#62. Andrea Featherstone: Deconstructing Mindfulness

So that voice in your head is based on stuff that happened when you were younger, if you had trauma, if you had had stuff in your life, your mind is naturally going to be quite risk adverse. So it's going to be like, don't do this, don't do that, that's scary. That was a snippet from my guest Andrea Featherstone. Andrea is an unconventional mindfulness facilitator and former cynical pessimist.

She's the woman that was ticking all the boxes in life but wasn't necessarily feeling that deep sense of lasting satisfaction that most of us crave. Perhaps the best description ever, she felt like an empty coloring book. Now she's a specialist in helping people not buy into that destructive mind-chatter that is constantly going around in our brains. Andrea helps indecisive overachievers get clear on the direction and sense of self by learning to tame their minds.

Today we're talking a lot more about mindfulness, what that means to her and how she goes a little bit deeper than some of the other mindfulness definitions I've come across. We're also talking about how you can start to tame that little voice in your head and not be so tough on yourself and how stepping away from that busy mind-chatter can help you make decisions and feel so much more confident about how you're showing up in life. If you want to read more about Andrea and her awesome storytelling, you can head to projectself.com.au or find her on Facebook at ProjectSelf. Without further ado, let's get chatting.

Welcome to Head of Thrive. I'm your host Kate Snowwise. This is a podcast with people who are ready to step up and live a happier life. It's for those of us who are dedicated to understanding ourselves and getting the best that we can out of this thing called life.

It's a mix of psychology and modern spiritual thought, always with a focus on practical advice so that you can take it back and apply it to your own life. I don't believe we're here to merely survive. I truly believe we're here to thrive. So let's get going.

Andrea, thank you so much for coming and talking to me on here to thrive today. I have been so excited about talking mindfulness with you. Thank you for having me. It's very exciting.

I love talking about mindfulness as you know. How do you define it? What does it mean to you? Well, I think I define it slightly different than other people because in the one thing I care most about is getting people to be more honest with themselves or know themselves better.

So in that term, I find mindfulness very helpful for that. And I think mindfulness really means the ability to disidentify from the voice in your head. So that little voice that everyone knows that we have now chatting in your head and the ability to realize that that's not actually you. So you have lungs and you have a heart and they beat for you and they breathe for you.

But they're not you. You wouldn't say I am my heart. I am my lungs. And in the same way, mindfulness is about learning that you are not your mind and then learning some attention training techniques so you can actually get a bit of a distant because our default mode is to speak what up in that voice and not heads and run around making ridiculous lives out of what it says and getting angry at people when we probably shouldn't.

That kind of thing. You're talking about mindfulness being not identifying with the voice in your head, the running commentary. You know, I can still remember when I realized I had a running commentary going through my head because I think I had been as a kid, which I'm sure most of us what I identify with so attached to that voice in my head. I didn't ever stop to realize there was a voice in my head.

Absolutely. I think it's how most people live until they realize. Oh, shit. Something else is going on here.

In terms of being a voice in our head, I've heard other people talk about mindfulness like mindful eating and being in the moment and bringing your awareness to something. Do you see mindfulness as being a lot broader than that? Yeah, yes. I think I mean, it all comes back to that when you're doing those other attention training techniques, which is, you know, bring your attention to the breath or bring your attention to something else.

The main point you're actually doing there is bringing your attention to an anchor like the breath so that you notice when your mind wanders and once you start to notice that your mind wanders, you suddenly realize there's two of us here, me, my attention and then my mind. Right. So it's all part of it, but I think the foundation of it is really realizing about that voice in your head and learning to train where your attention goes so you can actually choose. Okay.

I'm having a little bit of an epiphany here because what I'm hearing is those things that everybody talks about as being mindfulness are really just the tools to bring us to what mindfulness really is, which is recognizing the voice in our head. Exactly. And that's recognizing who you actually are, which is not the voice in your head because it takes a bit of time to realize, okay, well, if I'm not that, then, well, whatever, you know, shit, how can it work? This should help.

We need to go there. Like, if you're not the voice in the head, then shit, who are we? Yeah, tricky. Do you have an answer?

I do have an answer, but it requires a lot of practice. No, I mean, there's a thing that you have to discover for yourself by training your attention. That's kind of where mindfulness takes you. But in the end, it is what most people call you.

I don't know your instinct or that sense of feeling that you know when you're on the right track and you know when you're on the wrong track. But a lot of the people I work with describe their lives as like being in the passenger seat of their own life. And that's because their mind's in charge of their life and their mind is based on judgments and what other people will think and people pleasing and that kind of thing. So that actually just takes a bit of a practice.

But I'm practicing mindfulness. You get to the sense of, okay, well, what am I? If not that, but you can actually describe it because the mind is the only thing that speaks in words. And so if you want to work out what you are underneath the words, it's not something you're going to to be able to describe with words.

It's an experience of being yourself. It's really hard to describe. No, that is so good. I get it.

And the mindfulness tools are like the gym. You get to go to the gym for the experience or the feeling that you feel after you've been at the gym or your daily feeling. And that's the same kind of thing you get when you practice mindfulness. You're actually doing it so that you feel more yourself for the rest of the day.

Talking about that frame of reference, practicing mindfulness and the tools that we use. Can you talk me through a little bit what those tools are or how you practice mindfulness? Yeah, this, I mean, there's so many ways. Basically, what most people's definition of mindfulness is bringing your attention to the present moment and non-judgmentally.

So that just means you need anything that's in the present moment to focus your attention on. And that could be anything that's not your mind, basically. So you can focus on your five senses, your external senses, so what you can hear, smell, taste, touch that kind of thing. Or you can focus on your internal senses, so your interaception, exteroception, your ability to sense where your arm is in space, for example, or chest, or hand-bait, or whatever it is that's going on inside you.

All of these little senses that we have that we often ignore, you know, you usually only realize that you have this thing called proprioception, which is the ability to sense where your body is in space. We usually only realize we have that sense when we ignore it for a second and then we walk into a doorframe. You know when you do that? Oh my gosh, yes.

You're like, that's when you were so caught up in your mind that you forgot to check in with that sense that was like, I am wider than this, don't walk over there. The mind itself, the part of your brain that fly when you're thinking, it's called the wandering mind, is actually your default mode, and that's what it's called in your brain as default mode. Network, of course, that means it's default. So in order to make it not default, that's why you need these mindfulness practices to bring your attention back, otherwise you're just going to end up caught up and walking into stuff or even metaphorically, you know, putting your foot in it all the time or walking into situations that you didn't mean to walk into, fighting with your partner, or you didn't mean to.

Stuff that your mind would have you do when you're not aware enough of what else is going on in your body or in the world. Those mindfulness practices are basically training your attention to focus on one of those senses or one of those things that are happening in the moment, not in the past or the future, which is where your mind mostly lives, and then doing that over and over and over until you basically just get better at redirecting your attention. As mindfulness practice, it's a little bit like taking a person from sleepwalking to opening up their eyes. Yeah, I suppose you could definitely say like that.

It does feel like that. You feel like when you practice it and I feel like, oh my God, what was I doing for the rest of my life? It was, it was like sleepwalking. You were always a mindful human.

This was an Andrea before you found mindfulness. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were like you years ago and what the cynical pessimist version of you looked like? I think up to the outside world, I probably looked like pretty fine. I'm a typical perfectionist overachiever, so I'll always make you think that I'm living a really good life.

But realistically on the inside, I was feeling pretty, pretty numb, I think I would say. And I was really snappy with my boyfriends. I really treated them badly if I looked back. I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry.

I feel like I should see them some presents or something to say. Sorry. Oh, for my past self, I was really insecure, incredibly insecure, really ruined a lot of friendships, you know, just by overthinking things. And you know, when you're just talking to someone and you're not really listening to anything you're saying, because all you're thinking is being so boring anti.

Why can't I think of questions, you know, like, all that hating me, all that kind of mind activity that takes over? And of course it doesn't make you really boring because you're not even listening. So you can't have a conversation because you're just thinking about yourself. So there were so many different aspects of my life that changed when I went mindfulness to them.

I could pretty much say any aspect of my life that was worse before now was changed by mindfulness. Indecision was also a big thing for me, which is a big thing that I work with in my business is helping people to get there at making decisions because I just had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had a study in architecture and I was just really lost. You know, I just had no sense of self.

I was completely dominated by people pleasing and needing to be a certain person and looking a certain way. But I just felt no sense of real passion or excitement about anything really. You know, when you wake up and you're like, ah, another day, like you have got black out blinds and go back to sleep now. Around hot day.

Yeah. Like chicken and chicken out. I want to go there with the indecisiveness thing because I really think you're unique in that you marry mindfulness with indecision. And I've actually noticed in some of my clients recently, there's real kind of paralysis when it comes to trying to make decisions and especially life decisions and however the warming they can be.

How do you feel that mindfulness helps or relates to indecisiveness? Yeah, I guess it all comes back to, you know, what I said before about not knowing your sense of gut instinct or your sense of stuff beyond the mind means that you start to make decisions using your mind. And by mind, I mean, I'm talking about their voice and your head when I that's a different, like everyone has a different definition of mind. So that voice in your head is based on stuff that happened when you were younger.

If you had trauma, if you had had stuff in your life, your mind is naturally going to be quite risk adverse. So it's going to be like, don't do this. Don't do that. That's scary blah blah blah.

If it felt that you needed to be really perfect or really good at school to fit in, your your mind also going to tell you know, we need to do this. We definitely can't do that. Like for example, if I'm, if I love painting, well, we can't do that because only stupid people do that and you've got to do something better than that. You've got to get a degree and you've got to, you know, you need the status, you need the money, you need the blah blah blah blah.

So you end up with this mind that's just based on the values of everyone outside of you, but not you. And you, the more that you listen to that mind and it does seem to gain momentum, the less in tune you become with that, but it's gut instinct. And the faster the mind gets because you just start to realize you're in a big spiral of 10 million options of what I could do next and then 10 million reasons by all of those options are a bad idea, you know, the mind's role is to keep us safe from threats. So it doesn't actually care if we stay unhappy in a shitty job or whatever.

And so when it's doing that, that means it's incredibly indecisive because all it's doing is looking out for threats. And when you've got this other driving factor, which is your gut instinct saying, I really don't like this. I feel shit doing this. I hate this job.

I hate this partner. I'm not getting on well with this friend, whatever. And if you've got these two opposing things going on, you're going to feel really weird while also having your mind become more and more indecisive about that because you're just ignoring the sense that actually knows. And so for me, getting more in touch with your gut instinct requires mindfulness because you first need to understand what's distracting you from it.

If we didn't have a mind, we would have nothing except our gut instinct and we wouldn't have a problem with knowing what it was saying. Like all other animals in the world that don't have a voice in the head as far as we know don't seem to have a problem with knowing what they need to do. Even if they have to migrate around the whole world, they can do that just fine without getting indecisive about it. So it's like a unique human problem that we have.

And that's why I think mindfulness is really a key in learning to become more decisive. I love it. It's we have those that ability for our brains to just run on overdrive. So often our minds start to work against us and just spiral into this busy, crazy, just jumble really a spider web of thoughts.

So the way you're talking about it, it kind of sounds like mindfulness allows you to hit the override button and kind of cut through the noise in your own head and come back to what matters. Exactly. It doesn't mean getting rid of what's in your head. It's not like a reset where you suddenly have a free of thought or anything like that.

But it enables you to see that you might be speaking more than one language or maybe you're got instinct to speaking to in a different language than the voice in your head. And it just allows you to basically learn that new language and start to listen when necessary. Because the mind is helpful too for sure. But you need to be able to decide when to use it and not, you know, because I'm sure you've noticed like the mind is not very nice sometimes.

It's a bit of a bastard. Totally the mind can be a bastard. What you have a name for yours, right? Yes.

Yes, I've made my mind to Neville. Can we talk about that? The benefit of naming your mind? It's something I get all my clients to do when I first start practicing.

It's just another tool for disidentifying, you know, because if you call your mind by a certain name, then you're definitely clear that it's not you, right? And so I usually encourage people to use a name that's like a bit of a silly name, maybe like an old fashioned name that you'd never name your child. So we get a lot of gertrudes or, you know, never a gertrude or just random, random names that just make you laugh. So you think, oh, thanks, mind, you know, thanks, Neville.

It's really helpful. And it sounds really crazy like to be talking as though you haven't voice in your head and talk calling in a different name. But the reality is we do have a voice in our head and it is talking to us all the time. And we're not in control of it because if we were, we'd be able to turn it off and we want to sleep at night and we wouldn't get lost in thought when we were listening to someone.

By calling your name something, it gives you the ability to decide to identify to watch your thoughts. Is that how you found it? Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of like an ACT.

They suggest that you actually talk to it like, you know, saying, thanks, mind or whatever, you know, you hear an unhelpful thought and you might hear yourself saying the words in your mind. Thanks, mind. That's probably not the best advice right now. I'm just going to do something different and just that step of doing that is enough usually to I don't know when you just hear your mind say something like, yeah, you're just a real idiot Andrea and you're like, yeah, yeah, I am.

You know, but if you think, oh, no, Neville, what do you mean? Am I really true? It enables you to start taking your mind a little bit less seriously kind of as though you were to take your mind out of you and put them into another human in front of you and say, if this is a friend telling me this, would this be that useful? And often the answer is no.

And so that ability to see them as a separate entity helps you. Yeah, I guess it helps you take it less seriously when necessary. Yeah. I totally get.

I can have a conversation with your very own Neville in your head. Yes, exactly. We're just quietly also in there having conversations with ourselves. When it comes to some of those conversations, like you said, we can be pretty horrible to ourselves or our minds can be pretty horrible in our own heads.

Do you see that a lot with your clients that some of the, I would say, scripts or the things they're telling themselves over and over again, are pretty unfair? Yes, absolutely. And especially because I predominantly work with indecisive overrechievers who are, you know, perfectionists, control freaks, we all kind of fall into the same bracket. And that perfectionism is really makes people just so horrible to themselves.

And I know it because I did the same thing to me. I still do sometimes, you know, if you're not perfect, your mind will cut you down. And it's really, it's really hard that the important thing to remember, of course, is that the mind is not trying to make your life shit. It's actually trying to help you.

And at some point in our life, for most of us, probably in childhood, we made the assumption that in order to be loved, I need to be perfect. And so the mind's like, okay, great. So every time we're not perfect, I'm going to tell you about it. And I'm going to remind you because this is really important because if we're not laughing, we might die, our parents won't look after us.

You know, we won't be in the tribe, whatever it is. And so we need to be perfect. But just keep reminding you a bit by that when you're sucking, which is not being perfect. And that can really build up to be incredibly self-destructive over time.

I'm fascinated by this conversation. I'm so immersed in it that I'm like, oh, what's my next question? Which is good thing because I'm clearly being mindful in the conversation. You're in it.

You're listening. Yay. Winning, winning. You also described yourself as a cynical pessimist, then a pragmatist.

I was looking at some of the stuff you have online. So what were you like as a pragmatic person, who's pretty cynical when you came across mindfulness? Did you think this was a loadable loany? Yes.

I thought it was a total bollocks. introduction. Actually, my first introduction to mindfulness was an psychologist. I had been talking to someone at my work and I was telling her how I kept ending up in these fights with my partner and I couldn't understand why because the fights were over nothing.

And she was like, have you heard of this thing called self-sabotage? And I was like, no, what do you mean? And then I looked up and I was like, that's what I'm doing. Oh my God, I'm self-sabotaging.

So I went to see a psychologist. So I was like, I'm going to get to the bottom of this thing. I'm a perfectionist. Right?

I'm a perfectionist. I'm going to fix it. Exactly. And I had also just no knowledge of emotional awareness, nothing.

And I had no interest in it either. So I went to the psychologist and she said, like we obviously talked about a bunch of stuff. And she said, sometimes when you're feeling really agitated or you're feeling really stressed, what you just need to do is go outside and touch a leaf and feel the feeling of the leaf in your fingers. And I just remember thinking, you absolutely pass.

How is that going to help me when I'm angry at my partner touching a leaf? And I remember telling all my friends that watching said I was like, touch a leaf. God, you know, and only now I'm like, ah, maybe she could have delivered it differently. But that was what she was getting at.

She was talking about mindfulness and the way she described it was. It wasn't relatable to me as a cynical pessimist, you know, like a too practical for that. And so that's really why I've ended up doing how I do it with mindfulness is to try and explain mindfulness in a way that's a lot more practical and a lot less floaty, you know, touch the leaf, focus on your breathing. That stuff doesn't really work for me.

That doesn't work for a lot of people. And then the second introduction I hit to mindfulness was the EKAT toll, the power of now and osteopath I worked for recommended. I just remember thinking the power of now, like you've got to be joking me. What the hell is the name of this book?

It sounds terrible. And for that reason, I didn't read it for two years afterwards. I still have that book sitting on my shelf. We need to talk about this more.

But so you did finally read the book. I did finally read the book. And only really because I was struggling so much by that point. By this point, I was on a superhero in the Mediterranean ironing billionaires sheets for a living and vacuuming walls and serving Russian billionaires food.

And I was struggling because my mind was like, what are you doing with your life? You've got a degree in architecture. Like, look at you vacuuming the wall. The wall's clean.

What are you doing? And I was like, yeah, you're right, mine's like, God, what am I doing? I was very lost in my mind. It was pretty out of control when you're doing something so mind-numbingly meaningless and boring.

It's actually a lot like that whole wax on wakes off thing that they actually do when you're training to become a monk, make someone do something repetitive and meaningless every day. And that's when your mind gets really, really angry. And so that was around the time that I realized I needed to sort something out. And that's when I started to read the book.

So I did sort of accidentally get put in the position where I was almost doing that training, except on as it'd be up. I loved that. It's quite the same, a lot more alcohol and stuff involved. But apart from that, it was a big make-up call for me.

And once I started to read the book, I started to see that there was a lot more practical about it than I had formally assumed. I like the fact that you were doing completely mind-numbing work as you described it. And that's what broke your mind. It was like, okay, we're done.

We need something else here. Yeah. Well, I guess it's like there's not enough to distract you in our lives. We just find more distraction to make sure we don't feel how bad that feels.

But when you're just vacuuming a wall for hours, there's nothing there's what can you do? All you can do is think. And when your mind thinks it usually goes towards negative. So I was thinking about some pretty negative stuff about myself, about the guy I was fancying, or always just this drama that happens in your mind.

And I had nothing to distract myself from it. It's so interesting talking about distraction, because I think I'm a touch older than you. But I grew up and I didn't get a cell phone. And to pretty much like my last year of high school, it was the first texting cell phone that we all had.

And that was when the internet was done to get bigger. And I just think, oh my gosh, like this generation, the generation underneath me is just they've never not known a life where they could just turn around and find a distraction. And it does make me wonder if so many more people are disconnected from themselves or if we've always just found ways to distract ourselves. Yeah, it does feel like the problem is getting worse, doesn't it?

And I think that is straight because of the smartphone really, because it's just so easy now. So easy to just pick up something and no one has any gaps, no gaps in their day anymore. You don't even go out to dinner and your partner goes to the bathroom and you're like immediately your phone's reaching for your bag to get the phone and you're like, what am I doing? This is mental.

It's just a new addiction. But I definitely think our mind says sped up as a result, which in the speed of your mind, in my opinion, to the less in touch you are with what matters to you and therefore the less satisfied you feel. So it's like a conundrum, right? That's your mind, the more you want to check your phone, the more you check your phone, the faster your mind goes.

So it's a bit of a spiral here, I reckon. So how do you put a stop to that? Do you just say like, higher self, you know, the mind that isn't evil has had enough of this? So no more cell phone at the traffic lights?

Like, how do you stop that? No more cell phone at the traffic lights are like that. I have, yeah, part of my program is just take your phone out of your room. But I just find now that the only way to really do that is to start to be aware enough, just aware enough of how shitty it feels when you go into your phone and then you come out of it and you feel more disconnected.

Like, you know, like if you're having a chat with your partner, then you pick up your phone, you look at it for a bit, you then turn back to him, you almost can't work out who he is. Like there's a second of you, you just feel completely like who is this person. And the more you notice how bad that feels, the more incentive you have to get the phone away from you more and more often. I think that smartphones are more addictive than any drug, I think they're more addictive than sugar, they're probably more addictive than whiskey is to an alcoholic.

And if you're an alcoholic, you wouldn't have whiskey sitting next to you by your bed, you know, every day, you try to keep it away from you. So we have to, even though you think, oh, yeah, I'll just willpower, you know, it doesn't really work that well, because it's incredibly addictive at fire stuff in our brain that feels really good. So you actually have to keep it away from you, you know, and I, so I know how bad it feels when I spend too much on my phone, but I still do it because it's addictive. So I actually have to turn my phone onto airplane mode.

I put it on charge far away from my bed at night and I leave it there and I often don't even check it until that midday, even I'm going to start working and then I'll check it later. And simply because I know that if I do and I start my day looking at a phone, I know my day will be really shit, but I know if I wake up and my phone's there, I won't be able to help myself doing it, you know, so it's, it's more than just realizing it's, it's really realizing how addictive it is in treating it like that, treating it like an addiction. Oh, you're making me think I need to go and buy a clock for the side of my bed and put my cell phone down on the charger in the living room. Okay, do that.

Do that. Honestly, that's one of the things we recommend in our six days to decide some challenge, get an alarm clock or get like an iPhone four that barely works that you can still have a nice musical wake up alarm, take all the apps off it, turn the internet off and have that as your alarm, get your phone out of your room. Oh my gosh, I have kids. It'd be nice to have a musical wake up alarm.

I have like, no, just kidding. Do you mean anything? Right? It's like what it is.

Is then I glance over at my clock to be like, is it actually wake up time or do I tell them to go back to be? That's what it is. You need a clock. I only need a clock.

I don't need the alarm. All right. So I want to talk about the power of now that book by Ekat Tolle that you mentioned that I said I still have sitting on my, it's in one of my many parts of awesome books yet to read. When I picked it up, I kind of struggled to get into it.

I can remember you saying it wasn't an easy read for you at the time, right? Yes, not at all. So what made it hard the fact that it was such a new concept? The funny thing is I used to send it to all my clients.

I sent it to hundreds of people and they all found the same thing. And I even asked my stepdad to read it and he read it and he said he had the best description for it. He said it's so horrific and I was like, I don't know what that means. So I had to look it out and for anyone who didn't like me didn't know what it means.

It puts you asleep. Is that right? That's what it means. It makes you want to go to sleep.

I don't know. But I like that. It just sounded like such an epic word to describe it. Yeah.

That's why I didn't read it. I think it's really, I think the concept is so difficult for your mind to understand because you're basically trying to tell your mind that it is not the most important thing in the world and it's your mind you're trying to use to understand that concept. It's very hard going and your mind has all these objections and that is quite taxing on your brain. So I found I was only able to read one or two pages at a time and it took me like literally took me like a year to read.

But it all makes sense, even as you're reading it, it really does make sense. And I found that anyone who actually manages to read it will read it again and again and again because once you've got the concept, it's like mind blowingly amazing. So usually I find that it actually requires people to be feeling quite a deep level of suffering before they'll be even bother, which I was, you know, so maybe it's not suffering in a thing. Well, I had to admit, and I know that we bonded over here, Tolly, because I didn't go for that book, but I read his second book, which was his bestseller that made him super famous, which then made the power of now more famous if I understand it correctly in terms of chronology, if I got wrong, I'm sorry, people.

But I was addicted to a new earth. It's still one of my favorite books of all time. And it was a book that I have read multiple times. I've taken notes with it.

I've done all sorts of things. And it does have the same kind of concept in it. But I think the power of now goes into a lot more detail. But a new earth is all about how he separates the ego from the self.

And I know that that's the concept that the power of now is based on, right? Yeah, I think they're actually very similar. I've read them both as well. And I can't actually differentiate which bit you learn from which, because I feel like they're very similar, but totally differently written.

Okay, well, I'm going to read the power of now. I'm dedicated to it now. I'm going to persist. I'm going to persist.

But if people are looking for a starting point, then a new earth, I didn't find it too hard when I was I was still pretty asleep for lack of a bit of effort. So it was a good read. We talked about you being this pragmatic cynical pessimist who's on a superhero mind-lumbingly board, then you find mindfulness. And obviously we're fast-forwarded a number of years now.

How would you describe your life now? Is there anything that the Andrea Beck then could have comprehended? I think she would be pretty pissed off at what I'm doing now. She would not be impressed, I think, because I'd now teach mindfulness.

And I even put photos on my own face on Facebook and things like that. She would not have agreed with, because she was incredibly judgmental as well of anyone in the South Development world or just South Development in general. This is just so great. You become the person that your old South basically was super judgmental of.

I know it's kind of confusing because I still try to walk the line where I'm trying to be self-development for cynical pessimists. So I'm still trying to relate to those people who I understand very well because I am one and I was one. But I still think yeah, former Andrea would be still be like, oh, you're an idiot. Go back to university.

But life is better and so so many ways. I think I just learned to open my mind up a lot. I mean, I was so close minded. And back then I thought that was a form of intelligence to be so narrow minded.

And like, this is what science has proven. And the rest of it is all bullshit. It's just I just I don't know how I've came to that conclusion that to be so pessimistic was intelligent because I actually think it's really unintelligent to have such a close mind that you wait for scientists to prove something before you believe it. You know, like mindfulness has been around thousands of years.

They've only now started to prove it. And then you forget that of course scientists only prove stuff that they're paid to prove, which means most stuff doesn't get proved because there's no money. So I just totally opened my mind since then. But in terms of like my life, it's completely different.

I understand who I am. I know what I want. I'm a lot less insecure thanks to these skills. And I don't fight with my partner.

Like I used to, I can feel the urge that comes that I used to act on all the time every now and then. And I'm like, wow, like, this is crazy that I know how I would have handled this in the past. And it was not good. You know, and so just just every everywhere I described before that was hard before is now a lot easier, you know, not just in my life, it's perfect and magical all the time at all.

But I just handle things a lot better when things go wrong. I have tools to pick myself back up again, rather than just collecting an pile and becoming incredibly more pessimistic. You can't call your partner your partner because his name is bloody good chat. The funny thing is one of my clients who's been around for like a couple of years now, I emailed her the other day or she emailed me and I responded and said his name.

And I was like, you know, I'm not gonna say his name, blah blah blah. And then she was like, who is the real name? She emailed back and she was like, Oh my God, for a second that you freaked me out. I thought that you had broken up with bloody good chat, but then I realized like your jet must actually have a real name.

Yeah, I just, I always felt like I should probably not show the whole like my life is incredibly public now to many thousands of people and I don't really want to subject anyone else to that. So I've just called him bloody good chat. But if you go to Andrew's page on Facebook, where she shares the most epic stories, there's plenty of photos of bloody good chat. Yeah, and he doesn't mind that he doesn't, he actually doesn't even mind being known, but I think he'd rather he's very private person.

He doesn't mind his face being on it. He doesn't even mind me writing about them, so long as it gets to read it before, but it doesn't really, we don't. And he hasn't actually said I need to withhold his name or anything, but I just think he's private enough that he probably would want that. I think that it's so sweet that he lets you write about him.

I'm just gonna say it, big ups bloody good chat. So if you do want lucky, if you do want to read a whole heap of entertaining stories about how our minds play tricks on us and how we contain them, you have to go over to Andrew's Facebook page at Project Self. It's so much fun. Thanks.

You can read all about my private, but not private boyfriend. Do you have particular practices that bring you back to the moment awareness? Is there things that you do? Are you a mindful eater?

Do you hold leaves now like your psychologist suggested? How do you or is this just like part of your way of life now and you don't actually have to actively practice it so much anymore? No, you know, I walked down the street and I just touched it really if I can and then just try and feel a texture and you know that don't get too much. Seriously, I was like, I'm not going to laugh because it might be inappropriate.

I know I imagine that I've really turned that much, but I could say that I really just live one with nature now. No, I don't do that at all. Yeah, to some extent, absolutely, they'll be like, you know, the more you practice it, the more it becomes second nature and you don't have to, you don't have to, I think it's called unconscious competence in the mind from this world. You don't have to try.

You're just practicing it naturally. But the main thing is like often I still get massively caught up in my mind as we all do, especially as a business owner, is a lot to think about. So your mind gets a lot of momentum. So to bring me back, often, this is a really weird thing, but I actually lie on tennis balls on the floor on my back.

And I don't know what it is, but it seems to like release my nervous system in the same way as a chiropractor seems to. For some reason, it just brings me into this really like more calm present state. And I think I learned it from a yoga teacher in Bali, who does my own facial release with it. And I just realized it has a very, very quick impact.

And it feels a lot like yoga, because you're lying there, it's actually very painful when you have to really feel into the pain and to be able to stay there. So that's one thing I do when I'm panicking about something unnecessarily. How many tennis balls do you have that you lie on? Is this like three or is it like 30?

No, I imagine that. Now just two, which actually the less than the more painful because you have just two pressure points on your back somewhere and my back's quite bad. So it makes it harder, but then you can put it all over. You can put it anywhere in your body and lie on it and it basically just releases some of the fascia, well, that's what she says.

Yeah, you can't really do much while you're doing that. And you lie there for quite a little bit of time, like five or ten minutes on each point. My back feels kind of sore, you're just talking about it. So cool.

I like that. You lie on tennis balls. And now what else do you do? Other things that don't require tennis balls.

Every time I notice that my mind's totally wandered and got caught up and sounding, I'll just bring it back to whatever I'm doing. So if I'm doing the dishes, I'll just focus my attention on my hands or the smell of the soap or the sound of the water going down the drain or something like that, or when you're washing your hands or having a shower, you can do those kinds of things. Or when I'm walking, I try to put my attention in my legs to feel the movement of the walking. And you can do these kind of things like for a couple of minutes or less, whenever you notice.

You don't have to... That's one thing that I am quite passionate about is that you don't have to meditate to practice mindfulness, because I don't mind for this two years before I ever learn to meditate. And meditation is definitely like an accelerated form of training your attention, because you're sitting in the book nothing else to do but to train your attention. But you don't have to.

I just think it's really valuable for people to understand that they can really practice mindfulness through any parts of the day. Have to be honest, I'm a terrible mindful eater. I'm still like, boom, it's gone. Oh, don't forget it.

The reason I asked about that is that I'm truly much more mindful about my eating. So yeah, because I also just cracking out because I didn't have any questions written down beforehand. But I was just thinking about how I wanted to ask you about the relationship between mindfulness and meditation. And then you just go there.

So I think we're psychically connected, which I'm sure your pragmatic brain will just love. It must be the psychic connection. You're like, the pragmatist for me isn't so sure. But so just to recap that, you don't have to meditate to be mindful or to start a mindfulness practice isn't necessarily a meditation practice.

But meditation can assist in living a more mindful life. Yes, it definitely depends how you define some people might define. Like some people might say surfing is my meditation. Whereas, but for most, I think the definition of meditation is a seated formal practice of mindfulness where you're literally sitting down to do it.

But you can also have meditation without any mindfulness at all. There's types of meditation techniques that don't have anything to do with mindfulness. Like, I made a meditation, for example, which I also do, transcendental meditation, which is very popular involves repeating a mantra in your head. But that's not mindfulness because you're not focusing on that.

And it's in the present moment, you're bringing something into your mind to focus on. And so, yeah, you can have mindfulness without meditation, you can have meditation without mindfulness. So a lot of people seem to confuse the two words. And I think it's quite important to understand it.

They're different. But can be complimentary, but don't be together. Exactly. All right.

It's your turn to get my intermission set of questions, Andrea. These are sometimes quick fires, sometimes not. Are you a morning person or a night person? Night night night night.

You're just like, I'm a night owl. Do you start your days late? So late, you do start my day like, well, early today, I start my day like 11 or later. And I often work till 10pm or later depending on, how I want to start my day.

But I just, I'm on at night. Everything works well. And in the morning, I'm like, that's why you don't get to your photo midday because that's you only like woke up a couple of hours ago. I'm just giving you time now.

Possibly. I do wake up still early. I said, well, I wake up at eight. Some people would think that's really late, but I think that's really, I still wake up at eight.

I just don't do work stuff until like midday. Yeah. And so I'll be up and I'm going to go and I might go for a run or go and see a friend or do some round stuff. I don't even know what I feel my morning's worth, but stuff for me to take and then start my day and then look at my phone later.

I have, I have routine in me. I think I might need to change my little bit because I'm not naturally morning person either. And that sounds way cooler than my morning. I think it's different when you have kids and dogs and stuff.

Okay. And what is currently sitting on your bedside table, as us Kiwis would say, Americans say nightstand that table next to your bed. That's stand. That's funny.

That's exactly what it is. Exactly. And where you put stuff to stand for the night. That's true.

I've never got a good way of naming stuff what it actually is. It's not particularly interesting, some water, my Kindle, my lamp that I made and I'm doing some work working. And I've got my little iPhone 4, which barely works just enough to get my iPhone and a book called Stealing Fire. Is that a fictional book or a self-help book or do you not really read self-help books like I'm addicted to because you're a creditist?

No, I used to. I've read so many, so many self-help books, my Kindle is rambling and this is sort of like entrepreneurship slash self-help. I'm not even sure if it's self-help, but it is about mindfulness and neuroscience. A friend of mine sent it to me actually.

She was, I did a master my weather and she just sent it to me. I don't know where. So that was awesome. Very nice.

I like that. So what was the title again? Stealing Fire. And that's an actual book.

I don't know. We have actual books around because I travel a lot and have a Kindle. So it's quite nice to have a real paper book. Yeah, I have a slight addiction to paper books.

All right. What is your favorite self-care activity? Do you know my favorite thing to do actually is go and I don't know if this counts, but I go to the Melbourne Botanic Gardens and take my picnic mat and then just starfish in the gardens and just lie there with it, hopefully it's sunny on this day. And we're just relaxed.

We have spoken about this because one day I had what I would call my niggas in a twist and Andrea and Andrea and I were communicating and she was like, go outside and starfish on the grass. And I was like, you know what, the Minnesota grass is so much better to starfish on than my grass wasn't Texas, seriously. Did you do it? Yeah, I did.

But I'm a little bit worried because it's going to snow here, so I'm not going to be able to starfish for ages. I love I love lying on the grass. It's one of my best. Yeah, it just feels good.

And the gardens here are so beautiful. I just feel like I'm in a little holiday world. I forget that I have any issues. It's so good.

It's definitely self-care. Do you have a favorite book, like a book from your history that has really touched you? Have we already spoken about it or are the other ones? Yeah, I've always got to say the power of now.

Hardest book I ever read, but my only book I actually want to read and do, reread and I owe my whole life to that book. A very cliche thing to say, but it's true. So cheers, heck, I told the power of now. Do you have a long road that you took in life or was there a detour or a tough life lesson that took a while to learn?

Yeah, I guess just working out what I wanted with my life was a very long and tough around about in a first word problems kind of way. But it also led me to so much stuff because after I quit my masters of architecture, I traveled around the world for quite a few years actually working at Sonawood on Sipyots and did various things. And so I just learned so much and I met so many amazing people. And even though I was very lost and quite unhappy for really a long a lot of that time, like it was really life-changing, I guess.

So good and bad. That was a journey of self discovery by the sounds of it. And if you hadn't have been on the journey, you wouldn't have done the discovering. Exactly.

I'm really glad that I did it at any end, even though it was really hard because I think a life stuck to an office doing architectural drafting stuff that I didn't ever feel passionate about in the first place just would have been a lot tougher, just a lot slower, slower, a slower suffering than the suffering I caused myself by quitting that. But yeah. I like that. You're like the immersive class.

You're just like, I'm going all in and going to come out the other side better, quicker. Yeah, okay. I don't know. I'm very impatient.

I'm sort of just shit out now. Well, your patience is not one of my virtues either. Okay. So what is one thing in your day that you can't do without?

I'm going to say freedom. I don't know if it's not like a thing, a physical thing, but I need freedom. That's what I need. Well, every day I need to be able to choose what I want to do with it.

Reason, obviously, I have meetings and all sorts of things like that. But I can't deal with fully structured routine every day. That's why you didn't want to work at a desk and a corporate job for the rest of your life, exactly, exactly. And specifically, I actually because it meant that I wouldn't be on the travel and do my work as well.

So that would have been not good. Free spirit. Okay. The last question for you.

And I'm fascinated to see how you answer this one. How would you describe the soul? Clinical business is like the soul. That's why I was picking up it.

I was like, do you even use that word? Is it in your book? No, it's not. I have a quite a long list of vocabulary words that I will never use in my business because of cynical business.

So how would you describe it? Then if it wasn't the soul in your mind, yeah, I think what would you call it? I would probably just call it your gut instinct. I think I do like it's just a different word for what we all have.

We all have this thing that I think it's this sense of self or whatever you want to call it that goes beyond the mind. And it's something that doesn't necessarily talk to you and voice in your head and talk to you in words. It's something that pulls you in certain directions or tells you where on the wrong track or you need to turn around or I really hate this or I really like this. You should keep doing more of this thing.

It's yeah, to me, it's the gut instinct. And I think I read an article by Liz Gilbert that was saying, if you're really unhappy in life, your soul is just appalled. And I just loved a description of it. I don't know if you read it before.

It's like saying your gut instinct is just so pissed off at you. It's making you suffer and it's going to make you suffer until you change what you're doing. And if you're feeling really excited and joyful about life, then your soul is pretty stoked about that. You know, and you should keep on that track.

So that's what I think the soul is. It's our compass, I think. Oh, I like that. It's our compass.

I'll take that. I'll take that from a cynical pragmatist. Final thing from you. Have you got any resources that you can point us to that might help people kind of up their mindfulness game?

Any practical activities that they could do? Practical activities. Yes. Well, I can say two things.

No, actually, I think the easiest thing actually is just to say that I have a free six days to decisiveness challenge, which is actually a six day mindfulness challenge. And in that, there's every single day, a new video about a new mindfulness technique that you can practice on that day to get closer to your sense of self or making decisions. So that's probably the easiest things to do. And that's at projects.com.au slash mindfulness dash challenge.

And it's free. Can you give us a sneak peek as to like maybe one of the activities in there? Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say it before.

I sort of said it. And one of the things that I do is that when you're doing a mundane, every activity that you usually totally ignore, like maybe brushing your teeth, instead of zoning out, which is, you know, choose an activity that you normally zone out at some people choose when they're driving to work, some people choose when they're sitting at your desk and bring your full attention into one or all of your senses. So if you're brushing your teeth, really try and notice how minty the mintiness is and notice the little bristles on your mouth and notice the way your hands moving as you're brushing your teeth. If you're driving, you notice the feeling of the steering wheel in your hands or your feet on the brakes or the sounds that your car's making that you've probably never noticed before.

It doesn't have to be. We often think that we have to just focus on the pleasant sensations of pleasant things, but you just anything goes when you're practicing mindfulness because it's really interesting that when you really focus on any sense, any of your sensations, you don't necessarily have that judgment, that sense of annoyance at it because you're just focusing on what it is and just noticing it. I just have stuck on the tase the mintiness of the, well, how did you put it, the mintiness or something with the toothpaste? I'm like, I want to really concentrate tonight on just how minty my minty toothpaste is.

Well, you should just go and get some toothpaste right now. Well, you know, it's my big one because we're recording this late because Andrea's in Australia. So I'm pretty close to my minty minty toothpaste. Well, you enjoy that.

I will totally enjoy that. There was one thought or thing you could leave our listeners with. What would it be? It would be to work out how you can be a more honest version of yourself.

And obviously, I think the root to that is mindfulness. But I just think the most important thing is that we start being a lot more honest about what our minds are saying. And if we all did that, things would just go a lot more easily. You know, instead of getting angry and shouting at each other because of all this crazy stuff happening, if we're just honest about how scared we are or how exquisite we are, which you can do when you get more in tune with what's going on your mind, the world would just be way more awesome, I think.

And way less stressful, a lot less pretending. I hope you found that conversation insightful. I really like the way that Andrea has made mindfulness come to life for me. I understand it at a deeper level and really get to what the intention is with my mindfulness practices.

Now, Andrea mentioned she has a six days to decisiveness mindfulness challenge. If you whip over to her website, www.projectself.com.au, you will find links to sign up for that challenge there. If you want to learn more about AndreaProjectself.com.au or find her at Project Self on Facebook and Instagram. Until next week, beautiful people.

Thank you for showing up. And if you enjoyed the podcast, it would mean so very much to me if you could tell one of your friends that might also appreciate about the show here to thrive. And if you've got a couple of extra minutes, leave us a little review and iTunes. www.thrive.au forward slash review should help you get there quicker.

Until next week, keep thriving.