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Welcome to Inside Personal Growth podcast. Deep dive with us as we unlock the secrets to personal development, empowering you to thrive. Here, growth isn't just a goal, it's a journey. Tune in, transform and take your life to the next level by listening to just one of our podcasts.

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Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voice and the host of Inside Personal Growth. And I have a returning guest author. It's really interesting because I'm going to show my listeners, Bob, the first book that we did a and it's a little tattered on the one there.

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The first book we did was Grounded, How Leaders Stay Rooted in an Uncertain world. Wow. That's appropriate today, that's for certain. And then I told Bob that I went out and I got his other books, Conscious, which we're going to blend into this interview.

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But the reality is we don't have the book that we're talking about today, which is called Detach. And I want listeners to know that that will be releasing on. What's the date, Bob? April 29th. Okay. Hardcover, Kindle and audio, of course, who else?

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Right. And so that is the one that you will see that we're basically focusing on how to ditch your baggage to live a more fulfilling life.

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And Bob is a New York Times bestseller and we are going to tell the world out there listening a little bit about you. It's Dr. Bob Rosen. He's a world renowned thought leader on healthy people and healthy organizations as a psychologist and New York Times bestselling author, which I showed some of the books already, Bob, there are others too.

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A researcher and preeminent business advisor, his work in personal and organizational change is recognized worldwide each year. He speaks to thousands of people worldwide and appeals regularly in the international media.

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He's a frequent media contributor who's been quoted in New York Times, Wall Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Financial Times, Chief Executive Magazine, and on and on. The book Detach, which we said will be out in April, is virtually a book which if you were to look at all of his previous books, I think it's kind of a culmination of who Bob Rosen is.

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And he's really asking you, the listeners, to pay attention to really what you get attached to. He's a graduate from the University of Virginia. He subsequently earned his PhD in clinical psychology, University of Pittsburgh.

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He teaches in executive education programs and has been a longtime faculty member of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Services at George Washington University of Medicine. Well, you are an inspiring author and you are a great person for us to come to for this advice because of your background and wealth of knowledge and expertise in the area.

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And like I said, when you look at conscious and you look at grounded and you look at these other books and you say, here's Bob joining me from Mexico. He spends three months out of the year down in Mexico, the rest of time back up in Washington D.C. it's really this core idea and concept of detachment in kind of the Eastern philosophy.

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It's pretty well known. So you begin to attach by talking about our attachments, create suffering and hold us back. Can you explain what inspired you to explore this topic in the depth that you have?

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Like you're dedicating a whole book to this and how detachment leads to greater fulfillment. Because for our listeners, all of your books in the course, if they go out and got all these books, you would see coursing through what Bob has written about his love for people understanding this concept.

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Sure. As a psychologist, I've always been a student of self awareness and self development. And in the last 30 years, in my global travels for business, I developed a real interest in Eastern and Western psychology.

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And when you combine those two, I really started to appreciate the power of positive thinking in the west and the power of detachment in the East. In 2010, I had a dream.

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And the dream was that I was wrapped by 10 attachments that I couldn't get out of. And I wrote them down and I put them in the attic for another day. And about 10 years later, I went up into the attic and I pulled them down.

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I got really inspired and I wrote this book. And at the time I was noticing some real change in society. There was a global decline in overall happiness, a growing disconnection that people were having with each other, and an increase in loneliness, a systemic anxiety that was hovering over the masses with more mistrust and cynicism and indeed resentment and anger.

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And that people were increasingly uncomfortable in their own skins. They were more fearful also about the direction of the world. So I set out to write attacks and I got very interested in the baggage that people imposed on themselves.

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And the key of the book was to get rid of your unhealthy attachments and to explore and embrace your positive aspirations, to overcome fears, to increase your health and well being, to experience more freedom in your life and to treat your disappointments of joy, I mean, of disappointments for joy, your worries for peace and your fear for love.

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And that's really the secret of detach, to overcome how you might be standing in the way of your own success. It's very well put, Bob. And I think that obviously with the advent of technology and social media and you kind of look what builds this fervor, this resentment that people have toward one another and them lashing out through social media or at that point in email because they're not using a phone, they're not connecting, they're not sitting in person with one another.

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And you see all of these technological advancements as being wonderful. You and I are using one right now. Yet on another hand, having a degree of disconnection and loneliness for people. I just did a podcast around the epidemic on loneliness.

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Right. And you know, when you look at the emotions that people have, I think that this uncertainty, this anger, this worry, this fear that people may have about the current state of our world, I've had one doctor put it, Dr.

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Steve Berman, and I think he says it really well, that worry is a misuse of our imagination. And it's simpler said than done because as you know, the monkey mind's moving telling you this all the time after studying the Eastern.

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But in the book, you outline 10 key attachments. Like you said, you were surrounded, that shape and sometimes sabotage our lives, Stability, success, control, perfection, and more. Which of these do you believe is the hardest for people to detach from and why?

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And if you would address, you know, your perspective, meaning Dr. Bob Rosen, on how we're being influenced by outside factors that we have allowed to become part of our life and we've also now begun to believe in them.

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Right. And those beliefs have become pretty strong. We've seen it, the division even in this country between Democrats and Republicans, between whatever, it doesn't matter. But it does seem very sad to see what's happening.

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Yeah, it is very sad. The 10 attachments in the book are the attachment to stability, the past, the future, control, perfection, success, the attachment to pleasure, to youth, to yourself and the attachment to life.

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And different people experience different attachments and many of us have a combination of attachments. Just to give a quick example, the population that is at most stress right now are young people and they typically have attachments to stability, to the past, to themselves and to success.

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And the result is that they have career stress, they have money problems, they have relationship pressures, and they have a sense of loneliness. When you look at people in the mid career, they have a different combination of attachments, typically the attachment to stability, to the future, to success, to perfection, and also to pleasure because they are drinkers and smokers and a number of attachments to different forms of pleasure and the back End the older workers and retirees, they tend to be attached to youth and to themselves and to life and their experiences around fear, fear of dying, fear of degradation, internalized ageism and the like.

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So now the second part of the question is around the external factors. I think the external factors have always been there. I think we're just noticing them more. I mean, the internal factors inside of us are our thoughts, feelings and perceptions and our actions and the intentions behind our actions.

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The external reality is there and we need to look at it as real. And both of those influences affect us. However, the external world has become increasingly stressful and our reactions to the external world have become increasingly heightened and accelerated.

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So we're getting bombarded by the baggage from inside ourselves and the pressures from outside ourselves. And people are just not comfortable, they're not happy, and they feel disconnected. Well, Bob, you know, look, you've worked with some of the top people in the world and over 600 CEOs, and as I was reflecting to you, you know, I've done some interviews with Marshall Goldsmith, many of them.

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And it's always around. The attachment is like, I'm never enough. So if I can't attach to something, that is my identity, right? And like I said, it doesn't matter how many cars, how many houses, how many businesses, how much money in my bank account.

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There's always this desire to do more, be more, have more, do more. How does attachment manifest in these leaders and what have you observed in leadership who successfully, and I underline the word successfully, been able to detach?

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Well, I think most of them, many of them are attached to the future and they worry a lot and they're attached to success. And we'll talk a little bit about that later, I think, in the interview. But the best ones have a real commitment to self awareness and self development, and that influences the human strategy that they create and the healthy culture that they build.

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And they typically are more at peace with themselves. However, many others are hijacked by their ambition from pressures from the board and from the good enough syndrome that they just don't feel they finally made it to the CEO job, but they've been striving their entire life and they can't let that go and just accept where they are and who they are in the moment.

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So many of them get stuck in their attachments and it has an influence on their associates because oftentimes they harbor mistrust or cynicism. And that gets in the way of empowerment.

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It gets in the way of collaboration because they don't trust the intentions of others. Now this is Obviously not all CEOs, but there are CEOs who are truly attached to, to the various attachments. I mean, one of those attachments is control.

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Yeah. And I was going to ask you, you call it the illusion of control and you discuss attachment to control in the book? At length, actually. And I think there's something around the power of that to be able to make something happen the way I thought it was going to happen.

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Which is certainly the biggest detachment that one could have because you're setting yourself up for disappointment most of the time if you're after something and it doesn't work out. How many of us, we must feel kind of the control over our careers, over our relationship, over our, our, our future.

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How can we shift from control to trust and agility? Because you just mentioned a second ago, they don't trust. Yeah. What's it going to take? Well, it's interesting.

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From early childhood we are taught to shape our environment. We take charge, we maneuver situations to get what we want, and we're determined to control the uncontrollable.

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But we hide our vulnerability. And that is a critical issue around the attachment to control. So out to the audience I say, ask yourself, do you like to control people in situations?

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Are you typically controlled by others? Do people describe you as passive aggressive? And are you a natural over pleaser? Because those are four forms of an attachment to control. But by practicing vulnerability in each case, for the controllers, it's being vulnerable to let your hair down and allow other people to influence you rather than feeling like the only thing you know is to control others and to shape your environment.

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The people who are controlled basically give up a sense of themselves, their self esteem, their ability to influence their lives. And they have to take charge more and be more accountable and responsible for the passive aggressive people.

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They hold anger and resentment inside and so they're typically afraid of conflict or disagreement and they have to become comfortable with that. And the people pleasers live in other people's world. So I guess my tips here are to view vulnerability as a strength, not a weakness, and to be more trusting and trustworthy and to practice what I call injustice.

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Enough Anxiety. My book Confident Humility to be confident with your own personal power, but to be humble enough to listen and learn from others. So there's a whole chapter on the attachment to control and its aspiration which is embracing vulnerability.

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Vulnerability is a big one and I think doesn't matter if it's male or female because females in the workplace have had to even strive more to get to where they are as a leader. And I've interviewed many, many successful CEO female leaders and it's interesting how they have taken on as much of what I would consider that male dominance in their life.

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Now, you know, everybody who we speak of, you know, look, we have fear and the fear is the root of all attachment. You say in the book. And look, fear pays an important role in our life.

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It gets us out of the way of speeding trains and all that kind of stuff. That's a good fear to have. But then there's this constant fight or flight kind of situation that we are dealing with in the workplace today. How does fear keep us from, keep us stuck?

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And what strategies can you give the listeners to move away from fear based thinking to what you've referred to as freedom based thinking? Freedom from fear, right. Well, we all experience fear in our lives and it influences how we think and how we feel and how we act and our well being and quality of life and even our success.

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In fact, I think fear is probably the most foundational emotion and all of the secondary emotions like guilt and shame and anger and anxiety emanate from fear. Now fear comes in all shapes and sizes, Greg.

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And everyone's demons are different. Some of us fear the truth or the past or the future. Others fear people, places or things. Some of us fear success or even failure and the fear of aging or illness or being alone.

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So there's lots of ways that you can experience fear. Whatever your fears are, the key is to become deeply aware of them, to experience the emotions that are part of those fears and to eliminate your attachment to it.

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Personally, I had my share of fears earlier in my life. Fear of financial insecurity, fear of not being successful, fear of the future. And when I faced them head on, allowed myself to get comfortable being uncomfortable with those fears and monitored my self defeating thoughts.

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I was able to replace my fear with love. And this helped me get rid of the baggage that I carried for a more fulfilling life. Everybody has a story like that. And so I'm a big fan of sort of just looking at your fears in the mirror.

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They are, they are messages coming from inside of you about your baggage. And you need to work on eliminating them because it is an attachment that is holding them back. It's a good point you make.

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And I think some people might be, I'm not going to say they're doubtful, but love itself, I mean, I remember Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines used to go around the culture and you know, give out M&M's and talk about love, right?

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And it was, the heart was on the plane. And so it, I, I think it's really, really important. Although when you have so much baggage, sometimes it's hard to find it, right?

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It's almost like it's lost emotion, right? And you say, well, we have the choice every morning when we wake up consciously or unconsciously, to live the next moment in fear or love, right?

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It's just our thoughts that are moving across our skyline and it's just the feelings that are telling us to pay attention. So we do have choices and we do have control over this. It's just we get stuck in the morass of these attachments and we can't get out of them.

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Well, you've got all these 10 that you list in the book, but I think what we just referenced would actually bring us to a point of the neuroscience of detachment. You know, it's like your book discusses how detaching rewires our brain for resilience and well being.

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So what does the science have to say about letting go and how it improves our mental and physical health? Because much of what we're talking about here, you just said love or fear, right? Well, the reality is I have to know how I'm always bringing up fear to be able to detach from fear.

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And I think for many people listening, they will say it's an automatic response. It's just, I don't know how it's happening, Bob. It's just happening. But if you help people understand how they've wired their brain, and I think even as much important, you've got superconscious conscious subconscious, you know, in the subconscious side of things, when you rewire that, or I should say you reprogram it, how you can overcome so many things, but can you speak to that, to the listeners?

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Well, one of the problems is that many of us are attached to the past. We idealize or demonize our memories. We become immobilized by old emotional scars from childhood, from relationships that didn't work or business deals that went sour.

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And by not facing the truth and practicing forgiveness, we risk becoming too attached to the past, but accepting these demons and allowing yourself to experience the deepest emotions.

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And this is really hard because people run away from those emotions because it's too scary. But if you really ask yourself, what am I attached to from my childhood that is getting the way of me being free?

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And oftentimes the importance of just facing the truth, rewriting your story and practicing forgiveness, See, one of the rites of passage that many of us face is to accept our parents in that they did the best they could given the circumstances that they were dealt.

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And healthy people really understand that. And other people who are sort of shackled by their baggage don't. Now, let's get to the second part of the question, which is the neuroscience, because I think that's a really important question.

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We know that uncertainty is a reality and stability is an illusion. But unfortunately, many people are too attached to stability and they have difficulty changing or transforming themselves.

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The same thing applies to our brains. Our brains are in constant emotion, constant motion. They're adapting to threats and they're learning all the time. But when we are too attached to people, places and things, the brains stay stuck in fear mode and they slow down their natural renewal process.

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So when we detach from our attachments, from the fears, the brains actually rewire themselves and they move back into natural adaptation mode. So letting go is a very healthy process that enables us to move forward and for the brain to rewire itself.

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So I think that it's a very important question, but a lot of the work is psychological. Now I've actually taken. And that applies to, I mean, take the attachment to perfection.

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I mean, that is a very common one and that high achievers wrestle with all the time. But we don't face the fact that we are imperfect by nature. And many of us are ruled by the need to be perfect.

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And it's bad enough that we keep them inside ourselves, but we oftentimes impose our perfection on the people around us. And it creates lots of anxiety around the way. I mean, perfectionism is a way of seeing, thinking and acting based on idealized, flawlessly executed, high standards.

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Excellence is about high standards with flexibility and self acceptance. Perfectionism is unforgiving. And underneath perfectionism is the fear. The fear of not living up to your expectations, the fear of not being accepted, not being good enough, and the fear of not measuring up.

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So there's lots of things that we can do. First and foremost is to fall in love with our imperfections. And that is hard for a lot of people. So I actually have developed in the process a kind of methodology for taking people through the attachments that I'm happy to talk about that.

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I mean. Your detachment audit. What's that? Your detachment audit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. I think that'd be good for the listeners if you could guide them through a short detachment audit, kind of a self reflection exercise where they identify.

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In your case you say one major attachment in their lives and then take some kind of step. It's like baby steps, right? Gotta start with just one. We don't need to go through all 10 of them. If we just get through one and find out what it is that we're doing.

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I think this exercise would be really good to guide people through. Bob. Well, the first step. Well, first of all, we've created a pretty robust survey on how attached you are that gives you data on where you stand on each attachment and the methodology as well as the aspiration and the actions that you can take.

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But the first step is awareness. And we first have to get in touch, as I said, with our internal life and the external realities outside of us and to be ready to face our attachment. The second step is the attachment itself.

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And this step focuses on the attachment in question, the fears underneath them, and the circumstances where the attachment shows up in your life. The third step is aspiration. And here is about the desired state of what you want to create.

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And the last one is about action. So let me give you a quick example. When we are too attached to ourselves, we are preoccupied by our own needs, thoughts and feelings. And under the guise of taking care of ourself or acting out of self interest, we withdraw from others and often avoid the intimacy and connection that we want.

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So the aspiration is to learn how to love generously. So what do you do to accomplish this? You have to first become aware of your self absorption. Two, you have to drill down on the underlying fears of your attachment to yourself.

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Three is you gotta imagine how generosity would liberate you in terms of your relationships with others. And then lastly is you gotta practice love, not fear. You have to cultivate empathy. You have to choose community versus isolation and execute acts of service.

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And that liberates you from your attachment to self. So these are the four steps. Don't Bob, in your estimation, high performers, high achieving athletes, high anything. You know, there's, there's love and then there's self love.

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Yeah. And so the, the issue here, and truly in many cases, when you're talking about perfectionism and all these other kind of things that we've discussed, when you're attached to that, there is no self love, it's always about I can push the boundaries further no matter what it is, I can be a better leader, I can be a better athlete, I can be a better whatever it is.

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And there's nothing wrong with striving. But most of those people are very attached to the word better. Right. So where would you in this you just went through the mini audit, like help people get to self love.

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Just like I want to love myself for who I am and all my imperfections and who I am, but they just can't seem to get there. Well, Michael Phelps is a great example of that. Yeah, that's a good. Michael Phelps had plenty of better and better and better, and it led him to be the best swimmer in the history of swimming.

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Having said that, his life kind of fell apart after he left the third Olympic Games in Beijing and he had a couple DUIs, he had some tensions with his family and he was pretty uncomfortable with himself from a mental health point of view.

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And he put himself into the Meadows Hospital and he got in touch with his attachment to perfection is attachment to self, the attachment to control, the attachment to success. You may not have articulated that, but if you read the story, you can strive for perfection in an activity, but you can't strive for perfection about being a human being, because human beings are not perfect.

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They are imperfect by definition. And Michael learned the hard way. And I think a lot of people go through that process. And you know, to me the most important thing is to love yourself and you can be a high striver without loving yourself and you will never be happy.

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Yeah, it is an issue, Bob, that, you know, that story you used about Michael Phelps is just a great story that exemplifies somebody that just took it to the. To the max. Right. He even now was doing ads for a while for the mental health app.

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I forget what the app was, but to actually do that, and I mean, I know as a psychologist you've run into this, but the whole ace, ace, when you take that test and you really see where you fit in, the things that affected you in your life.

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I know there's many physicians that use that, but for people who need to become aware, it's a great tool. Just bringing it up as a way to look at it. Now, obviously the book comes out on April 29, so I want to remind all the listeners that it's going to be out there if you want to get more information, you're going to go to bobrosen B O B R O S E N to learn more about the book.

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And Bob, now in wrapping up, if you were to let our listeners know, Bob, about, you know, detach how to have a better life, what would be two or three things that you would tell them that you'd like for them to take away from our interview today, that's going to help them immediately apply this from an Emotional, a psychological standpoint that would allow them to overcome their attachment to the outcome.

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Well, the first thing I would do is do a self diagnosis and maybe use a survey to do that, to figure out what you're attached to, because everybody's different. To really understand what these 10 attachments are and to get clear about what are the attachments and how do they show up in your life.

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And so I think that's a very, very important first step. The second step is to imagine what your life would look like without them and what are the specific actions that you would do to actually achieve that desired state.

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And then lastly, and I think it's equally important, is that to recognize that detach does not mean being uninvolved or disconnected. Quite the opposite. By ridding ourselves of our attachments, we free up emotional energy, physical energy, mental energy to pursue our dreams and to fully stay engaged in what really matters to us.

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And there are lots of people right now who are just fed up with the world. For one reason or another. One half of the country feels differently than the other half of the country. And some people say, I've had enough, I'm going to detach, that's fine.

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But you have to detach from the internal stuff, but still pursue a healthy lifestyle, well being family and community, democracy and the importance of the environment, and to live our life more in love than fear.

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And so the book's coming out on the 29th of April, and I'd love for people to read it and give me some feedback. Tell me about. Well, we'll certainly encourage all of our listeners to do that. And I want to thank you for being on the show and, pardon me, talking about a topic which to me is extremely valuable if people get it.

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In other words, this is like anything in life. You have to sharpen your ax. This means you have to do some work here. This isn't something that just comes naturally. You need to inquire, you need to go inside the book. You need to look at the detachment audit.

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You really need to look at what it is that keeps you from being free and fulfilled and happy in life. One of the things we all know, look, you could say this over and over again, but happiness is our own choice.

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And if you're thinking something outside yourself is going to make you happy, you're so wrong. Because the only thing that makes you happy is you. You know, And I know that may sound a little trite to people, but the reality is a new car, a new house, more money in a bank account, whatever you think is going to make you happy is not really what makes you happy.

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Detaching makes you happy. And I want to thank you for, you know, exposing our listeners again to a topic that's so important. Go out and get the book. Go to bobrosen.com, read the book, send an email to Bob.

[37:51.7]
He'd love to hear from you. And Bob, thanks again for being on. I wish I had a copy of the book to hold up, but I don't. But the reality is you will see it on our screen because our video editor is great. He'll have used the book all the way through this whole thing.

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Thanks so much for being on Inside Personal Growth, Bob, Greg, it's a pleasure. Thank you for your work. And when people go to my website and they go to the connect button, the assessment and the book clubs are not quite ready yet. They'll be ready in a couple weeks.

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Just put your name down and what you're interested in. I'm happy to send them to you. And Greg, thanks for your work. Thank you so much. Thanks for being on. Namaste to you. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Inside Personal Growth.

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We appreciate your support. And for more information about new podcasts, Please go to InsidePersonalGrowth.com or any of your favorite channels to listen to our podcast. Thanks again and have a wonderful day.