut the chrysalis to help the butterfly get out, it will actually die. And the longer and harder it struggles to come out, the longer it tends to live and the stronger it will be. So something in nature is like it loves the struggle itself. He said The struggle itself alone is enough to fill a man’s heart. We must imagine Sisyphus happy and the butterfly pulling free from the cocoon is working flat out at very high stakes and in danger.

Rowan Mangan:
I love that idea that our struggle can be a measure of our strength. I think sometimes I feel like people can get into a sort of pain Olympics mentality where their struggle becomes some sort of badge of honor for want of a better way of putting that. But the reframe of I’m so robust because I have struggled so hard to get out of this goddamn whatever is limiting us, it’s worth the struggle to get out of, right?

Martha Beck:
And we actually put ourselves in situations where people will make us do hard things. We hire personal trainers. Some of us go to higher education, for example, or regular required school, because society tells us to. And then there are others who put themselves in school with a passion for learning something very, very difficult. I once had a friend who was getting his PhD in quantum physics, and he just said, “I had to know if I could force my brain around these concepts, because if I can learn that, I know I can learn anything.” But he said, “It is so hard, you would not believe it.” And yet he could not stop himself. He needed it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I can remember that. I can remember writing an essay in my master’s degree and sitting at my table, I might’ve talked about this before on the podcast. It was such a big moment in my life, and I was actually thinking so hard about trying to integrate these theories that I was reading and build my own argument out of them, that I was having to move them around in the air in front of me. And I can remember that feeling of my brain being right at its very limit. And it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It actually was like, but I’ve felt good afterwards, man. I can… Go on.

Martha Beck:
Well, one of the phrases for it in psychology is the rage to master. And we see that in our three-year-old, she will do things that are so hard, she screams with rage and frustration, but she will not stop. And if we’re still doing that when we’re 60, 80, 100 years old, we’ll still be learning like a toddler. But you’re right, it’s not fun. It’s called the rage to master because it’s exactly the sound you just made and then boom, breakthrough. And that feels good.

Rowan Mangan:
I remember this square three time that I had, because I don’t want to make it sound like square three, and that phase is always high octane, whether that’s passion or-

Martha Beck:
Or rage.

Rowan Mangan:
… or whatever. And so I just had this memory while we were thinking about this topic of, I think it was about eight years ago, our amazing friend in South Africa, Boyd Varty, who has a podcast called Track Your Life, that you should definitely check out, and a book called The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, which is-

Martha Beck:
Wonderful.

Rowan Mangan:
… so good. So good. Anyway, he invited me to come stay with him and do some work with him for a few weeks. And so I got to go to Londolozi, doesn’t suck folks, in South Africa where he lives. And basically we just sat down and talked for three weeks and just, he did some riffs, ideas, things he was thinking about.

We went out driving in the bush and he would talk about stuff. We would play with metaphors, just doing all this stuff. And I just recorded it all and started getting it transcribed and everything, because what he needed was someone to kind of put together some content for him. So he needed a website written, he needed social media, blah, blah, blah at the time. So anyway, so at the end of the time, my job was, I had all this material that I’d collected and I was going to go home. And over the next month I was going to sort of sort it, collate it, and then put it together in these various contexts. But I flew from Londolozi to Johannesburg, and I had a day, like 24 hours before my flight home to Australia, and I had this tiny hotel room, little airport hotel room. And Marty, I sat at this tiny desk in this room with my laptop for 18 hours.

Martha Beck:
Oh my goodness.

Rowan Mangan:
Working on this stuff that I didn’t have to do, it was due in a month. That’s when they were expecting it. And the thing is, the work wasn’t transcendent. It was highlighting transcripts and then going through and typing out what I highlighted. It was a lot of typing, a lot of word processing sort of stuff. But I was so driven to do it because I loved Boyd so much, and I loved his message so much that that was really key. So why did I work for 18 hours and not sleep on this stuff? And I think that I love helping, that is a big part of it for me. So I love getting work where I feel like I can help someone and that feeds me.

And I think there’s also a sort of love language in that, I was so grateful for this opportunity to come and do this work and have this time with Boyd that this was my gratitude being expressed. But there was also a strong overlap of mission. And I think that’s sort of what we’re drilling into is when square three is in line with your mission or your calling or your purpose, however you want to put that.

Martha Beck:
That’s so true. And I had a really interesting experience with it because I mentioned that when I started, I couldn’t seem to stop this thing called coaching people, and I couldn’t seem to keep myself from training other people to do it. And there was so much passion. I used to train people. They’d come for a weekend, four-day seminar or something, in some hotel suite, and I would sit there all four days for 12 hours a day. And literally, this may be a bit much for everybody to hear, but it is my experience and I claim it. Sometimes I would not pee the whole time. And later I developed a bladder problem, not because of this, but I had surgery and they looked at my bladder and the urologist said to me, and I quote, “Pound for pound, you have the biggest bladder I’ve ever seen.”

Rowan Mangan:
If you’ve ever heard Marty speak live, she likes to trot this little story out, whenever she forgets to give people bio breaks.

Martha Beck:
I was perfectly for, I’m completely decrepit, but I have a bladder that would just shame you, if you could see how big it is, you would be so ashamed of your tiny bladders. But here’s the thing.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve never thought to feel ashamed of the size of my bladder. But I am right right now.

Martha Beck:
But here’s an interesting thing. At one point I thought, okay, I’m going to do this thing and I’ve got to do it right. I’ve got to be in the 21st century. This was right at the 2000s, the aughts. And I hired myself a social media coach, because I thought, this is the way of the future, and I am a hard worker. I can go at this stuff all day and all night like a lumberjack. And he started asking me to tweet once a day, to take a picture every so often and put it on social media. Ro, I became so exhausted, I could not speak. I could not move. I wept. I had nightmares about my social media, and I would force myself to try to think of a tweet, and I’d put some lame ass thing online, and then I would have this intense revulsion response, and then I’d go do some other part of my business.

And again, the wild horses couldn’t have stopped me. They were pulling me forward. That really showed me. When we started doing the podcast, it was like, yeah, yeah, wild horses. Wild horses. But I can’t do other forms of social media that seem very similar to me. I don’t know who’s making the decisions, but I know I’m not bringing it out of culture because it doesn’t really follow the rules.

Rowan Mangan:
So as far as the culture that we always talk about, would it be fair to say that when it comes to square three work, the hard work in service of our dreams, apart from not really believing in any of that stuff, the culture sort of says streamline, monetize, show up without fail, be the same. So there’s that part of it. And then I feel like there’s also part of the cultural messaging is do it this way because you should, because grafting is a virtue, and this is what a productive, good, upstanding person does and is seen to do.

Martha Beck:
I believe you, and I don’t know what grafting means. What does it mean? Graft. Graft.

Rowan Mangan:
Means work.

Martha Beck:
It just means.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I think.

Martha Beck:
It’s Australian. I thank you for that word.

Rowan Mangan:
I think it’s like a cockney kind of, now I’ve got to look it up. You talk about Mark Twain or something.

Martha Beck:
When you use it again, make sure you do the chicken dance, please.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, yes.

Martha Beck:
But it made me think, as we were talking about it, made me think about Mark Twain’s novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Most people have not heard of that one or read it. And it’s about a guy who time travels back from the 1840s back to the time of King Arthur. And I was remembering this scene where there’s a holy man who’s been doing these prostrations to save his soul. I think he kneels and gets up again. No, he bows. He just bows and bows and bows. He’s been standing on this pedestal, bowing for years. And the Connecticut Yankee looks at him and goes, “I bet I could hook that up to a sewing machine.” If there is a source of any kind of energy or power in the world, the Yankee, the good Western society creator, is going to hook it up to a machine and make it productive and make money.

Rowan Mangan:
I have an update for you that’s going to please you a lot on the definition of graft, because I have always been given to understand it, that it means to work hard. And it turns out when I dig into the etymology a bit, what it means is to work hard towards something corrupt or shady. So it’s a fairly Australian consistent with your image of Australia.

Martha Beck:
Well, your country is a prison. Work is grafting. Sorry Australians.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry to come back-

Martha Beck:
I love that.

Rowan Mangan:
… to your thing after interrupting and going off on a little-

Martha Beck:
Oh, no. Hard work is hard work. Ask Stoffel, the honey badger. You don’t have to be doing anything right by culture’s light.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. That’s true.

Martha Beck:
I think we should be grafting.

Rowan Mangan:
But here’s the thing. Culture says you should be monetizing stuff.

Martha Beck:
True doubt.

Rowan Mangan:
But what your story about the creating the coach training and beginning or starting to coach people, it did get monetized. It monetized itself.

Martha Beck:
It did. It absolutely did. And I was stunned and amazed. I had never been able to make any money. I’d been taught growing up that being a businessperson was the most corrupt, grafty way you could live, and I never expected to make money doing this. Literally, people showed up and said, “Here, let us help you put some structures in place.” It started making money. They said, “Thanks, bye.” And it was all, it happened very easily. And I have worked so hard. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to just get a Eat, Pray, Love, breakaway success book that would set me up forever.

And I made money as a writer, but never enough to live on. And then this business sprouted out of the side of my head, and I put weed killer on it. It’s still made money. It’s so weird. But that’s when the wild horses are pulling you. They’re going to take care of you. That’s my belief. And I’ve seen other people do it. And if you fall back into, “No, I’m just going to grunt away here at things I hate.” It doesn’t work as well. The monetizing doesn’t.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? All right, so how do we figure it out? How do we come to our senses so that we know when it’s culture that is making us work hard in this way or when it’s inspired square three action?

Martha Beck:
I thought you’d never ask. I cannot wait to tell you, but I am going to wait until after this break.

Rowan Mangan:
So Marty, we need to learn the difference or learn how to tell the difference between the hard work that’s the culture and the man and is oppressing us and hashing our mellow and the hard work that is our true nature. Even when the work isn’t fun and even doesn’t feel inspired.

Martha Beck:
Right. We’re slogging away, we’re pushing the boulder up the hill, but there are wild horses still pulling us. Even as you said with your degree, you’re just like, and still fascinated somehow. And here’s what it seems to me, that your nature, I’m going to go woo woo here, I always do. After my conversations with not just one quantum physicist friend, but several, is I believe that whatever our true nature is, it exists kind of outside of time and it knows how to make things happen in the line of time that we experience. And sometimes we have to slog through part of that, but we feel at some level that this is the way the line of time should be going for us. And even though it’s a terrible struggle, I come back from physical therapy every single time and say-

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
I know I brag about it all the time. You would not believe the horrible things this woman made me do. I am so exhausted and I loved it.
And even though it literally makes me faint and fall down, the things it feels on purpose, it feels right. And I really believe my physical body responds to it that way. And here is a little data point from some really interesting research that I think proves this to me in a deep way that I can’t even explain, men who are raising infants without women. When you give birth, your body starts spouting oxytocin, which is the tend and befriend hormone that makes you want to cuddle your kid, and it creates milk in your breasts, and it basically just turns you into a love machine. Well, men who are raising babies in the absence of women begin secreting high levels of oxytocin, which makes them want to care for the baby. With that same kind of compulsion that many people have.

I mean, some people have terrible experiences, and I don’t want to say that everybody’s experience is the same, but for me and for a lot of women, the biological imperative to care for the baby is so strong that it is the worst, hardest, nastiest thing you’ve ever done. And you could not stop it. If they chained you to your bed, you would find a way to get out of it and take care of that kid. Is that your experience as well?

Rowan Mangan:
About men?

Martha Beck:
No, no, no, no, no. I was just pondering the fact that you just spent three hours dealing with a diaper issue that had to do with Lila not being quite clear about where the stuff goes once it comes forth.

Rowan Mangan:
It wasn’t a liquid only situation.

Martha Beck:
But you were in there.

Rowan Mangan:
I definitely think that raising kids can be that sort of that square three, there’s no tangible reward most days. Well, sometimes there is, but it’s still chipping away towards something that is your heart and your dream. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And even dudes whose bodies don’t typically secrete that hormone at those levels, that begins to happen to them in some way that we can only explain by referring to nature. It’s happening in the body, but there are a lot of things that aren’t so visceral. And I talk a lot about raising kids. You were talking earlier about how even working at that library you mentioned, you still had this natural compulsion to do certain things.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned in this episode that I worked at a library, academic library, university library for seven years. It’s kind of the new Harvard in our class.

Martha Beck:
I was just thinking we should all drink when you mentioned the library, and I did not mention Harvard. Oops. Just did. I can drink.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, no, I mean there was definitely, because I was saying often the square three is just doing your job, doing your day job. And then I started thinking about I… So when I did that job, I was working to help communicate to students the various services that were available to them to help them study. And one of my, okay, the high point in my career, I’ll just say it to date, has been 10 years ago, I actually think it might be 12 years ago now, my team and I put together a little animated video called What’s a Library Database, that has done-

Martha Beck:
It was adorable.

Rowan Mangan:
It was done quite well. It’s about 100,000 views on YouTube, if you don’t mind.

Martha Beck:
Boo yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s a lot in library land, just saying. So it was my day job. I went in, a lot of the time it wasn’t fun, a lot of the time it was fine. But I was sort of thinking about, you talk about parts a lot, parts psychology, IFS, and I was thinking like, “Okay, so there’s the dream of the part of me that is a book nerd that’s being served when I’m working on the square three stuff about, okay, let’s storyboard this. Let’s face it, library databases.”

Martha Beck:
Databases.

Rowan Mangan:
Are not the most exciting, fascinating topic.

Martha Beck:
Sexy.

Rowan Mangan:
Sexy. Then there’s a part of me that I already mentioned that loves to help. So helping these students who are coming in often from other countries and other sort of educational systems. And so that part of me was also had a dream that was being served. And there’s a part of me that finds creativity in finding ways to communicate things to people so that it lands for them with storytelling. And so I think often the square three and the nature of us, it doesn’t even need to be in my life I intend to achieve. I just think there’s little corners of our personality that are being served all the time often by these day-to-day tasks. And just because it’s not sexy doesn’t mean it’s culture.

Martha Beck:
I love that. And I love the way you’ve suddenly started putting the word serve into almost every sentence, because I actually think as you’re talking about it, that that one word is the key to telling the difference between what you’re pushing to do with culture and what you’re being pulled to do by nature. Ask yourself, what am I serving? What am I serving right now? I never asked this when I was developing a life coaching course. I was just like, why will people not stop? But if I stop now and ask myself, what is this serving? I can tell you immediately, I have always wanted to experience the thing Asian philosophy talks about where you transcend suffering. And everything I’ve done as a coach and the structure of the training and the way I train people, it’s all about can you approach your own awakening? And the moment I say that I’m serving that, I look back on my… This is quite a naruhodo moment. Sorry, that’s Japanese. This is quite an aha moment for me.

Because I’m looking back and going, well, no wonder it wouldn’t go away. Oh my God, it’s about awakening. Well, okay, whatever is the essence of myself, that’s what it wants. And it absolutely is the opposite of conforming with whatever cultural pressures there are. And it’s also interesting that when I first started the coach training, and actually a long way into it, we’d ask people, “Why have you signed up for it?” And about 85% of them for a long time said, “I have no idea.” They had these wild horses feeling. So I think it’s almost like if there’s something that you love and that serves your heart and it doesn’t make sense, that’s what you do.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s the pull that we’ve talked about before, that maybe when we’re working within the pull, even, or especially when we don’t understand what we’re doing.
Which makes total sense to me, that they didn’t know what they were drawn to it, right? They were drawn to it and their cultural mind couldn’t understand it. But tell me this, Marty, what do you do in the moment when you’re sitting at your desk hating what you have to do today? Say, my dream is I want to set up a yoga studio. It’s my absolute waystation dream of this part of my life, but what is before me is that I have to fill out forms to register as a business or whatever, and it still makes me want to die to do it. So where is nature here? How do I reconcile that?

Martha Beck:
Since I’ve worked with so many people who have tried to build their dreams, I actually feel like I have a data set, collective data to draw from here. And what I think it is, when there’s that feeling that you want to die, it’s not actually the tedium of the task, it’s the grind and the fear. When you’re marching through the things that you have to do, either physiologically or culturally to make a big thing happen, there is not only a strain, there is a certain degree of fear. Because every time I’ve had a client who was at that point where they could choose to move forward with the wild horses or just sort of sit where they were. Often they couldn’t move away, but they would just sit where they were. The word that came to mind was not energy or motivation, it was courage. It takes tremendous courage to serve something that makes no sense, but feels like your heart’s desire.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and courage is from guerrier in the French, or they’re both from the same root, I guess, which is heart. So it’s courage and heart as the same thing, which is often not how we think of it, I think.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I mean, in the Divine Comedy, when Dante, he’s traveled up purgatory and he’s almost a paradise and he has to walk through a fire. And his guide, Virgil, the poet, says to him, “There’s nothing I can do for you here. You must kill your cowardice and move forward with your fear on board.” So you have your fear. You can’t get rid of that, but you can kill your cowardice. And I think the way you do that is you drop out of your mind, which is so conditioned by culture, and you drop into the heart space, and that’s why when people say about an athlete that she’s digging deep to finish the marathon, or he’s out there on a torn Achilles or whatever, they don’t say, “Oh my God, they’ve got mind.” They say, “That’s heart.” That’s heart. That grind, that willingness to serve your true nature no matter what is the essence of heart.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
So, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I think that’s perfect.

Martha Beck:
So that’s square three. It’s not easy, but damn, it really, really… That’s where we spend a lot of the time and pulling in the traces of our lives, like the dogs that pulled the sleds 1,000 miles through the Alaskan wilderness to get the medicine to the children in the far north. We’re all slogging along like those sled dogs in impossible situations, but loving the run and feeling in our hearts that it’s worth it.

Rowan Mangan:
And so ultimately, I guess if we’re in service to our own hearts, then we’re on the right track.

Martha Beck:
And Balto, the head dog was half wild, he was half wolf. So if we go into the wolf part of our hearts and then serve what makes them beat harder, then we’ll come home. We’ll get to the right places. So everyone out there, thanks for listening. Serve your heart and stay wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

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For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.