Hazel Gale | Overcoming Mental Chatter and Focusing on What Matters

Transcript

Srini rao:

Hazel, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Thank you so much for having me.

Srini rao:

Yeah, so you are this really interesting combination of somebody who has this very multifaceted career, who is basically a former professional kickboxer turned therapist, which right away when I read that, you know, in the pitch, I was like, oh, hell yes, I definitely want to talk to Hazel. But before we get into all of that, I wanted to start by asking you what did your parents do for work? And how did that end up shaping what you ended up doing with your life and career?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

My parents, my parents were both scientists, strict, very firmly academic people. And this means that boxer was definitely not a part of their blueprint for daughter and when I started doing that they were really quite shocked. Of course they supported me wonderfully, my mum refused to ever come and see me fight, my dad really wanted to see me fight, I didn't let him come. We'll probably talk about that a little bit later, that's one of my biggest regrets.

Srini rao:

Hehehehe

Srini rao:

Yeah.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

But yeah, my dad was a huge stamp collector. My mum still is an avid bird watcher. You know, these were on the surface, very straight-laced people who have been wonderful, but what am I trying to say here? They were different to me. And I definitely felt this the whole way through growing up, not that I felt outcast, but I could feel that I was.

Srini rao:

Mm-hmm.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

on the edge of something, I was behaving in a slightly different way to perhaps what was expected of me. I've got a younger sister and she was kind of the opposite. She was a very good girl, she no longer is, she's absolutely rotten now. But when we were growing up she was very much the good girl.

Srini rao:

Yeah. Did you have siblings?

Srini rao:

Hahaha!

Srini rao:

Yeah. So I mean, your parents being scientists, I mean, I come from a family full of scientists and academics. Like what was the, their narrative for you about making your way in the world as an adult, obviously, you know, kickboxer, not being on that list of things.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I've had so many conversations about this, especially since my dad died, because he very famously looked at me proudly once and told me that I was the son he never had. He definitely brought me up to be, I mean, he's a man of that kind of generation. He probably wanted a son, right? Didn't get one, got two daughters. But I was such a tomboy. And I was extremely strong, very fast, very fit.

Srini rao:

Hmm.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

as a young child and growing up. And I also just, I mean, I've got ADHD and a lot of people, there's a lot of women who are getting diagnosed with late ADHD are talking about how it didn't get picked up for them because they didn't fit this naughty little schoolboy stereotype because people weren't researching what kind of effect it had on women and girls. But I did fit that stereotype. I very much was this naughty little schoolboy. And looking back, I can see that my dad,

really wanted to bring this out of me. He wanted me to be good, not naughty, but he also loved me being this gregarious kind of tomboy athletic kid. But at the same time, he wanted me to do my physics and my maths classes and stuff, which I did. I enjoyed that stuff. So he was pushing from that side. My mum was interestingly, I've learned recently, actually really into the rebellious side of me. You know, she...

said that she'd always respected two different types of people in her life, the academics and the rebels. And she said, and I knew from when you were about one years old, which category you were going to fall into. And I decided then and there that I was going to nurture that, that I was going to respect it and I was going to allow it. She said, all I did was I wanted to make sure when you were being a Terra Boy team that you were doing the naughty things you were doing close enough that I could help if, you know, if the worst happened, which I always thought was incredible.

Srini rao:

You know, something I wonder is why so many parents fight against that sort of rebel tendency in their children as opposed to nurturing it. I mean, I understand that, you know, like ultimately most parents, you know, just want what's good for their child. And, you know, like I, even when I look back at the advice my parents gave us about, you know, security and stability, it started to make sense to me after I understood the context, um, from which that advice was coming, given how they were raised and the fact that they were born in India and, you know,

life outcomes were binary, but I still wonder, like we see these tendencies in young kids early on, whether they're rebellious or artistic talents, and you know, either we're told, oh, those are nice hobbies, what do you think it is that prevents people from doing what your mother did and nurturing that and allowing it?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

fear and people getting stuck in their own ways. I mean we are, and this is so relevant to everything that I work on really, that we are each living in our own self-sculpted world filled with our own matrix of delusions about what is and isn't acceptable and who we are and aren't allowed to be. And when we become parents, inevitably that stuff gets projected onto our kids. And so if our kids aren't doing the things that we have put in the okay category.

unconsciously and automatically, we're going to try and help them by changing it. Now, it, you know, in some respects, that is helpful. You know, we've put the don't put your hand in fire into the idea into the not okay category and to project that onto our kids and teach them that lesson is probably a good thing. However, there is a point at which that stops. And I think that we really have to be very consciously driven to...

debuck the trend as parents. I'm not a parent, I'm speaking theoretically here, but we have to be very consciously driven to actually do that in order to have success in that, otherwise we will just live out these repeating patterns.

Srini rao:

We'll get into all of that, but how in the world did you get into kickboxing of all things?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I went to art school and I did a degree in fine art and I left my degree with absolutely no confidence in my ability to do that. So I worked in a bar like most people do with an art degree and in that bar I met a guy and I fell head over heels in love with that guy. And he was a fighter and he actually ended up being my flatmate for a while and he was convinced that I was going to be a good fighter and he kept trying to get me down to the dojo. And eventually I...

I gave in and I went. And it didn't work out with that guy, but that didn't matter because I did fall even more in love with fighting immediately. Within 15 minutes of the first class, I remembered all of this drive that I once had to be an athlete. I mean, in between that time I had got, you know, again, I went to art school. I did all the types of things that you would expect in art school, and an art school goer in those 90s and 2000s to do. I was a smoker, I was a drinker, everything else was, you know, I was badly behaved.

So I was not fit when I started kickboxing, but I was young enough to get my fitness back. And I really reconnected with these old desires to be this like warrior woman. Like when I was, I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I was growing up. And I was obsessed with Chitara from ThunderCats. You know, I'd kind of forgotten this part of myself until I walked into a dojo and started training and remembered that, yeah, there was a big part of me that wanted and actually could do this. When I found out that I was naturally quite good at fighting.

I felt a bit like, you know, just as Buffy had found her calling, I felt like I had as well. The fact that it then ruined me, completely broke me, the irony of that is not lost on

Srini rao:

Yeah. Well, you know, so it's funny. I went to, I ended up at six months of kickboxing was like right out as I was studying for the GMAT and I was like, okay, this is a fantastic workout. But I'm like, everybody here is pretty much here because they want to beat the shit out of somebody. I just want a good workout. So, you know, I ended up quitting, but one of the things I wonder is what are the challenges that you face, particularly as a woman in something like competitive fighting?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Mm-mm.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I think, I mean, I was very lucky because I was doing it in the middle of London and I was definitely not in, I mean, there was sexism in the gym. Of course, there was the sexism everywhere and you can't escape that. But I don't think I got the worst of it when it came to that sort of thing. So I don't, I don't, yeah, I do remember that one time, in fact, one of my first, I'd kickboxed for about five years and then I started boxing after that and my first boxing fight.

I went to weigh in and at the weigh in, you have to have your medical done. And this was, this was an amateur fight. I was only ever an amateur fighter, sort of like Olympic style boxing. And the refer, the, the ringside doctor who basically didn't even do a proper check on me. It's like he didn't want to touch me. It was very strange. And he looked at me at the end of this and he said, are you sure you want to do this? And I said, uh, yeah. And he said,

men don't like women who fight, you know. And I was like, well, my boyfriend's okay with it. I turned around, my partner was standing there shadow boxing in the middle of my coach and my partner, he was standing there shadow boxing and talking to the rest of the people in the space excitedly about how his girlfriend was going to, was going to smash it. You know, he was a bit of an overexcitable puppy type person. So he was, he was fully on my side. But I couldn't, I mean, I couldn't believe it that even in the fighting space where this doctor was supposed to be.

supporting me medically to make sure I was okay to fight, didn't even bother with that, but was prepared to project his opinions onto me and tell me that I was not doing what I should do if I wanted to stay palatable to the male gaze. So little things like that happened, but I don't think I ever felt too much of a problem with being female.

Srini rao:

Well, tell me something about sort of the mindset going in. It's funny because I remember you writing about Nicaragua, like in the book later, and we'll talk about that, because that was like my most fearful surfing moment ever. I literally thought I was going to die that day. But like getting hit in the face, you know, punched, I mean, that's the reason I didn't quit football after seventh grade. I was like, I really don't like getting the shit beat out of me. How do you go into a ring knowing that these are all people who are well trained?

I mean, obviously like I'm probably never going to be in the ring with Connor McGregor. And even if I was, it would last like maybe two seconds, but like, I always wonder, it's like, how in the world does somebody manage the mindset to think, okay, I am going to get the hell beat out of me potentially here. Like what is going on mentally? Like how much of this is, uh, what is happening in your mind and how much of it is your physical skillset?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I'm not sure I could put a split, I could work out what the split was in terms of mental and physical. But if you go in there, the fittest person in the world and you have the wrong mindset, you can still be beaten in two seconds. That's for sure. But you know what, the fear of getting hurt, I think I speak for most fighters when I say this, the fear of getting hurt is really quite, relatively quite low compared to the usually, I mean, I think people talk about the fear of failure, in particular, the fear of humiliation, getting knocked out in front of people.

That never happened to me, thankfully. But if that, I mean, that has to be one of the most humiliating experiences you could ever go through. This is what I was afraid of when I walked in there. What I was afraid of, I had such imposter syndrome that I was terrified of every fight, that this would be the one where I would be showed up as a complete novice, like an idiot that just shouldn't be there. Like how the hell did she get to this place to have this fight?

Srini rao:

Mm-hmm.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

And so when I started fighting, I mean, you get kind of, you get better at going into the fights, but I never got to the point until I started going through my therapy recovery journey that I'll talk about in a moment to overcome the burnout. It wasn't until I started doing that, that I actually got to the place where I could remember anything about my fights, including sitting down in the corner of the ring in between rounds and my coach talking to me.

I couldn't remember any of those things. And so I wasn't able to follow those instructions. I was in some kind of complete trance state. It was only once I'd worked on my fear of failure and my fear of weakness and all the stuff that was going into my struggle with it that those fear levels reduced enough for me to actually be consciously aware of what was happening during a fight.

Srini rao:

Yeah.

Srini rao:

Hmm.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I was going to say that there was one point, and you will have read about this in my book, but there was one point with one fight that the stark contrast between this fight and anything else that had come before it helped me to fully understand and fully own that I had changed after the burnout and the recovery. So I burnt out and I spent about two years first totally ignoring and denying any responsibility on my own part.

in having created this burnout in myself. I just thought there was something wrong with my body, poor me. Eventually I was sort of dragged myself kicking and screaming into the, into a therapy room. And started on this journey that taught me who I actually was, what really mattered to me, all that stuff. And it got me back to a place of fitness, enough to step into the ring and to fight again. And gradually I got back to competing at the level I wanted to be competing at.

And on this one day, it was the 13th of December, 2013, and I was warming up to box for a national title. Now, all around me fighters were, as per usual, sitting with towels draped over their anxious faces, each one of them waiting for their moment, completely alone. And normally, by this point, I would have been beside myself. I would have been questioning everything, my skills, my cardio, my arrogance, even thinking that I could do this. Instead of imagining myself winning,

I would be cycling back over the words that someone had told me about my opponent, some guy in the gym had come up to me, gleefully told me that this girl could bang. He was telling me that she was a big hitter. And so I would be thinking about that and picturing myself laid out on the canvas, just overcome, overwhelmed, like over. That's where my mindset would normally be, but not this day. This day, I was absorbed in the task of warming up. My feet were dancing expectantly to the song of this skipping rope as it whistled past my ears.

And when I walked out to fight, it was like I was strangely at peace. I'm not saying I wasn't nervous, of course I was. I had the adrenaline, but it was less noisy out there. It was like the crowd had been hushed by a crisp layer of freshly fallen snow. And there was a stillness in my mind interrupted solely by this curious little voice that said something like, you've got this. But instead of that voice of self-belief being one of overconfidence or arrogance, I wasn't.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

dead certain that I was gonna go in there and win. And I think anybody who, especially athletes, who tell you to have that mindset before their competition are probably fooling themselves. Because nobody can predict an outcome like that. And I don't think we want to be able to. For me, that sort of voice of self-belief was all about me saying, I don't know what's gonna happen here, but if I do win, I will deserve the victory. And that for me made a huge, huge difference.

And when I got in the ring and I fought, this girl was a Southpaw, normally something I hated, I didn't really care. And I got into this flow state where my hands did the work for me, my feet just knew where to go. I was almost sitting back and just watching it happen. And then at the end when we were standing side by side waiting for the judge's verdict, now I think we both knew by that point that I was going to get the win. But as my hand was actually raised in victory, I felt this surge of alien emotion.

And I always say that I'm not sure if it was pride or happiness or just a good old fashioned sense of achievement, but it was so new. Because every win up until that point when my hand had been raised, I had hung my head and averted my eyes because I'd never felt that I deserved that sense of victory because I'd always been ready to write off any achievement as fluke or chance like just another lucky day when I got away with it. But on this day, I was able for the first time to own the victory. And...

It changed absolutely everything. Now, weirdly, it didn't just turn me into the fighter I wanted to be, because actually when we drove home from that fight, that's when I knew I didn't need to box anymore. And I realized that I had been trying to prove myself as a fighter, I'd been trying to prove myself against my own insecurities, that I was weak, that I wasn't good enough, that I was weird, that I was different. All of these very normal, very cliched, but very painful, low-flying...

limiting ideas I had about myself. The reason I was in fighting was to try and prove those things wrong. But once I'd actually done the work to bring those things to light and realize that they weren't the truth, fighting and the wins that I was striving for there, they no longer meant the same thing. And I just, I knew that I didn't just like you said, there are a lot of people in kickboxing gyms that just want to be able to beat somebody else up. When I had that experience, there was when I fully knew.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

that I no longer needed to be somebody who knew they could beat somebody else up.

Srini rao:

Well.

Yeah, it kind of makes me think about all the things that I have achieved or goals I've set and how many of them were an attempt to compensate for some area of inadequacy. And I'm beginning to wonder if that's just kind of standard, like so many of us are setting ourselves up to compensate for inadequacies when we set these kinds of goals or we set our minds to something. One of the things you said in the opening of the book is that fighting made me a stronger person. There's no doubt about it. But that strength didn't come about in the way that people tend to assume. It was only that I was empowered by the ability to defend from.

myself or fortified by the stress of the contest, I didn't end up becoming famous or going to the Olympics. Competitive fighting put me on a journey of self-discovery by painfully exposing my weaknesses and making me face up to them. And I wonder, one, what is it that gets somebody to the point of being willing to face up to their weaknesses and be exposed to them? Because I think so many of us kind of walk through the world like...

pretty much not self-aware of what we're terrible at, our inadequacies, which we don't want to admit. And so I wonder, what was it that led you to the point of burning out that finally kind of made you start this journey?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Yeah, I mean, I think that you're absolutely right. I think some of the research we've drawn on in building Betwixt shows that around 95% of people believe they're self-aware, but if you put people through very stringent tests to measure their levels of self-awareness, both internal and external self-awareness, you'll find that the number is closer to 10 or 15% of us, which means the vast majority of us believe we know who we are and we don't.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

But yeah, I mean, so I was absolutely in that category before I went to the before my burnout before therapy before that stuff. I was so dissociated from my emotions that I was having I can look back and I can tell you that I was definitely having minor panic attacks probably multiple times most days. And I did not know that I was anxious, which is ludicrous and at the same time, very common. I just thought of something wrong with my body.

And soIf it hadn't been for my drive to get better, physically better so I could get back into what I now can see as my kind of depend, like horribly codependent relationship with fighting. If it hadn't been for my drive to get better as a fighter, I probably wouldn't have gone to therapy. I started that because I was like, maybe this can help me get back in the ring.

And so I was forced to, and thankfully I...was working with a therapist that managed to engage me, engage my imagination and my fascination with what was actually going on in a way that meant that I did actually do the work. Cause I could easily have just turned around and said, oh, you're not gonna offer a quick fix. I'm gonna go elsewhere. Because I was trying that with everything. You know, I tried every medical route I could do and I was trying alternative forms of therapy, you know. And when they didn't immediately fix me, I turned my back on them and went elsewhere. So thankfully this guy managed to.

to help me. And there was something I was going to say about that. He...

Oh, yes, this is about, I mean, yeah, I now know, you know, I now know that I have ADHD. I didn't know this at the time. What my therapist was able to do was to help me put things into a very visual frame. Like I was doing lots of visualisations, I was wrapping metaphors and stories around my realisations. And these things help them to stick in a way that the theory, the logic of it wouldn't do. And this

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

became particularly true for me when I realised that one of the most frustrating things while I was fighting was that people would acknowledge my nerves, often quite smugly, because everybody was trying to prove that they were less nervous than anyone else and they would acknowledge their nerves. And then they would say something like, you know, you've just got to learn how to make fear your friend. And I would be like, yeah, sure, that sounds great. But how? How is one supposed to do that? This fear that you want me to befriend is ruining my life. I know that in theory, I'm supposed to accept my emotions.

But how am I supposed to make this thing, this nebulous, demonic thing, my friend? I felt like my fear was, my fear of weakness, my fear of failure was this big black, cloudy monster that was following me around and I could not shake it off and I could not outrun it no matter what I achieved. I won two world titles in one day at one point and I still spent that whole evening thinking about how I should have fought better. No amount of objective achievement will help you to override.

an unconscious belief that you just aren't good enough. And so when I went through therapy and my therapist helped me to put, you know, wrap, like I say, wrap narratives and metaphor and visualizations around these understandings so they became something I could process visually, that's when they sunk in. And that's what my book was about and that's what Betwixt was about. It was about giving people a way to make visual and make understandable and digestible these very, very important truths.

that can change our lives.

Srini rao:

Yeah.

Well, I want to come back to something you said and you alluded to it and what you were just telling me. You said, this is the age of the quick fix. When we hit an obstacle, it's easy to just look for the pill or the supplement or for some other kind of miracle product to put things right. I don't think we just do that with pills or products. I think we do that with mentors. I think we do that with coaches. I've seen this pattern in friends where some joint venture opportunity will come along. They think that it's going to be sort of the thing that catapults them. You're basically outsourcing responsibility for your success.

the moment you do that. But what did it like, I get the desire for the quick fix. I mean, we're all impatient, like we want, you know, everything yesterday. But how do you actually get people to that point? Because like you said, you know, do the work multiple times throughout this. And I don't think that there is a shortcut to anything, particularly this kind of depth of emotional exploration. Like I just don't see any shortcut through that. You know, there's no way to shortcut this.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

No, no, but that's what I'm doing. The thing that got me to do this work was that my imagination and engagement was keyed into it. Now that I mean, obviously, as an ADHD, that is true of anything that I have engaged with in my life, if it is cute, like, queued up my imagination, if it sparked my interest, then I will do it. But I, but that's not only true of ADHD is, you know, the thing about learning.

about building self-awareness, about learning about what's going on inside your mind, about learning about the mind in general. This is a fascinating topic. And having worked, you know, as a therapist for 10 years, and had these conversations with people that time, I can tell you that people love a conversation about the inner workings of their own mind. You rarely see people so wrapped as when they're talking about that stuff. So I believe that if we want to move to a place where more people get into that point where they do the work,

as we keep saying, we want to, and we want to get away from the place where people have to do it because of their, they're in a complete state of crisis. We need to make the journey, the therapy journey, the mental, the self-awareness journey more exciting. We need to make it as exciting as it actually can be.

Srini rao:

Absolutely. Well, let's talk about the difference between sort of the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. You say the unconscious mind handles the way that we feel. It works with hunches and intuition and is largely responsible for the way in which we act. Studies estimate that approximately 90% of our behavior is governed by the unconscious mind. So talk to me about how we begin to, one, start changing that. But how do we even recognize or have the awareness that what is happening is the result

behavior or belief. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Because I mean, it takes us back to self-awareness, right? Don't you have to be self-aware enough to recognize that, you know, it's an unconscious belief or something that is actually dictating this action?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

As in how do we know, how does science know that that's the case?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Yeah, well, I think that there's two parts of it. So there's the there is on a personal level, yes, we need a certain level of self awareness, we need to have done enough self reflection to be able to recognise the patterns and say, hang on a minute, maybe I didn't just choose that consciously. But in terms of how we actually know, you know, that 90% stat that came from the book, brilliant book, what's it called? The user illusion by Tor Noratrandes, brilliant book on the mind.

And the way they know about those things, we, you know, no amount of self-awareness could give us that information because they had this neuroscience that's given us that information by looking actually at where neurons are firing, um, and how long before the point at which we believe we made a conscious decision to do something. So Benjamin, Benjamin Libet back in the 70s, I think made a very seminal, uh, a neuroscience experiment. This is a long time ago now. I'm sure they've got very much updated, uh, ways of checking for this thing, but what he was doing, he had a huge clock.

on a wall, which was a clock that lasted a second. And he was asking people, I think he was asking them to click their fingers. And so they would look at this clock and they would remember where the needle was on this clock at the point at which they decided, right, now I'm gonna click my fingers. And then they would click their fingers. But they were also checking what was happening in their brains, like when the neurons were firing. And they found that consistently that the brain was making the decision.

there was neural activity about making this decision a half a second, a full half a second before the conscious understanding that the decision was gonna be made was made. Now this obviously sparked huge debates about whether free will existed at all, is the unconscious mind in control of absolutely everything? And I will not get into that because I'm definitely not qualified to, but as far as I'm concerned, it gives us a very interesting and very clear view that we need to start working with the unconscious mind.

Of course we can work with the unconscious mind because we can train ourselves to do anything. Anytime we become proficient at something, that means we have trained ourselves to a point of being able to do it largely unconsciously. Any sport of course is happening very much unconsciously. The other thing about awareness is that, you know, we are consciously, we are consciously half a second behind reality. Like we, to have registered the fact that we have seen something, felt something, or heard something, it takes the mind around half a second to do that processing.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

So we can't possibly block a punch or, you know, do a, I'm trying to think of, I'm trying to think of a non-boxing sport metaphor and I can't think of one. I'm trying to do a football one, can't do it. Um, it takes, it, we have to be able to, we have to be able to act instantaneously in pretty much every sport with possible exception of golf. Um, and therefore we can't do those things consciously. So if we want to get better at these things, we have to learn how to communicate with the unconscious mind is where I'm trying to get to.

Srini rao:

Yeah.

Srini rao:

One of the things that you say is that all self-sabotaging traits aim to elicit some kind of benefit as well as usually the more obvious damaging effect. And with Britt Frank here, who wrote a book about this called The Science of Stuck, and she echoed those exact same sentiments, it's kind of baffling to me that, you know, you know that this thing is damaging, but there's some sort of unconscious benefit to something that you don't want. Yeah.

or something that you say you don't want. Like, talk to me about that. Like, how is it that even though we basically know that this is something we don't want, like there has to be some benefit behind it, whether it's smoking, drinking, whatever it is.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Mm-hmm.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's always I mean, and often you can just take that benefit down to survival. But the brain is, is you know, we grow up and we absorb all of this information constantly. And there's a part of the brain that is looking for patterns all the time. You know, this is consistently working. It's a thing I'm going to do. This is consistently not working. It's a thing I'm not going to do. Now, if we learn that something is going to keep us safe, or if we learn that something makes us feel more attractive, or if we learn that something makes us feel

Srini rao:

Mm-hmm.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

better about ourselves or gives us a dopamine hit or whatever, the brain will store that information away and then use it to determine future actions. Now, a lot of the times, the self-sabotage that we end up hating as adults and wondering why on earth we do it, these can be extremely old patterns learned a very long time ago when we were too young, when we were young enough that the behaviour that we've learnt would have been effective at the time.

For example, let's say that you're an adult with a fear of spiders and you kind of, like in the UK, it's not too bad to be afraid of spiders because there aren't that many around. But most people with a fear of spiders will find that the thing that they hate about it the most is the humiliation of seeing a spider or even thinking they've seen a spider in public and screaming and sort of running for the nearest adult to climb up like a...

like a tree. And that's because when they were very young, crying for help and getting picked up by mommy or daddy would have been the thing that genuinely would have helped with this fear that they had. And because it's such an intense fear, that behavior can get locked in and it can continue to repeat. We repeat it slightly differently as an adult, but we're basically doing the same thing.

Any self-sabotage, we are essentially just repeating old, outdated coping mechanisms that at some point have felt helpful, or maybe even were helpful, but no longer are, but our brain is still running basically an outdated computer program. And until we get to update that program, we will not be able to change the behavior, but because it's unconscious, it feels like it's out of reach.

Srini rao:

So we'll talk in a second about how to update the program, but there's something I want to talk about that you say in the book. And this is a world in which we're taught to base our sense of worth largely on what we achieve. As a result, fear of failure has grown into kind of a psychological epidemic. I mean, I can tell you coming from an Indian family, there's no question in my mind that to a degree, there's almost an underlying sense that our worth was largely based on what we achieved. You know, it was kind of a given that we would get straight A's, nobody celebrated that.

get into good colleges. It was just like, to this day, I still remember the day I got into Berkeley, I was like, Oh, I got into Berkeley, like, now I see these kids on YouTube videos. And like, when they don't get in, they look like, you know, their whole world has just fallen apart. And when they do get in, like the reaction of like, Wow, I sure as hell didn't have that response when I got it.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Mm. I mean, of course, I mean, the conditioning that we are all under is constantly, there's this push and pull. And I don't know if any of us can really understand where the influence of the conditioning stops and when and where our genuine desires and inclinations start. And I guess the journey of self-awareness is, of developing self-awareness is about actually working out where that line is.

I don't know of a brilliant way of describing how to do it. I think it just the truth tends to come out in the wash, but it takes quite a long time to get round to it through trial and error. I mean, that's absolutely the case. And it goes further than that. Horribly, sort of sexist tropes around, as a woman, it's absolutely a part of my reality that my worth.

will feel connected in some way to my appearance, no matter how much I know that should not be true. It still is a thing that I can recognise is having its influence on me. And I think a lot of the time we can't hope to override or overcome these very ingrained conditioned, these conditioned parts of being human in the modern society. And so what we have to do is to try to just build our awareness of them to a point where we can understand when

they are likely to be having an effect on us, just like you said before, having the awareness to say, oh, hang on a minute, maybe that's my conditioning talking rather than myself. And to in those moments be able to have the presence of mind to ask ourselves the right questions to potentially break the pattern. And I think that we can't expect to overcome those things entirely, they're just going to be wired in.

Srini rao:

Well, let's talk specifically about two things. One is sort of what you called rewriting the programming and talk about that in terms of the context of both beliefs and emotions. Cause you talk about the fact that we have this sort of reality filter. And there's no question in my mind that we see the world through a filter of our own beliefs, our own biases, and some of those biases, even if we're aware of them, are absolutely ludicrous and ridiculous. Like I, for example, have had this same conversation with enough psychologists on the podcast where I'm like, you know, women with small,

dogs are a pain in the ass based on my three data points of women with small dogs, which I know has no basis in objective reality has like I'm aware of this. Like I'm completely aware of it. I've dissected it with experts like yourself, psychologists and economists. And you know what? Every time I see a girl on a small dot with small dog on a dating app, I swipe left. Still despite being completely aware of it and knowing that is the most ludicrous idea ever.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I'm sorry.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Yeah.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

That's the best example of that I think I've ever heard. I mean, yeah, of course we're all doing that. But the thing is, I don't, here's, this is something that drives me mad. If you type into Google, people don't, and you see what it suggested endings for that sentence are, the number one thing is change. Like the world wants us to believe that we can't change. And we fully believe that we can't change. And people always nod sagely when somebody reverts into a bad habit and say, well, people don't change. But of course we fucking change.

We're changing constantly. If we didn't change, all of us would still be running around in our Spideyman's jumpsuits and believing in Father Christmas. We change all the time. The question is, can we change the things that we hate later on in life? And I think the answer is, of course, yes, it's not always easy. But in order to do it, we have to first be, the first and perhaps hardest step is to fully own the issue.

So we have a tendency when we are doing something that we don't like, and it is an attempt at self preservation, to distance ourselves from the behavior or the emotion or whatever it is. And so we try to push the part of ourselves that is doing the thing away. And unfortunately, the more we do this, the bigger the problem becomes. Eckhart Tolle very famously said, what we resist persists. I think that quote is usually attributed to Jung.

couldn't find any proof that he actually said it, but it does certainly match his teachings. Anyway, the idea is that when we have a part of the personality that is doing a thing that we don't like, for example, overeating, feeling anxious, getting angry, whatever it is that we don't believe that we are allowed to own fully, we try to push the thing away, but we can't push a part of the personality away. It's like trying to cut off a part of, if you sever a limb, you are likely to experience phantom limb pain.

most amputees do. And it's the same with this, you cannot push a part of the personality away. If you do, it's only going to shout louder, because it is a part of your makeup. And the thing for me that really made a difference was that I realized that especially all of my fighting and everything that I was doing to try and prove that I wasn't weak, that I wasn't a failure, was making my fear of weakness and failure bigger and bigger. And actually the bigger the

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

bigger my wins became, the more I achieved, the bigger the monster was that chased behind me. It just felt even more terrifying that somebody was gonna someday work out that I was actually a pathetic loser. And so what I realized through doing all of that was that I needed to flip my relationship with that part of the personality. So in my books called The Mind Monster Solution, I call that part a monster because it felt that way at the beginning.

But the ultimate aim is not to sort of disempower this monster. People think they want to do that when they come into therapy. They say, I've got this problem and I just want to get rid of it. And if you talk to them about the part of the personality that creates that problem, or even if you get them to try and visualize that part, they'll often tell you that it looks like a disgusting blob of slime or a little devil or a disgusting gremlin. They dissociate with this part as much as possible in an attempt to try and push it away, which is causing the problem.

So the question is how do we get to a place where we can start to invite that part back in? And the most important thing to understand on that journey is that this part is not trying to hurt you. Is it this, as we said before, this part has a positive intention. It was for whatever reason, because of whatever experience this part of you fully believes that what it is doing is gonna keep you safe in some way. So procrastination is an easy example of this. We procrastinate, which ends up meaning that we don't get our work done.

Why are we procrastinating? Often because the work is challenging and we don't like the feeling that we can't do it. So the self-sabotage ends up having the opposite effect to what's intended, because the self-sabotage is there to try and keep us safe from the feeling that we are a failure, but by not doing the work, we end up becoming a failure. And that is tends to be what happens with all of the self-sabotages. You know, we have an intention behind them that says one thing, and then because the behavior is outdated, it tends to bring about actually the opposite of what we wanted in the first place.

Srini rao:

Yeah.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

But we need to know how to bring this part back. Acceptance of its positive intention is step one. And step two is understanding the resources, skills and abilities that part of the personality actually has to offer. Now this was mind blowing for me when I first did it, that I, this horrible part of me that was afraid, and I thought it was just a weakness, and I needed to get rid of that weakness. But when I realized by re-accepting it, was that this part of me was also where

Well, first and foremost, all of my ability to operate from a place of self-compassion was in that part. And this part was trying to, my attempt was to keep myself safe by being afraid, therefore, not really fighting, even manifesting symptoms of illness so that I wouldn't fight. This was what my body was trying to do to me to keep me safe. So bringing that part back on site got me back in touch with my ability to activate self-kindness. But also it was where...

My ability to connect with people resided. It was where my creativity resided. And all of that stuff, I had been chronically blocking out, pushing out into the cold along with my monster, along with my fear on this quest to try and sever that part of my personality and become this fearless, steel warrior woman that I thought I needed to be. And I was so much stronger, so much better off with that part back on the team.

Srini rao:

Yeah. Well, talk to me about these concepts of the drama triangle victimhood and the role of responsibility as it relates to everything you just said.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

So drama triangle is one of my favorite things. I'm gonna try and make this concise. It's not easy to do so. The drama triangle is, it comes from transactional analysis. It's a game, it's a ubiquitous game. We all play this game. And we play it in any kind of conflicted or codependent relationship. And that is with other people. And it's also with things. For me, I did this with fighting. I'll get to that in a bit. So on the drama triangle, there are three roles. The persecutor, the rescuer and the victim. And when we are in some kind of difficult relationship, we basically step.

onto the drama triangle through one of these roles, and we'll usually have a preferred role. So people who are the kind of the bullies of this world, the people you can see are trying to overpower other people to make themselves feel better, they will enter into drama through the persecutor corner. They will be critical, domineering, demanding, and they are trying to make themselves feel okay by pushing somebody else down below them. That's their unconscious motivation.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

but is actually doing something quite similar. So the rescuer jumps onto the drama triangle as the savior, the selfless hero who is here to save the day. So they look like the good guy, but actually because they take a sense of self-worth out of being the savior, out of helping the victim in the scenario, they also need the victim to stay in victim because otherwise they wouldn't have anyone to save. So while their rescuing looks helpful, it usually is disempowering in the long run.

So the victim and the Rescuer operate from one up positions. The victim, of course, sorry, the rescuer and persecutor one up positions. The victim, of course, is in the one down position, operates from a place of poor me, believes that they can't, you know, that we can't overcome our own problems, that we need somebody else to come along and offer the quick fix, as we said before, that's of course where we look for rescuers. And also when we're in victim, we will look for persecutors because they justify our enduring sense of powerlessness. And once we are into...

drama triangle situation. We don't stay in our original starting role. What always happens is we cycle through all of these roles, usually repeatedly, and no matter what happens we always wind up down in victim. We always wind up feeling shameful and powerless and not good enough. And the reason for that is really all three of these roles are a different flavor of victimhood.

So the persecutor will actually readily identify with the victim because to them the world is a big bad place and they are perfectly justified in their bullying behaviors rescuer would never identify with victim because their identity is around totally the opposite end of the spectrum. But they are a victim of their own sense of duty and responsibility. They will never put their own needs first. And so they always end up feeling resentful of the people they're helping and victimized by the situation because they aren't ever looking after themselves. And the victim, of course, feels like a victim because they don't believe that they can be anything else. So we do this with our partners. We do this with our family.

all the time we play these little games. I think Yes But is the game of Drama Triangle that people most often recognise. Yes But is a game that gets played between victim and rescuer. And it goes like this. The victim says something like, God, I hate myself, I'm so fat and ugly. I'll never be able to like myself until I lose weight. So I've chosen to be a victim of fitness or a certain level of fitness, their body. And the rescuer will, seeing an opportunity to jump in and save the day will say something like.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Great, well, come for runs with me in the morning. That'll shift a few kilos in no time. And the victim will say, yes, but I can't because I've got bad knees. So the rescue will say, okay, well, let's go to yoga then. Ah, yes, but I can't because I've got a bad back. The victim, the rescue will say, well, why don't we go swimming? That's low impact. Ah, yes, but the chlorine makes my eyes go red. And anyway, it takes too long to get in and out of the pool. Yes, but, yes, but, yes, but, yes, but. When we want to prove that we are a victim and we all want to prove we're a victim in certain situations,because that means that it isn't our fault to release, that's how it feels.

There is a yes but for absolutely everything. There's only so many yes buts a rescuer can take before they throw their hands up in the air and say, you know what, solve your own problem, which signals their move over into persecution because they withdraw their help, which makes them feel guilty and puts them down into victim. And then they jump at the next opportunity to jump in as a rescuer again. And so the thing just goes on and on and on. And Drama Triangle is so ingrained in the way we relate to each other and the way that we actually operate in the world that we can't see this happening.

And we will only see the three options of being the persecutor, rescuer or victim in conflicted situations. We don't see that there's another option. Now the beautifully simple, but devilishly difficult thing to actually action that comes out of drama triangle is that the way you get off drama triangle is by being totally honest and taking 100% responsibility for the meeting of your own needs. Drama triangle is actually just a covert, manipulative, honestly, way of us trying to get our needs met without having to ever actually ask for them to be met.

So the victim is roping in a rescuer into their relationship because they know that rescuer needs to feel like they have someone to save. Unconsciously they're saying, if you need to save me, you won't leave me. So they do drama triangle rather than risk an honest, open relationship with an equal human being. The rescuer is doing the same thing. If you need me to save you, you can't leave me. They are opting for a drama triangle relationship over and over equal, honest relationship with an equal human being.

So drama triangle is a hugely important thing to be able to understand and to be able to recognize when it's happening so that we can choose the path of honesty and responsibility, which just will improve absolutely every area of our life if we take that opportunity. And for me with fighting, I was allowing boxing for me and kickboxing when I was kickboxing was...

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

my both my rescuer and my persecutor. It came along with this, you know, offering this sparkling glory that I believed I needed to pull me out of my victimhood and turn me into somebody of worth. But the thing about rescuers is that the rescuer absolutely always becomes the persecutor with time and for me that meant that boxing stopped offering this glory and instead started to break me down, you know, literally made me.

ill literally weakened me both physically and mentally.

So in order to step out of my codependent drama triangle relationship with fighting, I had to very slowly, man I was slow at this, I had to get to the point where I was actually able to first of all honestly admit that I was playing the victim, that I had to admit that it was convenient for me to be chronically ill because it meant that if I did lose I had an excuse to do so.

I had to make these were really hard things to admit. And after admitting those things, I had to take full responsibility for all of it. You know, I started to learn how to state my boundaries with my coaches, to stop mid-session if I could feel that I was going too far for my body, to pull out of some fights sometimes, and also to go forward with fights when I could feel this kind of...

oh so convenient sore throat coming out of nowhere. And I started to recognize that this was going to happen every fight because there was a part of me, a part in my body that was prepared to make me feel ill, even when I wasn't because it was the most likely thing to get me to stop. Ironically, of course, it never did make me stop. I never ever quit on a fight for being ill apart from one time when I was properly in bed with a pneumonia.

So I was going through all of this, making myself ill in the lead up to a fight, feeling awful about the fight and never actually, it didn't ever even have its intended sort of safety effect anyway.

Srini rao:

So, you know, I'll tell you that probably my favorite line in the book and something I'm like, wow, this could either be a tattoo or title of an entire book was this question of is there anything I can do about this right now?

Like, so I'll tell you a story. You know, I interviewed Tim Ferriss a while back and I was asking him, I was like, you know, you've interviewed all these really rich and successful people, like what is it about them? And he said that they don't get rattled by very much. That was like one of the big things. And he told this story about Matt Mullenweg, which always stayed with me, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress. He said they were somewhere in Thailand or somewhere in Southeast Asia playing pool.

And somebody had put out a tweet saying, you know, it looks like WordPress is really slow and somebody calls and it's like, you know, one of our data centers is down. And, you know, Matt Nolan like tells the person he's talking to on the phone, yeah, okay, just tell them we're working on it. And Tim Ferriss like just looked at him stunned. He's like, isn't that a big fucking deal? He's like, yeah, but there's nothing I can do about it right now. Yeah, and he was like, and this is something you'll find as a common.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Hmm

Yeah.

Srini rao:

response with people who have amassed fortunes like even Ryan Holiday. I think he said this in his book. It's like You know part of what made Rockefeller. So rich was the fact that while everybody was losing their shit. He kept his cool

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wonder what comes first. I mean, I think it's probably a two-way relationship, this understanding that there's no point in worrying about something that you can't change, or the, you know, the sort of sense of solidity of self that comes with that. But they definitely come together. And I wonder, sometimes I think that people, some people just are that solid, that understanding is easy for them. And other people have had to practice that understanding in order to get to a place of that solidity.

Srini rao:

Mm-hmm.

Srini rao:

Yeah.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

But it's such a huge thing. It's such a huge thing. I mean, 95% of the things we're worrying about are completely outside of our control. So why are we, I mean, it is just the most basic form of self-sabotage. Why are we making our day awful because the government are a bunch of bastards when there's nothing we can do about it? Whoa.

Srini rao:

Totally.

Srini rao:

Mm-hmm.

Srini rao:

Well, you know, I'll tell you, I noticed that my, like with age, my response to situations has changed like this. So, you know, I'll give you a stupid example. So a couple of years, this was like, I think the second year I blogged, a post Go viral, and you know, we're hosting with GoDaddy. And so the site went down and I was like,

I'm like, this is the end of the world. It was like the most stressful day. Then sometime, I think maybe six, eight months ago, like we were having problems with our LMS system. Like half the students in my course couldn't access it. It was like, these are people who paid me money. And my response to that was, I'm working on it. Give us a day. Like we're aware that it's a problem, we're working on it. And I remember I hired a WordPress developer, site went down and he was like, you're not freaking out. I was like, dude.

I paid you to do a job, you said you're doing it. I'm like, I can't do anything about it. It's not gonna make a difference right now. But I noticed that the sort of response to the situation was disproportionate to the situation when I was younger. And I've learned to kind of regulate, to have a more proportionate response to certain situations.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Yeah.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

It's so freeing, isn't it? I mean, it's so freeing. But for me, which you want one of the biggest, the biggest, it comes off the back of that. The question is, is there anything I can do about this right now, by the way, has two answers. What, because sometimes the answer is actually yes. And if the answer is yes, there is something you can actually do about this and you can do it right now, then you just do it. That's one of the beautiful things about that question is it gets you to identify when there is something you can do. Are you lying in bed at night worrying about an email you didn't send? Is it stopping you from getting to sleep for like an hour?

Srini rao:

Yeah, it really is.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

then send the damn email. You know, what's the point in thinking, well, it's not an appropriate time to send it, or at least send it so you can send it tomorrow. Whatever you need to do, do the thing you can do right now. Most of the time you can't do anything, and that's when you get to that place where you stop worrying about it. Sometimes that question isn't enough. I say that with a huge pinch of salt, because actually most of the time, that question on its own isn't quite enough, and we need other things to help us get to the place where we genuinely can just say, all right, well, I won't worry about it.

And for me, one of those big things was writing the stuff down. So I, I learned that my brain, well, the thing, I mean, this is true of everybody, but thinking is disorganized. And when we have something that we are concerned about, we try to think through it in an attempt to organize it because thinking is inherently disorganized. It doesn't work. So the thoughts just keep going around and around and around and around and around indefinitely, just driving us mad. But language, the whole.

purpose of language is it's there to organize and to analyze and to find meaning. So if you actually put your thoughts into language and you can do this by talking it through with somebody or you can do it by writing it down, your brain automatically attempts to fit a narrative around your thinking and organize it in a way. And also I think the act of writing it down on a piece of paper kind of makes your brain think this is safe. It's not going to get lost.

I don't need to keep this top of mind. It's not gonna let me look this written down. And I have this amazing situation once where I got stuck in a door frame, shoulder to shoulder. Don't ask me how this happened. Was with a boss that I really didn't like. So, and he'd, we were getting into his office and somehow we walked through the door at exactly the same time and shoulder to shoulder, we got wedged for about, I don't know, probably about 10 seconds, felt like an eternity because it was this person I didn't like.

And I was studying at the time and after this happened, I went home and I started trying to study for an exam and I couldn't do it. I was getting, you know, reading a paragraph and then I would be thinking about the door wedge situation and then I would read a paragraph again and I was back in the bloody door until I remembered the write it down technique. I just got up and I wrote it down. I wrote down what was going through my mind, you know, why it was pointless. I just kind of reorganized my thinking about it and then I screwed up the piece of paper and I threw it in the bin.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

And I went back to studying and it was hours before I even remembered that I had a problem with focus because I just got into it. Oh, my God, that's amazing. And I still do that to this day. That is my number one technique. If anything is I can't get anything off my mind. I just I sit up, I write it down, I throw the piece of paper away. It's amazing.

Srini rao:

Heheheheheheh!

Srini rao:

Well, you know, I think the thing that I realized, you know, having spent so much time writing, was one of the beauties of writing things down is that it allows you to hopefully have a more objective view on things. You know, because like, when it's swirling around in your head, like the stories tend to basically cover up the facts is what I tend to find.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

Yes, this is one of the main things we wanted to achieve with Betwixt. Betwixt is the app I'm currently making. It's a text-based adventure game, narrative adventure game that helps people reduce stress and anxiety by immersing themselves in this metaphorical journey through a magical world that responds to their thoughts and feelings. And it gives you that place of objectivity. It even gives you that, I mean, it's a safer move of this fantasy world. We have found.

really allows people to talk about the things that they struggle with in a different way that feels safe because it's at this distance, or objective because they're very often even asked to step into the position of other people that look about themselves through these different eyes, or just the fact that they're playing the game, they are seeing themselves from a different angle because they're imagining themselves as the protagonist of this game going through this weird frozen land that turns into this sort of magical place.

this idea of self distancing and there's some brilliant research on that by Ethan Cross. He recently wrote a book called Chatter. Did you? Amazing. We love his work. I mean, we'd read basically all of the literature he'd put out on self distancing before he published his book. So I thought, really smug when that came out and did well, because it's so simple and so, so powerful. And the bitwix is essentially an exercise in self distancing for people anyway.

Srini rao:

We've had him as a guest. Yep, we've had him. Yeah.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

But that's, you're right, that's what writing also does. It's entirely possible to write without self distancing, by the way, and they found, because expressive writing is something that's been known for a long time to, in the right circumstances, rival the therapeutic effects of face-to-face therapy with the human being, which is amazing. Just people have shown the same improvements after just doing four 20-minutes bits of writing about something they feel ashamed of or about trauma. But not everybody.

And interestingly, like ongoing research has found that there is a difference between the way people tend to write when they do this expressive writing stuff about past pain. And it very much determines whether or not the thing's going to be effective for you or not. If you write from an immersed place, if you write in a way that just allows you to sort of relive the experience from your same perspective again. Now, there was a time when we believed that this would be

bring about catharsis and would be a healthy thing. But no, this actually can make anxiety worse. It can make your sense of victimhood and your trauma symptoms worse. The people who were doing expressive writing from a distance place, however, who automatically or by instruction created this sense of distance between themselves and whatever it was they were remembering, they were the ones who were getting the benefits. So if we are gonna do journaling, that's a really important thing to remember is that we need to.

use self-distancing as part of it. And you can do that very simply by writing about yourself in the second or third person. And you can do it just by imagining sort of being a fly on the wall and observing yourself in whatever situation you're writing about. But really important sort of safeguarding feature because we can quite easily just make ourselves worse by reliving.

Srini rao:

Mm-hmm.

Srini rao:

Yeah.

Srini rao:

Yeah. Well, I want to finish with two final things. You mentioned this at the very beginning of our conversation that you never had your dad come and watch you fight. And I want to finish with you kind of telling me why that is and what was the, you know, what was the key learning there?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I mean, my dad was such a sporty guy. And like I said earlier on, he was really proud of my sporting prowess because he was just this. He was into games. He was a poker player. He was an athlete. He loved that side of things. And he really wanted to come and see me fight and would always ask. And I would constantly put him off because of course I didn't want him to come until I felt like I was good enough. Like I didn't want him to come until I knew that I could get in there and be brilliant.

because if my dad was going to watch me, I needed to ace it. But he died unexpectedly of a heart attack before that could ever happen. And it is one of the few really big regrets that I have that I didn't allow him to do that. And there was a great irony in all of this. And that's that I realized after this journey of recovery that the whole time that I was driving myself into the ground with my overtraining and my poor perspective on fighting.

I was operating from a faulty bit of logic. I thought, and I think most, a lot of people can fall into this trap because of the way we're conditioned. I thought that if I achieved enough success, I would turn myself into somebody that was worthy of the connection of others.

And what I realized when I had gone through all of this and when I had that moment standing in the ring and feeling that surge of alien emotion because I was able to own the victory, all of that stuff, what I realized after that, and in that moment, I'm really wishing my dad had been there as well. What I realized then was that it was actually only by being in connection with other people that I was ever able to even register the feeling of victory. Like when I was pushing people away and when I was, and my shame was doing that.

you know, by trying to talk myself into a version of me that I thought was more palatable, more respectable or whatever it was. This was meaning that I wasn't connecting to people properly because I was not being my authentic self. And therefore I wasn't having a relationship with anybody. People were having a relationship with some warped version of me. By doing that, I was chasing after something that I would never ever be able to experience, this sense of worth and victory and satisfaction, because I really needed to be.

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

in connection with other people in order to register those feelings. So it really flipped. I think that was the biggest and most important learning to come out of my whole journey. And actually, that just reminds me that something I haven't said that I always think is kind of important. My books called the mind monster solution, but people don't end up with a monster, they end up with mentors. And

I didn't put this in the book because my editor told me not to. And I really wish that I had fought back on it. But the way I came up with the idea of mentors, and it was that what I was one day reading my art school thesis while I was writing my book and I picked it up because I hadn't. I was tidying up. I was probably procrastinating. I picked it up thinking, I'm going to read this and I'm going to feel really smug about how much I've improved as a writer and a communicator. But I started reading it and it was really good. And I was like.

Srini rao:

Hehehehe

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I don't even know what half these words mean anymore, because it was so academic, and I was sort of out of that space. I was like, Jesus Christ, I've not got smarter. I must be punch-drunk. Like, what the hell is going on? Who is this person? And I had a real crisis, and then caught myself in the middle of this crisis. This is a monster moment, calm down. So I went in to make myself a cup of tea, because that's how English people get calm. And as the kettle was boiling, in that moment, I had been...

But like, this was a point towards the end of the book, and I hadn't worked out yet how I was going to stop calling the monster a monster. I hadn't realized how it was going to happen in the book yet. And as the kettle was boiling on that day, I realized for some reason that the word monster is an anagram of the word mentors, and that this was the perfect way to flip the script. Like, if you just look at the word monster differently, you realize that it spells this.

Totally opposite thing, and it's totally true. We don't have one big nasty monster following us around. We have the opportunity, a sequence of opportunities to learn things. And if we actually decide to learn from those experiences, we will grow. Now I'm not of that annoyingly glib sort of toxic positivity space that anything that happens to you happens for a reason or that any experience can be a good one if you choose to see it that way. I don't believe that, and I don't think it's responsible to say that sort of thing. But I do believe.

that we have a responsibility to ourselves to look for the meaning even in the darkest of experiences because if we don't find that, then those experiences can claim us indefinitely.

Srini rao:

Wow, amazing. Well, I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

I thought a lot about this and I don't have a tiny answer apart from to say that it's about authenticity. I had an idea for how I was going to answer this question and it's gone out of my mind. It's about being able to drop down into who you actually are and be okay with what you find there and I think that all of us are on that quest and some people somehow manage to get there really quite early without trying and a lot of people have to spend

decades thinking about it to even come close to understanding what it means to be themselves. I'm in that latter category. It took me a long time to get there. I hopefully find that I am eventually making some headway, but that's what you have to do, to be able to stop trying to fulfill other people's targets and do what the hell you want to do instead.

Srini rao:

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book and everything else?

Hazel Gale - Betwixt:

The book can be found in various places. I mean, Amazon is the usual place. It's called the Mind Monster Solution. You can find me mainly now. I'm working full-time on Betwixt, so my stuff is there. It's at Betwixt. The website is betwixt.life. You can find Betwixt on the iOS app store and Google Play. Just search for Betwixt. And you can find us on TikTok and Instagram at betwixt.app. That's basically it.

Srini rao:

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Fantastic.

Hazel Gale | Overcoming Mental Chatter and Focusing on What Matters

Candid Conversations: Elevate Your Thinking with Masters of Their Craft