Link to Episode HERE.

What if your greatest power wasn’t hustle or grit, but attention? 

00:00 The Discipline of Mindfulness

03:21 Understanding Thoughts and Emotions

09:18 Changing Relationships with Emotions

11:59 The Power of Observation

19:45 Mindfulness Techniques and Tools

24:02 Mindfulness in the Modern World

27:06 The Role of Gratitude

31:29 The GLAD Practice

36:13 Attention as a Superpower

39:08 Getting Started with Mindfulness

Today’s guest, Donald Altman, is a former monk, psychotherapist, and award-winning author who’s spent decades teaching people how to use mindfulness to reshape their lives from the inside out. In a world built to hijack your focus, Donald offers a quiet rebellion: the power to step back, observe, and choose. 

In this episode, we dive into the myths of mindfulness, the neuroscience of emotion, and why tiny moments of awareness might just be the key to real resilience. Whether you’re a bartender, a manager, or anyone trying to stay sane in the modern world, this conversation is packed with insights (and practical tools) to help you get out of your head and into your life.”

Expect to Learn:

• How mindfulness rewires the brain
• The difference between thoughts and facts
• Why attention is a superpower
• How to step back from negative emotions
• Practical breathing techniques for stress
• The STOP method for emotional regulation
• The five types of gratitude
• How to build a daily GLAD practice
• The science behind naming emotions
• Mindfulness as mental training not relaxation
• How modern technology hijacks focus
• The role of selective attention in happiness
• How to shift identity away from negative thoughts
• How small awareness practices lead to big changes

Links mentioned in the show:

⁠Donald’s Website⁠

Service starts now.

I talk mostly to people in and around the service industry space. I’m looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in restaurants. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess of a life, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. You can find more of my work at ⁠⁠⁠my blog⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and all my social links are at the bottom of that page.

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-#10:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Nat Harry, cocktail expert!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.

Cheers

Speaker 2 (00:42.965)

Alright, welcome back.

Speaker 1 (00:48.654)

Alright, there we go. Oh really OK.

that is night and day better.

Yeah, who knows what was going on there? Yeah, so the pros and cons that Riverside does a really great job. High quality video and audio and then there’s no passcode, which helps, which you saw the downside. Boundside is if the connection slow or you know something. So yeah, I’ve had one skip and then this is first time it hasn’t worked, so still evaluating. Yeah, that goes good. We gotta.

going.

Yeah. Well, Donald, thank you for joining us again. We had a little hiccup with our audio visual and technology, but we are back. And we were in the middle of talking about mindfulness as a training. You’re working me through how it was a practice that you had to work at. And I wanted to see if we could jump back in there.

Speaker 1 (01:44.3)

Yeah, well, you it’s interesting. You asked a great question. You you hear the word mindfulness everywhere and yet, you know, and it’s made out to be some kind of great panacea. can solve all these problems, it could do anything. But I like to make the point, it’s very much like a military training. Learning how to focus your mind, your concentration, your attention. And, you know, I actually spent time in a monastery and

Wow! It was hard work. I mean, you really… It’s like a discipline where it’s training your mind to undo all the kind of habits that you’ve created over your lifetime. Imagine that! It’s so easy to go on autopilot. Think about that for a minute. You get in your car and you’re totally on autopilot. You don’t notice what’s happening around you and you get to your destination. It’s like, wow! How did I even get here? Right? What was my mind doing all that time? And so, what I try to do

with mindfulness is to get people to engage with it in little bites at first. And then slowly over time, you start to recognize and start to notice, hey, I wasn’t paying attention or what’s happening in my mind right now? What am I grabbing onto? What am I avoiding? And what cravings or what is driving me that I’m not really noticing? And so

Mindfulness is way of training your mind to help you step back and observe the inner workings of your mind. And it’s really, it can be kind of shocking when we start to look at our minds, but I’ve had people train people to do mindfulness and I’ll, I might have them do a seven minute meditation at first, you know, kind of short or just sitting and watching their minds and I let them.

know what that’s like. The thoughts are ephemeral. They’re not solid, but we can kind of watch them. I have a book, a new book just coming out called Simply Mindful Reflections. And actually, the first reflection in that book, I’d like to read that for you because… Yeah, these are all short reflections, but they’re also trainings and they’re also meant to kind of wake us up to the true nature of looking withinward. We spend a lot of our time looking outward.

Speaker 2 (03:53.996)

Please.

Speaker 1 (04:08.002)

We’re spectators, especially nowadays with texting and all the social networking that goes on. Everything is pointed outward, and we don’t have time to pause, time to look inward for a moment. So the nature of thoughts, this first, and this is in the simplicity and peace section of the book, it’s impossible to hold onto a river.

but you can flow with it. Feelings and thoughts, and I would add to that even cravings or desires, are droplets in an endless river flowing out to the ocean. None are final, so why hold on to dissolving droplets? Instead, them, watch them flow past and through. This is nature’s way and the way to finding peace with feelings and thoughts. Reflect on this, and then I have

What’s it like for just one minute to notice how quickly thoughts and feelings change? You know, I was a therapist for many years, psychotherapist, and I used to have sometimes in my whiteboard in my office, I’d write the words, thoughts are not necessarily facts, right? But when they come from within our own mind, we take them like, this has got to be the truth.

Maybe I’m thinking something about myself that’s negative and I’m like, that must be true. no, it’s just a thought. And they’re like dissolving droplets going down a stream. How can noticing this flow be useful? Right? What can you learn about yourself from that? Or for one day, what is it like to be a keen observer of your thoughts, watching them pass by as fleeting and temporary visitors?

And so each one of these reflections has three very simple questions to help you go a little more deeply. And I think that, you know, the benefit of really working with mindfulness is that we, start to look inward and we grow, we grow our emotional lives. think we grow who we are. We become less on autopilot, become less driven by the things that may have harmed us in the past. Hey, let’s face it. Everybody has been harmed in some way.

Speaker 1 (06:30.782)

And I think we have to acknowledge that’s part of the human condition, but we don’t have to be wedded to that suffering, wedded to that thing that happened to us in the past. And we need to learn how to grow beyond it and become more positive in life.

No, no, I, yeah, I like what you’re saying there too. it actually is making me think, you know, the things that we trusted those thoughts that flow through us. seems like the negative thoughts, the doubtful thoughts and you know, the things from the past that you’re, those are the ones that you almost believe automatically are the true ones where all the like pleasant happy thoughts are the ones we doubt almost by default.

So it seems like you can let this string go by and you can grab onto these negative ones and let all the good things flow away. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s true. And so that’s one of the great benefits of doing this practice. We start to learn how to not grab onto those thoughts as tightly. We can just say, isn’t that interesting? that’s very, you know, we get curious about our thoughts. that’s interesting. I was thinking that. previously, we might never have even noticed that thought, how that thought was kind of making us feel or getting us

clenched up in the body or getting us angry or making us feel sad. You know, it’s interesting. I remember a client that came to me, she was having some relationship problems. She’d broken up with someone and she was feeling very down and depressed. And she had a roommate who just had a new love interest in her life. And that love interest would coming into the apartment and they were having fun. And she would go off in a room and just get really depressed and listen to music.

Speaker 1 (08:19.21)

And I said to her, what kind of music are you listening to when you go in your room? I listen to sad love songs. She told me. And I said, well, you know, I said, I want you to do an experiment for the next week. I want you to play different kinds of music when your roommate brings in her love interest. And I want you to go play different kinds of music and see how they affect your mood. How do they make you feel? And she came back and I said, so what did your experiment?

And she said, well, happier songs made me feel happier. And the sad songs made me feel sad. So I realized I have a choice into how my moods can, what I can pay attention to, what I can listen to, to make me feel, you know, how that makes me feel. So she took a little control over her life by doing that.

And I think what’s important is we, know, when you’re feeling sad, look around and see what’s going on. Why am I feeling this way? Or if you’re feeling empty or lonely, you know, a lot of times we don’t know how to name our emotions. And I think maybe that’s another important thing here. There was actually a really cool experiment that was done. It was a mindfulness type experiment. And this researcher, his name was J. David Creswell, but anyway, he

had people exposed subjects to very emotionally powerful pictures meant to elicit emotions in the subjects. And some people got very triggered by that and they couldn’t handle it. And other people were like, they were fine. And the people who were fine were able to name their emotion. They would say, that’s sad picture.

So they change their relationship. Instead of grabbing on and having it impact them like a sledgehammer hits you, they were able to sidestep the sledgehammer and just notice, oh, that’s this emotion or that emotion. Think of for a moment when you’re feeling sad. If you were to say, oh, this is sadness or this is anger, and now you start to rate it, let’s say, where is my anger in the body and what level is it from a one to 10? Let’s say 10, the most anger, one, the least.

Speaker 1 (10:36.396)

And when you start observing and noticing the anger in that way, you’re changing your relationship to it. You’re changing your relationship to your emotion in that moment. The emotion is now the object of your attention. That’s one way to think of it. And by shifting that perspective, you’re no longer in the grip of that feeling. That’s very powerful. But nobody’s taught that in school, how to do this, right?

And and you’re actually using a different part of the brain when you’re in the throws of an emotion it’s the emotional the more ancient part of the brain that is getting fired up and blood actually leaves the thinking part of the brain which is more behind the forehead and the eyebrow ridge and goes down deep down into the amygdala which is the Stress part of the brain, it’s the part of the brain that deals with emotions. It’s more it’s an older part of the brain

And so blood leaves your thinking brain and you actually, you know, it’s like you need to think about the emotion to bring the blood back to the thinking brain. You know, it’s almost like you have to reboot a computer, computer crash. Like our program crashed when we were starting this show. yeah. The audio wasn’t working. And so we rebooted, we said, how do we deal with this? And we tried a different program to do it. So we were adaptable in that way. And I think.

You know, that’s very much a mindfulness practice is learning how to view things and detach from them a little bit, just so observing them so you’re not in the grip of it. Does that make sense?

So it makes sense in one sense, but this is where I always run into, think maybe it’s just a mental like conception of mindfulness issue. But so at least the way I see it, like, and maybe I’m looking at it in a wrong way, but I very strongly identify with these thoughts that come through, you know, and in my head, I also think, you know, I am the thinking brain, but I’m also this amygdala too.

Speaker 2 (12:48.172)

So it seems like, it just seems like it’s a cheat code. Like how can stepping back into the thinking brain and looking at this, you know, thought how is it that that alone does so much? And maybe I’m over-complicating it, but.

Yeah, well actually it’s interesting. You’re kind of going even beyond the thinking brain. Just going to awareness state. It’s even beyond the thinking brain. So the brain that’s generating thoughts, you’re just observing. And so it’s kind of like you’re able to notice what’s happening without being the one who’s experiencing it.

And it’s a shift. It’s almost like the difference between, you you see a car accident, you could be in the car accident, or what if you were in a helicopter or on a hill just watching it, right? It would be a very different experience. So it’s that way of really kind of just lifting up in a way and just observing, right? It doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It doesn’t mean that you’re not feeling that.

What you said about identification is really important, I think too, because I call it the I, the me, the my, the mine, the I identity, right? That we do attach to things. And if you think about what often causes suffering in life is that we’re very attached to our identity. Why do people get upset?

or defensive about things, for example. If I said, I don’t like the color of your shirt. what do you mean? We get very defensive about things, right? And so that’s defending that I, that I identity. that’s where a lot of suffering really comes in. And I’m not saying it’s, you know, we can have preferences are great.

Speaker 1 (14:51.07)

I prefer to have a black shirt. I prefer to have a green shirt, whatever. do we have to be so wedded to the idea that it becomes ingrained in us? So if somebody says, I don’t really like that color, that you become enraged or threatened by that. So I think it’s important to look at what we identify with. You raised a really good question there.

What do I get aroused about? What do I get triggered by? That says more about you than what’s triggering you, I think. So that is a great way to practice mindfulness, to start to notice, when am I getting upset? Sharing another example from somebody I worked with once, she was very anxious.

about a lot of things as one particular client and her mind would go off spinning about things, especially related to her children. If her kid was in a park, she might just have the random thought, what if my child falls down, hits his head, you know, or what if there’s a nail and the spike comes through his eye? mean, crazy thoughts, right? But she identified with those thoughts and then she would go into a full-blown panic attack as a result of that.

I taught her breathing, which is a great training just for breathing does a couple of things. Breathing can help us focus our attention on the breath, but breathing, if we breathe diaphragmatically, you breathe into the lower part of the lungs, that actually presses on the diaphragm and your stomach expands and it presses on a nerve in your spine called the vagus nerve.

It’s a relaxation system. We can’t help but calm down when you do this kind of breathing. So I would have her notice when she was starting to tense up, when she was having a thought, and then I would have her do this breathing. And that helped her come back into this moment. So our thoughts can be helpful and they can

Speaker 1 (17:15.884)

be harmful to us, can’t they? mean, it just depends on how we react to them.

Hmm. Yeah. I guess kind of going back to the identity thing, would the thoughts that you have as your identity then be also in the same boat as the thoughts that are flowing by in the river? Should we let those release too? Or is there anything that we hold on to or?

Sure, I mean you can let them all release. thoughts, mean think about how many thoughts you have in a day. Well, the average person has at least 20,000 thoughts a day. How many of those thoughts, Andrew, tell you something profound about who you are as a person?

Sure, probably not many, but I would also say the thoughts that like, I am a husband or, you know, like there has to be some sort of thoughts that you have to hold on to, right?

You know, we live in a conventional world. you have a name, Andrew, I have a name, Donald. So those are, yeah, we have certain things that we hold on to that we need to have, sure, to operate in this world. And I’m not saying we don’t operate effectively in this world. What I’m saying is if you let yourself be pulled around by thoughts that are not helpful to you,

Speaker 1 (18:41.346)

That’s not helping you be effective in the world. Right? So, yeah, I mean there are things we’re going to have and thoughts are useful in helping us move through the world and we use language and we have concepts and sure all of that work we can be creative and all of that is helpful when it’s used when we’re the driver behind it. Okay.

When you start to see of all of these potential thoughts that I have, which ones are the ones I want to start to use more, and which ones are the ones I want to let go of.

Like little fish in the river. You can pick the fish out that you like or something like that.

Yeah, no, I like that. That’s a good way of putting it.

Yeah. No, I’m only asking about this point. just, there are so many things in the modern world that seem like true problems. Like a lot of people suffer from a lot of anxiety, a lot of uncertainty. And it’s always struck me that mindfulness, you know, I don’t have the best or most polished mindfulness practice, but I do some morning meditation and it has helped, but I’ve struggled to identify and really articulate how it’s helped.

Speaker 2 (20:04.85)

it seems like such a small thing to make such a big impact. That’s why I really want to… I’m like, there has to be something more there almost.

Yeah, well, I think there’s a lot to mindfulness practice. Meditation is good. There’s so many different kinds of meditation. There’s insight meditation where you start to see the nature of your thoughts. There’s Samatha, which is the breath-soothing, calming meditation. You can combine them. I often like to combine the two, so it’s a combination of

paying attention to your thoughts and what’s happening moment by moment sensations in the body as they arise and also do a common relaxation breath at the same time. And we need to know how to calm ourselves and soothe ourselves, right? I have a, in a lot of my books, I use different acronyms that people have found helpful. One is called STOP and it means

When you’re, you mentioned, you know, lot of people are anxious nowadays or whatnot, but when you’re feeling off balance or what you can do is this STOP method. It doesn’t mean stop doing anything. I mean, it’s really about calming yourself in the moment. And the S means stand, stop, just pause.

Breathe so you would take two or three of these calming breaths wherever you are I had a guy who I worked with who? He would get in fights with people and if he had one more fight. He was gonna go back to prison. He had been incarcerated and And so but he would get annoyed by people and so in different situations Especially when he was out in stores or whatnot. And so I trained him to do this and I said, you know I Said you’ve to practice

Speaker 1 (22:06.272)

I could just tell you this, unless you go home, I want you to practice this. So when something happens, you know, once you get enraged or annoyed with somebody where you get so angry, you’ll forget to use this. Again, the thinking brain gets disconnected when you get really heavily emotional. Okay. So I taught him this. So the S is just stop and stand and take some calming breaths. Nobody knows you’re even doing this.

The T is tuning into the body. So actually, I like to start from the bottom of the feet and just come up and say, Where am I tight? Where am I tense? What is this feeling that I have? Is there an emotion? What’s the name of the emotion? And labeling the emotion actually helps you change your relationship to it in that moment. So you’re tuning in. And the next, the O stands for observe. Find something in your environment that is pleasing to you.

So it could be a color, it could be a sound, maybe a bird chirping, maybe you look up, see the blue sky, or maybe just look around, maybe it’s a painting, something in your environment. And the P means, could think of the P as several things, possibility, what do I want to do in this next moment? It could mean prefrontal, because you’re actually stepping into the prefrontal part of the brain here, which is the part of the brain that is able to

most human part of the brain able to make Make choices make decisions so or possibility. I like to think of P as possibility What’s the next best thing I can do? Can I call a friend? Maybe to help me here. Do I don’t want to maybe I’m hungry and I need to get something to eat maybe I You know, whatever it is. If I need to contact my my sponsor or maybe I need to call Make an appointment with somebody to help me

So the STOP, so I taught it to this guy who was very annoyed with people in different situations and he came back to me. He was in one of these big box stores like a Costco or something and he said, this person really got to me and he says, I went to another aisle, I did the STOP and I completely deescalated and I was fine.

Speaker 2 (24:30.2)

But P didn’t stand for prison, so that’s good.

Right. Yeah, so he was able to look at the boxes and the colors and all the different shapes and distracted himself and, you know, and it helped him. So sometimes we need to know somehow some little tools could redirect our attention. Because what this also is doing is it’s you’re learning how to use your attention in a new way and maybe in what would be normally a very stressful situation.

Do you think that this resurgence and this interest in mindfulness, is this in reaction to a truly unique modern problem? Or is this human problem that’s gone back as long as humans have been around? Because I know that the practice of meditation and everything is ancient, but there’s also cell phones and Facebook and Twitter.

I think it is. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. mean the human problems have been around forever right of how to get along with others and identifying with things and and having, you know, selfishness and greed and all these negative emotions to deal with. So, you know, meditation goes back thousands of years and the Buddha who really talked about mindfulness at 2600 years ago.

But I think the situation we’re in nowadays makes it, maybe it has maybe brought mindfulness more to the fore. It’s kind of an antidote or prescription for dealing with the additional barrage of all of these things that are coming at us at breakneck speed. Everything’s so fast. You know, I kind of, I was a slow adopter to some stuff, but

Speaker 1 (26:23.214)

I actually felt as I was using my computer more, I felt my mind speeding up because I had noticed the speed of my mind and how I would think. And I think it’s speeding us all up and we make decisions faster. Research shows that people using mobile phones are more likely to make impulse purchases on a phone than even on a computer. But we’re prompted all the time. And I think there’s…

positive of that is, we get things right away. Order something, it’s at your doorstep the next day. But the other side of it would be that we’re getting prompted to do so many things that maybe we wouldn’t do if we thought about them a little bit longer. And so I think mindfulness is

is kind of allowing us to take a little bit of a space, a little bit of a break, a little bit of a pause from that and to come back to ourselves, come back to noticing nature. I think nature is a great way to find that connection to yourself. You know, just step outside just for a little bit. And there’s actually been a lot of research about that, about looking at nature and how positive it helps people heal faster even.

from injuries and things. just to take a minute, look at nature, pet a dog, pet your cat, not something like that, it’s all very beneficial.

Yeah, wow. I like that. It always ends up with the dogs or cats, doesn’t it?

Speaker 1 (28:03.596)

Ha ha ha ha ha ha

Speaker 1 (28:09.272)

Well, you know something else that you said earlier about how you know, we’re so dealing with cell phones and all this stuff and it made me think that gratitude you know, we could have gratitude for all those things that are in our life, but how much time do we spend thinking about what we’re grateful for, you know, and there’s so many different kinds of gratitude.

I want to say a couple things about gratitude. Gratitude has actually been shown to help people who are dealing with depression. It reduced their depression, reduced their episodes of depression. Gratitude is very participatory. So instead of just looking at something, and we’re spectators a lot of the time, gratitude puts you in the position of understanding what’s supportive for you, what’s helpful for you.

And so you’re really participating more in the world by noticing gratitude. I’ve identified at least five different kinds of gratitude. For example, there’s just the basic necessities. You can be grateful for, you have a roof over my head, I’ve got clothing to keep me warm, water and shelter and that kind of thing. There’s the ordinary gratitude, just the ordinary

Think about just the little ordinary thing. You have a chair you’re sitting on. I’m sitting on a chair. The little things that make your life easier, for example. So there’s a lot of little ordinary gratitudes. Then there’s relationship gratitudes. All the people in your life who enrich your life in some way, make you smile or make you feel good, right? They’re there for you. They can listen to you. The relationship gratitude.

Then there’s the personal gratitudes we have for, know, I’ve got a job, I have whatever level of health I have. There’s a lot of things I personally could be grateful for. I’ve got transportation to get around, whatever that is. And then there’s the fifth one. It’s a little different. It’s what I call paradoxical gratitude. It’s being grateful for those things you wish you didn’t have in your life. So an example of that is

Speaker 1 (30:29.806)

One time I had a workshop and I was talking about paradoxical gratitude and a lady raised her hand. says, you know, and she said, I have an example. He said, I was, uh, I think I this workshop was in the middle, like in Kansas or somewhere in the middle part of the U S she said, I lost my house in a tornado. And, when it happened, you know, everything was lost. And I mean, I was okay, you know, physically said, but I.

So many people came to my aid and I realized there was a community there to support me and I was very grateful for that. And I wouldn’t have known that if it hadn’t been for that tornado. She opened her eyes to this whole network of people who were there for her and it really changed her view of the world. So was a beautiful thing in that way and yet, you know, was paradoxical. think anytime something happens where there’s a silver lining and

You could think of what’s the silver lining in this so-called thing I don’t want in my life. That silver lining is a paradoxical form of gratitude. So we have all these things we could be grateful for. And I’d actually like to share with your audience another acronym, is GLAD, GLAD. And I have shared this acronym, and I was amazed at how it

sure yeah very much

Speaker 1 (31:55.598)

took off. in some of my books. It’s in a book called The Mindfulness Toolbox, Clearing Emotional Clutter. And I have different gratitude things in the book, Simply Mindful Reflections, the new book. But the GLAD practice, I had people just sharing stories with me that they’d used it in different ways. One college professor used it in his classroom and had people write stories about their GLAD experiences. I had somebody else who said they used it with their

partner, would do a GLAD, how I’m have GLAD for you and how they had GLAD for me. So let me explain what GLAD means.

G it’s an acronym so the G stands for gratitude and I talked about five different kinds of gratitude so think about one thing you’re grateful for today or one thing you could appreciate today. The L is one thing I learned so that might mean I learned something new. Maybe I learned something new about myself or maybe I learned something new about someone else so I ended talking to you I’ve learned some things about you.

Already, and I found very interesting. So the L is for learning. And maybe again, if you just learn something, it’s fun to be curious and learn something new. And then the A is for an accomplishment. Now, this is interesting because we often think of accomplishments in terms of longer goals and big things that we do. But we often neglect to think about the little things.

There are the steps that make the bigger accomplishments possible. Getting enough sleep at night. Which a lot of people nowadays, I think, are sleep deprived for a lot of different reasons. But getting enough sleep. Getting some nutrition, the right kind of nutrition to help you throughout the day. Right? Getting dressed in the morning. I think that’s highly underrated. I think you did a good job today.

Speaker 2 (33:59.598)

This is my pre, I wear a suit to work. So I work in a restaurant, close it down this evening. So yeah, so yeah, before that I dress like this.

Speaker 1 (34:10.926)

So, you know, I think we need to give ourselves a kind of a pat on the back for all the things that we do every day that just are helpful to us in terms of self-care all the little things that we do and and recognize that that’s an accomplishment. Okay. And and the last thing is more about the D is more about

the feeling of things, and that stands for delight. What things give you a sense of joy today? What things made you smile? What maybe made you laugh? What thing of beauty did you see today? Right? Like I had a guy who was very, very depressed and it was in the, I remember it was in the winter in Portland where I live. was very gray and dark and rainy. And he, I taught him this.

And when he came back, said, by the way, how did that GLAD practice go for you? And I thought it was interesting. When he got to the D, he said, I heard a bird chirp that reminded me of springtime and it gave me hope. I mean, who would have thought such a little thing like that, right? And what I told him too, what I like to tell people is every time you cross over a threshold, so every time you open a door and go into a new place, you could do the GLAD.

Every time you step outside, look around for the glad. Looking through a window. That’s another way of going through into a new space. You could find the glad there. And it’s amazing to have. I’ve had people who said they share their glad stories at the end of the day with their families and with their kids, and they taught it to their kids. And a one lady who I know actually created a gratitude

It was a bracelet and it had the numbers, the letters A through Z and she said every time, every day I pick a new letter and I find things that I could have gratitude for that begin with that letter. A lot of ways you could play with this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:26.35)

You get stuck when you get to X, but you power through it.

Yeah, that would be good when I yeah X xylophone x-ray, I don’t know. Yeah So I think this glad thing again, it’s about selective attention where you place your attention is what Wires your brain up think about that for a moment So if I’m paying attention if I’m looking at pornography all the time, that’s how I’m wiring my brain and I’ll you know

be more inclined to do that next time. If I do something with my kids or play with my kids, I’m wiring my brain up to be interactive with my kids. So, the GLAD practice is really a selective attention practice. It’s wiring our brain up in different ways to get out of our heads and into our lives.

Yeah. I’m realizing as you’re talking through the selective attention thing, I think that today’s conversation has really centered largely around attention. If you don’t start with that attention, if you don’t notice these things, then you’re not even getting into the game. And if you…

Wow, that’s very profound what you just said. I think that’s really true. If you don’t have that focus attention, so if you wake up and you’re groggy or you’re hungover or whatever, you know, I remember using marijuana a lot when I was in college and it was a way to cover up a lot of pain I was feeling. But I would get to the point, I remember waking up and it was like a hangover.

Speaker 1 (38:09.122)

And couldn’t focus. And you need to be able to, that’s why you need to take care of these self-care things like getting enough sleep, enough nutrition, like in the morning, getting some protein, for example, every two to three hours actually helps your brain to focus and concentrate so you can make decisions that are better decisions for you. So yeah, it may be, it all comes down to having attention and focus and how are you utilizing that? You know, we have,

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:39.362)

That’s a great power that that’s our superpower maybe. I never thought of like that until just now.

If you if you don’t focus your attention someone else will do it for you and it won’t be on what you choose At least in this day and age for sure

I agree, you know what, that’s very true I think in terms of the kind of things that the way these algorithms are so sophisticated they’ll feed you back you know if you respond to something a certain way you’ll get fed more of that and I know if I buy something and suddenly I’ll have all these ads for this similar thing appearing like I’ve actually sometimes done searches on my computer for things I don’t need

or have no interest in so that…

I’ll start getting ads for this.

Speaker 1 (39:26.414)

I’ll get ads for things that I have no interest in at all, which is like, that’s good. I don’t want to put my attention there. So it’s an interesting world.

It is. you know that that whole rabbit hole, I’ve often wondered, is it that they are kind of shaping us or is it that they’re revealing what’s underneath that has the potential if it doesn’t, you know, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s a little both. I that’s an interesting idea. Yeah

I definitely could talk to you all day, I do want to make sure we get to, you know, for the listener out there who wants to get into this and is interested in mindfulness, where should they start? You know, what, books of yours would be a good intro and how can they get into this whole thing?

Yeah, well I have a Simply Mindful book series that I created and that might be a good way to get into it. There’s the book Simply Mindful, which is a seven-week course in personal handbook for mindful living. So you can just read that at self-pace, go through it at your own pace and it really gets you into what mindful is about and different kinds of meditative practices. It talks about gratitude, talks about fidelity to this moment. How do we be more

Speaker 1 (40:44.494)

present and talks about relationships. So talks about a lot of things I think are very practical and can help people. And then there’s Simply Mindful Resilience, which is a very popular book actually for how do we overcome obstacles in our life? How do we reach goals? And it’s 101 different ways to build resilience. So every page is a different resilience tool on it. And then the Simply Mindful

reflections book that I just did, and I read you one of those. That is a great way to, you know, just throughout the day, just maybe reopen to a page and read one of these reflections and see what it helps you do or see how it helps you see things in a little different way. And they’re all supportive. They’re all inspiring. And I call it 101 Daily Reflections for Joy.

hope and healing, right? And essential tools for living in a chaotic world, which we live in a very chaotic world nowadays. So I think maybe those would be good places to start. And then if you could, you know, get to the point where you feel like you want to know, like your meditation practice, what do you, how long is that in the morning for you?

So in my ideal morning, if I have no interruptions, which, you know, sometimes does happen, I try to do 10 minutes. I just do focused breath in and out, usually four seconds in two seconds, and then out for six and just kind of try to bring myself down. I try my best to not make it my plan, my day, what my to-do list is. And every once in while I’ll catch my thoughts drifting to what’s coming up and you just kind of go back to the breath and

Yeah, yeah. And some days it’s short and some days it’s long and

Speaker 1 (42:42.734)

Yeah, mean somebody could start with just a couple of minutes and you know and whatever just to you know just to start understanding how this can help you and how it can be supportive.

For sure. No, I wanted to share with you, one of the things that really stuck with me, it’s probably been 12 years or so. But, you know, I’m in the restaurant world and certified SOM working on the advanced SMA. And I remember I was a server and we were in a lineup. And one of the other servers at the restaurant had the chance to taste a bottle of wine with one of the guests the day before. And that

manager asked him to describe it and he was able to go into it with such detail. And it was the first moment that I sort of perked up and I was, I thought, I don’t think I could do that. I’m not, it’s like, saw and start contrast that I was kind of living life on autopilot, not paying attention. And it just, it sort of jolted me awake. Like I need to start paying attention. And I started studying wine a little bit more. it was just one of those things like,

I don’t know. Do you find that people have moments like that, that they kind of get jolted or is that?

Absolutely. I think that’s very cool. I think we need more jolts. Actually, I wrote Simply Mindful Reflections to have those kind of little thunderbolt jolts and to jolt people out of just their complacency or just, you know, autopilot way of being. That’s a great story. And that kind of woke you up to, wow, there’s a whole lot more I haven’t even noticed about you.

Speaker 2 (44:27.15)

Well I was also like 23 so you know if I got a bottle of wine I was just drinking the wine I was a picture of the wine.

Right. Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting job you have. that’s, are you getting ready to get into that line of.

So I’ve done that on the side. I’m in management now. So I’m the general manager of a steakhouse, but I was bartender for years. This podcast is mostly geared towards people in the service industry. So a lot of people are servers, bartenders, chefs listen to this. But I just, you know, I really enjoyed as a kid studying and I didn’t really know what to turn that energy to. And wine is just so interesting.

so much about it from the laws to the history to even just the nitty gritty, you know, the practice of line tasting, you really have to be present and there. it’s, it’s a, yeah, it just, hit all the dials and all the things that I thought were interesting. So I just kept studying and kept doing it.

Yeah. Well, I think the whole field of, you know, customer service and, and, especially in the hospitality world, like you’re in there, that’s, that’s a real art.

Speaker 2 (45:38.666)

yeah. Yeah. It’s very easy to make a lot of people angry just by not paying attention to them. And you get a chance every day and you only get that one chance to really win it and see the person and make sure that they have a happy day.

know, it’s so funny. I, I, you didn’t want me to saying a couple of other things, but I was in, I was in a restaurant the other day and the waitress, I mean, she was so attentive and everything and she didn’t pay too much attention, but she knew what was going on. and I was like, I remember I said to my friend who I was with, said, wow, she’s a real pro. And I really appreciate, talk about having gratitude. I was like, wow, I’m so happy we got her. She’s a real pro and appreciated it. And you know,

It really came through that she was really good at what she did and she cared about it. I appreciated it.

Yeah, well, it’s a job that it’s easy to do in one sense. You write down some things and you know it’s on the menu and you bring the food, but it’s a job that to do it well, when you see it, you know it. It’s, this is what it is. Okay. So yeah, it’s what I’ve done my whole life.

Wow, that’s great.

Speaker 2 (47:01.826)

Well, Donald, thank you so much for joining us. In the show notes, I’m going to have a link to your website just to make sure everyone can find you easily. it was a pleasure. When does the book come out?

Well, it just released this week. just came out this week. Awesome. So I’m very excited about it. And that’s why I’m very appreciative for coming on and being able to talk to you about these ideas. Right. As a fresh. Just in general. Just to help people start to see there’s a big world out there in terms of how we can respond and react to things.

Yeah, and there’s a lot of suffering, but I think a lot of suffering that doesn’t need to happen too.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So thank you so much for having me on the show, Andrew. And I think it’s great what you’re doing.

Well, it’s a pleasure. This will come out June 26th, just so you know. Okay. Yeah, I’ll send you the…

Speaker 1 (47:58.262)

link and then I’ll I can promote it to let people know.

Sure. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you. Bye now.