Welcome to the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want the truth about having a healthy, happy, strong body. Remember, your body was meant to move. Now here's your host, Steven Sashan. You've just gotten out of big, thick padded motion control shoes.
Maybe you're running barefoot. Maybe you're running in a truly minimalist shoe like zero shoes. You've had incredible experiences. Injuries might have gone away.
You feel better. You're having more fun. So you want to tell everyone, right? Yeah, shut up.
Don't do that. We're going to talk about why on today's episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting with the feet first, those things that are your foundation, where we talk about the propaganda the lies and the theology about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body and to live, to dance, to play, to run, to walk, to hike, to lift, to do all those things you enjoy doing and to do them with more enjoyment and more efficiency and more, well, fun, frankly, everything's all about fun. If it isn't fun, don't do it. We talked about that on a press episode.
Don't run. It isn't fun. There's one way putting that. So welcome to the Movement Movement podcast.
I'm Steven Sashan from zero shoes.com, your host. Feel free to just join us at www.join the movement movement.com where you can find all the past episodes and all the different ways you can interact with this content. Of course, you're finding this podcast wherever you find podcasts. Feel free to find us on Facebook or on YouTube or, of course, on our website, etc.
I'm looking at a board. You know how to share information. By the way, I do call it the Movement Movement because we are creating a movement about movement. We're trying to make natural movement the obvious, better, healthy choice the way natural food is and you are the ones who make this a movement.
You're the ones who spread this information to others and there's this grassroots ground so well thing is happening at a certain point. There'll be a critical mass where I believe everyone's going to realize this is the better, obvious, healthy choice the way natural food is. Until then, what do we do? How do we talk about the fun, the benefits, the experience that we've had when we get out of big, thick, padded motion control shoes and into something that lets your body move naturally?
Well, I'm going to recommend you don't talk about it the way that you want to. Let's chat about that. So first things first, when, boy, what do I want to begin? There are a couple of problems with having conversations with people.
We talked about this on the last episode and that is research doesn't convince people. Information doesn't convince people. Oh, I remembered something from the previous episode that I wanted to say and that is, oh, wait, and that just fell out of my head. Oh, man, this is, I don't know what, this happens to you, but like an idea pops up.
I want to grab it and then by the time I do it just disappears. Okay, got it back. This is from a previous episode where we talked about why data doesn't help people. Why giving them scientific information about the benefits of natural movement just really doesn't convince people and that's because humans aren't wired to take new information and have it replace old information.
Frankly, why conspiracy theories work the way they do? Once people get in their head that this conspiracy theory is true, there's no amount of information you can give them that will change their mind. In fact, they'll use that information to further believe the irrational thing they already believe and this is the point that I wanted to make in the previous episode and that is that when someone thinks they've made a rational decision, you can't just give them more rational information. And when it comes to footwear, people think they've made rational decisions.
Even if that rational decision for why they're wearing what they're wearing came from listening to some 21 year old kid in a running shoe store who just got the job last week and was told to parrot certain ideas about the shoes that they're selling and of course not talk about the shoes that they're not selling. Rational information doesn't move people into other rational decisions. If someone's on the fence and they're not sure and they're investigating, then you can give people some rational data and they will probably use that to come up with a belief to come up with some new ideas. But if they've already got one lock in, it's pretty tough.
So that said, why am I saying don't talk about your experience? Well, I'm not really saying that but I will tell you what happens and give you an idea of what to do perhaps differently than what you've already been doing. And I want to start by talking about something that used to happen in a different domain, which is meditation. I'm not going to teach you how to meditate.
I'm not going to get into that. But I used to do a lot of meditating. I started when I was about oh gosh, 12 and I was doing 10 day meditation courses. I did in my 20s.
I did 30 or 40 of them. And invariably, I'd meet someone who was the first time they had done a long meditation course and they would have these amazing experiences. Not everyone did, but I'm talking about the ones who did and they would want to tell everybody. And I would say, hey, don't do that for two reasons.
One is the feelings that you're having right now, the radical changes in your personality that you think occurred from sitting on your butt for 10 days and watching your breathing and your sensations, a lot of that's going to pass. You're going to find that a lot of it fades away and you come back to often relatively close to where you were before looking a little tweak, but it's not going to be the amazing life changing thing that you want to get on the top of the mountain and start screaming about. The second reason is that most of your friends don't hear about it. They're not going to be that interested in what happened for you on this thing that they have no experience with or possibly no interest in whatsoever.
And that's going to be related to what happens with the whole idea of natural movement. So you get out of big padded motion, you run a shoes, you run barefoot or you run in a truly minimalist shoe, like zero shoes, you have this great experience and you want to share it. Well, you've got to understand something. Most of your friends are going to think you're crazy.
They're going to think you're insane. They will think that the thing you're doing is going to hurt you. And even though you're having a lot of fun now, just wait, you're wrong. And the reason they think that is that's what people have been saying for 50 years that you need big, big padded motion control shoes.
You need arch support. You need a control pronation. You have flat feet and you can't run like that flat feet. You have high arches.
You can't run like that with high arches. You have gray hair. You can't run like that with gray hair. You have no hair.
You can't run. Whatever it is that they think for why you can't do what you just said you're doing is you're not going to be able to convince them of that. If you haven't seen, I made two videos years ago. One called a ship bear for runner's sake and the other is ship runner's say two bear for runners and in the ship runner's say two bear for runners video and if you haven't seen them look them up on YouTube in the ship runner's say to be a runner's video.
There's one little snippet where there's a guy who's saying something like, hey, you can't really run like that. I mean, you can't do it. Hey, wait, wait, wait, come back. And that's the way it is.
People just won't believe it if it's not their experience. And it does, you know, compared to everybody else, if you're running around barefoot, you look a little nutty when you walk in a Costco barefoot like I do, you know, people will look at you strange when you walk into Whole Foods barefoot, they will try to kick you out. It's amazing. Whole Foods will say, you know, you have to wear shoes, even though it's okay if instead you're breastfeeding your dog.
So it's just not socially normal unless you're living in a beach town where it's totally cool, but anywhere outside of a beach town, it's not socially normal. And if you do things that are not socially normal, it's just human psychology. We want to shun people who aren't part of the crowd. And so that's going to happen to you as well.
So they're going to dismiss what you're saying despite your incredible experiences if you're having them because a it's, you know, whoa, that's a little nutty and b it's all the right it off and b you know, you're not part of the crowd and see, well, this isn't the way it's done. You can't be right. So what do you do instead? You don't talk about it from a perspective that has to do with you and you don't talk about it by trying to prove that it's true with scientific data, with rational information.
What you can do though is you can point to their own experience in a way that seems almost tangential and it may make them just curious enough to hear your actual experience. So how do you do it? Well, let me tell you how I've been doing it and I want to hear if you come up with other and frankly better versions than mine. I start by saying things like this.
People ask me what I do for living and my answer is, well, let me ask you a weird question as a response. Do your feet feel better at the end of the day than they did at the beginning of the day? And invariably people say, no, they go on these long stories about why that's not true or a variation of that that I started up by asking is, imagine it's the end of the day you come home, you kick off your shoes, your feet feel better and people will talk about yes. Now, frankly, the reason that I do the first one where the answer is no instead of the answer being yes is when you give people a question where it seems obvious that the answer is going to be yes, they feel like you've tricked them into it.
But if you give them a question where the answer is no, they feel like they've stood up to you by saying no and that makes them feel like they're in control and empowered. I know I've just given away a big marketing secret, but it's not really a big secret. Where this came from is a guy named Chris Voss, V-O-S-S, who is a former FBI hostage negotiator. He wrote an incredibly fascinating book called Never Split the Difference, the title of which comes from the idea that if someone's holding four hostages, it's not okay to split the difference and only get two of them.
So giving people the opportunity to say no engages them in a way without them feeling like they're being set up. So your feet feel better at the end of the day than they did at the beginning and they'll talk about no. And then what I say in response is, well, do you know why? And they'll say no.
Well, it seems like it's because your shoes aren't letting your feet do what's natural. Imagine putting your arm in a cast and when you try to move your arm, it hurts because you can't move and you're putting extra strain on it. It's the same thing that happens with your feet. If your shoes aren't letting your feet move naturally, you're creating excessive strain and that is cumulative during the course of the day.
If the shoes squeeze your toes together, that's creating an unnecessary strain and not letting you use your arch and that makes it harder and harder throughout the day. And they're going to be interested in that conversation. Another thing that I say at some point, sometimes then, is did you know that you have a quarter of the bones and joints of your entire body and your feet and ankles? Doesn't that sound crazy?
And they're going to say, no, I didn't know. Yes, that sounds crazy. Or does it sound ridiculous to think it or that's another way I'll say, does it sound crazy to think that a quarter of the bones and joints of your whole body are in your feet and ankles? Yes, it sounds crazy.
But in an odd way, yes, it sounds crazy. It's kind of like a no. And maybe you'll find a better way of asking a question like that that leads to a no other than did you know? Or did you know that you have more nerve endings in the soles of your feet than anywhere but your fingers, your fingertips and your lips and they're often going to go, no, and become a tree?
It's like, yeah, I mean, here's how I follow those two thoughts up, more bones and joints, more nerve endings. So does it seem crazy to think that that means you should use these things, that they're made to bend and flex and move and probably feel the ground? I mean, there's a reason that those are there. So doesn't it doesn't seem crazy to think that given all those extra bones and joints or all those nerve endings that you're supposed to use those?
The answer is, well, no, that doesn't seem crazy. And now there's some curiosity. You say, well, you know, there's footwear that actually lets your feet do what's natural and what's natural can be beneficial. And that's when there's an openness for a conversation.
That's when as it goes, you can start talking about what may have happened to you and you don't need to present it as a be all an end all or as a one size fits all, even though I think that one size does fit all when it comes to natural movement. But you can again, present it as an inquiry, a conversation to explore. And the more you can think of ways of linking things back to someone's own experience or to do something curiosity inducing that they haven't really thought of, the better your chance of having the conversation in a way that someone's open to regardless of their beliefs. Another thing that I'll often do, you'll hear me do these things.
I'm not revealing anything that's a secret. If you go to zero shoes.com or if you listen to other podcasts that I've done, you'll hear that I say things like this all the time. So one thing that I like to say is linking back to their experience. I remember being a kid and like on a warm summer day, you run outside and you kick off your shoes and you're running in the grass, you feel the grass between your toes or maybe it's a beach and you feel the sand or the water or maybe you're just out, you know, playing in the dirt, but you just feel the ground with your feet and you feel that connection.
You remember that fun? You're like, oh, I like to just play outside barefoot to run through the sprinkler to just do things until it got so dark. Your parents had to scream to drag you home, even though you couldn't see your hand in front of your face or the ball you're trying to kick. Remember the fun of that?
And people of course will remember that. And now that's not a no question. That's a memory thing that just evokes a feeling. And then I link that and just say, well, you know, you can have that same kind of feeling now because it comes in part from doing what's natural from feeling things from having fun.
And all I can tell you is doing things naturally can feel good and be fun and actually be good for you. And that's a way of opening the conversation. So that's another link of something that you can do. Oh, gosh, I had a third one that just popped in my head.
I get these ideas when I'm doing these podcasts. It's like flit barely into my consciousness. And if I don't do something, write it down immediately. It disappears.
And that's like exactly what just happened that time. I have another memory one. It's something that you remember from being a kid. And I'm losing that.
Actually, here's a fun one. If you want to do something really fun, somebody go to a track meet where they have little kids running and just watch the little kids running because they have this look on their face that you just don't see very often with normal runners. It's called smiling. And the only other time you see it in adult runners is when they're running barefoot or something minimalist.
People aren't striving just to get in the miles or just to do this because they think it's good for them. They're not having a good time. When you feel the ground and it's enticing and enthralling and entrancing, we often smile. And you can spot a barefoot runner from 100 yards because they have that look on their face.
Anyway, point being that if you want to share your story, start by inviting the other person into the conversation with some curiosity or something that allows them to kind of dismiss what you might be talking about before you start talking about it so that it becomes a conversation that they can link to, that they can relate to rather than you just trying to preach about the amazing thing that happened for you and why you want everyone to do it. But look, here I am preaching about this amazing thing and why I want everyone to do it. But frankly, I'm continuing to learn. I'm continuing to develop and involve the way that we do this conversation so that it does become more and more inviting for more and more people.
Eventually, we won't have to do this. Eventually, it's going to be like it was back in the 50s and 60s where everybody was wearing shoes that let their feet bend and move and flex and feel the ground. And we won't have to do this. But until then, we've got a lot of big wall of propaganda that we are trying to chip away out or get over or dig under that's two generations of mythology and frankly outright lies about that you need motion control and art support.
And you can't pronate. And that if you have flat feet or high arches, there's something wrong with you. Or if you have Morten's toe where you're big toe shorter than your second toe, which I have, that that means there's something wrong with you. There's all these things where shoe companies have taken normal stuff and made it seem abnormal and made it seem like they have a solution for which they have no evidence.
But now it's become just part of the, I'm going to say, it's part of the zeitgeist. It's part of the way everybody thinks. We're trying to change the way people think by getting them to think to realize that their own experience is valid and that they've had enough experience with what natural movement can be that they might want to give it a shot. Sometimes I just ask people, do you know, do you like walking around barefoot?
And if they say yes, then we're into the conversation. If they say no, then it's actually a whole different conversation about what they've been doing that might be causing the reason that they don't have an enjoyable experience doing what's natural. So I guess the short version of this whole episode is you want to engage in a conversation rather than a speech he says after doing a speech for the last 15 minutes. Anyway, I want to hear what happens for you pro and con as you're talking to people about natural movement.
Let's see what we can do to figure out how to have better conversations, to get more people willing and interested to discover that letting your body do what it's supposed to do naturally is good and fun and something that everyone should be doing. That's what I'm going to talk about or finish talking about on today's episode of the movement podcast. Thanks for being part of it. If you want to have a bigger part of this simple go to www.join the movement movement dot com.
You'll find previous episodes. You'll find all the different places that you can engage with the podcast. You can find us on YouTube and on Facebook and on Spotify and iTunes and everywhere that you know that you can find podcasts. We're there.
If you have any recommendations or questions, drop me an email. Move at join the movement movement dot com. I can't wait to hear what happens as we continue our movement movement and expand that and until then and during all that time, please have fun and live life.