It wasn’t until a few months ago that I jumped on the podcast bandwagon. Before then I listened to a few here and there, but nothing really stuck. It wasn’t until I heard Jess Lively‘s interview with my favorite food blogger ever, Jessica Merchant of How Sweet Eats, that I realized I had finally found someone who gets me. Well two people who get me. Since then, I’ve been listening to Jess’s podcast religiously every week.
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(via: The Lively Show)
She has a really great interview technique, where even if she’s interviewing a small business owner or blogger, she doesn’t focus the interview completely around the person’s career. Instead, she poses questions that show the listener the bigger picture of the interviewee’s life. And they always have awesome stories to share!
This week was a really exceptional interview with Eric Zimmer, the creator of another podcast I have since fallen in love with: The One You Feed (and started binge-listening to yesterday afternoon). The name comes from the old tale of a grandfather speaking to his grandson and tells him that inside each and every one of us is a battle between two wolves. One wolf is evil: jealousy, resentment and anger. The other is good: love, hope and joy. The grandson thought about this and then asks “Which wolf wins?” and the grandfather responds: “The one you feed”. It’s an immensely powerful concept that we all contain good and evil inside of us, but who we become depends on which side we “feed” or give power to. We all have the power to change, but it must be a conscious change.
Eric talks a lot about the amount of comparing we do in our own lives. We either compare ourselves to others who we consider better than ourselves to make us feel worse about where we are in life or what we have. Or we compare ourselves to others who we consider to be worse off than ourselves so that we make us feel better about our own lives. And by doing so, we’re distancing ourselves from actually being able to understand and get to know the people around us. It’s such a profound concept but so true. A few months ago, I noticed how much I was judging the people around me, people I didn’t know and even those that I know personally. Most of the time the judgement was completely unconscious, a thought would just pass through my head: “what a terrible shirt she is wearing” or “wow, I wish I could do a handstand like her”. We’ve been programmed by our culture to favor our ego over the “good wolf” inside of us, so these thoughts may always be present in our lives (unless we become highly spiritual yogis), but I’ve been working towards acknowledging these thoughts and attempting to reverse them. I do so by reminding myself that while the girl who wears her sunglasses on cloudy days on the train does come off as a b***h, I do not know her story or her journey, so I should not judge her without first getting to know her.
It’s also reminded me how much we live in our own heads. I am constantly reminding myself that the conversation I’m having with myself and the way I am seeing the world, is in no way the same as the person next to me. That’s one of the reasons I’ve become so obsessed with podcasts like these because they allow me to see the world from someone else’s perspective, even just for a fleeting moment.
I don’t want to give away too much more about Eric’s interview, but I will say that he really opens your eyes to the idea that there is no reason that you can’t have the things in life that you really want. We can all have the career we’ve been dreaming of, find that person whom we’ve been searching for and live the life that we want for ourselves. If you have 45 minutes free today, listen to his interview, I promise it will be worth it and it might just change your life!
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
