you want to present yourself to the world in a manner that that doesn't disgrace you in some sense
that that might be a good way to think about it and you don't want to disgrace yourself because the consequence of disgrace is emotional dysregulation more
pain less positive emotion and so the best way to present yourself is to stand up
forthrightly and to stretch out you know and to occupy some space and to to to
make yourself sort of vulnerable by doing that because you open up the front of your body right but it's a sign of confidence and that way people are most
likely to give you the benefit of the doubt and that's a good way to start regulating your mood but not only does
it directly regulate your mood to stand up because it's so tightly associated
like posture reflection is associated with serotonin and emotional regulation but also because
if you straighten up and you present yourself in that manner then other people are more likely to take you
seriously and that means they'll start treating you as if you're a number one lobster instead of a number 10 lobster
and that's another way that you can at least give yourself the bloody benefit of the doubt right and
and and and and and confront the world in a courageous manner let's say you're a filmmaker and i'm a professor
okay we could so we differ there right we're playing a different game
so you might say and and as you go down into the particulars of what we do it might even become more different so if you look at
what a plumber does and a lawyer does as as you get more and more fine-grained they get more diverse but you might say
well the lawyer and the plumber are both honest they're both good citizens
and then you might nest that inside while they're both acting out the archetype of the hero and
and like i said after that you're out of the things get too abstract for us to we
can't go farther than that i think that you know i think the world is order versus chaos let's say the balance
of order and chaos on a it's good and evil on the background of order versus chaos
and so you're either the hero or the adversary or actually most of the time you're a mixture of both
and it's best for you that's what our culture has decided it's best for you
to take on the role of the hero to the degree that that's possible and that would be associated with love and that's
that the love and i define that in the second book particularly
what's the third book i wrote but in in beyond order are you working for the betterment of
being or are you working for harm and everyone has a sense of this
and they know when they're working for harm
look it's good for you to go take your place in the world have some ambition have some have a vision have a goal have
a strategy try to try to be a good person in not not because it's your duty
precisely because that's the proper way to live we're in danger of undermining all of that and it's not good for people
one of the things that i've really learned for example recently is that there's a or learned to articulate better is that there's a very tight
relationship between aspiration and responsibility so let's say
well the first question might be do you need to aspire to something and the answer is well yes because you have to do something okay if you just sit there
you'll die you can't just sit there you have to go act out in the world okay so act towards what
well that's whatever your aspiration is you have to have an aim okay well what should the aim be well it should be
something worth doing let's say why do something that you don't feel is worth doing what do you think's worth doing
well if you watch other people and you judge when they're doing something worthwhile usually judge them positively
if you see that they're taking responsibility at least for themselves but you want to be completely useless so other people have to take care of you
that's pretty pathetic and maybe you could get your act together so you're taking care of yourself and
