John R. Miles (3:55)

I am absolutely thrilled Today to welcome Dr. Bob Rosen onto Passion Struck. Welcome Bob. How are you today?

Dr. Bob Rosen (4:02)

Hi there. How are you, John?

John R. Miles (4:04)

I'm doing great and I'm so excited to have you on today because this podcast is all about how do you create a fulfilling life and that feels like it hits squarely in your bullseye as well.

Dr. Bob Rosen (4:16)

Yes, it does, both personally and professionally.

John R. Miles (4:23)

So you are a New York Times bestselling author and you've written powerfully about your own battles with anxiety and addiction. How did facing those parts of you reshape your own understanding of attachment, which is something that you are known for?

Dr. Bob Rosen (4:39)

I'm a psychologist and businessman and I've spent my life passionately interested in self awareness and self development, and I spent my career coaching CEOs traveling around the world. I got very interested in Eastern and Western Psychology in 2008. I had a dream, and the dream was that I was tied up by a handful of attachments. The attachment to the future, and the attachment to success. And I woke up and I wrote these 10 attachments that came to my mind at the time. The attachment to stability, to the past, the future, control, perfection, success. The attachment to youth, to pleasure, to yourself, and to life. And I wrote them down and I didn't have time to write that book, so I put them in the attic and brought them down in 2021 and the book came out of me in about a year. I have found personally that every time I experience some kind of angst, I turn to these 10 attachments. And I've noticed that varieties of people and the leaders that I've coached have also been hijacked by these 10 attachments in one form or another. And as I focus on these attachments and I can breathe through them in meditation, they just go away. The angst goes away. And I think that there may be more. But these are 10 ways of thinking, 10 kinds of baggage, 10 obstacles, 10 belief systems that we have in our head that stand in the way of our happiness.

John R. Miles (6:37)

Thank you for sharing that. And those all come out of your new book, which we're going to be discussing in more detail today, titled detach, ditch your baggage to live a more fulfilling life. But before we go there, you brought up that you've spent many decades studying both Eastern and Western psychology. What's something Western achievers deeply need from the East? And what's something that Easterners need from the West?

Dr. Bob Rosen (7:05)

Wow, great question. Western psychology teaches us about positive thinking. It teaches us about dreaming, setting goals and aspirations. And we're a very forward looking problem solving culture. Eastern psychology teaches us about impermanence or constant change. It talks about how we get in the way of our own happiness by having attachments. And the key is to detach from these attachments. And it frees us up to be freer and happier and more liberated. So I think that both cultures need to blend the best of each in order to be successful in life and successful in business.

John R. Miles (7:57)

It's so interesting. I asked this because I recently wrote a children's book. It's coming out in December and it's titled you matter. And the character's name is Luma. She's a little bunny. But in the book I don't think a child would pick up on it. But I blend Eastern and Western science in it. So I bring in Buddhist principles and I really layer it with behavioral science and positive psychology throughout the different scenes in the book. And I find that when you do that, you really create a foundation of the best of both worlds because there's so much we can learn from both. So I thought it's important to combine them. And I'm sure that's how you help coach the CEOs that you do, right?

Dr. Bob Rosen (8:45)

I've spent my career advising or studying or coaching over 500 CEOs of large corporations in about 60 countries. And the heads of Toyota and Canon and Boeing and Coca Cola Companies like that. And I have found that the very best ones are self aware and committed to their own development. So I've learned a lot from them. So this Eastern psychology is critical for Western people. One of the main lessons that I've found is that nobody teaches us how to live and thrive in an uncertain world where the world is constantly changing, our brains are constantly changing. We all know that's called neuroplasticity, but we're not taught how to thrive in that. And one of the contributions of Eastern psychology is it basically says that there's no such thing as stability. Stability is an illusion and uncertainty is reality. And so that actually leads to the first attachment, which is the attachment to stability.

John R. Miles (10:03)

And I want to dive into the attachment to stability here in a few minutes. But I want to go back just a little bit and talk about these CEOs just for another second. Because in my own career, and I know you're just learning about me, I was a C level in a Fortune 50 company, a senior executive and a couple Fortune 50s before that. And then I became a CEO of four or five private equity companies. And I used to have a coaching business where I would go in as a fractional executive to coach and help the founders of different small and medium sized businesses. And it's interesting to me what I found across the board is regardless of the size of the company, they all had the same recurring issues. It was more the scale that you were dealing with between a company that I was with like Dell, compared to a startup or a small business, but the issues seem to be eerily similar. Did you find the same thing?

Dr. Bob Rosen (11:08)

Pretty much. I always had a curiosity that every business model was different, but the human problems were all the same. And what I find is that the more awareness, self aware leaders are able to understand the value of the human strategy of their business and building of a healthy culture because they have insights about human nature and human development. But a lot of leaders are shackled by issues of ambition, anxiety, feelings of grandiosity, unnecessary perceptions of power, perfectionism, the attachment to control. And it really gets in the way of their leadership and their relationships with their boards and their executive teams. And they really can't see the value of creating a covenant with their workforce and, and it influences their trust and you name it. I saw a lot of these things in business.

John R. Miles (12:16)

I did too. And if I think since you're wearing green of the Marshall Goldsmith book, what got you here isn't going to get you where to where you want to go. What do you think is the biggest thing that stops so many people from getting to that next level of becoming a CEO?

Dr. Bob Rosen (12:32)

I think there is. First of all, they spend their entire lives aspiring to this job, and they finally get there, and the first day is the first day to the next phase of their life. But they come with some very well crafted belief systems about how to create value and an organization. And I think one of the problems is they believe those belief systems too much and they don't allow them to evolve and change and in fact, transform. And so they get stuck in their own mindsets. I think that's the primary obstacle, I find. And they, their companies are changing, but they're changing faster than their mindsets. And so they really have to focus on allowing themselves to learn and in real time. And that's hard for them because it involves vulnerability, it involves imperfection, it involves not having answers and you get to the top and there's pressure for people, for CEOs to have all the answers.

John R. Miles (13:50)

Man, I felt it. And the difference I felt is no one has your back. You think that the board might be helpful, and to an extent, you can go to them for some counsel, but you don't want to seem weak in their eyes at all. So you're really in this point where you got to seem like you're strong to the people underneath you. You've got to feel like you're a force with the board. So you're really putting a pickle if you're faced with a situation where you don't have the answer and you're on the fly trying to figure it out. So I've been there, and it's difficult.

Dr. Bob Rosen (14:25)

Well, I think one of the challenges that we have in society is that everybody is the CEO of their own. So this goes all the way down. All organizations in countries, all over the world, and we suck out the authenticity of people inside our institutions, and we don't allow them to be whole human beings in the workplace. Now, we were moving in that direction over the last 20 years, but I sense that workplaces are becoming more. Less healthy, not more healthy right now because they're moving from this concept of stakeholder capitalism to being really focused on the shareholders, again alone. And I think that's a troubling thing for all the stakeholders.

John R. Miles (15:16)

Yeah. That's why I really liked what Sir Richard Branson was trying to do with his concept of the B team, where he was trying to get a bunch of CEOs to start thinking about what is the value system that a company should be valued on other than shareholder value and things like that. So I wish we could go more down those lines because it's going to take these companies to create the systems change that we need to solve so many of the world's issues.

Dr. Bob Rosen (15:43)

But in fact, I think that the next group of people who are going to be the primary catalysts in changing society are business people. But they have to have the courage to do it. And that takes confidence and self awareness and a commitment to their own development to show up as an open, authentic, learning individual. And it's hard inside institutions to do that. So I agree with you.

John R. Miles (16:12)

Yeah. I used to work as a fractional executive for a company called Bold Business. It was founded by this business executive named Ed Kopko, who used to be the publisher of Chief Executive magazine. And he's been a serial. Have even heard of Ed?

Dr. Bob Rosen (16:26)

I've been in the magazine a couple times. Yeah.

John R. Miles (16:29)

Yeah. So Ed is one of the smartest people I know. And he created this brand because he truly felt that people don't understand how much businesses can change the world. And an example he would always use is you think of Verizon as a cell phone company, but you don't think of the power that comes from the mobility and devices that they offer and how much it's changed society for the better, nor the philanthropic things that companies do to make the world a better place. So I love your answer, and that's where I was going with it. I'm going to get back to the book. So let's go to chapter one, the Attachment to Stability. And you write, let's face it, stability is an illusion. Uncertainty is reality. That line really hit me. What's been the hardest part of accepting that truth for you personally?

Dr. Bob Rosen (17:20)

I've had quite a bit of health problems in my 30s and 40s. I had a couple bowel obstructions that led to some intestinal surgery. I had two back surgeries. I was diagnosed with atrial fib when I was 41 years old and I got a pacemaker five years ago. All of that and still very healthy and work out six times a week. But all of that forced me to change my relationship to change. Rather than seeing change happening to me. I really started recognizing over time that change was happening for me and that it was really an uncertain world and I had to change my relationship to change. But there's no such thing as stability. And every time we breathe, the world changes and we breathe into a vulnerable condition. So we start to fear change. The antidote is to learn how to Embrace agility to recognize that change is happening all the time. And what holds us back are these attachments, the fears that we hold inside ourselves and the belief systems that are wrapped around these fears. So the attachment to stability is fundamental. I write in the book. There are 30 stories in the book and lots of questions to engage you. And I write about David, who is an attorney, kept everything structured in his life, and he couldn't develop a relationship. He kept all his friends separate, and at some point, he decided that he needed to change. So he went to his enneagram teacher who. Who basically said, go out and risk falling down and getting up. Well, he got a call the next week from the Department of Commerce to be an assistant secretary. Totally a surprise. And he met his partner two months later, and they got married. Sometimes you just gotta step outside of your comfort zone and lean into the uncertainty and. And it opens up your world. And a lot of people get attached to stability.

John R. Miles (19:44)

I'm glad you brought up David's story, because he went from a person, if I remember the story correctly, scarred by abandonment from his childhood, which led him to build a life anchored in control and structure.

Dr. Bob Rosen (19:59)

Exactly.

John R. Miles (20:00)

And he ended up, I think, mistaking that control for safety. How common is that, and why do we fall into that trap?

Dr. Bob Rosen (20:10)

Well, we think that stability and safety and structure will protect us, but in fact, it oftentimes holds us back because we don't know how to thrive in uncertainty. And. And the world is always changing faster than our ability to adapt. It's just the way it goes, and we have to give that up. And it's very scary for people under each of these attachments is fe. Fear is the most fundamental emotion that there is, and all the secondary emotions emanate from it. Grief and sadness and anxiety. So fear is critical. And if we don't face our fears directly, they don't change. Belief systems are programmed into our mind. They're very hard to change. I'm a big believer that if you want to change your behavior, you have to start with the psychological pain that is inside of you. And only through acknowledging that pain, those fears, can it release the energy for behavior change. And we have all these gimmicks for how to get people to change habits and change behavior. But if you want sustainable behavior change, you gotta look at the fear.

John R. Miles (21:34)

I often when people ask me about this, because I think for most people, the hardest moment of change is actually starting. We think about the changes we need to make. You might have an addiction to alcohol. You might have an addiction to Something else, an attachment like you bring up in the book. And we recognize it, but then it's like we're stuck in concrete and we can't move. And for me, I remember when I was on this business career and I wanted to make my own move into doing what I'm doing now, becoming an author like yourself, et cetera. I was just stuck in this chasm where I felt like I was on one cliff of a mountain. And then the distance I could see the cliff I wanted to go, but I couldn't figure out how to get there. And I think that's a trap so many people fall into. So if someone were asking you, like, how do you make that first step when all you can see is a.

Dr. Bob Rosen (22:33)

Forward.

John R. Miles (22:35)

Ledge leading to the abyss in front of you? What do you suggest to them?

Dr. Bob Rosen (22:39)

Well, the abyss is never as deep as you think it is because the brain titrates its anxiety for most people. Some people are biologically vulnerable to more intense anxiety. But I'm a big fan that just the right amount of anxiety is the catalyst for really positive productive change. And too little anxiety is the face of complacency, and too much anxiety is the face of chaos. So how do we create just the right amount of anxiety to push us forward? I think another thing is that people live in the gap between their real self and their ideal self. And the bigger the gap, the harder it is to change. And when people's ideal self is aligned with their real self, what they aspire to be and who they are in the current moment is narrow. They have less anxiety. And so for me, I was attached to the attachment to the future. I was always worrying about what was going to come, and I had trouble experiencing the present moment and enjoying the present moment. I was all attached to success, because when you strive for success and it becomes a compulsive need for achievement, you got a problem. And there are a lot of ambitious people who have that problem because they define success from the outside in rather than inside themselves. And they're constantly chasing awards and trying to have more and more and they don't enjoy their life. And so they operate with a scarcity mindset that something is missing in their life rather than an abundance mindset where they have everything that they need right now. Doesn't mean you stop dreaming, and it doesn't mean you stop aspiring to something more, but you don't get shackled by that. So I was attached to both of those things, and I had to look at the fear behind each one. And the irony was it was that I was so attached to the future and so attached to success that I would get burned out. And when I got burned out, that didn't feel good. And so I had these health problems and they gave me opiates and I got addicted to Percocet and Vicodin because I was attached to pleasure and didn't want to look at the pain. So if you don't look at the pain, you don't change. And that's the problem, because it's uncomfortable.

John R. Miles (25:22)

I want to comment on a few things that you talked about. So first, for the audience who's out there. In my own book, Passion Struck, one of my chapters is focused on something that Bob, you talked about earlier. I call it the anxiety optimizer, meaning you've got to optimize how you're deploying your anxiety. And there is a certain point where too little and it causes issues. Too much and it causes issues. So for yourself, you have to figure out what your optimal anxiety level is to perform at your best. And then another concept that you touched on when you were talking about your ideal self compared to who you're showing up with today really reminds me of the concept of self discrepancy theory, where so many of us lead the lives we think we should be instead of what we could be. And this is something that both Hal Hirschfeld and Benjamin Hardy have done a lot of research on in their future self work. And I've had them both on the podcast. So if anyone wants to listen and go deeper in those areas, those are two great places to go. But I want to go back to this gap concept before I go to the chapter on future self. You write in the book. There's a growing gap between those who are awake in the world and those who are asleep. And I feel that viscerally what makes people wake up when they've been living kind of the lie of safety for.

Dr. Bob Rosen (26:49)

Too long sometimes that can be self motivated. People are always searching and learning. They meditate, they take walks in nature, they're constantly learning. And so you can learn your way into waking up. A lot of times people wake up when they have a crisis in their life. They bleed for one reason or another, psychologically or physically or whatever. And it forces them to get in touch with the pain in their life, whether it's sadness or worry or anger for that matter. And out of that comes an aha moment. You get divorced, you lose a job, something happens to your kid and it really forces you to get in touch with these Deeper emotions. I think those are really the two major ways that we wake up and. But it's such an important concept. I write in the Last Attachment, the attachment to life, that we go through life believing that we are born and then we die. But in fact, being born, growing, declining, and death happens over and over again in our lives. And so over time we develop. We call it resilience, but we develop this capacity to live in cycles. Could be a work project, could be a relationship, it could be a belief system or a philosophy. And so it's really important that we recognize. Excuse me, it's really important that we recognize that these cycles really matter and to take perspective about them. And that helps us as well to be awake. But the flip side of that is that there's so much pressure to stay asleep because habit as well as it doesn't feel good always to wake up because you wake up into some pain or some conflict in your life and people run away from that. Freud was right. He said we seek pleasure and we avoid pain. And. But pain is the primary catalyst for growth.

John R. Miles (29:25)

Yeah, it's a perfect metaphor for the Matrix. When Neo wakes up and he has to face the pain and. But it's through that pain that he grows into being the One.

Dr. Bob Rosen (29:35)

Exactly, exactly.

John R. Miles (29:38)

So I want to go into a different story because for whatever reason, when I read it, it reminded me of Jay Shetty. You tell the story of Amir, and he was someone who grew up similar to Jay in a religious life and then left it like Jay for the business world and then had to wrestle with a number of excessive grips that he has. And his strength is his intellect. But the real work is deeply emotional. And that feels like a mirror for what I see. With so many high achievers, how do we move from intellectual insight to emotional integration? Because this is something I really struggled with. I really could outthink a lot of my peers. I could out think a lot of people using my intellect and neuroplasticity. But for me, it was harder to build up that emotional intelligence. As I grow more senior in my.

Dr. Bob Rosen (30:28)

Career, I do think that men have a particular challenge when it comes to their emotional intelligence. Traditionally, we're not taught a language of emotions and women are more in touch with their emotions oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes because they've been given more permission to be emotional. And the flip side is to be vulnerable. And when you feel strong emotions, you're vulnerable. Whether you feel intense anger or resentment, you're vulnerable. When you feel sadness, you're vulnerable. When you worry and you're anxious, you're vulnerable. It's not something that men like to do. There's a real pressure on men to be stoic. There's a whole movement of stoicism for men, and I think it really gets in the way of their mental well being because human beings are imperfect by nature and we need to fall in love with our imperfections and laugh at ourselves because we're imperfect. And that gets to the attachment to perfection. And a lot of business people are attached to perfection, and it's impossible. And so they're in a straight jacket. And so how do you live life when you're attached to perfection? In a box in a steel bunker, you can't do it. So I think we have to give ourselves a lot more permission to be human beings and to be imperfect human beings, and it's okay. And when you do that, it's an incredible relief because you don't have to be somebody and you throw out the should in your life and embrace the truth in your life. And I think that's a really good thing.

John R. Miles (32:24)

I'm glad you brought this up. I had a deep dive into this concept of effortless perfection that's happening across college campuses with Susan Cain. And she had recently gone back to one of her alma maters, Princeton, and she just sought across the campus. And then I was talking to Lori Santos, and she found the same thing going rampant across Yale, which is why she started the course that she did, which is now becoming the most popular course in Yale's history. But really it's the whole course that she's trying to teach is how do you change from an attachment to perfection to towards aspiration of wholeness and self acceptance like you were just talking about. And I've heard you on other podcasts talk about the importance of self love. So I thought maybe you could fit that in here, because when I've heard you talk about this, you do it in such a powerful way.

Dr. Bob Rosen (33:25)

I think one of the biggest problems that people have is that they don't love themselves. And I think it's probably the most important quality of character that you develop. And because if you don't love yourself, you're very vulnerable when things don't happen the way you want, which happens all the time, happens every day at some level. And so really falling in love with yourself, and it's not really about unhealthy narcissism, it's really about. It's really about the belief in yourself that you can get through life on your own and that it's okay to trip up. But nothing is going to get in the way of loving yourself. Even if you are flawed in you do something that is imperfect, you make a mistake or whatever, nothing. It's non negotiable. Falling in love with yourself is non negotiable. And I just think it's really important, and I think it's the source of a lot of disgruntlement out there. I want to come back to one thing that you said about perfection. It used to be that midlife crisis was the time of maximum tumult. Now it's people in their 20s and early 30s. It's the new midlife crisis. And that generation right now is really stressed. Career conflicts, financial conflicts, relationship conflicts, you name it. And there's been some research that you may be familiar of it that says that people between 17 and I think it's 30 have very high rates of perfectionism. And there's something about living that helps you get over it because you realize as you get older that you can't be perfect all the time. Life has a way of teaching us these things. And so I think it's a real struggle for young people.

John R. Miles (35:34)

I have two kids in that age bracket. One, I have a daughter who's 21 and a son who just turned 27. And I see the perfectionism more in my daughter, but in my son, I see more of the struggle of. He's constantly looking at what AI is doing and how it's going to shape his career and how can he do something where it's not going to impact them. And I keep trying to tell them that it's going to impact all of us. So the best thing that you can do is become an expert in it. And by becoming an expert in it and starting to use it, you'll find ways to eventually stay ahead of the curve. But to me, a lot of things that we've been talking about, I don't think AI can ever replace things like our emotional state. Emotional intelligence, dealing with attachments are universal themes. And I think if, if you concentrate on those and you're a younger generation, you're going to find your path to be able to overcome what AI is bringing our way. But I'm interested in your thoughts.

Dr. Bob Rosen (36:38)

I think it's true. These are human endeavors, and the brain is organized to change, okay? It's constantly adapting, looking for threats and looking for opportunities. But when we hold fear too tightly in our mind, the brain slows down. It gets cloggy and it gets too thick and it doesn't rewire the way we need it to rewire. So the more you hold on to these attachments, these fears, the harder it is to change. And in a world that's constantly changing, if you're not evolving, you got a problem. And that is from the beginning to the end of life. I write about in the book the Attachment to Youth. There's something that happens at every generation that we get enamored by our youthful selves, and we're fearful of aging. Many people walk around with internalized ageism, and there's research from Becca Levy, very powerful, that says that if you have a positive attitude toward aging, on average, you will live seven and a half years longer than if you don't.

John R. Miles (38:05)

Wow.

Dr. Bob Rosen (38:06)

And that is a very powerful thing. So something happens around whenever we retire where we get to choose one of two paths. One path is full of regret, full of isolation, full of disconnection, and it leads to premature death. And the other is a life of openness and transparency and authenticity and learning and connection. And that is a much healthier place to live. And I think we do these paths at different points in our lives. We choose to shut down and close off our development, or we embrace it. And I think you can do that in your 20s, your 30s, and your 80s.

John R. Miles (38:55)

Right.

Dr. Bob Rosen (38:55)

I'm not sure what we were talking about, but I thought it was interesting to say.

John R. Miles (39:01)

Well, I'm glad you brought up the attachment to our youth, because especially as we get older, a lot of us get locked into actually our past as well. I know you were talking about one of the things that was an issue for you was an attachment to the future. But for those who have an attachment to the past, you bring up five emotions that keep us locked there. Pain, fear, worry, loss, anger. And you said something in the book that really hit me. While pain is inevitable, suffering is self imposed. You say it's a deliberate choice. Can you speak to that distinction between pain being inevitable and suffering being self imposed and how it's different from just getting over it?

Dr. Bob Rosen (39:50)

It's a fundamental principle in Buddhism, and the Buddha really said it, that pain is inevitable and suffering is not. Things happen in life. You fall down and you get a scrape on your knee or you break a finger, and that hurts, and you want to do something about it. But there's an old notion that there are two arrows that hit us. The first is the pain. The second arrow is the story. We tell ourselves about the pain, which is the suffering. And we create stories or narratives around the pain that just Exacerbates the problem. You have a date and you go out a couple times and then the person loses interest and suddenly you're telling yourself a story about you have an entire life full of rejection. And it started with your mother rejecting you, or you get rejected from college, in from one application and then suddenly you have an image that you're going to be a stray cat in an alley without a career. The attachment to the past is very significant for people and some people are very vulnerable to their past narratives. And the only way out of it is to look at it directly, experience the pain of where it comes from, let it go. Recognize that you're an adult, you're not the four year old child who experienced the story at the beginning of your life. And then forgive, forgive yourself and forgive whoever you're upset at. I think one of the great rites of passage in our lives is to recognize that our parents did the best they could at the time in their lives with the tools that they had. And it wasn't really about you, it was about their inadequacies. So allow themselves to have those inadequacies and forgive them and then let them go and rewrite your story. And I think a lot of people get tripped up in the past and.

John R. Miles (42:10)

I agree with you on that wholeheartedly. Well, Bob, I wanted to go into a little bit of neuroscience, especially the neuroscience of letting go. You write that the brain, when stuck in fear, slows its natural renewal. Can you walk us through how detection actually rewires the brain towards resilience?

Dr. Bob Rosen (42:28)

Well, there are four steps in detach that I write about in the book and I use a story that I'm happy to share about a professional golfer. So the first is awareness. You have to really have an awareness of what's going on inside of you. Your thinking and your emotions and what's going on outside of you. And how is the outside influencing your internal emotions? The second step is to really figure out which one of these attachments is holding you back and then to discover the fear underneath the attachment. The third step is the aspiration. What is the picture of the desired state that you're trying to create? So the attachment to control. A lot of people have the attachment to control. Okay, so what's the secret? The secret. And by the way, control is typically motivated by fear and anxiety. Okay. You're fearful that you're going to lose control in a situation or you're not going to perform at the level. Why do people micromanage? Because they're fearful that they're not going to perform, their team isn't going to perform and how it's going to reflect on them. And there are probably other reasons why people micromanage. But the solution, the aspiration, is to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to recognize that you can't do everything. And it's actually the most important job of a leader, is to create other leaders so that it doesn't fall on you all the time, because that's why we micromanage. So the third step is aspiration and then the fourth step is action. What are the behaviors that you're going to do differently this week or next week to execute the aspiration? So there's a four step process. We have an assessment that we give that actually rates all these attachments. And then we have a book club guide that can take a group, a team, a group of friends through the attachments. And then finally we have a series of workbooks, short workbooks, that take people through each of those stages for each of the attachments. Most of the time these conversations have to be had with other people because that sense of community and connection is so important.

John R. Miles (44:59)

Bob, I typically do this at the end of the episode, but since you just brought it up, if people want to get access to those workbooks and everything else, where's the best place for them to go to find it? I'll give you a softball.

Dr. Bob Rosen (45:10)

Thank you. Just go to bobrosen.com I put everything there and I also am putting some products there with my previous two books, Grounded and Conscious. Because I think that the combination of being grounded, which is having physical, emotional, intellectual, social, vocational and spiritual health, and being conscious, which is being aware and being detached, is really about mastering your life. And I think those are really important.

John R. Miles (45:42)

Bob, I wanted to go big picture on you. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because we're living in a world right now where we're addicted to urgency, we're addicted to noise. So many people aren't living grounded, they're not living detached. They're not living a purpose driven life. So you're clear that we're not just fighting attachments. We're reacting to massive social pressure, massive epidemics of loneliness and hopelessness and division that we're seeing worldwide.

Dr. Bob Rosen (46:17)

Yes.

John R. Miles (46:17)

How can detachment serve not just individuals, but but culture at large?

Dr. Bob Rosen (46:24)

Well, first off is that detached does not mean disengage or disconnected. Quite the opposite. It means that you get rid of the stuff that is holding you back and holding you down, the baggage, and it frees up energy to focus on the things that matter, whether it's our health and well being or our communities or democracy or the environment. Wherever you stand politically, it frees you up for energy. I think we're in a really tough spot right now. There's more mistrust, more cynicism, more resentment, more loneliness in society. The Gallup poll shows that unhappiness has increased over the past 15 years around the world. And some of the most distraught countries are the developed countries in the world. And the United States is right up there. So here's the thing. One of the basic principles of psychology is the serenity prayer, okay? And for those who don't know the serenity prayer, it's accept the things you cannot, change the things you can, and have the wisdom to know the difference. The key is to figure out what do you have control over, and then free yourself up to do what is aligned with your higher purpose and values. But we spend so much time being upset, sitting in anger and sadness and anxiety, the three major emotions, trying to control what we have no control over. And that is a real problem. It's a real problem for leaders. It's a real problem for people across the world. And I think Americans struggle with this more than others because of the first conversation that we had about our positive psychology. We believe that we can shape our environment. We believe that we can maneuver and manipulate and influence people to get what we want. And it is at the heart of agency. It's about self control and self mastery and self efficacy. But there's a downside to it. And I think that one of the good questions to ask yourself when you're confronted with some kind of dilemma is, what do I have control over and what do I not have control over? And I don't know how long this is going to last. It's one of the most stressful times I've seen in workplaces in a very long time. Covid gave us the experience of living a more holistic life, despite Covid and the flexibility of working at home. And now organizations are basically saying we're going to perform better than we've ever performed. And AI is accelerating that movement. And also people are saying, I want you back at work. And there's a real disconnect there. And we got to figure out how to solve it. And I don't have the answers for that. But it's a real problem.

John R. Miles (50:00)

Yeah, it certainly is. Because once you get accustomed to not being there at work and finding that you can do the same job, it's so difficult to want to put the anxiety on your life of doing the commute and everything else. But I. One thing I have found is I certainly don't collaborate or have the strong bonds that I did when I was there collectively in a room with people than I do over a medium like this. So I think it's got to be a mixture of both. But if you're just demanding that everyone come back full time, that's so difficult for so many people to do now because they've created their new story in a world now that doesn't exist, that they can thrive in. So I completely agree with them.

Dr. Bob Rosen (50:46)

I agree with that.

John R. Miles (50:48)

So I want to go to some reflection here. You write that in life we wake up to find a story has hijacked our mind. What story do you hope people start writing after reading your book?

Dr. Bob Rosen (51:03)

I think the story is that we are programmed to be unhappy by the attachments that we develop over our lives. They're very resistant belief systems that are very difficult to change. It's not a superficial behavior. It's a whole philosophy, an elaborate belief system. I call it a cancer that suddenly hijacks our mind and we carry them around with us all the time. And so I think it's really important to take a look at that. And right now, in my life, I'm 70 years old and I chose to write a book for the masses because I want to help people become a little bigger and a little better than I found them. I want people to be happy and joyous. We have so much in our lives, but so many of us walk around with a scarcity mindset. The cup is half empty and it's constantly draining out. Rather than an abundance mindset, as I mentioned, that you have everything that you need right now and just enjoy the present moment doesn't mean you don't dream. My husband and I, we have a game that we play at dinner parties. We ask people, do you live in the past, the present, or the future? And the people who typically live in the past are sad, they're depressives, and the people who live in the future are typically worriers. And the people who live in the present are the happiest. However, a lot of people live on the two edges and they say, but I'd rather live in the present moment, but I'm stuck. The future hijacks me or the past hijacks me, and I'm not living in the present moment. And I think that's so important to do. So I want people to just come away and be freer to reach higher in their potential and to have more joy in their lives. And that's really the reason why I wrote the book.

John R. Miles (53:23)

Bob, it was such an honor to have you today. Thank you so much for going into depth in this book. And we covered just a small aspect of it. I tried to tease out some stories so the listener could hear what they would get if they read the whole book. Where I think you have like 30 of these stories in there, plus a lot of your personal stories, including ones where you reflect back on exposing to your parents that you were gay and how that impacted your life and created attachments. So lots of both personal and stories that people can relate to. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Bob Rosen (53:59)

Thank you, John. You asked great questions today, so thank you for that.

John R. Miles (54:03)

Thank you so much, Bob.

John R. Miles (54:05)

And that's a wrap on today's episode. And if you're anything like me, that conversation opened up some truths you might have been avoiding. Because the real work of change is not about hustle. It's about letting go of the fears, beliefs and attachments that keep you locked in an outdated version of yourself. To help you start that process, I've created a free takeaway guide with reflection prompts, detachment exercises, and next steps for building sustainable change. You can find it@theignitedlife.net along with last week's Congruence workbook. If you want to bring these ideas to your team or event. I speak on behavioral change, purpose driven leadership, and unlocking peak Performance through alignment. You can learn more and book me@johnrmiles.com speaking and make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel at johnrmiles full length episodes and exclusive extras coming this Thursday. In episode 632, I'm joined by Karen Salmanson, bestselling author and transformation expert. We'll explore how micro acts of courage can create macro shifts in your life and why sometimes the smallest choices spark the biggest change.

Karen Salmanson (55:11)

We all tend to procrastinate until something is really due and until we know there's a deadline looming and death is the ultimate deadline. And in some ways I wonder if death is the universe's sassy way to get us to stop procrastinating. Because imagine if we lived forever. We'd be like, you know what? I'll tell her I love her in a millennium. Or I'll finish writing this book maybe in a couple centuries from now. So when you realize the time is limited, it puts fire under your tush to really do things and really instead of like fear of failure. You have fear of regret that you didn't do it. It switches things up.

John R. Miles (55:52)

Until then, remember, change doesn't start with a strategy. It starts with the story you're willing to release. Live, boldly, lead fully, stay passion struck.