The Joys of Insignificance | Ron Siegel
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2022
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many, if not all, of us have a nonstop, ambient thought-track running through our minds of: how am I doing? How do I look? Why did I say that? Am I running behind? What do other people think of me?
How did we get this way? And what do we do about it? Ron Siegel has thought a lot about this, and has plenty of practical answers, including the notion that we should lean into our insignificance. Many of us grew up being told how we were special. But Ron argues that the words, "you're not special," constitute extremely good news.
Dr. Ron Siegel is a part-time assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and a board member at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. In his private clinical practice, he provides mindfulness-oriented psychotherapy. He is also the author of the new book, The The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary: Finding Happiness Right Where You Are.
The episode explores:
- The notion that we didn't evolve to be happy.
- Why we self-evaluate
- The downsides and upsides of self-assessment.
- Strategies for dealing with this often irrational self-grading criteria, which include mindfulness, self-compassion, and gratitude.
- What it means to "lean our ladder against the right wall."
Content Warning: This conversation includes brief references to mature topics, including sex and addiction.
Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/ron-siegel-431
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% happier podcast. |
| 0:05.9 | Dan Harris. |
| 0:07.9 | Hey, everybody, as we were preparing this episode, I was thinking about a story that a meditation |
| 0:15.3 | teacher, friend of mine once told me. |
| 0:17.9 | I'm not going to name him because I didn't actually ask permission to tell the story, but |
| 0:21.9 | the gist of it was that my friend was on a retreat doing walking meditation, you know, walking |
| 0:26.5 | super slowly and trying to be mindful. |
| 0:28.4 | And he noticed how after each step he was assessing his own performance, did I do a good |
| 0:33.0 | job with that one? |
| 0:34.0 | Was I awake for the whole step, etc? |
| 0:35.8 | As I recall the story, my friend broke down and wept when he suddenly realized that he |
| 0:39.7 | had spent basically his whole life engaged in compulsive self evaluation. |
| 0:45.0 | If that sounds familiar, welcome to the human condition. |
| 0:48.4 | I think many, if not all of us, have a non-stop ambient thought track, or you might call |
| 0:53.5 | it a self-directed diss track running through our skulls of how am I doing? |
| 0:57.5 | How do I look? |
| 0:58.5 | Why did I say that thing? |
| 0:59.5 | Am I running behind? |
| 1:00.5 | What do other people think of me? |
| 1:02.0 | And blah, blah. |
| 1:03.3 | How did we get this way? |
| 1:04.5 | And what do we do about it? |
... |
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