[Music] resentment is a key human motivation and i would say it's a great teacher to listen to your resentment is one of the best things you can possibly do resentment only means one of two things it means either like shut the hell up grow up quit whining and get on with it that's one thing it means or someone is playing the tyrant to you might even be you you have something to say and do that you should say and do to put it to a stop and so maybe resentment can show you the pathway to
doing that like a resentful person wants other people to change and if you're resentful then your motivations aren't trustworthy in fact they're very very dark and what should you do instead how do you treat your own resentment i would say well solzhenitsyn who i'm a great i'm a great admirer of solzhenitsyn his book the gulag archipelago was one of the things that brought down the soviet union and he said that one man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny and you know he said that with some authority and he said when he was in
the gulag camps you know meditating on how the hell he got there he had a rough life man i mean first of all he was on the russian front at the beginning of world war ii and then he was thrown in the gulag camps and that was just the beginning of his adventures man he had a rough life he was in the camps he was thinking what the hell how did i get here what's going on and he had hitler and stalin to blame right so if you have if you need someone to blame man
hitler and stellan that that's great but he that isn't what he did he said he meditated for a while once he realized that he might have something to do with in some strange way with the way things turned out for him and he said he went over his life with a fine-tooth comb in his memory he thought okay where did i go wrong but by my own judgment when there was a path in front of me when did i take the path that i knew i shouldn't take because you all know that right you know
sometimes you don't know if what you're doing is good or if it's bad it's just ignorance you just don't know but sometimes you bloody well know and you do the thing you know you shouldn't do anyways that happens a lot and why do you do that spike is part of it stupidity there's all sorts of reasons but you certainly know you do it solzhenitsyn thought okay what would happen if i took responsibility for where i am in this concentration camp and then i went over my whole life and tried to figure out all the things
i did that were wrong by my own estimation that increased the probability that i would get here and then what would happen if i tried to set them all right now in the present and that's why he wrote the google like archipelago and one of the consequences of that as i said was it sped the dissolution of the soviet empire so hey that's not bad eh like you make a real confession you really repent you you do your penance which is writing this book and you completely change the geopolitical landscape of the world it's like
and that that's worth thinking about because it's not only solzhenitsyn who did that nelson mandela did something quite similar it's not so impossible and so the idea that what you should do if you're feeling resentful about the nature of being or suffering too much for your own life let's say is straighten the damn thing out like seriously try it for a year even try it for a week try not doing the things you know you shouldn't do try not saying the things you know to be false and just watch what happens you might as well
give it a shot right because you say well i'm all in for a year you know i'm going to do things right and then i'll just stand back and kind of watch how things unfold and maybe i'll reconsider at the end of that year it's like try it try it i mean i would say i've had thousands of letters now from people who are saying hey i tried that you know and hey you know worked i read this great line in the t.s eliot play called the cocktail party and in it this woman comes up
to a psychiatrist and she says you know i'm having a really rough time of it i'm suffering badly my life is not going well and then she says uh i hope that there's something wrong with me and the psychiatrist says what the hell do you mean by that and she says well here's how i look at it there's either something wrong with the world and i'm just in it and that's how it is and then like what am i going to do about that because it's the whole world or maybe i could be fortunate and
there's something wrong with me that's causing all this unnecessary suffering and if i i could just set it right i could learn and i could set it right and so well i've been thinking about that for a very long time and i think well if your life isn't going the way it is you know you can find someone else to blame which is pretty convenient for you and also relatively easy or you could think okay i don't like life i don't like the way my life is unfolding maybe i don't like life in general because
it's tragic and and tainted with evil how do i know if my judgment is accurate and the question is well have i really done everything i possibly could to set my life straight because maybe i shouldn't be judging it it's quality or the quality of life itself or being itself for that matter if i haven't done everything i possibly could to set my life straight well so there's a there's a task the humility element is it took me a long time to understand why there's religious injunctions supporting humility to even understand what the word really
meant in that sort of technical sense and it means something like this it means what you don't know is more important than what you know then then what you don't know can start to be your friend you see people are very defensive about what they know but the thing is you don't know enough and the re you can tell you don't know enough because your life is not what it could be and neither is the life of the people around you you just don't know enough and so what that means is that every time you
encounter some evidence that you're ignorant someone points it out you should be happy about that because you think oh you just told me how i'm wrong it's like great like maybe i had to sift through a lot of nonsense to get through the real message that you're telling me but if you could actually tell me some way that i'm wrong and then maybe give me a hint about how to not be wrong like that well then i wouldn't have to be wrong like that anymore that that would be a good thing you can embark on
that adventure by listening to people and if you listen to people they will tell you they'll tell you amazing things if you listen to them and many of those things are little tools that you can put in your toolkit like batman and then you can go out into the world and use those tools and you don't have to fall blindly into a pit quite as often and so the humility element is well do you want to be right or do you want to be learning and then it's deeper than that it's do you want to
be the tyrannical king who's already got everything figured out or do you want to be the continually transforming hero or fool for that matter who's getting better all the time and that's actually a choice you know it's a deep choice and it's better to be the self-transforming fool who's humble enough to make friends with what he or she doesn't know and to listen when people talk and listening is a transformative exercise like if if you listen to the people in your life for example if you actually listen to them they'll tell you what's wrong with
them and how to fix it and what they want they can't even help it if you start listening because people are so shocked if you actually listen to them that they tell you all sorts of things that they might not have even intended to things they don't even know and then you can you can work with that and the other thing that's so interesting you know now and then you have a meaningful conversation right you have a good conversation with somebody you walk when you think geez you know we really connected and i know more
than i did when i came away from that conversation and during the conversation you're really engrossed in it and that feeling of being engrossed is a feeling of meaning and the feeling of meaning is engendered because you're having a transformative conversation your brain produces that feeling of meaning for it says oh yeah this is exactly where you should be right here now it's the right place and time for you and that's a great place to occupy and so a good conversation where people are listening has exactly that nature and the reason it has that nature
is because it is in fact transformative it's one of the truisms of clinical psychology like if you're a clinical psychologist a huge part of what you do is just listen to people it's like you know they come in they're unhappy and they'd rather not be something like that you say well why do you think you might be unhappy and they don't know they have some ideas they may have to ramble around for like a year before they figure out why they're unhappy they get rid of a bunch of reasons why they thought they were unhappy
that are untrue and then you kind of get to the heart of the problem then you might ask them well if you could have what you wanted so that your life would be okay what would that look like then they have to ramble around a bunch about that because they don't really know but the listening will straighten them out because people think by talking and in order to think you have to have someone to listen because it's very hard to think hardly anyone can think and even the people who can think can only think about
a limited number of things but almost everybody can talk and you can listen to yourself talk and if someone listens to you then well then you also have a foil for your thoughts right because you can watch the person when you're talking and see if you're boring or see if you're amusing or if you're engrossing all of those things so like if you're arguing with your wife let's say or your husband big party is going to want to win that's stupid because because you don't want that you want to you want to defeat your wife
in an argument oh well great like if she was going to disappear tomorrow no problem but like you're going to like live with defeated miserable her for the next week that's no good so you listen and you think okay well here's here's what you what i think you said and maybe even make it a little stronger and more elaborated than was the case with the original utterance so that you get the damn argument right because you don't want to win you want to fix the problem that's the winning [Music] you
