Humble the Poet
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
coming up next on passion struck all we need in our lives is a direction and orientation no matter how specific no matter how vague if we know where we're going that in itself reduces our anxiety if you put someone in the middle of the desert and they have no idea where to go their anxiety is going to go up just say hey head north that will reduce their anxiety we need a little bit of clarity we need a little bit of direction
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
So it was important for me to start it where I felt I was already meeting people. My big question that I was asking myself as I was writing this book, because I wrote it selfishly to address the anxious feelings I was having around circumstances in my life, it was what does a white belt and anxiety look like? What does somebody who just, we all have anxious feelings.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Not all of us have realized it yet. And my question was just like, how do I meet somebody at the very beginning? And it was this idea that we're viewing anxiety as some sort of condition. I have in that same chapter, anxiety is in herpes. It's not dandruff. It's not a condition that you need to cure. It's a signal. It's like hunger or something that we need to pay attention to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
It's something that when it's tuned correctly is one of our greatest gifts. It's on our team. And it was really important for me to recognize that all of us are dealing with way more than we should be dealing with. And I wanted to approach that with grace and respect. So the reader understood that, look, we're all in the same boat. Let's go on this journey together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I'm still on the journey and I'll forever be on this journey. And if we go through it together, I'll take the first steps by being vulnerable and open about it. And let's see if we can improve together as a collective.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I think just a general statement about us as a species is I think our outside world has evolved and changed significantly quicker than our biology has. We're not even biologically designed to consume some of the colors that we're seeing. These colors don't exist in nature. There's a super normalness to them when we experience them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And if you think about the world that we live in, which is post-industrial, super modern, this is a world that's existed for maybe 300 years. And we as a creature in our form, we've been around for maybe 50 to 100,000 years looking the way and having the biology that we do. And For the majority of human history, we were always in smaller communities.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
We were in communities of probably 50 to 150 people. And we developed programming that put the needs of our village over ours, understanding that rejection would have led to our death, understanding that we are part of something greater than us. And then a lot of our modern day problems relate to the fact that we still have the software, but it doesn't work. when you have a million people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
You can figure out who the coolest kid is in your middle school if you got 300 kids, but you can't figure out who the coolest kid in Manhattan is if there's 11 million people here. And that does something, that discombobulates our ability to process information.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And what happens with that, and you include this concept of for the needs of the economy, we're being pushed towards a culture of hyper individualism. I think the first thing that I would love to say to the audience is, Understand your need for authentic connection with real people in real life. It's a non-negotiable. We need each other. We need each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Not that we want, we need each other and it's our responsibility to create these connections. And it's really important to understand that modern society has provided us with fast food options. Just like eating fast food. If you're hungry, you can eat fast food. And it'll be quick. It'll be cheap. It'll be easy. And obviously it'll be really delicious because of all the flavoring they put in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
But if you eat it long enough, you start to realize, wait, I'm still lacking nutritional value. We can't replace nutrition with something that's just delicious. And we have fast food versions of connection being on our phones. We have fast for dating apps, watching television, living through a screen. These are fast food versions of things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
people encouraging us to feel sorry for ourselves, self-victimhood, that is pretty much developing a fast food connection with yourself saying, nobody understands what I'm feeling except for me. And it scratches, temporarily scratches that itch for connection. And what we have to understand is community, authentic community is really important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I cite in the book, just even the way we have urban planning, the amount of lanes between where you live and across the street determines how often you'll cross the street to even see your neighbor over there. And this is the part that's important. When we have connection, we build more empathy. We have more opportunities to be seen. I'm fortunate here in New York City.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I have a really cute puppy. So when I'm not with her, people aren't looking at me. But when I'm with her, everybody remembers her. And that encourages a lot of different conversations. A lot of local businesses know her. For her, every day is Halloween. She's walking into stores, getting free candy, free doggy treats, etc.,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
But I think from this concept of us building connections and needing each other, it's really important that we prioritize connecting with people in ways that feel authentic to us. We, we often try to fit in and we often have to, maybe we have to fit in that work. We have to fit in that school. We have to fit in certain social circles.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
But figuring out where we authentically belong will give us a feeling that we'll scratch so many itches that we won't find ourselves spending too much time chasing these fast food distractions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Absolutely. And piggyback off that they have to be built and maintained. If you build a bridge between you and someone else, you got to clear the debris every now and then. There's going to be ruptures that are going to require repair. And again, we're in such a predicament where all this convenience is being provided to us and sold to us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
that when we hit these moments of challenge we're like well i can just swipe right and find a new date or i can just go hang out with another friend and it's something that i don't blame anybody for feeling Because it's a challenge. Whenever we hit a roadblock, there's an option of either getting some grit and pushing through or just bouncing off of it and moving on to the next thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And in a world where everything is becoming hyper-disposable, it makes us feel hyper-disposable and it makes others feel hyper-disposable, which again, severs connections or minimizes our motivation to build a connection with others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Absolutely. None of our greatest relationships will have a happily ever after. There's always going to be a day after. And that day still requires more work. And oftentimes we've just been signaled by
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
content that was designed to entertain us but now we think it's there to inform us that no you just find people you just find that friend and you guys are best friends for life and no work is needed there'll be no ruptures or you find your soulmate and you guys will just be perfect and happy and have no issues or you find that perfect job or you find that perfect place to live and there's no the only promise is change we're constantly changing and that's okay it's anticipating that change and being okay with the challenges
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
that come from that change. We can't avoid challenges because those are the gifts that allow us to grow and become more resilient.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Oh, I think the first thing I had to unlearn. Is that anxiety is not my enemy. Anytime that I have anxious feelings, I'm not under attack. And I think also recognizing that anxiety to say my anxiety, I have anxiety. I think that wording is not helpful. So I think recognizing things through the lens of, is this helping me or is this not helping me? So I stopped judging things as good and bad.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
So instead of saying my anxiety or I have anxiety, now my base sentence has to be, I feel anxious because. And this requires me then to go inwards to figure out what's happening. I feel anxious because I'm about to miss a deadline. I feel anxious because Someone didn't reply to my text message. I feel anxious because Team Canada might be losing this hockey game, whatever it may be.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
But I think giving understanding anxiety is the most misunderstood emotion that we have. And one of the most intense, giving that I feel anxious and not labeling myself as I am anxious allows me to separate myself from my emotions, understand that they're not permanent, understand they're not tattoos on my forehead, labeling my identity. And that goes for the positive and the negative emotions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I feel happy. I feel scared. And for me, that was probably the first step in going through all of this and then recognizing some of the signs of anxiety and trying to make sense of them without getting too scientific. We have the polyvagal theory, which is our safety, fight or flight, freeze, and sometimes fawn.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And understanding this idea too was like, hey, I can logically understand that I shouldn't be in danger now, but my body is responding in a totally different way. And for me, a lot of that learning came from doing jujitsu. In the book, I talk about doing jujitsu. And the reason I think jujitsu was a great teacher for me, it's because you roll with people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
You're rolling, and jujitsu was grappling, or as I like to call it, professional cuddling. And you're rolling with somebody that you know holds no malice towards you, but the moment they grab you and get an arm around your neck, your body starts to panic. And it shows you a big separation within you between how your body responds to something and how your logical mind can.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And very often when we are flooded with emotions, it's not our logical mind. It's not the prefrontal cortex that's responding. It's our survival brain. It's our amygdala. And what we're really trying to do to improve how we feel is to close that gap of reacting to something and converting that to a response and the inconvenient truth of that. And I've been learning this a lot.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
is that you can't talk yourself out of anxiety but you have to you can't think your way out of it you have to act your way and a lot of that comes through voluntarily putting yourself in situations that make you feel anxious when you're in a great place and so for me that's required understanding this concept of triggers and realizing that triggers aren't my enemy again another cultural concept that we have is don't trigger me that's triggering this is a trigger warning and it's like
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
The truth is a trigger is a roadmap. The trigger is revealing where we need to do the work. So for example, if I'm walking down the street and I walk by somebody and they're wearing a fragrance and the fragrance is the same fragrance that maybe an ex-girlfriend wore mine. She hurt me. That fragrance is going to trigger a pain. It's going to trigger an anxiety.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Now in the moment, I feel when we do feel these triggers, we should be kind to ourselves. And be like, all right, whatever I need to do to get over this. Do I need to grab my phone, doom scroll? Do I need to smoke a cigarette? Do I need to distract myself, avoid Medicaid? Whatever I need to do, fine. In that moment, do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
But later, when you're in a good place, when you've hydrated, when you've had a good night's sleep, when you're in a good place, now let's voluntarily go back into that trigger. Let's journal about it. Maybe let's go to a department store. Let's smell it. Let's re-identify what that is and what that means to us. And this is the work that I realized it's voluntarily putting yourself in that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
So, you know, back to jujitsu, somebody wrapping their arms around my neck made me freeze. Then doing enough jujitsu, them wrapping their arm around my neck would put me in fight or flight. Now that I've been doing jujitsu for a couple of years, my heart rate doesn't change. I stay calm and I can stay logical in those situations and be like, oh, he's trying to choke me. Does he have it?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Is his elbow in the right place? And to me now it feels much more like a game. And it's the same way you throw a kid in the swimming pool. They're going to freak out the first time. Enough exposure allows their nervous system to be like, hey, I'm not in danger. And a lot of times that we feel anxious is because Our survival brain says, hey, this rhymes with something that might be dangerous.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And its definition of dangerous is so broad. Anything new, anything that kind of looks dangerous, anything that potentially harmed us in the past. And it really is the work that we have to do is to be like, hey, let's voluntarily put ourselves in these stressful situations. We talked about Wim Hof earlier. That's all he's encouraging us to do. Put yourself in some really cold ice water and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
and watch your brain freak out, but stay in long enough until your brain's like, wait, we're not going to die. This is okay. And it builds resilience. It's not magic. It's a nice, simple concept of, We have to be nicer to ourselves, but at the exact same time, we have to voluntarily put ourselves through stress.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I think what I realized is, especially as a school teacher, is when we were kids, somebody else was in charge of putting us in these uncomfortable situations, in these new situations. They packaged it to be fun, but this is how we learned how to sound out letters and read. This is how we learned how to do math. This is how we learned almost every skill.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
But then as we become adults, we start to avoid anything that feels uncomfortable. And then that's when our growth almost becomes very stagnant. This is an opportunity for us to self-parent and self-advocate and be like, Hey, let's voluntarily find difficult things to do regularly. And that's how we train our resilience.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
So when hard things and challenging things find us, we're more prepared to deal with it. A healthy nervous system isn't a calm nervous system. It's a prepared nervous system. We need to be prepared. We don't need to be Zen all the time. We need to be prepared and allow our emotions to be expressed the way they need to be expressed at the appropriate times.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
So I'll say it bluntly. The world is a dumpster fire. It's not your fault. And there is nothing wrong with you for feeling anxious while existing here, okay? It is not a feeling to feel anxious in this current modern world that we're in. This is not your fault. And I think very often we internalize our challenges like, oh no, no, I should be able to handle this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Everybody else around me is doing so well. And it's no, we're all trying our best to deal with this dumpster fire of a world. And it's really important to understand that it would be odd if you were completely emotionally regulated in this type of world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
We are not designed for the amount of noise, the amount of light, the amount of stimulation, the exposure to bad news, the exposure to information, the exposure to different opinions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
echo chambers and all of this on a regular basis this is not what we've been designed for as a species so it's going to be overwhelming it's going to be feel heavy it's going to feel challenging and it's going to constantly trigger our survival brain the amygdala to think that there is danger just around the corner so i think the first thing is to give yourself grace and understand this is not your fault now even though it's not your fault
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
it's still definitely your responsibility and you have options to make it easier or more difficult. And I think the key messages that I would put even before you have to read this book is like, hey, drink more water, get more sleep, be significantly nicer to yourself and hang out with people that make you feel good about yourself and allow you to be who you are authentically.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
These are four options right there that will take some of that weight off your chest and some of that weight off of your shoulders. So when you deal with stress that you can't avoid, like your job, like raising your children, like navigating the landscape of what our society is, you have a little bit more bandwidth. You have a little bit more gas in the tank.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I think that's the important part, which is recognizing what's in our control and what's not in our control. We can't control so many of these outside factors. And it's very challenging for us to control some of the inside factors. So a lot of it needs to start with being kinder to ourselves. One word that I would highly recommend we divorce ourselves from is the word should.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
We keep saying, I should do this. I should do that. We're just creating tension by using that word. Let's replace it with the word could. I should wake up earlier. Let's change that to I could wake up earlier. I should eat healthier. Let's replace that. I could eat healthier. I should go to the gym. I should make more money.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
All of these things, every time we tell ourselves who we should be, we are creating tension by not allowing ourselves to accept who we are. Self-love is accepting us as we are, warts and all. Think about the person you love the most. You could probably write a whole list of their imperfections. None of that disqualifies them from love. It's the same thing for us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
For us to have a connection with ourselves means we need to accept ourselves. So shitting and saying we should be doing this and Phil Noseworthy is the man that put me into this idea. He said it funny. He goes, don't shit all over yourself. All the shitting isn't happening. And I think it's a beautiful way to look at it where it's just like, just let go of that word.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
let go of that word should catch yourself every time you use it internally and externally and question why why should i two and a half kids in a picket fence why should i find a life partner as soon as i graduate university why should i believe what this politician is telling me and i think it becomes a lot more interesting when we start doing that because it encourages an internal dialogue that i realize begins this infinite journey inwards
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And what it'll allow you to do is to make a lot more improvements on how you feel on the inside. And it'll lead you down a journey of equanimity and equanimity just means prepared, managed. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Thank you so much.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
something that we can orient ourselves towards. And then we just enjoy the journey, understanding that that journey is going to have its highs and its lows, its easy days, its very difficult days. And who we become through going through that is the only thing that matters.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Yeah. So in 2010, I decided to walk away from my stable career as an elementary school teacher to pursue my creative itches at the time. I thought I was just a mediocre teacher. And when I was creating art after work, I was known as the tough one, the guy who was getting everyone to work extra hard and put in the extra hours. And it really helped me differentiate. Oh, maybe I'm not lazy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I'm just doing the wrong thing. And I realized it was one of the first instances where I was able to give myself grace through observing myself and picking up on my patterns and being my own cheerleader to encourage myself to pursue a life that felt more authentic. And it was definitely not the easiest leaving a job and starting from scratch as a creative.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Thank you. Thank you. ,,,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I'll feel guilty. And I think that guilt is the authentic guilt that we probably need, which is, Hey, that's not you. Let's correct that. I think what ended up happening now is being weaponized. A lot of our emotions have been weaponized via manipulation, via generations and generations of practice where our families
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
But definitely it was one of the largest turning points in my life where now as I live and have such unique, beautiful experiences, I wonder what if you didn't pull that trigger? You hadn't done it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
There's a quote in the book that says, your parents know how to push your buttons because they installed them. And guilt and shame become some of the biggest weapons. There's that level of manipulation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
So I think for us, it's realizing that we have to be our own best friends and we have to just recognize that the guilt that we think we're feeling is really us doing an old practice of trying to metabolize other people's pain. I don't want to let John down. So I'm going to put myself through more pain So he doesn't feel it. And it sounds noble. John's a resilient person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And John can deal with me saying, hey, I can't make this interview today if I'm not feeling well. Or we have to realize that it's not helpful to take everybody's stuff upon us. And also recognize, as I said, you can't guilt and shame a caterpillar into becoming a butterfly. There's a process there. The same way that you can't rip open a caterpillar in a cocoon to help it become a butterfly quicker.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
So that definitely is one of those moments in my life that really changed everything, not just in my external world, but also in my internal world in terms of how I viewed myself and how I treated myself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Its muscles wouldn't have developed and the wings won't fly. So it's recognizing how often guilt and shame are used and becoming observant when you hear politicians using it, when you hear public figures using it, when you hear your family using it, when you start to realize that, hey, there's an internal dialogue that uses it for me too.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And you realize, and I learned this a lot being an educator, working with little kids. It's you have to speak to them. You have to motivate them. Hey, buddy, see, you haven't done any work yet. Let's get to work. Because you can't just keep using guilt, shame, and fear on them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
and realizing that look when we're talking to ourselves we're talking to a scared child within that inner child and the goal here is to be effective and helpful i'm not talking about what's right and what's wrong or what's ideal versus what's not ideal i'm talking about what's actually effective what's going to get you the results and for me it's the same thing where it's like okay i got to go to jujitsu today but i'm not feeling good and i have the conversation with myself like hey are we
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Just because we don't want to go, or are we actually just not feeling good? And I can trust myself to have that authentic conversation and be like, Hey, look, man, we have a good history with each other. Let's do that. And I think about that as a self-employed individual being like, Hey, we've been self-employed since 2010. Let's look at our patterns.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Have we ever missed a deadline or messed up work because we played an extra video game or we went out to watch a movie or we spent time with friends? No, we haven't. So we're not going to guilt or shame ourselves if we do it today. And I think. Collecting information about yourself and using that to pick up on your patterns as self-awareness, which I think is an important practice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And it allows you to be nicer to yourself. And when we're nicer to ourselves, we'll get more results. It will give us the results that we think guilt and shame will get us. And this is really important because the guilt and shame will increase the tension, which by default will increase the anxious feelings. And the goal is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
is to feel anxious feelings less so we only feel them when we absolutely need to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
There's nothing wrong with you for feeling anxious. It's completely normal. It's like goosebumps. It's like hunger. It is a normal part of this. It is just an emotion. We have to do a lot more work to manage. Anxiety isn't anything we need to cure. It's just like hunger. You don't cure hunger. You manage it. And if you're feeling hungry, you don't ask yourself what's wrong with me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I'm feeling hungry. And also we've also had those moments where we feel hungry. And it wasn't actual hunger. Food wasn't, maybe we're actually dehydrated. Maybe we were actually stressed. Anxiety works the same way. We may feel anxious. And the secret to addressing and managing anxiety is to feel it. Anxiety is a signal.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Imagine anxiety, you're driving in your car and the light turns on and it says low tire pressure. That's a signal to check your tire pressure. When you check your tire pressure, maybe it wasn't low. Then we're like, oh, something must be wrong with the signal. Let's address it. Or your tire pressure is low. You put the air in the tire and you won't feel that signal anymore.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
However, we are living in a society that says, instead of feeling your feelings, let's medicate. Let's avoid. Let's distract. So pretty much we live in a society that's telling us, hey, if you see that low tire pressure monitor in your car, just put some duct tape over it. If you hear your smoke alarm go off, don't look for the smoke. Just put some duct tape over it or take out the batteries.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
That does not solve the problem. That's putting a bandage on a bandage. Let's feel our feelings. And unfortunately, resilience, when we practice resilience, it's not a warm, fuzzy feeling. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. For those who are listening right now, an easy day at the gym wasn't a good day at the gym. It's the same thing with life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
We can't constantly chase an easy life because we're trading our resilience. That's the price we're paying for that. And our resilience comes from voluntarily putting ourselves in challenging places. We have to go out and find challenges. So we are better prepared when challenges find us. There's nothing wrong with us for having these types of emotions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
The work that we need to do is just to make sure these emotions show up at the right times and they're not misfiring just because we got an awkward text message or we have a deadline and they show up when it really matters, when there's real danger, when there's real change. And I think that requires us to be significantly nicer to ourselves, being significantly more patient with ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Patient doesn't mean waiting around. Patience just means respecting the time it takes for things to naturally occur. You know, you can't just turn up the oven and bake the pie quicker. We have to respect time that it takes. And it's the same thing with our personal growth and understand that this is a lifelong journey. We're not going to solve this by snapping our fingers or flipping a switch.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
This is a lifelong journey. For me, this book was inspired by the anxiety that I would feel around reaching out to people. Reaching out to people and saying, hey, can I come on your podcast? Hey, can I share this book with you? I felt so much anxiety around asking because I was so afraid of rejection. And I was trying to figure out why.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And then you start to learn that rejection is such an ancient fear of ours because when we live in these smaller communities, rejection meant ostracism, which meant death. So when we feel rejected, when we feel left out, our ancient software is still making that feel like death. So what do we do? We avoid, we distract, and we medicate. And what I realize now is that, no, I have to lean into that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I have to lean into rejection. If anything, I have to voluntarily get rejected as much as possible so I can build resilience from it. And I think everyone listening can understand that. We all hate being rejected, but we all fantasize about the idea of who we would be and what our life would look like if we were not afraid of it, if we were enthusiastic towards it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
They say some of the most successful entrepreneurs get dopamine hits through rejection. And I think that's a really interesting idea. And for me, even now on this journey of promoting this new book, I've been reaching out I've been texting, messaging people and asking them to come on podcasts and help me promote the book. And some are replying. Some have surprised me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Some have completely went ghost. And all the emotions that I'm feeling, all I'm doing is I'm surrendering to them. And my definition of surrender isn't giving into them. It's observing them and saying, Hey, I texted so-and-so three days ago. They would always reply to me. Now, since I've asked for a favor, they haven't replied. How does that make me feel? And I journal about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
It makes me feel like I'm not worthy. It makes me feel like I'm not good enough. It makes me feel like the connection wasn't authentic. And I can explore these. I can explore these feelings. Could there be any other explanations? Maybe they're busy. Maybe they have anxiety around saying no. Maybe they can't accommodate this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And what it allows and it has taught me is that when I'm kinder to myself and have more grace for myself, I'm kinder to others and have more grace for others and vice versa. And this was the reason this book was such an important mission for me. It started as a selfish journey to deal with the anxiety that I was feeling.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And it helped me realize that this is the biggest problem we are facing as people that currently, and I hope it doesn't change, but anxiety currently is the biggest problem that we're facing that hasn't been politicized. It hasn't become a polarizing topic. There isn't two sides to this conversation right now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And it's everybody of all walks of life, no matter how you live, no matter what your political leanings are, we feel anxious feelings. And I realize if we can address this as a collective, The anxiety that you're feeling isn't an individual problem. It is a societal problem, which means it's not going to have an individual solution. It's going to have a societal solution.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And if we as people, as individuals and a collective address this, we are going to feel better as individuals and as a collective. And I don't think there's anybody, especially in this country, feeling that we're united, that we're in a good place right now. And I think this is the first step to us feeling better in our own skin, in our own universe inside, and in the universe around us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Really did. And I really appreciate that. As I said, every time, this is my fourth book through the major channels. And every time it's You're always pleasantly surprised. You make a new friend and this is us now. And at the same time, it goes the other way too, where you're unpleasantly surprised by others. It's a part of the journey.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And as I said, it's a great practice for grace and acceptance and a wonderful opportunity to sit there and observe the chaos that goes on in your mind and in your body. When you deal with rejection, when people say pass, When people may say, oh, no, the story isn't interesting enough for us to cover.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
It's such an interesting thing when you start to realize the differences between worth and value and understanding how this kind of this game gets played. And it's been really interesting for me through my journey of self-love and self-acceptance of recognizing how much of this journey I want to play.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And some of the best advice I was given, and I'll share it with you and anyone else listening, is I'm just on a mission. You watch those heist movies, you watch Ocean's Eleven and And George Clooney just goes around recruiting people for the mission. That's all I'm doing here. I'm on a mission to help people better manage their emotions. And I'm reaching out to people to be a part of this mission.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Most definitely. And it's such an interesting position to be in. Because a fraction of the job is the teaching. And if you start thinking, going back to your own memories and thinking about your favorite teachers, you don't remember much about what they taught. It's really about if they made you feel seen, they made you feel heard and how they made you feel about yourself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And some people have given me a thumbs up and they're like, you son of a bitch, I'm in. And everybody else is not. And that's okay. If they're not on the mission today, they may be on it later or they may never be. And I think that's completely okay. As long as I'm being authentic to what matters to me. And that's part of this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I've also been in this long enough to know that we have no idea how this stuff plays out. This book is selling a million copies and it could be the worst thing that ever happened to me. It could sell 10 copies and I can be completely happy. We don't know. We don't know how things play out anymore. And I think it's a fantastic opportunity and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
surrendering, observing and adjusting my stake in the outcome. But I definitely, with all my heart, really appreciate you sharing your time and your platform with me to have this conversation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I think that was a big, valuable lesson because I went in thinking that, oh, I love learning and I want to be a lifelong learner. And this would be a great environment for that. And then I realized this wasn't just going to be a knowledge base. It was not to fill anybody's head with knowledge, not mine, not theirs.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
It was to light a fire in both of them and I. And as you said, there's talking at an audience, talking to an audience, just talking through an audience. And it really is when we introduce emotion, vulnerability, honesty, is that when we build that authentic connection, which is a two-way street, even with
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
a platform like a podcast where we may not be able to have the conversations with the people on the other end, we can still create a two-way street of connection. And I think that's the most important part for us to learn and grow with each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
It is really interesting because you start to realize that the structure of the school, the classroom, the clock, the hierarchy in terms of your teachers, your principals, a lot of it really feels industrial. And you start to realize you're like, oh, this is really, you're preparing children for society, but really what society is an economy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
You're preparing them to contribute to an economy, not contribute to a community. Our communities have become so big. We live in cities of millions of people now that we can't have these deep connections with our village, with the people, even in our own neighborhoods. And what ends up happening is in school, it's about, okay, let's get these basic lessons taught.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Let's reward people with very specific learning styles. We're rewarding behavior that works well in a workplace. We're rewarding behavior that works well for somebody who's looking for a salary in two weeks off per year. And There are so many different learning styles and people absorb the world in so many different ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Some people, a simple example would be if you want to teach children two plus two is four. Some kids, you can just write it on the chalkboard and they'll get it. Some kids, you're going to have to give them a bunch of Cheerios to play with and manipulate, and they have to get that structure that way. Some people, you can just tell it to them and they'll understand.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
There's auditory, there's visual, there's kinesthetic. And when you start to fill up a teacher's classroom with 35 kids, they don't have the bandwidth or the resources to approach each individual student the way they need to be approached.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And then you start to recognize that some of the success and the failures with individuals as they grow up really has to do with a world just not being designed for them in the way they are. And that really robs us of some of the most important things that we need, which are soft skills,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
i'm sure you recognize it too just being able to work with people making friends cooperation co-existing sharing all of these are have they have such an important value not only just a society but even if you're working your job at some point everyone's got the same resume and they're going to hire the person they want to beat see every day and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
I think we really realized that a lot of this is really based on feeding something that may not be as important as we think it needs to be. As I said, the standardized testing, the reading, and we're not updating it. We're not updating it for the fact that there's a calculator in our phones. We're not updating it for the fact that AI exists or YouTube lessons exist.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And it's a really interesting thing that I think individual parents have to take a look at when it comes to getting, preparing their kids for the world. I think you and I have both understood in our entrepreneurial journey that You got to learn as you go and you got to constantly learn. There's no finish line. Yeah. There's no paperwork.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I always, the analogy that I use is the zoo in the jungle. And it's like, even when I was working in the school, I felt like I lived in a zoo. I felt like I was in a cage every two weeks. Someone gave me my food, but I was trapped in a cage. And then when I left the safety and security of a job, I moved to the jungle.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I was definitely more free and I could go wherever I want, whenever I wanted. But that cage that held me in was also protecting me from predators. And it was also providing me food that I had to find myself. And there was a couple of years it took for me to adjust to it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
But I'm grateful I did because I think, and I'm sure you can attest to this again as an entrepreneur, there are no more curveballs that we're not prepared for because every day is a curveball. All we're doing is practicing our swing to deal with the curveballs of life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I think in the new world that we're in, that's probably one of the most important things that we can teach younger children is resilience through challenge. And the simple idea that the world will never get easier, you can only get stronger and have them correlate that to the societies we live in where every single product being sold to us is sold in the name of convenience.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
This will make it easier to get your food. This will make it easier to watch a movie. This will make it easier for you to get from point A to point B. Not understanding that we're not just paying with money, we're paying with resilience. And then our lack of resilience is an abundance of anxiety, stress, tension. And when we have an abundance of those, then we start to lack empathy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
We start to lack our ability to connect with other people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
the idea the way education is currently structured it almost feels like it's sabotaging us from a mental health perspective but also from the perspective of us having even basic empathy for each other and caring about each other and hyper individualism is great for those who want to profit but it's not so good for us to be excited about getting out of bed in the morning
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Absolutely. And I think the important thing to recognize as well is, especially during the pandemic, how much did we rely on creativity to keep our lips above water? We were listening to podcasts. We were watching Netflix. We were listening to music, movies. These are children that never grew up creating this. And we depended on that. We depend on music when we're stuck in traffic.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
We depend on these things. And we should value them accordingly. This stuff isn't just here for fun. It is a necessary part of our system. It's a necessary part for our mental health and our ability to get through the day. And it can't just be for entertainment. It has to be storytelling because as a species, that's how we progress. We write our stories. We share our stories.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And we learn from other people's stories.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Because when I was going through my research, and I came across some of these activities, It's almost presumptuous to assume that somebody needs to unclench their jaw and take their tongue off the roof of their mouth, but that's where it's already at. It's just the idea of the body keeps score. Our bodies are already compensating for the stress and the tension that we're feeling.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
And I wanted to meet people where they're at and say, look, we're all going through a difficult time. And it's important that you understand that I see where you're coming from. And I'm not here to promise you magical inner peace for the rest of your life. What I'm here to do is start a dialogue with you and address some of the despair that we all feel.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Humble the Poet on How to Stop Anxiety and Find Inner Peace | EP 595
Despair meaning the hopelessness when we think we've run out of options. This book isn't a magic pill to rid people of anxiety. This book is a book full of options that we may not have considered to manage our emotions more effectively. and navigate this world which is getting heavier and more challenging every single day.