Martha Beck || Living with Integrity

Today we welcome Martha Beck, who is a New York Times bestselling author, life coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science. Oprah Winfrey has called her “one of the smartest women I know.” Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher, known for her unique combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her newest book is called The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self.

In this episode, I talk to Martha Beck about integrity. According to her, we are all born true to ourselves, with our integrity intact. But then we lose sight of who we are because we try so hard to fit into our society. Martha shares advice on how to live authentically in a culture that doesn't necessarily share the same values as you. We also touch on the topics of neurodiversity, emotions, coaching, and transcendence.

Website: marthabeck.com

Twitter: @TheMarthaBeck

 

Topics

02:38 Martha’s interest in coaching

04:17 Martha’s Harvard degrees

06:55 Science and eastern philosophy

13:31 Writing for Oprah’s magazine

15:13 Regaining our wildness

20:19 The Way of Integrity

25:08 Duplicity is people pleasing

31:32 Inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy

34:55 Enlightenment through surrender

39:25 Personal effectiveness

47:11 Suffering is a guidance mechanism 

52:27 How Martha left the LDS Mormon Church

56:27 Hold true to your integrity

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Most of us sell out our true natures and join
the culture, and then we wander around feeling weirdly divided
from ourselves, and integrity is the way back. Hello, and
welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Martha Beck

(00:20):
on the show. Martha is a New York Times best
selling author, life coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard
degrees in social science. Oprah Winfrey has called her quote
one of the smartest women I know. Martha is a
passionate and engaging teacher and coach known for her unique
combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her newest book is

(00:41):
called The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your
True Self. In this episode, I talked to Martha Beck
about integrity. According to Martha, we are all born true
to ourselves with our integrity intact, but then we lose
sight of who we are because we try so hard
to fit into our society. Martha shares advice on how
to live authentic in a culture that doesn't necessarily share

(01:02):
the same values as you. We also touch on the
topics of neurodiversity, emotions, coaching, and transcendence. Martha is one
of the best coaches alive on this planet, and it
was such an honor to chat with her on this
podcast and to gain her unique wisdom on integrity and
living a life of authenticity and purpose. She's just such

(01:23):
a delight. So, without further ado, I bring you Martha Beck.
Martha Hello. I love your podcast, I love your books.
I've been a fan of yours that I was stunned
when I realized it was you doing the interview. I
was like, oh my god, are you serious. I had
no idea that the great Martha Beck even knew I exist.

(01:45):
Are you kidding? I am? I am, I'm not kidding.
I loved Wired to Create, I love Transcend. I'm like
I am. I just wade a book proposal where I
leaned quite heavily on Transcend, and my agent said, look,
not everyone is as excited about Meslow as you are.
I was like, well I should be, because this is awesome.

(02:07):
Well that made my day. So thank you so much.
And I know we have a mutual friend Andrew me
and Gino, and he speaks so highly of you. Ah,
he's amazing, He's amazing. Yeah, just so I was, so
I'm just so excited to get you on this show,
and and just a chat. You know, we have very
formal chats, you know that don't feel the need, you know,
you know, just come as you are, you know, and

(02:30):
we'll just sort of riff. And I loved your I
loved your most recent book on integrity, of course, and
I love all your books. But can we talk a
little bit about, you know, what's your motivation? What, why'd
you get into the field of coaching? You know, how
did that? How did that start? What's the backstory there?
It was a complete accident. I literally tripped and fell
into it. I was teaching multinational business management at Thunderbird

(02:55):
Business School in Phoenix, where I lived, and I developed
a career class to help the business school students there,
and they really really liked it. And then they started
asking me to just talk to them outside of class.
I said, well, I'm not a therapist. They're like, no, no, no,
we just want to talk about So I started calling
it life design and I started doing it, and then

(03:19):
like I've been doing it for four or five years,
but still didn't have a name for it. And then
I was on a plane and I opened USA Today
and they were naming me as one of the best
known life coaches in America, and I was like, what,
what a life coach? That's it yourself that way? Oh
my gosh. No, I was like, that sounds yeah. Sorry,

(03:43):
all your coaches out there. I no longer think that
that is so funny. That must be so surreal. Though.
See a headline of how the world perceives you? Oh
my god, and that's not how you had perceived yourself.
I just think that's really interesting. It really was, and
it was another lesson in the fact that the way
the world sees you really has nothing to do with
who you are or how you feel inside. But I

(04:05):
was very you know, I was thrilled to be that.
Other papers have said things about me that weren't as complimentary,
so I've learned to take it all with a grain
of salt. And you have a degree in sociology, is
that right? I do? Yeah, I have three Harvard degrees actually,
and I was counting. Yes, all my friends play drinking

(04:29):
games whenever I mentioned that, and they're perpetually plastered. Now
they drink water, but they do have a drinking game.
I'm not even kidding. That's impressive. But sociology is just
one then what are the other two? My undergraduate degree
was in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. So I was
a Chinese major basically. Yeah, so obviously Chinese by heritage,

(04:51):
and uh oh yeah, yeah, I just thought, well, that
sounds weird. I'm going to take that. I mean, for
a girl from Utah, I want to learn Chinese. That's
what I want to do, and the others are in
sociology socioeconomic development. I thought about psychology, but at the
time I was at Harvard, if you studied psychology, it

(05:11):
was you and a rat alone in a lab, and
if you brought another person in, it immediately became sociology.
So that's where I went. I mean, this wasn't when
Skinner was there, was it? Well not when he was
there there I saw him want some elevator. But I'm
not as old as Beef Skinner. It's surprise. Well I
know that. I know that, but it's possible. Maybe you

(05:32):
were young to a Turk, you know, when he was
very old. Yeah, I was seventeen and he was very old,
but they were still swimming rats around. I told a
story in one of my books that I had a
friend who was swimming rats around in a solution of
powdered milk and water with electrodes in their brains, and
the pool she used this little pool that was for kids.

(05:54):
It was called u a Smurf pool because they had
the cartoon characters, the Smurfs on it was so I
was talking to her, and I had a seminar one
floor below in William James Hall, and I was late,
so I ran down there and there were all these
visiting professors that day, and I said, I'm so sorry.
I was I was upstairs watching my friends swim rats

(06:17):
around a Smurf pool, and they all started talking about
Smurf and Smurf's work and how they'd read his latest articles,
and I realized they thought it was like a skinner box.
B F Skinner made these boxes for training pigeons and
his daughter and it was very very benevolent, but he

(06:37):
did keep his daughter in a skinner box a lot
of the time. So people thought that a Smurf pool
was by doctor Smurf. And everyone sat there talking about
how what strides Smurf was making in psychology. That's so funny,
that is so funny. Well, I know that you never
intended to become a life coach and kind of fell
into it. But the thing that seems to be underlying

(06:58):
all of that is your your deep passion and interest
in eliminating human suffering by any means available. Good, Okay,
confirmation on that there's no confirmed, but you get it
in lots of different ways, right, So you do. I
love how you draw on brain science. I love you drawing.
You know my field of psychology, but you also draw
a lot on timeless spiritual texts and animal videos on YouTube. Absolutely, yeah,

(07:23):
it's not just human suffering I would like to eliminate.
I don't like the idea of any any being suffering.
And so yeah, I entertained myself with watching otters play
with rocks about an hour a day, and the rest
of it is science. The rest of it is been
trying to help people. And you're right. I do draw

(07:44):
on pretty much anything I can find. If it works,
if it does alleviate suffering in any way, I want
to know about it. So I've studied everything from shamanic
practices to as I said, Chinese ancient Chinese philosophy, Asian
philosophy in general, and all the wonderful things that Western
psychology and science have been teaching us it's a fun

(08:07):
time to be playing around in this field. It really
is a fun time. And the more the more I
dig into Eastern philosophy historically, even you know, two hundred,
three hundred and four years ago, the wisdom, I realize, like,
what's the point of the scientists because I feel like
in a lot of ways, we keep just replicating and
we're like we've discovered right, Well, what we've really discovered

(08:30):
is what someone said like four hundred years ago in China. Yeah,
so trying to justify, you know, being a scientist. You know,
I don't feel like I get that many surprising findings.
We still need to do the science to see what's
what's real. But if I'm being honest, I can't say
I get that many surprising findings anymore, you know, where
it's like, oh my god, it turns out people don't

(08:50):
want to be happy in their lives at all. What No, No,
I mean, you know there's just timeless truths, right, Well,
I don't know. I think it's super exciting to find out,
for example, that the what we know about the neuroplasticity
of the brain. I mean, everybody throughout history has known
that people's minds can change right, but to watch it
happening with machines and see the different ways it happens.

(09:14):
I ran out in the nineties and found a lab
that would wire me up with one of the hats
with the electrodes, so that I could watch my own
brain at work and learn to move something a cursor
around a computer screen just by thinking different thoughts. And
it was so so bizarre because the thoughts that I
thought would work didn't work. I was trying to bring

(09:34):
me own anxiety, for example, and I was wired up
with my little hat, trying not to blink because that
would make the electrodes go crazy. And I thought, okay,
I'm going to meditate. My phato waves went up, but
my anxiety did not go down at all. I was
just watching my anxiety. And then I started thinking just
random thoughts, and I started thinking about dangerous situations, and

(09:57):
my anxiety just dropped and dropped and dropped, and it
dropped to zero. When I thought about skiing in a
blizzard with no visibility on the edge of a cliff,
or being live on Oprah, those were zero anxiety. I
would have taken a lot of years to figure that out.
If they hadn't had my fancy hat and my fabulous

(10:19):
brain scientists there with me, and it really it informed
my knowledge and opinion about what happened when I meditated,
for example, which is an ancient Asian practice and well
all over the world practice. I actually think that you're
in the know. You're sort of down in the clay,
and you're looking at little, tiny advances because that's how

(10:40):
scientists do it. But for those of us who are
looking at it from a broad historical perspective, your books,
I love your books. I think they're full of exciting
new ideas, and those ideas are old, old, old. I mean,
transcend is all about this ability to move beyond our
suffering and into liberation, and that that comes from all

(11:00):
over the world. But it's so exciting to hear you
say it. I have to say it's I love the
fact that you defended my field of psychology on the
Psychology Podcast. To me, I love that. I love that
that just happened. I love that because you're right. You're right,
you know what you're right. You know. I like to
play Devil's advocate sometimes just for the fun of it.

(11:23):
And you're a modest man. Let's face it maybe maybe
a little too modest. And also I must say, my
parietal lobe is not active this morning. I feel behind
me the lights blew out the lights. I'm trying to
get a replacement. I just order a replacement brain. I
love it. Got a parietal love stick it through your ear.

(11:45):
He'll be fine. Exactly. I apologize for that. That explains
why I was critical of my field for a second there.
So can I double click on something you said because
maybe I'm not understanding it. That is a super fascinating
finding that your anxiety levels were lower for these really
high stakes situations. What was the explanation for? Did I

(12:08):
miss it? You didn't tell me that yet, did you?
You may have noticed I have diagnosed add That was
one thing they diagnosed. They looked at my brain and said,
holy smokes, you have add So that's why I'm watching
otters with rocks and I can't stick to the point
and everything. But I don't suffer from mental illness. I
enjoy it. So because my brain was jumping around, I

(12:31):
was able to track. Okay, here are the thoughts that
bring it down. What did they have in common? And
what's the explanation? And it is it? Is only when
I am in an absolutely crucial situation where any mistake
feels catastrophic, that I am truly present without any wavering attention. Colpe, Oh,
that's what did it? Wow? I think I can relate

(12:53):
to that. And actually my mom I don't really. Maybe
I shouldn't bring my mom into this, but God bless her.
I find that she is so neurotic about every little,
tiny thing in the world, but to her credit, when
an emergency happens, she goes into this like completely different
state of like concentration and like Okay, let's get this,
you know, sorted, But like she'll worry about like the

(13:14):
widdows tiny as things every other second of her life.
So it's just so interesting how that can happen. You
mentioned being an Oprah, aren't you Oprah's coach? Is that?
Is that true? I wouldn't say I am. I mean
she would. I wrote for the magazine. I wrote for
her magazine for almost its entire existence. I had to
call him every single month, and a lot of the

(13:36):
topics came through people who had been talking to her,
and I would write directly to her, and she always wrote.
She always told me that she read my articles first
every month, and she often thanked me for insights and stuff.
But it's not like I sat down and said, well,
obviously your life sucks, so you need a life coach.

(13:56):
I was kind of watching her life to see how
it works. Frank So I was Oprah's coach in the
sense that I sort of belonged to her. She was
my boss. But I was never like, I can help
you Oprah with your problems. No, not that way. You
may not have explicitly said that to her, but you
did help her, you know. So that's maybe you're being

(14:18):
too modest. Now. There was one time when I just
sort of said to her, you are exhausted. Nobody ever
thought about how tired Oprah must have been after She's like,
she never missed a show. There was never a sub
for Oprah and she was. I said, go rest, go rest,
and she sent me a blanket, which I suppose was

(14:41):
barter of a kind. She's so generous that you can't
even give her a bit of advice without getting something
wonderful in respect. And look on your chair, there's a blanket.
I love. I love that, And I have to say
I'm able to distracted with this painting behind you is.

(15:01):
I love it, Thank you. I'm intrigued by it. Can
you can explain a little bit about it? So it's
in a forest. This is an audio, so a lot
of people won't be able to see unless thing on
YouTube to watch this. But they're in a forest and
there's and what I see is is it like a
father and a child. No, it's a woman and a pig.

(15:22):
I am not even kidding. I can't see from this distance,
but it's no, you can't. You shouldn't be able to
see from it doesn't hang on. Okay, it's a woman
in a wild before more to the point, I see now. Now,
I see it, Now, I see it. That is so cool. Yeah,
I painted that as the cover for a novel. I wrote,

(15:43):
So you painted this painting? Yeah, it is my own painting. Wow,
you're so you're an artist as well. Yeah, and I
had I had a bunch of autoimmune problems and my
hands stopped working for a couple of years, and it
really it made me sort of change course and decide
that I kind of had to work with my mind
because that was the only thing that wasn't falling apart.

(16:05):
The book is about a woman who gets lost in
a forest. And I found one fact in my YouTube
ramblings that I think all your listeners need to know,
and that is that if you take a farm raised pig,
little pink pig, put it out in the forest, let
it fend for itself, it will revert into a wild boar.

(16:25):
It'll grow darker, it'll get shaggy, it'll grow tusques. And
if you in the same individual creature, this is not evolutionary.
It's a it must be epigenetic. I don't know anyway.
I use that as a metaphor for regaining our wildness,
for being like, we're kept in little pens and society

(16:45):
puts many many pressures on us and we lose our
true nature. We become docile and easy to deal with.
But that's not what's in us. So she goes out
to the forest and she goes wild old herself and
it goes wild. And yeah, it's a whole thing about
regaining our our natural selves. Now, I describe myself as

(17:10):
a wild introvert. That's my descriptive. Yes, can I be
one too? That's perfect. I've never heard the race thankful,
I'm trying to like coin this. It resonated with a
lot of people. When I came out as a wild introvert,
people like, that's me too. You know, I'm definitely wild inside.
I need a lot of rest. I need a lot

(17:30):
of rest. I am also a wild introvert. I love that.
I mean, consider it coin that is brilliant, and I
will credit you for at least a year and then
I'll forget. But here's the thing. I'm a wild introvert,
but I'm also and I need a lot of rest.
But I'm also not culturally cooperative. So introvert means I

(17:53):
like to be away from people a lot. I like
to go to the forests myself. But it doesn't mean
that I'm not willing to be weird. I don't care
if people think I'm weird, and this means that my
wildness can come out more. I think. So is your introversion?
Does your introversion makes you? Does it make you cooperate

(18:13):
with social norms? Or is it just no, not at all?
It's agnostic to that? Yeah, what's agnostic to that? Yeah? Absolutely? Yeah. Yeah.
The trauma, loss, and uncertainty of our world have led
many of us to ask life's biggest questions, such as,
who are we what is our highest purpose? And how

(18:34):
do we not only live through, but thrive in the
wake of tragedy, division, and challenges to our fundamental way
of living. To help us all address these questions, process
what this unique time in human history has meant for
us personally and collectively an emerge whole, I've collaborated with
my colleague and dear friend, doctor Jordan Finegeld, MD to
bring you our forthcoming book. It's called Choose Growth, a

(18:56):
Workbook for transcending trauma, fear, and self doubt. It's a
workbook design to guide you on a journey of committing
to growth and the pursuit of self actualization every day.
It's chock full of research from humanistic psychology, positive psychology,
developmental psychology, personality psychology, cognitive science, and neuropsychology. So lots
of themes that you hear about on this podcast, and

(19:17):
it's aimed to help us all integrate the many facets
of ourselves and co crete our new normal with a
renewed sense of strength, vitality, and hope. Whether you're healing
from loss, adapting to the new normal, or simply looking
ahead to life's next chapter, Choose Growth will help steer
you there too, deeper connection to your values, your life vision,
and ultimately your most authentic self. Choose Growth will officially

(19:39):
hit the shelves September thirteenth, and you can border your
copy or the audiobook in the US now on Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound, and all major retailers. If
you're in the UK and Commonwealth, you can order now
at bookshop dot org dot UK. We truly hope this
book helps you grow and thrive and become your best self. Okay,

(20:00):
now back to the show. Well, maybe this would be
a nice segue into a whole rich discussion we can
have about integrity, an area of mutual interest to both
of ours. But I loved your book, The Way of Integrity,
and I heard somewhere that you almost called the book undivided.
That's true, right, you almost called it And I see why.
I see why, Yeah, because that's so core to your

(20:23):
definition of integrity, right, yeah, the whole The word integrity
just means intact. It doesn't mean. There's sort of a
virtuous Sunday School sort of nuance to it that is
taken on in English, but it really just means being
one thing, not divided. So we're all born in perfect integrity,

(20:43):
and we have a genetic predisposition, and then we have
a culture around as a family culture, you know, religious, ethnic, national,
all these different levels of culture, and before we can
even talk, we basically sell out our true nature to
be more like what people want us to be, which

(21:03):
is cultural. And that all also is inherent our incredible
susceptibility to socialization. And it's fine as long as it
doesn't really pull us away from who we are in
our essence. But I would think that most people, certainly
by the time they're an adult, would have confronted social
pressures that pulled them away from something that was very,

(21:26):
very essential to them. And most of us sell out
our true natures and join the culture, and then we
wander around feeling weirdly divided from ourselves, and integrity is
the way back. Wow. Look, there's some interesting connections here
between your writings some integrity and how the humanistic psychologists

(21:46):
thought about integrity, especially the Book of the Insane Society
by Eric crom I think that he really he've used authenticity,
which is authenticity as being true to your value use,
especially in environments that challenge it. Right, So, what does
it mean to be happy when everyone else around who's unhappy?

(22:09):
Isn't that the highest mark of insanity depends on who's
defining it, because it is. I mean, you know, if
like you're in a you know, in an environment where
everyone is being killed around you and dying, you know,
and you're part of the problem, you know, and you're like,
I'm happy, I'm being authentic, you know. Yes, Anyway, he
wrote a lot about that, and it just it just

(22:29):
dawned to me that there's I think that there's a
relationship there because he very much viewed the environment and
your relationship to the environment as essential to authenticity. Well,
I think pretty much as you said earlier, all these
concepts have been done in it from a million different directions, right,
So if you look at any great psychologist, I mean,
even Freud with the ego the end supero thing, I mean,

(22:51):
it's kind of about achieving harmony between these unlike parts.
So I think everybody's sort of feeling for the concept
step of making the psyche hole, making a life whole
and intact integrity is just another way to say it. Yeah,
and even I'll throw another phrase into here. Maslow talked

(23:15):
about synergy, which I think is what you talk about
inner and outer world simply works, you know, being unharming
each other. Maslow said, what is good for you, it
is automatically good for the world, and that's what he
viewed a synergy, which he actually got from Ruth Benedict,
the anthropologist. We should give her some credit. She was brilliant,
absolutely brilliant. She talked about synagionistic cultures. Yeah, yeah, she

(23:37):
talked about synergistic cultures. Then Maslow adapted that phrase to
talk about individuals who are synergynistic with their environment. Fabulous Anyway,
what I'm going on too much here? No, it's awesome.
And it's a point of faith that if what is
good for me is good for you. And that's a
huge schism in Western knowledge, like is the natural state

(23:59):
of man be competitive and mutually destructive or can we
say that if everyone went and became completely themselves the
world would benefit from it. And the conventional wisdom is
that everybody would just take a bunch of stuff for
themselves and destroy other people. And we have to rein
in our natural impulses because they're destructive. You me, Maslow,

(24:24):
Ruth Benedict, and Eric from Apparently we all share this
optimism that what's good for the individual is ultimately going
to be good for the group and for the world.
And like we've been going on the other assumption for
a long time and things are not looking good, So
maybe we should try the other way where we find
ourselves instead of giving ourselves away. Yeah, part of ourselves

(24:47):
of so much of your writings as well, is the notion.
And you don't really necessarily use this phrase, but I'm
going to use it people pleasing. You know, you do
talking about pleasing our culture, this incessant drive to feel
like your needs don't matter and it's only the other
you have to serve, you know, completely selflessly. I think
that can be very dangerous, especially if you're a child

(25:08):
and you have parents who don't listen to your real
felt needs. Carl Rogers talked about this a lot as
important for developing to a fully functioning human is individually
your your own self. So yeah, I can talk a
little bit about that. Well, I think I do use
people pleasing in there a couple of pay but because
it's it's the same as what I'm calling duplicity, where

(25:29):
integrity is one thing. Duplicity is two things, and the
duplicity that most of us suffer from has nothing to
do with being bad. It's not that we're out of
integrity because we are willful liars. It's always that we're
trying to be good. We're trying so hard to be good.
Even people who end up doing bad things are usually
trying to please someone around them because the the propensity

(25:54):
to be incredibly vulnerable to socialization is part of our
genius wonderful so and we're so helpless and completely dependent
as infants that we'd better please the people around us
because they have to get up in the middle of
the night every night. These people are exhausted. I don't
know if you have kids, but trust me, anyone raising

(26:19):
a human infant is exhausted. And it does them both good.
At the infant is really keyed in and going, okay,
I want to figure out what's right for you and
I want to become that. It helps them both survive.
But there's a period, maybe in toddlerhood, where kids say no,
and they call it the terrible twos, and I think
it's where the child is trying to recognize where or
she or they do not want to please the other people,

(26:42):
and that can be either crushed out of us at
that very moment, or it can be celebrated by parents
and people around us who are interested in who we are.
I've got this great educator from South Africa with me
right now, with her daughter, and what's so interesting to

(27:03):
me about her is she never uses the word children
or the word babies. She always says small people, little people.
From the moment a child is born, that child is
a person to her, and they're sort of moving through
the stage where they have to finish just dating outside
the womb, because they're basically just plasma pets when we're born,

(27:26):
and then waiting as the child learns to talk and
walk and do things to see who it is who
has come to visit, and that curiosity and the dignity
of calling an infant a person. I've noticed that with
people who are wonderful, wonderful teachers and parents, and I
think our culture could really benefit from saying, yeah, the

(27:48):
terrible twos are when the child says who hears you
or they are, and it's an exciting thing to discover.
I love that. I love that I'm thinking about education
as my mind went when you were talking about this
because I'm really a favor of a human centered education system.
Maybe we should stop calling them students, Maybe maybe we
should call them humans. Yeah. I have a son with

(28:10):
Down syndrome, and he's been a huge teacher of mine
on especially in integrity, because he will not say anything
that's not true for him, and he will not he
will do things that aren't things he wants to, but
he will never lie to himself and say that he's
doing it for his own good. He knows he's doing
it to, you know, go along. But when he was born,

(28:32):
people told me there are lots of therapies you can
they do early intervention with these kids. Now, you can
teach them to almost act like other kids. And I
thought I knew he had Down syndrome for a couple
of months before he was born, and people kept telling
me things like this, And I thought, you know, if

(28:53):
I went to the pet store for a puppy, because
everybody has puppies, and I came home with a pet
and it turned out to be a kid, and people
would say, it's okay, it's okay, you can teach you
can work with these kittens, you can teach them to
kind of bark, sort of wag their tails, you know,
And I thought, what about maybe cats are kind of cool.

(29:14):
Maybe I wait to see what the cat likes to do,
and then it's okay that I have a cat and
you have a dog. Even if you don't think it's
okay to have a cat, I am enjoying it. And
that is another thing about integrity. I read books saying
you will always be ashamed of your child, and I
was like, nah, I don't think so. And I also

(29:37):
didn't think that he was bad because he was different.
He was just another kind of wild to me. Yes, yes, well,
I'm big into neurodiversity and kind of just appreciating that
all the different things we have in the human genome,
we have a lot. There's a lot there in the

(29:59):
human genome, you know. The wisdom of crowds that weird
principle from economics that if you ask everybody in the
room to guess how many beans there are in a barrel,
the average answer of all the answers in the group
will come closer to the truth than any individual answer.
So the crowd is wiser than any one person in
the crowd. But it's more true if the crowd is diverse.

(30:22):
So if you get a huge number of Harvard professors
and have them, guess, there's less diversity than if you
throw in a few people with down syndrome, right or
you know, so getting that diversity makes us more intelligent
as a group, as a global group. And I think
that's one of the reasons. Is, as you say, it
might be nice to change education and start judging people

(30:46):
along such a narrow band of abilities. Right, The only
use they have is to be students, to get good
scores in a standardized test. Yeah, you know, is that it?
It never did meet any damn good nothing, nothing. I
was very pleased with my scores. They did not translate
to life skills. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Okay, well,

(31:11):
what about Dante's divine comedy? Why do you bring that
into your work? Ah, because it's just such a knee slapper. Now.
I read Dante. I read The Device the Inferno when
I was eighteen and very depressed, and there was this
image of Dante going through Hell and it gets worse
and worse and worse and worse until he gets to

(31:31):
the very center of Hell, where Lucifer, the fallen Angel
is locked in the Lake of ice. I remember thinking
that like of ice sounded very familiar to me. It
feels like depression when you read about it. And his
guide tells Dante, you have to keep going down, and
he says, I'm as down as it gets. I'm at
the center of the earth. And his guy says, no, no,

(31:53):
you have to keep going down. So he finds a
hole in the ice, and he actually has to climb
on the body of the monster to get down, and
then he has to turn because he has passed the
center of the earth and now what was down has
become up. So by going the same direction, he emerges
into a place where he can then climb toward paradise.

(32:13):
And I read that at eighteen and I recognized it
as it or maybe I just projected, but I thought,
that is a psychological metaphor, and it gave me this.
There's sort of a validation that if I kept going
through my own suffering the way I was doing it,
I was getting worse, but it was going. The only
way out was through right, and it worked. It worked.

(32:37):
And then I read the whole Divine comedy, and everybody
reads Inferno, but nobody reads two thirds of the epic poem.
That come after that. One is Purgatorio, and the last
is Pardiso. And the Inferno is about how awful the
world is once you get through that. Purgatorio is about
once you've gotten through the horror of the world, once

(32:59):
you transcended to use a book from a word from
your book, there's still a lot of work to do.
You have to start actually doing, in three dimensions in
your real behavior what you've found to be true in yourself.
So you have to do One metaphor would be, you
have to be yourself with your parents, even if they
don't like who you actually are. You have to defy

(33:21):
the norms of your culture if your culture doesn't serve
your truth. And that's what I think Purgatorio is about.
And then the Paradiso is about once you've really, really
gotten to the point where you are living your truth
in every aspect of your life, something unbelievable happens, and
Dante says, don't even try to understand this, And then

(33:43):
he goes on to describe an experience that is almost
exactly like the experiences of awakening or enlightenment that I
had read about from Asian philosophers, And I thought, oh,
Dante did it too. There is this thing called awaken
or transcendent, and people experience it with similar metaphors and

(34:07):
symbols no matter where it happens in the world, and
I believe it to be the end of suffering. I
think the end of your psychotherapy is when you're enlightened. Wow.
Do you think it's actually ever a state that anyone
gets to though, as opposed just to process? Oh? No, no, no,
I think it's a state. Why well, if you look

(34:28):
at like Andrew Neuberg's work that I've been following forever.
Of course he's a friend of mine. Yea God, would
you like tell him I'm a massive fangirl. I'll introduce
you to each other. Yeah, I'll make an intro. Oh good, heavens.
I'm just rereading one of his books right now. Anyway,
when he I don't know if he was one of

(34:53):
the people who wired up those Tibetan monks like Younger
Minger young A Minger Rimpochet another one of my favorite
people to read a spiritual perspective, but he's probably spent
more time meditating than anyone on earth, and when they
wired up his brain and had him go to a
state of compassion. It practically blew up the machine. Right there,

(35:17):
there were two distinct parts of the brain and you
probably know the names of them. Off you'r the cuff,
but part that establishes self other differentiation, it seemed to
go dormant. Well, funnily enough, part of the part of
the pridal little that is dormant here on my behind
me right now. Yeah, yeah, that's so cool. I wonder
if that's a coincidence. And then the other part is

(35:41):
so there's self other differentiation, and then there's a sense
of being in control, which it is probably I don't know.
My friend Jill Taylor would say, is the left hippocampus
is part of it. Anyway, you lose the sensation of
being separate in a body, and you lose this sensation
of controlling what happens. Those two things. Like, I know

(36:05):
so many people who would love to be enlightened and
go beyond suffering. And then if you said to people, okay,
that you will have to surrender two things, your sense
of self and your sense of control, they would be like, okay, No.
We are so obsessed, especially in Western cultures, with you know,

(36:26):
clarifying ourselves and getting our own things going, and we
are so obsessed with controlling everything in our own lives,
everything in the world. But what the enlightened people say
is that after a certain period of introspection meditation, what
happens to Dante, after he's gone deeply into his integrity,

(36:46):
is that the self falls away, the sense of self
falls away, and what replaces it is this unbelievable connection
with a felt sense of connection with the universe. Yes,
the sense of control goes away, but what comes then
is in Chinese they call it wei wu wait, which
means to do without doing. You become, in a weird way,

(37:11):
a puppet operated by the benevolent force. I mean. The
absolute symbol of it for Western culture is when Luke
Skywalker is trying to destroy the Death Star and he
hears Obi Wan Kenobi say trust the Force, Luke. Why
do we love that so much? Because when we put
down the sense of control and the sense of self,

(37:34):
there is a force that we experience, whether it's real
or not as moot because it's perceived, it's an experience
that is real, and then the force works through us
and that is also extraordinarily blissful. So I think this
has been happening to people all over the world in

(37:55):
different cultures at different times. Some of them wrote it
about it, some of them didn't, but all those that did.
I mean, there's a twelve thousand year old story that
came across the Bearing Straight with some of the Native
American peoples. It's called the Tale of Jumping Mouse. That
is one of the most powerful stories about enlightenment I've
ever seen. It's been everywhere all through history. It's just

(38:18):
not very common, but I think it could be. Yeah,
that's true. That's true. It's not very common, but yeah,
I like expert meditators would tend to have certain neurological profiles.
The happiest man in the world. About Turocard, They did
scan his brain and found that he had a lot
of compassion and they were able to distinguish that from empathy.

(38:39):
Oh cool, So that's really that's really cool, because you know,
with empathy, you can get burnout, right, you can burn
out if you're in the helping professions and you're always
feeling what other people feel, you know, you can get exhausted.
But compassions actually energize us to approach and help reduce
suffering in the right way. Okay, So what is the
idea of personal effect then, because you talk about that

(39:01):
in your book, and maybe some techniques to become better
at what we do, better, what we do professionally, better
what we do. What do you mean by personal effectiveness?
I think it would be that we work towards the
well being of ourselves and others, in whatever form that
would take. And the instigation of the desire to do

(39:24):
anything effectively has to come from authenticity, from the place
where we are truly ourselves. So the first thing that
starts with is deciding what it means to be effective
in your own life. You have to know what it
is you truly, truly want. So one of the things
that I often say to clients is I ask them
to write down things they want. They come in and

(39:47):
life coaching, do well, financially whatever, make a vision board,
they make lists of things they want, and then I say,
all right, now, when you wake up at night alone
in the dark that you yearn for and you can
feel the like when you think about things like wanting
a professional achievement, it's it doesn't come from the same

(40:10):
part of the body as the yearning for that beautiful,
warm presence you know with everything that that is body
sell the whole thing. When we yearn for other people,
it's deep. For me, it comes from my solar. I
feel it in my gut, my solar plexus. Like wants
come from but a yearning comes from my body. And

(40:34):
the things that people really really yearn for are very similar.
And it's a short list. Love is one of them.
Having someone to love and to love you back, Peace, freedom, joy,
that's kind of it. I was like, that's and I've
been all over the world asking people if that's all
we really want? So how do you move yourself toward

(40:58):
what you yearn for? You find out what choices you
make on an everyday basis, on a minute to minute basis,
how do they affect the part of you that yearns.
So to be really effective is to be like an
animal tracker. I love to go animal tracking, and you

(41:19):
find the track of the thing you're looking for in
the joy of your body. The tracks that you use
what would be footprints or whatever you're following in the wilderness.
You find what you really want to track, and you
really define what that looks like. Before you track an animal,
you have to know what it's prints look like. Once

(41:41):
you get that really, really solidly in place, you start
to begin to track this thing by the experience of
joy in the body, the sense of sort of settling
into integrity. And let me tell you what it feels like.
I call it a sense of peace or sorry, a

(42:01):
sense of truth. And it's the same thing that you
feel when you solve a math equation and you know
it's right, as it is when you go to the
pound and get a dog and you know it's right.
That's your dog, that's right. That's what you need to do,
the same feeling of rightness. And I've asked people all
over the world to say different things and see if

(42:23):
they got this ring of truth or chime of truth.
And the one sentence that I've found rings truest to
everyone is the phrase, I am meant to live in peace.
But if you just repeat that, or whoever's listening, if
you can repeat that silently in your mind, I'm meant

(42:44):
to live in peace. It immediately makes me take a
deep breath. It did, yeah, And then it drops you
into a state of nervous system alignment, where ah, there's
a clarity, there's an alignment of all the different parts
of the self, body, heart, mind, spirit. A lot of

(43:06):
traditions divide it that way, and they're all on the
same path and they're looking for the same things. And
from that sense of truth, everything you do is very
very effective. Wow. Wow, Can this help people in their
lives who they feel like they're doing all the cult
right things in their life, but things are just not

(43:28):
working as they expected. Something just feels off, you know,
Can some of these techniques help help them feel more
whole in their lives? I could just type that up,
put it out on a newsletter and say, this is
what the way of integrity is about. Yeah, you absolutely
nailed it. The people who are trying hardest, doing the best,
getting the best grades and the best salaries and all

(43:49):
the things, very often are the most lost. So at
the very beginning of the Divine Comedy Dante, it starts
out in the middle of my life, I came to
myself in a arkwood. He was lost. He was confused,
he says, the right way had been lost. He didn't
remember getting there. He just felt wrong. He was scared

(44:09):
all the time. He was unhappy, he was tired, he
didn't feel good, and he didn't know how to get
back and then he sees rising out of the murky forest,
this bright mountains and it's the sun is shining on
it and it's all golden, and he calls it mount delectable.
And he sees all these people scrambling up toward the
top and it looks fabulous, and he thinks that's the

(44:31):
way out of here, and so he starts trying to climb.
And to me, this is trying to climb up the
pyramid of status, wealth and power in your culture. Like
all those people are trying for that stuff. That must
be the good stuff. I'm going to go for that.
And you do really, really, really well. He gets so
tired and he's animals keep attacking him, and they have

(44:52):
like mood state names like the sad the sad Wolf.
There's a wolf that makes him super sad and that
makes him scared, and a leopard that makes him ravenous. Anyway,
as he gets up the mountain, it gets worse. And
what I've found as a coach is the most suffering
I've ever seen has come from like people who just

(45:16):
won an Olympic gold medal, people who just made a
billion dollars, people who just got number one on the
bestseller list, And this is not hypothetical. These are real people.
I've also coached homeless addicts on the streets, and they
have actually less suffering going on than that person who's

(45:38):
sold out every ounce of his or her strength and
time and will for some social goal that when you
get there, is not it's not deeply joyful in itself.
It's just what you were told would work and it doesn't.
It's so powerful, and you said something so powerful just now,

(46:00):
you know, you said this idea of kind of using
up all of your talent strengths. You know, that can
also just feel so depleting and also like where do
I go? Where do I go from here? You know,
like and then you also can have the pressure of like, oh, well,
your next book has to be even better, and you're like,
what if I don't have it in me? You know,
I'm used up? So then does that mean I'm done?

(46:21):
You know? My life is over? As there's something really
energizing about being on the other side of potential where
you feel like you have so much potential and you
are on the journey that's energizing. Oh yeah, it doesn't.
It seems completing when you're when you when you reach it.
It nearly killed me. I mean by the time I
was like, by the time I was getting my third

(46:43):
Harvard degree, I was so sick. I had all these
drinking games. Yes, yeh, drink, drink, but I was looking
around at the people who were I mean, the pressure
there is intense, and everybody there is intense. Right, they're
all climbing mountain delectable as hard as they can am.
I was climbing away too, but fortunately for me, my

(47:03):
body gave out. And then what you just said about directionlessness,
I think I made I made a list of things
that I called Darkwood of error syndrome, things that make
us feel like Dante waking up in the dark wood.
And the very first thing was this loss of a
sense of purpose. The number one thing people complain to
me about is not they can be sick, they can

(47:24):
be miserable, but that losing your sense of purpose. It's like,
why not just kill yourself in it's really deep suffering
And that's really deep. Yeah. And if that goes on
for a while and you don't change course, you get
really negative moods, depression, hostility, whatever. And if that doesn't work,
your body will give out. You'll start to get sick.

(47:44):
And there's lots of research showing that lying and secret
keeping just incredibly increase physical illness because the body hates
to lie. The body does not like to lie. True.
That's a good quote too. Yeah, by the time I
was twenty nine, I was literally just bedridden and couldn't

(48:06):
move my hands, couldn't I was an absolute mess. I
had all these diseases and I just decided I can't,
I can't do this anymore. I have to find what
gives me some kind of physical relief from pain. And
that was the first step toward integrity for me to
move away from what gave me physical pain. So it's

(48:28):
not just depleting, it's actually it actually creates a very
very positive environment for illness and disability when we're pushing
that hard for things that aren't ours. Well, I'm so
proud of you. I'm so proud of you. You really
chose growth and really really did what it took to

(48:49):
get out of that hell. I didn't really have that
much of a choice. It's kind of like, yes, I
chose to pull my hand out of the fire. So yeah,
it wasn't an option for me to not find my
integrity and try to live it. I feel like I
want to coach you right now, Martha Beck. You know
what is it within you that can give yourself a

(49:11):
little bit of at least a pat on the back?
Oh all right? Value it? Yes? Yes, yes, a little
bit of agency you did take in taking and steering
your own life. Is it makes me very proud of you? Oh?
Thank you? Yeah, you're welcome. Well, in the book this,
I want to reconcile a couple of things here what
you just said with Well, you do write in the

(49:33):
book about how negative emotions can actually be guiding you
towards a better version of yourself if you follow your integrity,
And I think that's the big if, right, if you
follow your integrity. So can you kind of integrate that
thought with what we're just talking about. Well, the negative
feelings are always things that are there to show you
your blind spots. So you're doing your you know, if

(49:54):
you're like most people, you're doing your level best to
be a good person and to be successful every minute
of your day. But you have you've been taught things
that aren't exactly true for you, because nothing can be
exactly true for everybody. So there are places where you're
gonna have blind spots, and as you feel the negativity
of those things, it's a steering mechanism. It's like rumble

(50:18):
strips on the highway. They put those, They corrugate the
asphalt on the shoulder of the road so that if
somebody goes to sleep and you drift over to the shoulder,
it goes and it wakes you up. And that's what
it's suffering is to me. It's the it's the guidance
mechanism of the human psyche and the human body for

(50:39):
that matter. And so there's there's a time when stress
feels good. You can have positive stress, like working out,
but if something hurts you, it's telling you stop. It's
really simple. It's just stop. And in that way, suffering
is our greatest ally. It's telling us all the time,
and it can tell us that there fine levels of

(51:01):
discrimination whether something is good or bad for us. Now
I get to the point where if I have the
slightest twinge, I'm like, my whole philosophy is cave early.
When you start to suffer, immediately I give up. Uncle, No,
I won't do that anymore. And it puts you on
a really rapid course toward happiness. Strangely enough, Yeah, that's

(51:24):
so interesting. But you don't let things spiral downward is
another way of putting it. Right. If you do, you
just and you will because you have illusions and because not,
you won't always have the same amount of effort or energy.
But the beauty of it is the more you spiral down,
the worse it hurts. So at a certain point it
becomes unbearable. And then you pull your hand out of

(51:46):
the fire unless you're very considered, you want to really
please your parents and you just let yourself burn alive.
That's powerful. That's powerful. So if you have the integrity
and it goes against the grain of the culture, Now
it's not, you're not it's not always going to be
the case, right, Like, it's not like integrity is equivalent

(52:07):
to going against the grand nature? Right, No, no, no no,
but sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. Won't everyone hate you?
How can you mentally have a mindset that's that's productive
when you go against the grain of culture and you're
the kind of person who likes to be liked. Well,
in my case, and I am, I was born such
a massive people pleaser. When I finally pulled my hand

(52:29):
out of the fire. When I was so sick I
could barely move, and I realized I had to find
my integrity. I was raised very Mormon, and I was
living in the community i'd grown up, and I went
off to Harvard I had when my son was born.
I moved back to Utah because I knew everybody would
agree with me that down syndrome wasn't such a bad deal.

(52:49):
But then I was surrounded by the people I'd grown
up with, and they were all Mormon. And as I
started looking for the deepest truth in my soul, I
saw I didn't believe what they believe. And I actually
left the Mormon Church, which is the only sin that
they see as being worse than murder. So I asked

(53:11):
to be taken off the list. And it took some asking,
I'll tell you, because if they take you off, they
feel like they're condemning your soul to eternal misery. And yeah,
so people I loved I basically lost. I decided that
for a year I would not tell a single lie,
and I didn't tell a single lie that year, and

(53:31):
everything fell apart. I left Mormonism, left Academia, left every
brand i'd ever had, my extremely large immediate family. It
was complicated. I explained it in the book, but basically, yeah,
I sort of got cut off from pretty much every
source of social feedback i'd had in my life. We
don't need to go any details. But you had some trauma.

(53:53):
I mean, you had some real trauma and abuse. Yeah,
there was a really good reason, a really good reason
why left. I want to make that clear. My father
was a big cheese in the Mormon church and I
he had also sexually abused me as a child, And
so when I left, it was very public and it
wasn't just one little church member leaving. It was a big,

(54:16):
big deal. And I got deaf dreads, I got a
lot of hate mail. It was very intense. And I
always tell people your journey to integrity will not be
if there is any justice in the universe, it won't
be as bad as mine. And mine still set me free.
I started getting better here, I am yeah, and I wasn't.

(54:41):
It was incredibly painful in the way that I suppose
surgery without anesthesia would be incredibly painful. It's different from infection.
What I had felt like it was toxic and infecting me.
And then the pain of getting back into my integrity
was like a surgery that was extremely painful, but I

(55:04):
knew it was helping, and so there was this sort
of rightness to it almost. And I went through the graving.
I went through the center of hell and out the
other side, and then here we are. I mean, Wow,
what a journey of self actualization it's been for you
in your in your own life. You've almost had to
fight for your self actualization. Yeah, yeah, for periods protected protected. Yeah.

(55:28):
I went and learned karate actually literally to get this wow. Yeah,
to get the fear out of my body. I went
and got some belts. I have so many follow up questions,
but you know, we don't have that much time. But
I feel like I want to coach you in a

(55:50):
water down fashion. People. It may not be that they're
they're so dramatic in how they need to go against
their environment, but there may be many cases, as you
talk about or book, where people the environment won't let
people be true to themselves. So like if a family
holds different views, or the boss is impossible, or you
don't have enough money to do what you want to do.

(56:10):
What's your advice to people in holding true their integrity?
In those situations as well. Well. The first thing is
don't lie to yourself. If you realize that your culture
that people around you aren't doing, I always compare it
I like to go to extremes. Logically, at the end
of my year of not lying at all, I thought,
if I were living in Germany during the World War

(56:32):
Two and I was hiding Jews in the basement and
the Gestapo came and quiz me, I would have lied
to them and felt moral. So there's this. If you're
in an insane system, you may not want to march
around proclaiming your beliefs. I mean. One example is people
of color in America. I had people friends come to
me after I wrote the book and say, you know,

(56:54):
there's a lot less latitude for speaking your mind if
you're a person of color in this culture. And I
was like, oh my gosh, you are so right. So
you but you want to know you like for a
person of color in this culture to be careful and
avoid racists and avoid like getting hurt by racists. That

(57:14):
is integrity, But it's also integrity to knowing your absolute
heart mind sells that racism is wrong and that you
are no less worthy than any other kind of person.
So don't lie to yourself. That's the first thing. The
second thing is there are a couple of ways. One

(57:35):
I call the Monte Cristo approach. The Count of Monte
Cristo was kept in a dungeon and he dug his
way out through solid rock with a spoon over fourteen years.
So keep working towards your liberation, even if it's you
can only do a little a day. And another metaphor
for that is what I call one degree turns, where
if you're in a plane and you're going ten thousand

(57:56):
miles and every half hour you just turn it one
degree north, no one will notice the change, but you'll
end up in a really different spot. So keep heading
toward your authenticity, your integrity, even if it's just one
degree at a time, little shifts, ten minutes a day
spent doing what you love instead of what other people

(58:18):
want you to do. Yeah, it adds up love that
I must say. Martha Beck, you have lit my brain up.
Look behind me. Yeah, it's a miracle. But you were,
you were enlightened before. Well you know that's the other
thing that that Dante says at the end of the parody.

(58:40):
So that things happen with this miraculous, benevolent, wonderful magic
kind of And yeah, I mean you do start to
see the world that way for sure. I don't know
how you made dead bulbs come alive, but you did.
I just love it. I love it. Lit up that brains,

(59:01):
and I love how lit up you are. I just
I think you're so wonderful. I love your work so much.
Thank you, Martha. That that all. I'm gonna go to
text Andrew right now and be like, can you believe
what Martha has said about me? But thank you so
much for coming on the podcast today. I just really
appreciate your authenticity and uh and just openness to the world.

(59:23):
And it's a hard one, hard one, you know, in
a lot of ways, and you've done it such a
joy to come on. And I'm so grateful for your
work and everything you put into the world. It's it's
really made my life, Richard. So thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to
this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to

(59:46):
react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
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Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show,
and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,

(01:00:06):
and creativity.