(mellow electronic music) – Welcome to “Ear Biscuits,” the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. I’m Rhett. – And I’m Link. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we’re talking about the Enneagram and we’re talking about specifically my number and your number. If you don’t know what the crap we’re talking about, well, we’ll give you a little bit of primer on that to start out. – Yeah, I mean, okay. You know I’m Mr. Disclaimer so I’m going to give you a few disclaimers before we get started. First of all. – “Rondstadt,” don’t forget. – The first disclaimer is the third episode of “Ronstadt” is out. This is where you get to meet one of Link’s characters. Maybe, I mean, I think my favorite character that you play is Gus Twitty. – Oh, really? – But this is really, this is. – Knee Slapper is my favorite. – It’s a very good character as well. – Yeah, you get to meet Knee Slapper, episode three on “Ronstadt.” So wherever you get your podcasts. It’s scripted. You can catch up at any time. Get on the train. – Few disclaimers. The first disclaimer is for anybody who knows anything about the Enneagram, you already know that everyone did their Enneagram podcast like four years ago, minimum, and so we’re late to the game and these disclaimers are actually coming through my wife, who is the most knowledgeable person I know about the Enneagram. So just to let you know, this is from losfamgeles, Jessie Lane Interiors. – Oh gosh, I don’t. But we’re not, that’s not the podcast we’re doing anyway. – The bigger disclaimer is what she wanted me to do. She said, “Don’t tell me you’re doing an episode on the Enneagram.” She said, “Are you going to do what everybody does and you’re going to not bring on an expert to talk about the Enneagram. You’re going to talk out of your ass about the Enneagram and you’re going to misinform and miseducate.” I said, “No, no, no, no.” That is not what we’re doing because we are not trying to educate you about the Enneagram. We are talking about our experience with the Enneagram. But just in case you’re the kind of person who wants to be oriented to what the Enneagram is if you’re not already in order to then enjoy or appreciate the discussion that we’re going to have, I do encourage you to go to other sources to figure out what the Enneagram is. Because we’re going to give a very brief explanation but this is not comprehensive and it’s not meant to be authoritative in any way. Okay? – Man, you’re really hedging. It’s like you almost sound like a one, like a perfectionist, who’s like if I, if I’m gonna be criticized for this, I don’t wanna do it. – A self pres three is the closest to a one of any spot on the Enneagram. Now the other thing I’ll say along that lines is there’s a bunch of great sources. I’m a little bit biased towards the Enneagram Institute just because it’s a website, not a book. So it was really easy to go to and it’s free, and you can go over there and you can get a brief description of the different personality types, and you can get a brief description of what the Enneagram is in general. There’s a lot of information for free. You can also take the test, which I do think you have to pay for on the Enneagram Institute anyway. – But the thing that we really want to talk about is just kind of explore our experience and being exposed to the Enneagram and starting to understand what our numbers are and how that has impacted how we, how we think about ourselves, how we think about each other, and the people and other people that we interact with, like our wives. We’re thinking we’re going to make this a two-parter because today we’re going to talk about both of our numbers and our experience with that. – Right. – And the insights we’ve gained into what makes ourselves tick. – And then probably next time we’ll spend more time talking about how different numbers relate to each other. How the fact that I’m a three and Link’s a one, like what that means in our relationship. The way our marriages function with the insights that we’ve been given by learning about the Enneagram. But let’s just start just really quickly, just saying a couple of things about what it is. Okay, so you hear the word Enneagram, it sounds a little bit like pentagram. It kind of looks like a pentagram. – Well it sounds like kilogram too. – It is a nine-pointed diagram that essentially represents the fact that there are, or the idea, I don’t even know. I don’t want to use the term fact because this is not scientific. This is very observational – You talkin’ about a nine pointed symbol? This sounds creepy, man. – The idea is that there are nine personality types. Now, just, this is not astrology. If you’re into astrology, good for you. I don’t believe in it. But astrology is based on the idea that depending on at what time you were born during the year, there are certain things that are true about your personality. Enneagram has nothing to do with that sort of idea that there’s some sort of cosmic thing determined about you, based on when you were born. – I think it’s more like the Myers-Briggs personality test but that kind of sells it short in terms of the history of it and I mean, wouldn’t you say? – Yeah, well, I’m going to, I’m going to just read to you something from my favorite website, enneagraminstitute.com. Okay, from one point of view, the Enneagram can be seen as a set of nine distinct personality types. Each number on the Enneagram denoting one type. It is common to find a little of yourself in all nine of the types, although one of them should stand out as being closest to yourself. This is your basic personality type. Everybody emerges from childhood with one of the nine types dominating their personality with inborn temperament and other prenatal factors being the main determinants of our type. In other words, this is mostly to do with discovering who you are just genetically. This isn’t necessary, I mean, you can argue about how much is nature and how much is nurture. But this is just, based on observation, it seems like there are nine sort of dominant types of personalities that people can exhibit. For me, and I think that I’m speaking for Link as well. I mean the main, like, okay, so what’s the point? Why, what do you do? Why, why are you into this and why has this been impactful or impactful? I mean. – You just said the same word twice. – For me, but I emphasized a different syllable. The main benefit is the realization that I am not my personality. That’s actually a huge part of this for me because we tend to get confused and tend to think that we are the way we act and the way we think, right? But my personality and your personality is a protective shell that we have constructed to protect our inner self, right? This is something that I explored in therapy and the way that Enneagram kind of lined up with it was pretty awesome. But in the more that I understand my personality, the the more that I understand what the shell is and how the shell was constructed, the more transparent it becomes and the more I can look through it and see my true inner self. That’s good for me personally but it’s also good for my relationships because I’m able to experience my true self, express my true self, but also let you as someone in my, a relationship with me, experience my true self. – My experience is that it’s a nice companion knowledge base to therapy. Now, I don’t actually talk about the Enneagram in therapy. Sometimes I might refer to it, but I access some of the things that I’m learning in those conversations in therapy. And so it, it can definitely be very insightful or I’ll also say heavy, you know? It can really help you get access into, you know, what’s going on inside and then help you understand why you’re doing the things that you do and respond to certain situations. That’s a very rewarding process but it can also be, you know, it’s work. It sometimes, you know, you can be, it can be painful, you know, to get into it. But I’ll say also, as I was exposed to it through our group of friends that were into it years ago, it was also fun because it just, I felt like all of a sudden some things kind of clicked into place and I understood things and I could, you know, all of, all of the quirks that I have, and I got plenty. I didn’t feel as alone or as weird. I still love to celebrate my weirdness and my unique-esy but there was a bit of validation that like, oh, I’m not alone. I can, as much as I want to, I can apply the labels associated with one and feel not so, not, not so alone. It’s kind of, I mean, if you’re into it it’s fun and you, you know. – If you’re not into it and you have friends who are into it, it can be a little pretentious and annoying also as well, but I’m into it so I’m probably just pretentious and annoying, but. – It provided a common language for our friend group to understand each other much more quickly on a deeper level. To this day, we still refer to those things. But I mean, there was a big wave when we were all reading the books and talking about it that now it just kind of comes up occasionally. So, you know, I’ll say it can be, it can be painful, it can be heavy, but it can also be fun and I think we’re going to talk about both those things today. – When you learn more about your personality and you, and you kind of learn through this, this, you know, the filter of the Enneagram, it’s interesting because you’re kind of learning what your strengths and weaknesses are at the same time because the old adage, your greatest strength is usually your greatest weakness. What makes you a one, what makes me a three, what makes you whatever you are, there are some strengths and weaknesses that come along with that and usually again, the thing that makes you an asset in a relationship or an asset on a team also in when it’s not healthy, it can make you a liability. I think that that’s the biggest thing that we’ve been able to learn because as you, as you kind of understand like, when I’m like, okay, that’s why I’m, oh, I do this thing? Now that I can actually read about it and I can see like you were saying that, oh, there’s a whole lot of other people who have this same struggle or have this same tendency. It suddenly kind of neuters it a little bit. You know what I’m saying? It takes the power out of it. And I don’t feel as controlled and I actually feel like there’s a little bit of hope for dealing with this particular thing that is a problem. – Right, when you separate yourself as a personality. – Yeah. – Then in that you’ve constructed, then you can start to change your habits and your actions and your, you can dismantle your unhealthy defense mechanisms, and you know, I’m not great at it. I’ve kind of gone away from the Enneagram. I haven’t been reading a lot about it in a few years, but it was nice to kind of get a refresher on it. Let’s go quickly through all of the types. – Okay. – But I mean, ’cause we’re just going to talk about my type in your type today, but I’m sure people want to hear and you know, there’s quizzes and you can go to the, you can go to the website, and you can start to read these books and type yourself. It’s going to take a little bit more work than just the one liner that I’m going to read right now. But I’ll just go in numeric order. Not because that puts me first, just because, I mean, I am a one. Type one is called the reformer. Some people might call it the perfectionist. One book that we’ll refer to calls the one the machine, which I kinda like that. The rational, idealistic type. Principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic. Type two, you got the helper. That’s the caring, interpersonal type. Demonstrative, generous, people-pleasing, and possessive. Jessie is a type two. – This is my wife, which we can talk about next week. – Type three, you’ve got the achiever. That is you, Rhett. – This is me. – Do you like any of the other names besides the achiever? – Well, the same book, “Millenneagram”, which we will recommend later, calls this the winner. I like that. (laughing) – The success oriented, pragmatic type. Adaptive, excelling, driven, and image conscious. – Can you tell? – Type four. You’ve got the individualist. The sensitive, withdrawn type. Expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental. Type five, the investigator. The intense cerebral type. Perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated. Type six, the loyalist. This is my wonderful wife Christy. The committed, security oriented type. Engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious. Type seven, the enthusiast. The busy, fun loving type. Spontaneous, versatile, distractable, and scattered. Type eight, the challenger. The powerful dominating type. Self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational. Type nine, wrapping things up. You’ve got the peacemaker. The easygoing, self-effacing type. Receptive, reassuring, agreeable, and complacent. – Now there’s a couple of ways to figure out what you are and the one way is the test. What I will say about the test is like the section called the RHETI. R-H-E-T-I. It’s an acronym for something from the Enneagram Institute has been evaluated to be like 72% accurate. So in other words. – I don’t think I ever took it. – So I took that one and there’s some other free ones that you can take online, and you’re, you might not always score. I usually like 90% of the time, three will be the thing that hits, that pings the highest, right? But another way to sort of figure out what you are in addition to the test is to read in depth about each one and see which one resonates the most with you and I would go as far. I think the way that my wife put it is the one where it feels like they’re reading your mail. You know what I’m saying? – You might start to get a little embarrassed. – You’re going to have a little bit of shame and embarrassment, some self-consciousness that is associated with the negative qualities of each type. It’s really those negative qualities that you you begin to feel that, oh, that’s me. Oh, you got me. Yeah, you called me out. When I read about three, it’s clear as day that that’s what I, and I think you feel very strongly in the same way about the one. Now some people might not, it might be like, I, and again, this isn’t science, it’s not science. This is an observational thing that just kind of helps you think about yourself. So don’t feel too discouraged if you’re like, I can’t really figure this out in an afternoon. Maybe it’s obvious for you, maybe it’s not, but just be patient with it if this is something that you want to pursue. – So let’s dig into our numbers, but first let’s promote some merch. I got this mug sitting here. You want to travel, you want to stay hydrated, then you need the mythical mug. That thing, this thing is sharp. Well, no, it’s not sharp. It’s very safe. You just, I mean, if you’re a type six, you’re like I’m not going to get a sharp travel mug. No, it’s like it pops open in a way that, it’s perfectly designed so that you can drink it and then seal it up without having to touch any of the stuff that you don’t want to touch with your mouth. Because I’m a one I endorse this mug and also endorse the wacky design of the “Good Mythical Morning” mug as well. – [Rhett] Wacky. mythical.com. Get yourself some mug action. – Okay, I mean, since one comes before three, just go ahead and uh. – All right, I’ll kick it off but we’ll bounce back and forth. – Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. – I, it definitely was obvious that I was a one in my mind very quickly. I mean, even without knowing about the Enneagram, my perfectionistic tendencies, you know, maybe it’s because I’m a one or that I identified with it immediately, or maybe it’s just like the concept of being a perfectionist is something that people talk about more often than some of these other types. Maybe. I don’t know, I can’t tell because I’m kind of on the inside of it. But people tend to think they can spot a perfectionist because, you know, it’s a familiar term, right? So I kind of always consider myself a perfectionist. Very meticulous. So as I started to read about it, I was like, oh yeah, I didn’t play with my toys. I posed my toys in the way that I wanted them and I never touched them again. – Right. – You know? I look over my family’s shoulder when they’re loading the dishwasher and I just can’t help but reload it once they’re done. Basically with any type of procedure, I always think I know the best way to do it and I just can’t help myself to get my hands in there and to rearrange it. Gotta make things right. – Right. – I mean, that’s a big part of it. It goes a lot deeper than that but I mean, speaking of going deeper, I guess we can talk about the childhood message of it all? – Sure, yeah. – Is there, so in “The Complete Enneagram,” it’s more of the reference book that we both read. – Well, I think that’s. – “27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge.” That’s the one that I read. I didn’t read the other one. – Well, the unconscious childhood message that the one that I just told you about, I know is in “The Wisdom of the Enneagram,” ‘Cause that’s what I was. It could also be in “The Complete Enneagram.” – Yeah, it says, “Chaos or uncertainty or anxiety in the family motivates the one child to take on the task of providing order and structure for himself. The coping strategy of adhering strongly to sound rules, and routines, and standards of behavior provides a one with inner cohesion and security as well as protection from criticism.” So, you know, it’s not that my mom, my mom didn’t have a lot of rules actually. I, things were, things were pretty loose but I definitely had this sense that I needed to be a good child and that I needed to follow the rules even, and I would make them up for myself. So I can definitely see, I mean, some people will assert that you’re kind of born with a number and that it just kind of manifests itself through the message that you received as a child, and it’s like the first litmus test of kind of what your number is. Other people may say different things. But for me, I think there was this perceived insecurity and that some of it was, it was up to me to make sure that we were good. You know, it was like, it was me and my mom. You know, I remember things like it just being, okay, my mom’s getting a divorce and now it’s just me and my mom in like late grade school, and just kind of internalizing the fact that I need to do my part to walk the line. I don’t, you know, I don’t want to cause any trouble. I don’t want to be the one to create any sort of split here. I don’t, nothing was to the point where like, I mean I’m certainly continuing to explore those things from my childhood in therapy and in my own work. But I wouldn’t say that it was traumatic to the point. I mean, I just think that that’s how I responded to it. – Right. – With, I can order my zone. I can stay in, my room can be my place. And if there’s, if anybody has expectations of me, I need to do everything I can to follow those. So it does resonate in that way. I think the the childhood message is it’s not okay to make mistakes. – Right. – And again, I think that was not anything that was, I didn’t have a drill sergeant of family members that were saying, you know, and I didn’t, I’d never experienced a lot of punishment. It was all something that I put on myself and that I definitely believed as a defense mechanism of things going wrong. If anything goes wrong, it can’t be because I didn’t do something right if I knew it, if I’m culpable. – And just to give people an idea of how personal, how much you take it upon yourself, it’s not just the the feeling that you can’t make mistakes. I mean, like the basic fear of a one according to the Enneagram Institute is of being evil or defective. You know what I’m saying? So it’s not about, like, if I make a mistake, it’s going to screw things up. It’s about you. – The core of my being is. – If I do something wrong, I’m bad. – I am a, yeah, it’s not just I did something wrong. I am wrong. And, you know, in the, in the evangelical environment that we grew up in, you know that is a tenant of the faith, is that you’re born into sin. So you’re born guilty and in need of punishment. You deserve punishment. You know, just by virtue of being born and existing. I never questioned that. I accepted that. Maybe it resonated with me and I internalized that. So that was a defining belief and a defining part of my experiences as well. – Well, it’s all, you know, the different environments that you find yourself in will, might exacerbate it, right? I think interestingly, I mean one of the things we didn’t say at the top, is there is definitely a spiritual aspect to the roots of the Enneagram. So it actually, the Enneagram is talked about quite a bit in Christian circles, right? Both evangelical circles but also sort of post-Christian or liberal Christian, progressive Christian circles. You don’t have to have any sort of spiritual identity or you know, that doesn’t have to be a part of your background in order to appreciate light Link’s talking about the practical side of things. But when you’re in that environment where you’re being told that you’re bad and that is your ultimate problem, I think that probably speaks to a lot of the ways that we processed our whole spiritual experience so differently. You know what I’m saying? Which we’ll get into how a three navigates the spiritual space when we talk about me in a second. – Yeah, for me it was okay, my, everything that I learned in church growing up was okay, a set of rules and a set of beliefs, and an entire worldview that’s completely organized that I was like, okay. It gave me a sense of comfort that existed. All I had to do was live up to it and you know. – That’s tough. – Follow through with the action. Oh yeah. And it, and that’s not, you know, that’s not ultimately the point of it but that was certainly what I fixated on. – Right. – You know? It wasn’t a connection and a relationship with God. If you replay my spiritual deconstruction episodes through this lens of being a one, it definitely makes sense and it’s helped me process it. Another part of it is, like I said, protection from criticism. Like trying to do everything you can so that someone else can’t point out your fault. You know, I think about when I was dating Christy and I was just, I was reading all these books. I wanted to do it right. You know, my dad, I never lived with my dad. You know, he left when I was two and then my mom got remarried, and then there was a divorce. I don’t think I ever blamed myself for either one of those things, but how I internalized it is a different question. I could definitely see when I was dating Christy, I was like, I don’t, I wanna make sure I do it right. I want to read all the books so that no stone is left unturned with what, with this decision I’m going to make. Should I ask her to marry me? – And I remember, I remember this summer where you’re trying to figure this out and you were like asking all these questions, and you were like weighing all these things. You were meeting with other people. – There was like pro con lists that I would make. And it was as if someone was looking over my shoulder, analyzing my choice so that, so that if they said why are you doing this? I would have all the reasons. – Yeah, and not having any, I mean, we, weren’t very in touch with who we were at all in college. But, you know, I just interpreted it as Link’s being weird about this decision, which is as simple as that. ‘Cause I specifically remember just telling you, I was just like, do you want to marry her? – Right. – If answer is yes then just ask her to marry you. It was, for me, it was, I tried to simplify it to that level and then you were like, no, no, no, no, no. It’s not that, how could you just make this decision based on what you want? – My mom always tells the story of when I, we went out to dinner and I was like, “Mom.” I looked at her eye and I was like, “Mom, I think I love her.” And she was like, “Ya think?” It’s, of course you do. You know, it’s like, finally you’re figuring this out and poor Christy, it’s like she had to wait for me to like justify the fact that I loved her to some, and it wasn’t to God, it was to like any outside criticism so that, you know, again, I just didn’t want to make any mistakes. And as a one you don’t, you don’t want to, you know, having to defend, having to say, yeah, I, you know, I didn’t do this right. I didn’t look look at all the information. I didn’t do everything I could have. It was, you know, it was, I was kind of trapped and I robbed myself of a lot of the experience of experiencing falling in love with Christy and being in love, and I would apologetically explain love as something that wasn’t a concrete reason. – You were trying to break it down to something that was even more pragmatic than it can be. – I mean, for what’s the childhood message for the three? – Or where, start wherever you want to. I don’t have the perfect episode in my mind that I want you to adhere to. – You’re really resisting. You’re really resisting. – Oh yeah. – So here’s one way that I knew I was a three. The day that Jessie told me about the Enneagram and she said there are nine personality numbers. I was like, which one’s the best one? (laughing) I was joking. But honestly, that’s how a three approaches every single situation, is how can I be the best in this environment? In this, with this challenge, right? So again, little description of the threes again. The achiever, the performer, the winner. Threes are self-assured, attractive. Now the reason that it says attractive is not because you’re naturally good looking. It’s that you’re image conscious so no matter how ugly you actually are, even if you don’t have a chin, right? You can grow a beard over that chin and be like, that guy is not bad lookin’. Don’t shave. You see what I’m saying? That’s what a three can do. Charming, ambitious, competent, energetic. They can also be status conscious and highly driven for advancement. They’re diplomatic and poised but can also be overly concerned with their image and what others think of them. They typically have problems with workaholism and competitiveness. Who’s that? What? At their best, self-accepting, authentic, everything they seem to be, role models who inspire others. So the childhood message, and this is this is interesting, right? So on the surface, it’s something that I think many of you can relate to, and that is most parents, and I’m one of them, make the mistake of sort of giving praise, and rewards, and love to your children when they do things well. They make good grades, they perform well in sports, and some kids, kids who are threes, internalize that message to this hyper-drive level where they actually begin to attach their own self-worth to having pleased their parents. So this doesn’t mean that my parents did something wrong in telling me that it was good to make good grades or that being good at basketball was something they were into. It’s that the three takes that and builds an identity that is based on what someone else wants. So they call the three the chameleon in a lot of, because what they can do is you put us into a situation. Put us on a basketball team. We’re going to figure out how to be the best player on the basketball team. Put us into a classroom. We’re going to figure out how to be the smartest person in the classroom and if we can’t be the smartest, we’re going to be the best person who is giving a speech. We’re going to find something that we can do and if we can’t do it, if we start thinking why I actually can’t cut it here, we bail and we go to all the other things that we can do and we learn how to navigate and be good at it. I see this pattern repeated so many times in my life. Academically, with sports, with our career. You know, they’re the ultimate fake it ’til you make it, right? Threes will go into a situation knowing that they do not know how to execute or be good at something. But with this belief, I’ll figure it out. I’ll get into the situation. I will adapt. I will learn and I will come out on top. There’s just this pathological belief that that’s how you can approach everything. Now. – Bullshit artist. – Well, we can be very deceptive and we can be, a lot of politicians. A lot of politicians are threes. – Bill Clinton. I got a list here, yeah. – But. – Michael Jordan – Now. – Is he a politician? – I mean, a lot of people who have succeeded in like, Tiger Woods is a three. A lot of people who have succeeded sort of exceptionally in a particular field to a maniacal level happen to be threes. – Oprah. – But Oprah! But what are we running from? Why? Why are we like this? Why am I like this? So, you know, I think this is the thing that has been so impactful and the beginning of transformative as it comes to like my therapy and exploring these ideas, is that actually our basic fear is of being worthless. The unconscious childhood message that we received was, not that we received but that we latched on to. Again, I want to make sure that this isn’t coming across as like. – Blaming your parents? – Your parents did something. This is what we latched onto because of our disposition. The message that I received and believed was it’s not okay to have your own feelings and identity. Now there’s a lot of reasons why that might be the case. But what you end up doing is to not have your own identity. What that means is that threes have a really difficult time figuring out what they want because what they’re really good at is figuring out what you want, what the environment that they want. Think about campus ministry, right? I have had a tendency throughout my entire life, when you put me into an environment, I find a way to navigate to the top of it, right? So what did I do in campus ministry? We went to one campus crusade event and I saw that there was a guy out there talking. Every week he was introducing people. He was making jokes. He was in videos. And it just clicked and a wasn’t a conscious process. It was like I’m going to be that person. Because I can’t navigate a space in any other way. So the next year I was that person, right? And so, but what are we, what are we running from? We believe that the moment that we stop asserting ourselves and the moment that we stop being this thing that other people have found value in, that we don’t have any value. That we are a worthless. So it’s actually this tricky thing where it’s not this thing. We don’t actually think that we’re great. We actually think that we’re not great. We think that we are ultimately worthless unless we can do something for you, unless we can perform in a way that you’re like good job, great job. And if we don’t get that, we begin to disappear. I mean the worst fear that I have is like being incapacitated. Like literally like, oh, what if I’m in an accident and I can’t do what I do anymore? Like, that is what a three is scared of. Because the moment that people have to, and this is what, we also tend to be incredibly independent. I don’t want you doing something for me. Don’t help with something because that means that I’m, that I can’t do it and I might be worthless. So receiving things from people, receiving help from people. We’re not good at that because we want to do it. Again, not because we think, it comes across as arrogance. I’m very aware of that. It comes across like, oh, you’re arrogant, you’re prideful. You think you’re shit. That’s sort of the external impression that we can give. The soft underbelly of that is we actually are afraid that we’re not those things. We’re afraid that we’re worthless. We’re afraid that if we cannot perform for you then we will fade away into non-existence. – That’s, yeah, and that’s, that’s kind of sad. But it’s nice to get in touch with that so you can start to say, okay, how am I going to grow? How going to integrate these insights? ‘Cause for me, it’s yeah. It’s, if I’m not, you know, I guess I’m afraid of there not being an answer or there not being a, like a perfect way. You know, it’s like, if there’s not an answer, well, how am I, what am I supposed to do? – But again, one step below that, if my ultimate fear is of being worthless, your ultimate fear is of being bad. – Yeah, of being, yeah. – Corrupted. – Of being fundamentally flawed as opposed to being fundamentally good. Nailing it, nailing it. – And you know what? We’ll get into this in a second. There’s subtypes, right? So there’s wings and there’s subtypes. We’ll talk about that. But the specific subtypes that we are actually makes us similar in some really interesting ways. We’ll talk about that. But the thing about like this desire to be, to not make a mistake, to be good that the one has, and then this desire to accomplish. I’m not saying that, there have been some situations and I can’t, I wish I could think of one where we have to make a decision about something and it’s a much easier decision for me because I’m just like, do we want to do this or would this be a good look? And then you’ll kind of get caught up on yeah, but is this the right thing to do? – Yeah. – You know, and I actually think it’s a really good balance, because it, the sort of the one-two punch of that decision-making process is it can be very powerful. But there are a few times where I’m just like, hm, Link is really link is really spending a lot of time thinking about the merit of that, like the moral merit of this and I’m spending a lot of time thinking about like, what it will do for us. I’m not talking about like, oh, I’m going to bend the rules. Now threes we’ll do that. Threes will bend the rules. Threes will break the law. Threes will lie in order to take advantage of you. A healthy three doesn’t do that. I consider myself a three that is moving towards health and is at times healthy so that being deceptive is not, I’m not a liar. That’s not a, that’s not a problem. I’m not gonna lie to you to try to get something past you. I guess there may have been times in my life that I would have done that but thankfully, that hasn’t been one of the things that I’ve had to deal with. – One of the things, I guess to bounce back to the one. Like one of the hallmarks of oneness is an incessant inner critic. Now a lot of people, and I guess of many different numbers, can describe having an inner critic. An inner voice that is analyzing and assessing your performance, your actions. Whatever the case may be. Measuring you against the standard. But the inner critic of a one is a constant thing. Again, to quote the textbook, “Ones internalize a parental voice that functions therefore as an internal critic or coach. This coping strategy of proactively criticizing oneself and trying to do things correctly prior to coming under parental scrutiny can avoid outside criticism and punishment.” It can be crushing because it’s so constant. Like I remember when I had my lawn mowing job when I was like 14, 15, and on into 17. You know, around my Nana and Papa’s house. Like they got me this gig. First of all, Nana was the one who was like, I remember she would always say don’t half ass it. If you’re going to do anything, go all the way. Do it right. I mean, she was the closest to like the concrete voice of find the right way to do it and do it. – Right. – Or don’t do it at all. Chew your food 30 times. Chew your food a lot. It was probably. She might’ve never said 30 times. She might’ve just thrown that out there as like a ballpark figure, which is really high. But to me, that was like, okay, now I know I’m going to count 30 times every time. And when I’m done with this podcast, I’m going to go to the dentist and get fitted for a mouth guard so that you know, I don’t chew my mouth to shreds while I’m sleeping. – You’re chewing it at night. You’re practicing chewing while you’re sleeping. – Yeah, as a 43-year-old. But I remember I would cut grass and I usually didn’t have my cassette Walkman because I didn’t want to get it dusty. I would, it’s definitely not a CD player because it would skip too much. So I would just be there alone with my thoughts and my thoughts were my inner critic in the form of a, it was like a sports commentator or like a couple of them talking to each other. It was constant chatter about how well I was mowing the grass. So if you listened in on my thoughts at any point for the hours and hours that I was mowing all those lawns? I wasn’t daydreaming at least half the time. It wasn’t daydreaming, or like, you know, just zoning out. It was listening to these commentators that I was manufacturing talking about oh yeah, that corner, you know, he kinda missed a little grass. He’s going to have to go back for that one on the second round. And then oh, the grass is a little long this day. What’s his strategy going to be? And then ultimately, how long did it take him to cut Miss Bathoone’s grass and get paid while listening to her talk about her ceramics? Be nice but not stay too long that he’s going to get home before dark. You know, it was, and I just thought it was, it was motivating for me. Like I listened to these voices and I got really good at mowing grass. But it wasn’t this, it wasn’t an outlet. It was just, it was a barrage of assessment. It was constantly there. – It’s striking how similar the inner thoughts, inner dialogue of a three is to a one to hear you say that. – So for me, it’s here’s a standard of perfection. Are you, are you a cheat? Are you a, I’ll say, I’ll use the word achieve. Are you achieving it or not? But I guess your inner critic is saying achieve something different. – No, no. So, well, it’s so similar and that’s why, first of all, people, and I, there are people that I’m close to that are not into the Enneagram and I don’t know if there are three or a one, which you may be like, what? It seems so different. Okay, here’s why it’s not different. Because the net effect of you having this inner critic that won’t show up that’s in the form of these two, you know, announcers, is that you’re constantly focusing on your performance. You may be doing it because you don’t want to make a mistake. Now, shift the analogy a little bit into say I’m mowing the grass. Well, what am I thinking about? I’m not thinking about the two commentators. I’m thinking about the crowd that is watching. I’m thinking about the audience. So I don’t have an internal critic. I have an inner audience that I am performing for constantly. I told my therapist about this and a lot of times, frankly, it’s my parents and my brother. It’s my family, it’s my immediate family. Like, I’ll be doing something. As a 43-year-old man, I’ll be doing something stupid like cleaning a window, or painting something, or changing a tire on my kid’s bicycle, and I picture them watching me and saying he’s doing a pretty good job with that bicycle tire. – [Link] Mm hm. – I mean, now of course it manifests itself in things like, oh, well, he’s on “The Tonight Show.” Or he just won an award for that show that he makes on the internet. But it is these inner audience that I’m performing for. When you talk about that inset, it’s all, they’re always there. The cloud of witnesses, they’re always there. They’re always watching and I hope they’re always impressed. Right? If I’m by myself, if I’m, I mean one of the things I struggle with when I meditate is the moment that I begin to focus on my breath in a way that’s actually not encumbered by my thoughts, which is very difficult for me to do. The moment that I focus on my breath, the audience is like, he’s doing it. He’s focusing on his breath. It’s like, and it goes right back back to having to perform, and it’s the most difficult thing to shed and to let go of. But again, if you’re just watching somebody on the outside, you just see two guys doing a really good job cutting grass. One guy, Link, the one, is competing against this inner standard that he’s established for himself. The other guy who’s doing a really good job as well is thinking about the guy across the street with the mower and how he’s better than him. How he’s doing a better job than all the other people who might be mowing and he’s obsessed with not just beating his own standard but beating the standard. What’s the standard for mowing in Lillington? Whatever that is, I’m going to the top. – Yeah. – And again, a lot of these inner struggles, like when you think, when you talk about any, you might feel exhausted when you hear about the inner dialogue of a one and a three. I think that’s probably the case for most any the way that I talk to Jessie. I mean, the inner dialogue of a two, it’s like, oh, that is, I feel so sorry for you. That is exhausting because this is the thing that you’re constantly running from. I can’t take a vacation, right? I’m a workaholic, right? So I go on vacation. Here’s this perfect example. A couple years ago we were getting ready for our tour, the Rhett & Link Sing Song tour, or whatever we called. – That was not what we called it. – I had told everybody that I was going to learn how to play the piano for this tour, right? So of course now that I did that, I had to do it. I’m sitting on vacation in Cabo San Lucas next to a pool relaxing. Now my wife is doing, she can relax. She can do it. Day one of vacation, she’s poolside. She’s got a book that’s like fiction. Like a fiction book, you know? And she’s just enjoying herself. One of the reasons I have trouble reading fiction is I feel like I’m not fixing anything. I’m not learning anything. It’s just a story that’s going to go in one ear and out the other. But I remember sitting poolside and I was like, boy, you know what this is the perfect opportunity for? This is a perfect opportunity to write a song because we gotta, I gotta write a song for this. I gotta play the piano. I gotta write a song. And I wrote that’s why I travel and that’s why it’s about being at a Mexican resort because I was at a Mexican resort at the time. And it was like, and again. – You have to be doing something. – If I don’t do that. – You have to be achieving something. – If I choose to be like, you know what? Today I’m not writing a song. I’m not thinking about, I’m not contemplating a project. I’m not trying to be a better me. I’m just being. Again, that’s the ultimate thing for a three is, stop doing and start being. Learn how to be, not do. Very difficult for me to do because the moment that I don’t do anything, I get this, it feels like the world is caving in. Even this past weekend, I spent like an afternoon. I watched a movie and then I kinda just napped on Saturday. – Yeah. – There was like a four hour window where it was like, it was a movie and then a nap. At the end of that I was like, I feel horrible. What could I have, what else could I have done in that four hours? I could have like, I could have figured something out creatively. – Well, this is what I did this weekend. Were you done with your thought, though? – Yeah. Well, I want to come back to the wings in a second ’cause the wing, but I want to hear what you gotta say. – Yeah, for me this weekend, it was, you know, I was vacuuming the vents. – Yeah, the vents, they get dirty. – Because you look up there and you can start to see that boy, they’re dirty, and I would take them down. I realized there was so much more I could do to vacuum inside of the vent. – Yeah, you can go all the way up in there. – That type of stuff. When I was done with all that, I realized that the vacuum cleaner was really dirty. So I disassembled the vacuum cleaner and cleaned all of it. The thing about ones is we can relax if we can manage to put things in just the right order. We can have this sense of wellbeing when things are are put in their place. Like oh, I’ve cleaned and the thing that I cleaned with is now totally clean, so now I can relax. But if I just cleaned the vents and I made my vacuum cleaner dirty, well I’ve created a problem and that’s not made right yet, so I couldn’t chill out. Now this is a trap, of course. But I do know that sometimes when I’m cleaning or organizing, those things make me feel better because they give me that sense of control, which is associated with achieving perfection in my own mind. Control is really for me like, nailing perfection. – Yeah, yeah. – So it’s not about whether it’s out of my control or in my control. It’s like, it’s whether the, I can achieve a result with control and there’s, you know, there’s plenty of things that I will not, I get very sensitive to signing up for things if I don’t know what, if I don’t know how to get to the end goal of perfection. Like if it’s, if it’s open-ended or if I feel like it’s a big commitment and I’m not going to be able to, if I get 80% or 70%, even if it’s a friendship. Remember that story I told about the guy who was just like, he was just a friend who wanted to continue to be a friend, ad I broke up with him because I didn’t feel like I could be a good enough friend to him? So I like preemptively just broke up with the guy. I mean, that’s what was behind it. – Well, and this is another area where the threes and the ones are so alike. In fact, the three one combo which we’ll talk more about next week, there’s actually a nickname for the three one combo. – Oh don’t tell, don’t tell yet. I don’t know. – I don’t know what it is. – Okay. – But basically it’s the combo of numbers that will accomplish the most if you put them together. – Ooh. – Because they’re both ultimately super committed to results. And again, like, okay, so the one, like, what you’re saying is, you’re hesitant to enter into a situation if you don’t feel like you’re going to be able to do it and you’re going to be able to control it. A three will gladly very, they will sign up. We will get right in. We have no idea. We haven’t been educated in this area. We’ve never done it before. It doesn’t matter. We’re jumping in. The moment that we begin to believe that we will not achieve, that’s when we bail. Most threes. – And for me, I cannot bail. So it’s like, if I sign up for it, I feel like I have to do it. So it’s like. – So I think that again, this, the three one combo is that I will convince you to jump into something and then I’ve got this pathological confidence that we will be able to figure it out and do it. And then once you set your mind to it, now we’re a team, you know? So it ends up like, again, we’ve we kind of talked, before we understood the Enneagram, we talked about it with like the analogy of like, you got one guy who gets the ball rolling and you got the other guy who keeps the ball rolling. – A starter and a finisher. – That is how it manifests itself a lot as three to one. Now, interestingly as this relates to, I want to talk about the wings a little bit. So an aspect of the Enneagram is that you can be a number with a wing and the wing isn’t the number that is immediately adjacent to each side of you. So I could be a three with a two wing or a three with a four wing, and you can also be a three without a wing, right? But as the more I read about three, I’m definitely not a two. First of all, let me just say right now. Two, which is what my wife is, which is a helper. And again, I think that’s kind of a demeaning name to give to the two. There are better names for it in other books. It makes it seem like I’m just here to help. It just basically means that they kind of give themselves to people in ways that are just monumental. I’m not that. In fact, I score the lowest on two. Like if you look at my scores, like two is like barely ticking. But four, which is the individualist, I actually scored pretty high on, and a three with a four wing. This isn’t let me, I’m going to read. This is from “Millenneagram.” A three with a four wing means that I’m most concerned with what I produce and put out into the world. So that’s where I found my value. It’s not just necessarily like, hey, now again, it is like hey, we’re doing this thing where we’re throwing darts at a board. Well, I’m going to do the damnedest job I can possibly do in this game. That’s why I’m so competitive in GMM in a lot of ways, right? Because you just put a challenge in front of me and I’m just like, well, how do you win this? But really it manifests itself in I am trying to find my worth in the things that I produce, right? So what that ends up doing is the net effect of that is every single thing that we produce, every single thing that we put out into the world, my self worth is attached to it. Now that’s kind of true. You might say that’s true for all creative people. I believe that it is true in a lot of ways. But it is fundamental to my core that I have been in this long adulthood battle to detach my self worth from the success of what we do. But that’s my tendency. My tendency, and I think that’s one of the reasons that when I’m not healthy, I get so defensive. So we talked, you know last week or a couple weeks ago about. – Failed projects. – GMM 22, the multi-episode version of GMM. When it failed and when it was in the midst of failing, when it was in the midst of getting this incredibly negative reaction from fans, we decided that we were going to do a podcast and talk about it. Now, we made the mistake of just being like, we’re just going to be real, and raw, and just process this live. I made an ass of myself in a lot of ways, right? I was super defensive. I insulted people who were disappointed in us. I was like a cornered dog, you know? I attacked and I lashed out. What I have come to understand is that I was defending my own worth. Not saying it was healthy. It was unhealthy because I had so attached. I had identified my self-worth with the success of the show. When people were rejecting the show, they weren’t just rejecting me. They were telling me that kind of worthless. Like you took this time, you hired all these people, you put all this thought and effort into this thing. You know what? It’s shit, man. That’s what it is. It’s the shittiest thing you guys have ever done. So what I hear is you are shit. You’re worthless. – Yeah. I may have told you that too, sorry. – So when I’m in the bad head space. Well first of all, should have never made that podcast, I don’t think. Maybe we learned something from it. But if I had to go back, I think there was a way to process that rejection in a healthy way but that wasn’t what I did because I tied as a three with a four wing, it’s about the things that I bring to you. I’m like, here’s something else. Here’s something else. Here’s a book. Here’s a concert. Here’s a song. You know what I’m saying? I’m constantly bringing you things and you’re, I’m like, am I worth something now? Is it okay? Am I enough now? Can I stop? That’s the process that’s going on. – And you know, they talk about the emotional passion associated with each one. What is that for a three? – The emotional passion? – Yeah. For a one, it is anger. – Oh yeah. For a three it’s deceit. – Okay, so does that, I don’t know how that plays into this because to me it feels like the thing that I access is that okay, ones most often feel resentment, which is a kind of a low level background tamped down anger that things aren’t as they should be. So I try to remember, I don’t remember what I said in that podcast and how I was processing that. But I think that something that had to be going on was just this frustration that it didn’t work and that I, I mean, my mind definitely goes back to the things that we foresaw that we needed to work in terms of the tool. Like, I start to blame how YouTube worked and we talked a lot about that because, and I fixated on that because I felt like we had a plan and there’s things that we needed that didn’t exist. It didn’t work in a way to give the audience the experience that I wanted. The perfect experience wasn’t possible. When it became impossible and it didn’t pan out and didn’t meet my standard, I just got very resentful and frustrated because there was there was no way forward. It failed because it wasn’t going to come together. You know? So for me, that’s where the anger comes. That’s how I experience this anger, this like seething frustration that things aren’t right. I do think that it’s like, well, I knew, I knew what it would take. But that part was out of our control and when we asked for it, we didn’t get it. Now I’m just mad because it feels like, it feels like I’m wrong and I’m bad, but it wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault. – And this on a, like a smaller level than the GMM 22 thing. We talk about this openly. You know, we’ll be in the middle of say a production of some kind that’s getting, I begin to feel this is a little much. This is taking a lot of time. There’s a whole lot going on here and then like, we’ll be, it’ll be like Wednesday in the middle of the week and I’ll be like, Link seems angry today. Right? I think it’s because there are so many things going on and or you tell me. Maybe it’s like, I feel like I I’m losing my sense of understanding and control. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster that is suddenly like one of the wheels may have just come off. – I always have an idea of how things should be going and when it is not happening, then it just, yeah, it’s very frustrating. Very frustrating. – But you don’t. – Because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happen in my mind. – But it’s not a passive like, there might be some types. Like I think a nine tends to sort of retreat a little bit. A one doesn’t retreat. A one turns up the volume on the aggressiveness. – I can fix this! It’s not too late to fix this. – We talk about that sometimes. I’m like you’re being a little aggressive. You’re being a little aggressive right now. Because you’re like, well, if I could turn up the volume on this and we can just get through this. – If I can dig claws into it deeper and start to steer it or mold it, then maybe it’s not too late. – Now the whole deceit, I’m glad you asked that question. So it might be like what do you mean? What does that mean, that the three’s sort of passion is deceit? Wouldn’t it be pride? No, actually the two’s passion is pride. Talk to my wife about that. Again, just to remind you, we don’t actually think that we’re great. We just want to seem like we’re great, right? Again, I use, this is a funny analogy, but I just I use the example of, I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me. I grow a beard because I do not like the way my face looks without it, right? I am actively deceiving you. Except for those of you who are able to find that picture that’s all over the place on the internet. – Oh, it’s easy to find. – It’s the worst. I don’t actually look that bad without a beard. That picture that you took, something about my hair, my expression, I was a little bit overweight in the chin area. It’s the worst picture on the internet. And it’s like a meme now. – Yeah. – Can you tell that I’m upset about it ’cause I can’t control my image like a three wants to? But again, what I want to do is I want to deceive you. So I don’t want to. – So you’re talking like Snapchat filters, but across your whole life. – Well, I, again, I want to be very clear and I don’t want to mischaracterize threes or mischaracterized myself, because again, I am not a liar. I don’t like get into a situation. I don’t cheat on my taxes. I don’t have an offshore account. I’m not that kind of person. I’m sure there are many threes who are. But that active sort of deception is not what it is. It’s a very, it’s much more subtle and it’s much more sneaky because I am lying to myself. I’m trying to present myself to myself in a way that is acceptable. So we might be, we might be in GMM 22. GMM 22’s falling apart and I’m trying to find a way to reposition the argument so that I’m still okay. Then I say same things like you guys don’t even understand how you’re supposed to understand this thing. You know, I don’t remember what kind of stuff I said. But again, I don’t actually believe that. I know if my inner self knows this is failing, it isn’t good, but I can’t deal with it not being good, so I’m going to start lying to myself and I’m going to start lying to you. Not just some big, giant lie. But I’m going to start. – Spin. – Spinning it a little bit. That’s why we make great politicians, because you can ask us about, well, why do you, did you say this in 1998 and now you’re saying this now. It’s like, well let me tell you why. You’re wrong, I’m right. It was never a change. It was the same thing. It was just a slightly different emphasis. We’re masters at that kind of deception. But again, we’re lying to ourselves as much as we’re lying to you. – I mean, I can definitely see that even for me, I might try to change the rules in order to like my measurement of perfection. Look at it in a different way. I think one of the challenges for me is just judging. You know I’m constantly judging myself, but then I’m judging everything or assessing everything to then know what the standard is. I’m always searching for the standard. Matter of fact, like when I was choosing which type of engineering I wanted to go into, I gravitated towards industrial engineering. One of the reasons was because it was all about taking something that it, you know, you weren’t, it wasn’t about making something. It was about how you make it, how you go about it, the way you do it. There is, it was such a focus on procedure and systems that it really resonated with me. I was like, okay, just like any math problem, there’s this, there is steps to then get to a solution. There is a best way to do something and there’s always a way to improve something to get closer and closer to perfection. You know, I think that, I know that perfection is an illusion, but it’s I have this drive to get as close as I can to start, you know, to dial the fine tuning as much as possible. So like very detail oriented. It’s like any little thing to get everything in order. So that’s why I even went into engineering. Industrial engineering specifically was for that reason. – And it’s, again, my threeness, it gives a very clear explanation as to how I navigated my engineering situation, right? So, okay, so I went into engineering because originally I wanted to be an architect. Like growing up, I wanted to be an architect and I would like do house plans and stuff like that. Then someone told me that design school was like really, really difficult, and it was a lot of time. So I was like, that doesn’t sound fun. That sounds too hard maybe. But you know what? Structural engineering is like the engineering side of design school. So I can still kind of be involved in architecture and you know, my friends like Link are going into engineering. I’ve been told that I’m good at math. Okay, I’ll do that. So then halfway through my freshman year or maybe it was, I can’t remember. I’m taking a structural engineering class. I’m like this is the hardest thing I’ve ever taken in my life. Like, I don’t know if I understand what’s going on. I admit I’m like, I’ve been able to sort of fake it and make A’s. – There’s no real place to hide. – But like, I think this guy’s going to give me a C! I’ve never gotten a C in my life! At that moment, when I started to see that I don’t know if, I didn’t know if I could succeed, I was like, well, oh, there’s also this concentration in civil engineering called hydrology, which is just like dealing with water. How hard is that, right? – Oh gosh. – So I switched over to like straight up civil engineering with a concentration in hydrology, and it was easier and I had more fun. But again, it was the three in me. It was the three facing an obstacle that he thought he couldn’t actually, again, I got myself into it. I went into engineering. But once I was like, oh, you actually can’t succeed in this lane. I shifted. – I think another thing for me is like, now everything we do has a post-mortem. Well, this has always been the case creatively. Whenever we make anything and I’m talking about like at every stage of the process, so if we shoot an episode of “Good Mythical Morning,” we go back to the dressing room and we’re like, you know, getting on with our day. I am talking, I am thinking and talking about everything that just happened to assess what could’ve been better. Because it’s never come back and like, well, that was good, man. Like, I very rarely shoot an episode being like that was good. It’s always like, you know what? I can always find something. – And I hate these meetings, by the way. – Yeah, and we institutionalize this thing where if you know there’s always a lesson to be learned in order to make something incrementally better, and the increments get smaller and smaller and smaller, but my tenacity to find it, it gets more intense and more intense. I’m like, we have to have something ’cause I know it’s not perfect because I know that’s an illusion. But we can always get closer. – What I always tell you in those meetings, and again, I think that I’m glad we do the meetings. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do the meetings. But a lot of times you’ll see me frame things like, you know you may be right that we can learn this little lesson and we can make this improvement. In the grand scheme of things, do you think it will make a substantially better product, right? Now maybe it will but I always kind of try to talk myself into like, yeah, but what else could we be doing with our time? Like, let’s find something. – What else could we achieve? – Let’s find something else to achieve. There’s this idea that I got from “Millenneagram,” where it talks about threes actually are addicted to achieving and competing with ourselves. Always aiming for another level of success that is just out of reach. It’s tantalizingly out of reach. So, you know, we talked about all the other stuff that we try to do and we’re like, you know. We’re trying to do something in a traditional space. We’re trying to get a TV show on the air. We’re trying to make a movie. We’re trying to do these things. It feels like it’s this next level of success. Now I understand that like, there’s more kids, in fact, Mr. Beast did a survey on Twitter that showed that more people want to be YouTube than actors or more people want to be successful on YouTube than in the traditional space. I get that. I understand that. But I ain’t a kid and I’ve been successful in the YouTube space. – Yeah, you’ve done it. – I’ve done it. So it’s like, all right, what else can I do, right? I actually, I gravitate towards things that feel like they probably won’t be able to happen. They feel like they’re out of reach because I’m addicted to reaching for something that’s just out of reach and then possibly getting it. I want to talk about. – And it drives me crazy because I’m like, oh, he’s going to, what’s the next thing he’s going to sign me up for that I have to perfect. – Right. – And, you know, I feel like I have a limited capacity to continue to drill into things. – [Rhett] Right. – Because everything that we’ve added is still in my mind, on my plate. – Has to be perfected. – I’ve, you know, I’ve actually shed some things from my plate and shed some of, some of this desire to, you know, to round the edges and perfect every little thing. But it is a tendency and at those moments where it’s like, we’re jumping into this next thing, let’s make it happen. I’m like what is he signing me up for? – [Rhett] Right. – You know, even when you go back to all the layers. This is a conversation we had in an early podcast, where you’re like, it’s that next thing that you want to experience? And you did talk about it in terms of experience. But I have to think there’s like an achievement. I can now pilot an ultralight. I can now do this. I’m guessing? But for me it’s like, okay, am I going to get into this genre of music? Because then I need to know. I need to collect everything in that genre or. – It’s not always like, if you use surfing as an example. I also tend to sign up for things that, okay, I’m six foot seven and I’m in my mid-forties. Being, I’m never going to be a good surfer. I’m never going to be the kind of person that like, I’m not trying to be. I was never trying to be like a real surfer, a professional surfer, for God’s sake. But just the idea of like being someone who doesn’t look awkward and embarrassing, if you happen to be watching them. Lots of people were watching me because I’m so damned big. – That’s why you don’t want to do stand up paddle board. – Well, there’s a reason, there’s multiple reasons why I don’t want to do stand up paddleboard. Yeah, I don’t like drawing attention to myself doing something poorly, and being on a standup paddleboard, you’re already sort of an outcast. There’s also beaches that you can’t go to, whatever. But yeah, I struggle with it. But in health, I am able to be like I can just experience this. I can just experience the ocean. I can just experience in these projects that we’re doing that may never come to the light of day. May never see the light of day. The process, being. Not being, I am doing, and I’m not going to stop doing. The answer is not to stop doing but the answer is to be able to be in the midst of doing, right? But I want to talk a little bit about feelings. – Yeah, let’s talk about that and I do think that, ’cause what we were about to get into would be a good thing to talk about next episode is, what we’re doing with all of this information in terms of growth and integration, as well as our interaction. – Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m just going to set up one additional sort of. – So I just controlled, I just produced the episode a little bit. – I’m used to it. I just want to set up like one, and we can talk how I’m dealing with this next time and also talk about like the three and one relationship, the two three relationship in my marriage, the one six relationship in your marriage, maybe even some parenting things. This has impacted our parenting. But this is going to surprise you if you don’t know anything about the Enneagram. But there are different triads, right? There’s nine total numbers, and so there’s three, three, and three. There’s a triad called the feeling triad. This is called the heart center. These are the people who are most in their heart and have the most feelings. Three is right in the middle of the feeling triad. You’re like, what? That doesn’t make any sense. You don’t seem like you are, you don’t feel that much. You don’t seem very sensitive. Well, threes are not known as feeling people. Rather they are people of action and achievement. We’ve actually put our feelings in a box so that we can get ahead with whatever we want to achieve. We believe that emotions get in the way of our performance so we substitute thinking and practical action for feelings. But let me tell you, we have a lot of feelings and this is why I am in therapy. Okay? Because I am naturally very sensitive and feeling things deeply all the time. But those feelings seem so impractical. They seem, they’re not pragmatic at all. How is a feeling going to help me do something? So we become masters at putting a dam up between us and our feelings, and let me tell you, that dam cracks and that dam can burst, and it can make things happen weird in your body, and it can give you lower back pain, and it can give you a, almost a detached retina, or whatever it was that happened to me. I know it wasn’t that, it was something else. It can manifest itself in health problems, which I’ve had a lot of them. Skin conditions. Because you can become an expert at being like, I can have this really strong feeling and I can, I’m an expert at transmuting a feeling into an action. Like it just bypasses right past me. It’s like I’m having this strong feeling. Boom, what’s the plan? If I have a conversation with my wife and she’s dealing with something where what she needs is comfort, what she needs is a listening ear. What she needs is someone to actually get into the trench with her. I want to show you the way out. I want to immediately give you a solution and let’s begin to do it right now. Let’s not sit in this discomfort. So we’re not good at comforting people. I’m not good at going and seeing somebody in a hospital bed. I’m not good at knowing what to say at a funeral. I’m the worst and threes might be the worst because we stay so far away from feelings, but inside there’s this giant water wheel turning, with the power of all these feelings, and it makes us need therapy! (laughing) If you’re a three. Everybody needs therapy, but if you’re a three and want to be healthy, you especially need it. Because. – Well, you’re saying that because you’re a three. – Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody, everybody, everybody needs therapy is my opinion. But because the threes. – My opinion is I know I need it and I’m going to stay out of their business. – No, what I’m saying is that a three is feeling the most in suppressing the most and I never understood that. Jessie would tell me all the time. She’s like, I would be like, I just, I’m just not that sensitive. I’m really independent. I’m not that sensitive. I don’t care what people say to me. I don’t care. Like you don’t have to give me birthday gifts. I’m never an inconvenience for people. I’m super stable and reliable. Like I pride myself on all these things. I don’t really have that many feelings. But I was having giant waves of feelings that I was able to defer. – This was a revelation to yourself. – And in therapy, I have been able to, I mean I’m in like my third year of therapy. Peel back those layers and be like, oh no, there is a feeling and that feeling does not need to be transformed into action. That feeling needs to be felt. – We’ll keep going with that next week, I think. And as a one, I think I’m in the gut triad. Honestly, I don’t know what that means. I also find it interesting that like, in this, in this episode, as we wrap up, it felt like you had, you took the opportunity to like help people understand some misconceptions about you. You know, it’s like. – ‘Cause I’m an image management. – And I think I don’t, I don’t know what my drive is. I dunno, I’ll think about that. But for next week I think, yeah. ‘Cause there’s still lots of, there’s lots of good stuff in terms of like, okay, where do we go from here that like, it’ll be fun to process in the next one. So I say let’s leave it at that, but you need to give a rec. – Yeah, so there’s a bunch of good books that we have read. Really, I would be lying to you if I told you that I had read it all through all of these. My wife has. – That’s the good thing, is that you only have to read like the parts about your number at first. So it’s like a big book. You can have a sense of achievement or that you didn’t, you didn’t quit. – So I’ll say that if you want to go, if you want to go a little bit deeper, “The Complete Enneagram” or “The Wisdom of the Enneagram” are great. But if you are like most people these days and you don’t want to go deeper because it takes a lot of time and you want to read something that is a little bit more approachable, a little bit more irreverent, I think that “Millenneagram.” – I’d say it’s a lot more reverent. You gotta like F bombs. But it’s a really fun book. – “Millenneagram” by Hannah Paasch. This is definitely, I mean, first of all, it’s great. A lot of the stuff that I talked about today, it came directly from the insights in this book. But it doesn’t go as deep into like the background of how this whole thing came about and it doesn’t feel as technical, and I’m saying that for most people that’s a good thing. It’s approachable. It’s digestible. “Millenneagram.” It’s pretty too, look at that. It’s got a bunch of colors on the front. – Yeah, I like it. Lots of fun. All right, we’ll keep this going next week, but hey, go ahead. #EarBiscuits. Let us know about your experience. If you’re a one or a three, what’s resonating or just as you’ve been exposed to this, what’s your experience with the Enneagram? – And maybe over the next week, now that you’ve heard this episode, you can actually begin to explore this for yourself. Maybe when you listen to next week’s episode, you already know or begin to be knowing what you are. – [Link] To watch more “Ear Biscuits,” click on the playlist on the right. – [Rhett] To watch the previous episode of “Ear Biscuits,” click on the playlist to the left. – [Link] And don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe. – [Rhett] If you prefer to listen to this podcast, it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for being your mythical best.