 Good mental health. I'm your host Matt Kelly. I'm pleased to be joined as always by my co-host, our behavior expert, and Solutions Focus Life Coach out of Woodstock, Vermont. Dr. Neil Maranello. Neil, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome. My pleasure also, Matt. The show course is Good Mental Health. Our objective here is for listeners to take what they can and what they want from each of these podcast series shows in the series that we are doing. The series is based on tweets that Dr. Neil Maranello himself has published on his Twitter feed. You can follow him directly at coach Dr. Neil. Our topic for this week is no one is better than anyone else. And Neil, I have to tell you as the curator of the topics here, you know, we're basically kind of doing what I like to consider the 12 tweets for life based on Dr. Neil, if you will. So these are sort of our foundational ones. Before we move into it, much more deeper as the series progresses. And certainly, as I have the opportunity to curate and decide what each topic we're going to speak about, I've had an opportunity to really sit with this and find my response to it in different levels. And certainly on an intellectual level, I can understand it. And on an emotional level, you know, as my soul would speak. But I still find that I'm having some difficulty with it. And I think I found where that that is originating in. And that is in my ego, or the ego, the egoic mind, as you and I have spoken about before, as I refer to it, that it wants to basically think I am less than everybody else. Well, a lot of people want to think they're less than and a lot of people want to think they're more than the truth. As I see it is that that in each of us is a specialist in one or more areas. I don't consider myself to be better than anyone else, except in one or two areas. I'm pretty good at talking to people. I'm pretty good at helping people change for the better. If you ask me to figure out how to get a chair through a door, I'm an idiot. I literally can't operate as a mechanical engineer in any sense. If I'm an engineer of any kind, I'm a thought engineer. But the bottom line on it is that no matter what your particular area of specialty is, each person does have an area of specialty. And it doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how powerful you are, it doesn't matter how rich you are. Those are ways that people compare themselves to other people. But the real comparison that matters is comparing to yourself. Each of us can be better than we are. And if I'm good at anything, it's helping people to figure out how they can be better than they are right now. But I have been fooled by people who were on an intelligence test would be categorized as mentally challenged. I have been conned. I remember one time I trained as a clinical psychologist and the tool of the psychologist is the test. The tool of the psychiatrist is the medicine. And unfortunately, social workers and coaches are stuck with just having to talk to people. The reality is that in one way or another, I either administered or overseen probably over a thousand IQ tests and other types of tests that I've given or other psychologists have given. At the same time, I remember interviewing a teenage boy talking to him for about 15 minutes. And before I administered the IQ test, the Wexler intelligence scale revised to him. If I had been asked what do you think his IQ is, I would have said about average. And his IQ turned out to be 62. And as I thought about it afterwards, I realized that he had really practiced how to look cool, how to look like a teenager, how to sneer like a teenager, how to act as if he was dismissing everything that I said, when in fact he wasn't understanding anything that I said. I got conned by someone who was by any intelligence test in the bottom 1%. Wow. Well, you know, as I keep in mind again, the the topic no one is better than anyone else. One of the things that kept coming to mind for me was two of our richest men, if you will, in the American culture today, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, both going through the breakdown in their primary relationship with their spouses and going through divorces. So it doesn't matter how much money you make, you know, a breakdown in a primary relationship transcends all of us. So that was one of the things that just kept coming up to me that here our society certainly is idolizing these rich people. And yet, they're no better than the average person at a human relationship. Well, when I moved to Woodstock, Vermont, I was scared. My specialty was always working with poor people. Woodstock, Vermont has one of the largest percentages of multimillionaires of any small town. There's only 4,000 people in this town. At the same time, a huge percentage of them are multimillionaires. This is where Lawrence Rockefeller set up stakes. And one of the things that frightened me was I didn't know that I knew how to work with rich people and I had never been rich. When I got here, I realized something that I hadn't even considered, which is that rich people are just like the rest of us, only they don't have the excuse the rest of us have. I remember coming into town and seeing the person that I assumed must be the village idiot because I could see his overall legs sticking out of a trash bin as he was digging into it. And it turned out he was the richest man in town. His name was Frank Tegel. He was very much of a conservationist and a recycled person. At the same time, and he had a three-page portfolio, one line of which was 20,000 shares of Exxon. At the same time, Frank was just a very normal guy in most respects. I remember him walking out of the Woodstock Inn one time, reaching into his pocket, pulling out a used piece of soap and saying, can you believe it, Neil? I can get six showers out of this soap. They were going to throw it out. The man was extraordinary in many respects, but he had no real sense of reality. At one point, his lawyer was my best friend at the time, Gary Brown, and Gary called me up one time and said, Neil, tell me what to do. Frank decided that it would make sense for him to play a joke on a friend of his who got picked up in a no-nuke rally. And the friend had been put in jail. And Frank thought it'd be a really great joke to send him a cake with a file on it. And it was that sort of unreal reality that some rich people have. Dealing with people who have money, what you begin to realize is that rules get set up about how to use the money. And those rules get set up by people whose specialty is supposed to be managing money. So sometimes it's bankers, sometimes it's financial managers. But those rules vary, and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not. So being rich by itself doesn't really make a huge amount of difference in how you can manage yourself emotionally, manage your relationships, your relationships to work. Money doesn't have much to do with it. Relationships to work. Four things have to be happening. Both people have to want it to work. The good times have to outweigh the bad times, and on that one, one really bad time can outweigh a lot, maybe even all the good times. Each person has to feel like they have a good deal. Each person has to feel like the other is doing the best they can. Those are all attitude things. Those are all state of mind things. Nothing to do with money. Going back to our subject, no one is better than anybody else. It seems that we're in a paradigm in our society that seems to value a Bill Gates or a Elon Musk, as an example, more so than others. And actually, to come at it, even with animosity, there was, Elon Musk just appeared on Saturday Night Live, and there was some backlash that someone worth so much money should be involved in the production or something like that. And so, again, I find it interesting as to the animosity that perhaps some people might feel against those who are more successful or who have been luckier than they have, and how it's displayed in terms of money or other realms that we may say or we may value more in our society. And speaking to myself, going back to, again, my original premise, that, again, is the tool of the ego to compare myself against someone and to see where I fall short as a way to, A, either spur me on to achieve more, or as a manipulative tool of the ego to try to keep me down. Yeah, I think that there are all kinds of ways that people use to think themselves into being inferior. And there are ways people use to think themselves into being superior. The idea that money is the way of determining whether you're better than someone else or worse than someone else, the reality is that whether it's money, whether it's power, whether it's anything else, nobody gets out of life alive. Nobody gets to take it with them. And those people who believe that money is anything other than a tool to get you from one situation to another are delusional. The reality is that you need a certain amount in order to survive. Beyond that, you're playing games with a, you know, he who dies with the most toys wins. And it doesn't matter. The quality of life is what it's about. And knowing you're growing, knowing you have your act more together now than you did a month ago and knowing you'll have your act more together a month from now than you do now. And it has nothing to do with how much money you have in your pocket unless you're homeless, unless you're really hurt. And those people need help and they need help from people who are less hurting. And this, you know, I love our progression of our series of conversations here because, you know, we started with I'm the most important person in the world to me and yet here we come back around to no one is more important or no one is better than anybody else. So that's a rather interesting paradigm at the same time that here we are wrestling with that. I am the most important person and yet no one is better than anyone else. I don't see much contradiction there. You know, I think since I'm the most important person in the world to me, I can improve myself. And if I'm good at anything, it's helping people to figure out how they can be better. But the bottom line on it is so what? You know, I'm good at it and something that you may not be that good at. I mean, look at this relationship, you and me at this point. I have no idea. Before this started, you were showing me how to use this computer and how to set up the microphone. I don't know anything about that. You know, I'm just good at talking to you. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting because I feel it comes back around to the shame issue again, that if, you know, if I goes back to, you know, what I was saying earlier that, you know, it's the egoic mind in me that makes me want to compare myself to someone. And usually the ego wants to then try to keep me down by bringing up shame, which again is a topic that we talked about here in our last episode and are probably our last two episodes. So I'm enjoying the connection, if you will, of these topics. And again, believing that it's the foundation, as we say, to good mental health to try to significant, which we've also talked about this, this concept, no one is better than anyone else. Yeah. And I think that there are a variety of ways in which shame fits in. If we just look at the issue of bullying, for example, that's, you know, the name of the game is, I'm better than you because I'm stronger than you because I can make you say, Uncle, when the reality is that power is one of the worst ways of establishing superiority. The best way has more to do with love has more to do with wanting what's best for that person, even if it's not what's best for you. My definition of love. So when you get hung up in the negative side of it and the shame thing and in the bullying thing and in the, oh, I let my mother down because she didn't, because she gave me the bottle instead of changing my diaper. It's all this, what you've referred to as the ego thing. It's basically the ego is forming based on the reactions of other people and the reactions of other people are basically things that you're seeing and assuming has to do with you. It may have something to do with how you behaved, but it doesn't have to do with, oh, I'm wrong because this person is bigger, who's bigger and stronger and who I depend on has an expression on their face that doesn't give me what I need. Well, and to bring that back around again with that we all live in our own reality, which was our last topic of discussion in that if somebody doesn't come to my way of thinking they're either right or wrong. So if they don't come to my reality, they're either right or wrong and then that can perpetuate a sense of superiority of I am better than that person or they are lesser than me and I think we see this a lot in our current society of people on both sides of the political spectrum looking at the other and saying, I'm right, you're wrong, therefore I'm better than you are. And the bottom line on that one is that if I'm better than most people at one thing it's getting inside other people's heads. If I can't get inside your head you're better than I am. My job is to understand how you think and if whatever skill set I've developed over the last 60 years I don't understand how you think and I need to go to work here and I'm not doing my job right. So the reality is that when you say I'm right or wrong what you're really doing is avoiding the fact that you're not inside the other person's head. You're not thinking the way they think. You're not actually understanding that in their minds they're right and you have to really understand how the minds work. And they say minds because as we've talked about before there are at least two. There's the conscious and the subconscious. Okay, right. But would you, you know, we're going to digress here a little bit. I would almost say that there are three and we've just touched on it. The third is the egoic mind. You know, yeah, if they're talking about the way in which we think about ourselves, some call it the announcer inside our heads. You know, some people walk around, you know, really believing that and thinking to themselves, describing themselves and what they're doing and describing other people and what they're doing as if it's all objective outside of themselves. The truth is that we all have a way of thinking. And I see that way of thinking as being very similar to what you're describing as the egoic mind. That particular way of thinking is in my mind something that can be changed. And it can be changed, especially if I understand how you're thinking. If I understand how you're thinking, then I'm there. And I can say something that gives you a way of looking at your thinking that changes it. And then you whether you want to change it or not. I love actually what you've just said for the simple reason that, you know, I'm up the belief that, you know, the history of man, if you would say, is really the history of the egoic mind. And the egoic mind is bent on you not seeing the other point of view, you know, and getting offended over words, let's say. And then, of course, that is, you know, perpetuated war and so on and so forth. And, you know, the subjugation of humans and the human spirit. And that's the egoic mind. But what you've just said is I think the crux here is being able to step into the other person's point of view, and adopt it as your own and advocate for it as your own. Because that's, that's the only place that it seems like empathy can really spring from. Yes, yes. I think if you want to go back to, I'm a reductionist, as I've said before, if you want to go back to the basics here, it's Descartes. You know, I think therefore I am. So understanding how you think is what allows me to be able to change that or to give you another way of thinking that might change it. And if I can't understand the way you think, I'm not doing my job. And that's good advice for, I think, us out here in the general public as well. And it's interesting because, you know, one of the future topics of our podcast series here is another one of your famous tweets, which I just love. And that is, you know, the definition of compromise is that both of us don't get what we want. And that can only occur again, I think, based on what we've been discussing just now, with that empathy and stepping into the other shoes to hear that point of view. Yeah, flexibility instead of cancel culture. Right, there it is. We're speaking with Dr. Neil Maranello. Our series topic is Good Mental Health. It's based on his series of tweets. You can always follow him on Twitter at coach Dr. Neil. Our subject here today is no one is better than anyone else. It follows up on our other three topics that we've been speaking with that I am the most important person in the world to me. We each live in our own reality. And here again, no one is better than anyone else. Dr. Neil, do you want to offer some final thoughts on that statement and how, you know, our viewing public might be able to optimize it going forward as they go out into the world and to use it to get to good mental health? Well, I think that the way that I started to play around with this was really when I was a freshman at Harvard. And as we said before, I was very young. And if no one else knew what I knew, I was stupid. I knew there was all kinds of things I didn't understand about the world. I also was interested in this field. And so one of the first jobs I got was working in a mental hospital at Massachusetts Mental. And while I was there, of course, I was working at the lowest level as a psychiatric aid. I think I was making a dollar 10 an hour. And that was 1961. And they had a thing they, at that point, they called specialing, which is they put one person, one psychiatric aid with one particularly difficult patient. While I was there, a sophomore at Harvard was admitted as a patient. And he was very interesting to all of the psychiatrist and psychologists and other mental health professionals there, because this was the year of Freud and he had actually had sex with his mother. There were plenty of gals that had had sex with their fathers, but very few. In fact, he was the only one that they had seen who had had sex with their mother. And so all of a sudden, I, a 16 year old kid, was getting all kinds of attention because the only person that this guy would talk to was me. And the reason he would talk to me was he was a sophomore at Harvard. I was a freshman at Harvard. He was telling me things like, you know, hey, don't take this course, take that course, this guy's a good teacher, blah, blah, blah. We were playing cards a lot. Meantime, the head psychiatrist there was saying to me, we ask him this, we ask him that, you know, what was it like when he was, and I was feeling, you know, totally confused and at the same time realizing, you know, this field, this mental health field, the top people in the field are getting down on their knees to me. All of a sudden, I'm some very important person. When I know I'm stupid. I know I don't know what I'm doing. I know that the only reason this guy's talking to me is because we go to the same school. It began the concept that we're 60 years later talking about now, the idea that no one's better than anyone else. I was better than all of these psychiatrists and psychologists and all these people who had all these letters after their name. And the reason was because I could talk to somebody they couldn't talk to in a moment. And it's interesting that you bring this up because this has been going around in my head as well in preparation for our discussion in that you as a 15, 16 year old student at Harvard, one of the youngest at the time to ever enter, and the intimidation that that must have brought onto you. And in a sense, what we're talking about just now, that even in elite colleges, among the elite of the elite, there is still that feeling that one is not as good as the other. Because maybe in their class of Harvard, they're in the bottom 10% or something like that, which still would be miles in a way above any one of you or I in the general public. So that was just really interesting, again, analogy of this concept that no one is better than anyone else. And even in the elitist of schools, that's a hard concept for them to even ascribe to. Well, I believe that everybody at Harvard felt like they were faking it. Everybody felt like, Oh, my God, or all these other people around here. I know for me, this concept also got underlined by virtue of the fact that I graduated second in the class of over 300 in a public school. And the top, this was my marionette high school in my marionette New York, a suburb of the city. And the top 20 positions in the class, even though the class was 50, 50 male and female, 16 of the positions were occupied by boys, 14 of which were Jewish boys. And all of those 14 applied to Harvard. And I was the only one that got in. From my point of view, many of those guys were better than I was. At the same time, I get to Harvard, and half the class of Exeter is there, half the class of a band over is there. These are the preppies. And they had worse board scores than the other guys that I went to school with. And I'm looking at them and I'm saying, you know, what's so great about them and what makes them better than these other guys? And why am I better than the guys that as far as I was concerned were better than I. So the whole concept of someone being better than someone else struck me as a load of crap. And I guess I've sort of followed up on that and realized that I don't think I've ever met with somebody I didn't learn something from. And it doesn't matter, you know, for six years, I was in charge of all of the programs for developmentally disabled people in Vermont, people who were emotionally and intellectually challenged and physically challenged. And at the same time, every one of them that I met with, no matter how, how they scored on IQ tests or what everyone of them had an area, a way of thinking that taught me something. And I feel beholden to all of them. And I don't feel better than any of them. Yeah. And, you know, as we wrap up here, for me, it's just an opportunity to be reminded that, you know, walk in somebody's shoes, it doesn't matter who that person is. If you can take on that persona or like we say walk in their shoes, that notion of anyone being better or less than somebody else goes away pretty quickly. And if we can always try to keep that in our forefront of our minds, which is one of the messages I think of this podcast series is that we come up with some great topics that if we can always keep them in the forefront of our minds or use them as our basis for our own individual operating system, I think it will lead us to good mental health. Yeah, I think that the way I interpreted it is rather than walking someone else's shoes, think the way someone else thinks. And one of the first awarenesses that I had when I got in this business was there are no bad thoughts. There are no bad emotions. There are only bad things we say and do. And when you accept that, then you realize that how you think really affects your emotions and your actions. And it's possible to change both based on changing the way you think. And you know, what I've learned in my work with you over the years is that each of us is doing the best we can with what we have at any given time. Yeah, well, if we look at this relationship, the relationship that you and I have, what we're really talking about here is you're very good at some things that I'm not good at at all. And I use my area of specialty, you use yours, but neither of us is any better than the other. Right, we come up with what I hope and what I hope our viewers find to be engaging content that will give them pause for thought and introspection as they navigate the challenges of life. On behalf of my co-host, Dr. Neal Maranello, I'm Matt Kelly, wanting to thank you for joining us here today. Again, our topic has been no one is better than anyone else. A reminder, you can follow Dr. Neal on Twitter at CoachDrNeal. We invite you to join us on our next podcast as we both wish you good mental health.