#119 The vocabulary we use for our sexuality, the single conversation to reignite your sex life, and jealousy vs compersion, with Dr Joli Hamilton.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

0:05  
Welcome to the personal development mastery podcast. I'm Agi Keramidas. And my mission is to inspire you to rise up, grow, stand out and take action towards the next level of your life. I interview leaders, influencers, entrepreneurs, authors, exceptional people who can and will inspire you to improve your life, Jr for

0:26  
two episodes each week, and make sure you subscribe to the podcast to get the episodes as soon as they are released.

0:36  
In today's show, it is my real pleasure to speak with Dr. Joe Lee Hamilton. Surely you are a best selling author, TEDx speaker, a sex expert and relationship coach and a professor of human sexuality with a PhD in depth psychology. You believe that being passionate about your business doesn't have to mean sacrificing passion for your partner. And you are enthusiastic about helping women entrepreneurs create passionate, sustainable love without giving up one single ounce of their ambition for business success. So Ali, it is an absolute delight to have you on the show today.

1:18  
I'm so happy to be here. I know there's plenty to talk about.

1:24  
Absolutely. And I will start with a very brief question. I picked something from your website, and I will quote you you like to talk about stuff that makes most people uncomfortable. Sex, money, religion, sex, politics, sex. So Julie, in a nutshell, what why are most people uncomfortable talking about sex? I mean, collectively,

1:49  
yeah, collectively, depending on where we were raised. And when we were raised, there's going to be a different amount of sexuality talk that happened. But almost nowhere in the world? Is it a comfortable conversation between parent and child, or between teacher and child. And so we start off right out of the gates with putting sex into the shadow, and anything we put into the shadow will come out and get us. And I like to think of it a future where perhaps that isn't the reality we're talking about sex is comfortable. But it really is going to be on each of us in the meantime to decide that just because we weren't taught early how to talk about sex with comfort, doesn't mean we can't do it. So yeah, I just get right into it.

2:37  
Amazing.

2:39  
Can you before we start, can you give us a brief introduction about your background and your story? Is there a key defining moment that in your journey that you feel it's relevant to this conversation we're

2:54  
about to have? Definitely. So my background is pretty broad. I've been starting businesses since I was just a kid. And I never really fit into the corporate world. I gave it a whirl when I was in my early 20s. But it didn't work. And then when it came to love and sex, well, I've just always been interested, I read the whole psychology section of my the adult library in my town before I was 15 years old, because I was obsessed with learning whatever I could, but I didn't think of it as something that could be a profession. And so I carried on starting businesses and a whole bunch of areas, from fashion design, to birth support all kinds of things. And then, when I was 33, I had a really spiritually awakening moment in the least likely place ever. It was like a sticky dance floor, music's pounding the whole thing. And I had this I this wash of love pass over me, for someone I wasn't married to. It completely uprooted my life. A lot of stuff happened after that. But one of the key things that happened was that I decided to reinvent myself. And when I did, I messed everything up. I made a lot of mistakes. I made the mistake of thinking that I knew enough about love and sex because I was just a person that I could totally figure this out. And it turned out I didn't know anything and I broke a lot of relationships. I hurt a lot of people. And I had a lot to learn. So when I tossed my whole life overboard and tried to start over again. I studied my way out of it. It's not everybody's path, but for me studying my way out of it was the key. So I studied great thinkers from the ancient Greeks to Carl Jung I studied, I went into relationship therapists and experts I and then I realised that for me, you couldn't separate sex and relationship. And so frequently I was finding that in my teachings, what I was what I was learning was about love and relationship or about sex. But rarely were the two held really closely together, which seems sort of odd. But people specialise. We specialise and specialise and specialise. And I realised, all of a sudden that that's where my interests lie. I care deeply about relationships. And I know how hard it is to try to have a great one. But I also care about just maybe bringing some comfort into this conversation about sex, whether that is sex with your partner, or sex with yourself, whatever sex that that is, or whether it's just even thinking about sexuality, bringing comfort to that can remove some of our fears, and bring us into better alignment. And when we're in alignment, all sorts of pieces of our life can work better. So I think this is just one of those things that gets shoved into the dark. And when we bring it into the light, there's possibility where there wasn't before.

5:52  
And I will ask something that I mentioned earlier in my introduction, and it is something that you do about you believe that they're being passionate about your business doesn't have to exclude business passionate in your relationship, and you say that you can actually leverage your entrepreneurial skills. Yeah, to do that. So tell me your thoughts on that. It's really intriguing.

6:22  
Yeah. So I found over the years working with entrepreneurs, and being an entrepreneur myself that there are things that are very common to entrepreneurs, like, we tend not to be very risk averse, we're willing to take some risks, we're relationship people, we connect people to each other, we we go out to the cutting edge and take a step we are not afraid to, to do something, even if we're not totally sure it's going to work. These sorts of skills that entrepreneurs honed over the years and come to them naturally. These skills are all really, really, really great at home. But so often, we come home, and we set that down, and we want to walk into our relationship, and we forget who we are. And we start acting like, well, to be perfectly frank, we act like our parents acted, we, we start acting out what we saw early on in relationships. So we come home, we take off our entrepreneurial hat, and we start acting like our parents, and all of a sudden, we're confused as to why our life doesn't work. I find that when people bring their whole self into their relationships, so you bring that that risk tolerance, you bring your connectivity, your ability to solve problem solve, you bring that into your home, and all of a sudden, more of you is present. And you also have skills that you can put into solving the problems that come up in our relationships. And it's, it's so much easier when I'm working from a place where I feel confident and like I'm in my strength, I know how to problem solve, what would I do if this were coming up at work? If I have a problem discussing a sensitive topic, or I need to set a boundary, or I need to set a limitation, or I need to convey complicated information? Wait, I know how to do that in business. If I bring that home, and I remind myself that I know how to do this, I now have a whole new range of skills that I can I apply that probably aren't these same patterns that I'm just I've been playing out since I was a child in relationship.

8:25  
I agree. And certainly we can use those skills and transfer them over. However, that's it doesn't sound like it's enough, though, to me, doesn't it? Because you can use these skills, but it's you would, or I won't. And I suppose many people would deal with a certain problem at my business in a different manners and a certain or a similar problem in my intimate relationship, because there are other complexities there or things that might complicate things.

9:02  
Absolutely. This is where it becomes really important to be clear on our strengths, and not use them as if they're just a hammer that we hit every nail with. Right? So it's about how we apply them. And I actually think we do this in business. So when you meet with an investor, you put on a different a different part of your your front person like your your persona, a different part of you comes out versus if you're meeting with someone who you're interviewing, if you if you're working with if you're working with your partner, and you're trying to problem solve and you decide that you're going to apply your your problem solving skills from the workplace. It's important to do so with an eye to how do I do this in a way that feels inclusive. So we have to remember that our partner is appear and a colleague so the big problem I see when people miss apply this skill transference is that they accidentally treat their partner like their An employee, don't do that. That's a big No, no, your partner is your colleague and you. And yet, it is worthwhile to say, Hey, where are our strengths? Where do we want to apply ourselves and split up some of the work rather than having to rather than just leaning into whatever you've always done? How do you split up the work of running a household? How do you do that with a peer, a colleague? How do you do that with care? And so the other thing that comes up is, what kind of language do we use? language, that's the tone for so much. And in business, there's an acceptable kind of language. And at home, it's a different sort of pattern, we say different things, and we say them differently. So one of the things that many of us need to learn to do, especially since so many of us just started working from home in the last year. So now our work and home life is even more blended, we have to learn what parts of our communication serve in which areas. And I'll say, this goes both directions, I have recently started including the words, I love you in places where they didn't use to get included. And I will say, express to someone, I love this fact about you, I love this way that you work, right, I bring that into my professional work. And I also started bringing some strengths oriented language home to my partner and saying, I see you accomplishing, you know, whatever task it is, attending to the children's schoolwork, my partner is great at helping them with their math and their physics homework, that is not my strength. So I'm trying to notice that and bring that home the same way I would if I were seeing someone at work doing something fantastic. noticing what our partner is doing is one of the keys to actually getting on the same page, noticing what they're doing when they're doing awesome stuff. Because that creates this this mutual respect of this mutual admiration. And from there, it's so much easier to address the areas that maybe aren't working well.

11:59  
That's great. And talking about language and communication that you mentioned, can we bring those topics over to the when we talk about sexuality, or when we talk about our sexual relationship and apps? How How can we use them to our advantage rather than detriment or sometimes happen?

12:23  
Yeah, this is probably the most important thing anyone can do in their relationship. When it comes to sexuality. It's not about body parts. It's about your language. Getting on the same page with your partner around sexuality means having a shared vocabulary. A lot of times we start off a relationship, and it progresses we call this like the relationship escalator you, you start off and it just keeps progressing until you find yourself in. Let's say you find yourself married. And if I were to sit down with any married couple and say, so how do you talk about sex? What language do you use? What words what words do you use for your body parts? What words do you use for the act of actually having sex? Most of the time, most people will say, first off, I don't want to say that. And second, they'll say, we never talked about that. We just do whatever happens. A lot of people never say any words. I encourage people to do the uncomfortable exercise of of talking about what words are sexy to them, what words turn them on what words are actually a total buzzkill. If, for instance, someone has some a word that they use for your sexual anatomy that you don't like, and it makes you feel bad, but you've been letting them say it for 20 years, setting up a time to say let's get on the same page, let's share our vocabulary that can shift everything. Because if you can just imagine for a second how much better it would feel to have your body referred to in ways that feel luscious, boom, everything starts to change. The other conversation that really, really has to happen, and it's all about language is what is sex? Exactly? How do you know when you're having sex? It probably sounds very straightforward. But when I have asked rooms full of people, even rooms full of sex therapists and counsellors to define the word sex, tell me when someone's having sex, you never wind up with two matching definitions in any room ever. And turning to the dictionary doesn't help us. Because sex is an act that happens either with ourselves or with a partner. And if it's happening with a partner, then it's all about the mutual definition we have. So I say we need to have a conversation where we say, what exactly is our sexual pattern? When are we having sex? What body parts does it involve? What apps do we like to do? It can be an incredibly exposing feeling. So sometimes this conversation needs to be had in parts. I have some exercises in the book that I wrote Project relationship where I asked people to have these conversations really intentionally. And to use the book as an excuse to have the conversation Jolie says we have to do this. I know it's uncomfortable, but let's talk about it. Because once we define sex, some people find out that they don't actually have the relationship they thought they did, they actually have a wonderful relationship that just was missing some language that they may have been feeling like they were like, not having their needs met, or they weren't getting the sex they wanted. And all they needed was to learn what they would actually have to ask for. And their partner is there for them and wants to be in that. So somebody has to be courageous, and say the words.

15:40  
That's very profound. Julie, thank you for sharing that. I believe it's extremely important. Important. And I would like to ask, generally, a little bit more about, you know, having a passionate relationship, or maybe reigniting, which I'm sure you've seen it many times after years, a couple does not have the same passion in the relationship. So what are your thoughts on that? I know, it's a big topic, but I'm very, very curious to know,

16:16  
it is but you know, reigniting passion, that can be something that needs to happen, you know, in the first months of a relationship, or in years, years later, but um, reigniting passion is all about coming into relationship with my partner in a way that is not all squished together, and a meshed so tightly that I can't tell the difference between me and my partner, it's actually much easier to be turned on and interested in our partner, when we can view them from just a little bit of space, when we can say, Oh, that's the other capital, oh, other, there's some sacredness to them, they become different from us, we open up that space. And in that space, that's where we can Kindle a fire. That's where there's enough juice to actually get something going. Now, often, desire decreases, because there are misunderstandings. So, I think of rekindling desire as a process that we commit to, like, you know, what, we can always level up, even if my marriage is operating at, you know, an eight out of 10, I've got room to go. And you know what, sometimes I even feel like it's operating at 10 out of 10. And then I will have a conversation about how I connect to my partner or my partner will go away and have an experience and something new blooms in them. And I find out that you know, what, 10 wasn't the limit, this relationship can go to an 11. No problem. This is about rekindling desire is about allowing yourself to be a little uncomfortable, we fall into patterns. And once we're in that pattern, we're doing the same thing over and over and over again, it's like trying to burn the same laws over and over and over again. And that's where we find people accidentally turn to infidelity. As a way to resolve this desire, the problem like they want to feel desired or to experience desire, because they they become trapped in their own patterns at home. And then novelty captures your interest, right? It just does. That's normal, that's natural. But what if you took that same energy, and you allow yourself to create some, some curiosity around your partner, who is this person, they are not the static thing you imagine, my partner works 18 inches outside of my door. And still, I find that he has changed at the end of every day. And when people are in relationships that have gotten stale, it only takes one person to decide to make a change. So even if your partner's like just fine with how things are, you can start on your side and say, I'm going to reengage my curiosity. And I'm not going to just do it for 30 minutes, I'm going to re engage my curiosity as a new habit, a habit of curiosity about my partner. And that means I need a habit loop. Right? So I need to decide how am I going to remember to put curiosity back in my life, figure out what your trigger is for me that triggers cappuccino. My, when I have a cappuccino in my hands, I know that it's time for me to ask my partner a question I've never asked him. So I think of something I just wrack my brain, ask him something I've never asked him. I asked him a question. All of a sudden, there's a new conversation. So every day, we have this little loop that we find ourselves in. He has his own habit loops. So he's curious about me too. And this is a well honed process for us now. Like even in the pattern. There is this built in curiosity and where there is curiosity, there can always be passion.

19:51  
That's wonderful. And I agree 100% I love how you said to reengage curiosity and curiosity will lead to exploration and all good things by being curious. And I also liked very much you said, you use the first to be trapped in your own patterns, which I think most of us can relate to right in one way or another. And to step out of what's comfortable at the relationship level of flow, because we often talk about the comfort zone in personal development or in business or, and we fail to see that a relationship is exactly the same, it is a vehicle of growth and probably their most sacred vehicle of growth, I mean, the personal growth or the soul's growth, or however, that one looks at it, and to be able to step out of the comfortable or it's comfortable to me or to the ordinary and have the uncomfortable conversation, move on with your partner to a direction upwards, I think it's a gift. That's maybe one of the reasons so if one of the main reasons why we are in relationship, even though we have forgotten about that, I think it's a vehicle to growth to personal growth and spirituality.

21:21  
I believe that relationships are an individuation accelerator. So I studied Carl Jung. So my work is really founded in the idea that we have the capacity to develop at all times, all people at all times. And when we see our relationships as a place to be completely at rest, which is a mistake some people make, they're like, I want my relationship to just be comfy, I want to come home, I want to relax, I don't want it to be a place of growth, I say okay, but you are leaving at least half of your potential on the table for the rest of your life. At the very least. And this isn't just about your marriage partner, this could be about a best friend, this could be about your relationship with your parents, your children, this could be any relationship where you can just notice the opportunity to be yourself to show up as yourself and your changing self, and to experience problems. Because the problems that you're experiencing in relationship are your opportunities to individually, those problems are showing up over and over again, with a message for you. And if you continue to ignore them, you can do that. But you're not going to be really comfortable either, because those problems are going to keep knocking on the door. So it's a false comfort that we have, I say jump into the deep end, do the do the uncomfortable thing. Because in there, you have an opportunity to become something that from where you are right now you can't actually imagine it's going to be an incremental process. But there is no end either. There's no individuated state, you're not done. So it's also the joy and beauty of knowing that you can grow the whole time your relationship is going to offer you opportunities to continually engage in the psychological dimension. And in the, in this being alive thing, right? every single day. I can't think of anything more exciting, I may someday decide to set down my business, I may someday decide to set down some of my volunteer responsibilities, all of those things. But I'll always be in relationship to someone, there's always going to be that. So there's always going to be the opportunity to experience the discomfort, lean into it and say, what does it have to teach me about me? Because it's not about them and what they need to change. Whatever I'm experiencing is about me, and what I want to be to become to do in this world.

23:53  
As three fascinating, thank you. It's it's one of the things that intrigued me very much. So having conversations with about this is extremely intriguing to me. I would love to speak a bit about something else as well. Julian, I was watching I was we were discussing before we started recording, I was watching your TEDx talk, and I came across and I'm sure you hear that often came in you were talking about compassion. And I have to admit that I did not know the word compassion, which you know, sometimes because English is not my my mother language. I accept that there will be words that I have to look up. Apparently the Oxford Dictionary didn't have the word compassion in it. So that led me to a deeper quest to find out more about what it is and rather than me going on, I would like Your thoughts since you have really researched the subject? Can you give me your thoughts on what compassion is? And then there are some very specific questions I want to ask you. But give us an overview, first of all?

25:16  
Absolutely. So compassion is a word that was coined in the 1970s by morning glory Zell. That that was a person involved in the the free love movement, right gave birth to a whole bunch of alternative relationship styles, which many alternative relationship styles have existed in other cultures. But in in white American culture, there was really just that one monogamous style morning, Laurie Zell, and a whole bunch of other people had started these communities where people were having more than one partner more than one romantic partner. When you do that, you invite jealousy right in through the front door. And so along the way, in some of the Messier parts of this, you also come to discover that there isn't language for everything we need there to be language for. So this word compersion, c o m, p, r, s, i o n is not yet in the dictionary. And what it means is joy for another person's joy. It's the antonym of jealousy. compersion is the sensation in your body, when you watch someone enjoying something that they absolutely love, that you aren't a part of, but you're happy for them anyways. It's not a feeling that replaces jealousy. It's a feeling that sits alongside jealousy, it's a feeling we can cultivate. But, you know, when I was doing my formal research, my academic research, when I started really digging into compersion, I came across this related term mudita. It's an ancient term. And it's sympathetic joy, and it's very close to compersion. But there are some minor differences that are important, because compassion was came out of this, this new like, New Age idea of multiple loves, right, and it came specifically out of there. And it was meant to include even something as drastic as my partner enjoying sex with another person. Like, that's a big leap for most people to make. So compersion is this is this idea that we can experience joy, even while we're experiencing a range of other emotions, like jealousy, or we can experience joy, because we've decided that this, that this move of of embracing love in all its forms is for us. When I first gave my speech, it wasn't the first time my children had ever heard me talk about conversion. But the youngest one was 12, at the time. And he said to me, I'm really glad you said that, because I've heard you say the word, but I didn't really know what it meant. And I can't do the opposite of jealousy. If I don't know what I'm going for. How would I be happy if I didn't know what sad was? I think he nailed it right there. compersion is useful as a term because if we want to move away from jealousy, if we want to experience something, besides our jealousy, we need to know what we're moving towards. And so often people just try to kill or cure or crush jealousy. But jealousy has a purpose. And so when we try to kill it, or crush it, or remove it or excise it from our life, it will just come back in a new form. So instead, I invite compersion into the room, to sit next to my jealousy and say, you can have these darker feelings that are challenging for you. And at the same time, you're capable of feeling joy for your partner's joy. And that opens up a little space again, lets me breathe again.

28:52  
It certainly does it just the thought that they are not mutually exclusive, being jealous and having joy for the person at the same time, because I think many people would think that they're opposites. Therefore, it's either one or the other. But blending them or co having them coexisting really opens up new possibilities of looking into, into

29:19  
definitely, I think of it like jealousy itself is neutral. It can serve a purpose. But it often feels terrible. compersion itself is is neutral. It's neither good or bad. You're not good, because you feel compassion and bad because you feel jealousy. They're just emotions, their emotions that flow through us. And yet, if I can cultivate compassion in my life, I may have sensations that feel more pleasant to me. When I cultivate jealousy, I probably have a rockier experience. Jealousy brings up a lot of other really tough to deal with emotions like anger and sadness and grief and despair. And fear. And when we're trapped in that we have nothing pleasant to go alongside it. I don't know anybody who wouldn't like to add a little bit of something pleasant to go alongside that.

30:13  
You mentioned cultivating compassion. So can you give us some more specific tools on how one can do that?

30:23  
Yeah. So I suggest that people start cultivating compassion in places where it's a little bit easier. So I think that it's easier to do often with our friends. Rather than our romantic partners, it's easier to start there. Because when we think about our friendships, I don't know anybody, nobody that I've ever interviewed has said, I have a best friend and I don't allow them to have any other friends. They're not allowed to write. But we, we do have exclusivity in our marriages. And that's fine. What that means that friendship offers this opportunity to experience the triangle of jealousy, because jealousy is always a triangle, to experience it in a way where we say, Okay, I'm feeling jealousy, I'm feeling my connection to my friend. And now I'm experiencing this third person potentially interrupting my connection to my friend. And yet, I can allow this experience to exist in me, what do I do right now. And the thing I ask people to do first is tune into the body. Pay attention to the sensations in your body. Notice how complicated it is that your jealousy isn't just jealousy? The clue is, we tend to tell ourselves, I'm just jealous, or she's just jealous. As soon as you hear the word, just something's up. It's not just jealousy, pull it open and say, okay, am I feeling angry? Am I feeling scared? Am I feeling rageful? Am I feeling sadness, my. And, in all of that, am I also feeling any thread that might be sunshine? Am I feeling anything at all? That is, oh, there are more people in my world right now. So between me and my friends, now there's this new, there's this other person is my friend enjoying their time with them. That's a place where I can say, my friends enjoying time. Okay, I can bring intention to that. And I actually get to decide which feeling I focus on. So this is about then shifting from I have these darker feelings that feel uncomfortable. But I also have the capacity to feel this compulsive feeling of Wow, they're, they're learning something new, or an example that I use is, if my partners across the room and they're happy, they're engaged in a conversation, I see them. Like they're deeply engaged, and they're feeling seen, and they're getting to share their ideas. I can stand at a distance. And rather than try to include myself, appreciate the joy that I see on his face. just appreciate it for what it is without needing to intrude and allow myself to feel the tension of opposites inside me. The tension of opposites gives birth to what Jung called the transcendent function. So that tension of the joy for the joy I see on his face, and my own sadness that I'm not included in this conversation, that tension can give birth to the third thing. And the third thing, that's magic, that's, that's adding a whole new dimension to your friendship to your relationship. It really is beautiful. And if you're feeling terrified right now, because you're like I don't, I don't want to have to hold that tension. Remember that you can do this in small doses. So you could do this in just the smallest doses. Sometimes I practice it with my own children, because it's easier for me to feel happy for their happiness. So just practice, there's my oldest daughter, she's 21, she's experiencing her friendships, she's out in the world. Okay, I can be happy for her, I don't need to intrude, I can just experience the joy that she's bubbling around with her friends. And that reminds me of what this joy feels like in my body, which then allows me to transfer it to other relationships. Getting to know what that sensation feels like the compulsive sensation is tricky, because we tend not to focus on the yummy sensations, we tend to focus on the ones that we want to avoid. Humans have this desire to run away from the Sabre tooth Tigers that are our feelings, right? So we have to actually bring intention. And this is where slowing down returning, taking a deep breath, allowing ourselves to slow down. And then just I actually use the word I remind myself conversion is a goal. It's a goal of mine not to be perfectly convergent compulsive, not to stay in it all the time, but it's a goal state. So when I'm feeling a difficult emotion, I try to move toward it. It's not always easy. Sometimes I have to write it on the inside of my hand to remember whatever it takes Because it's a practice, and it's a practice that not many people are doing. So you're going need to give yourself some reminders.

35:07  
Yes. And it kind of relates to the overall need to be mindful to not let your mind take control over your actions, but pull the brakes from time to time and to see what's going on right now.

35:22  
Yeah, reflect on that state. Because we are, we're the we're the driver, not the elephant, right? Like, just reflect on that state. I get to be in charge of this. And just because jealousy wants to run away with the show, doesn't mean I can't also invite these other parts of me M.

35:37  
Yes, absolutely. And there was one other thing that came to mind when you were talking about jealousy. And that was, with what's going on the recent years with social media, it's what's easier to be exposed to other people's successes or apparent successes say away and especially I think, younger people do suffer, if I can use that word from jealousy of what they see others doing and to make them freely. So being intentional, bringing the intention, as you said, and being joyful for their success, or for whatever it is that we perceive that they're doing that brings us that James feeling is I found that a very useful tool, just take a step back and realise that right now being jealous, how can I merge that with compassion, as you said, that's my own, you know, my own interpretation?

36:37  
I find it so what you're describing is, is tech in the technical sense, is envy, right? Because I want this thing the other person has. And so this instead of a triangle, there's something really interesting. But there's the beauty thing, rarely do we think about how to work with our envy. But what I have found is that the tools for working with jealousy work on envy, too. So if you're experiencing that, that, that, that FOMO, that fear of missing out on what somebody else has, or their success is, is making you feel less. Yeah, intention, absolutely. Just the intention of right remember, that we're celebrating so I actually use my Instagram as an I think of it specifically and intentionally as an opportunity to celebrate. I go to Instagram when I want to celebrate my friends, not when I want to complain about them. Because that's not the place for it. This is a place if you can imagine yourself in a spot, you wouldn't show up at somebody's birthday party and say, I can't believe you got presence. That's what we do. And we show up to Instagram, and we're like, oh, I can't believe they have that. Don't do that. Instagram is a place for celebration, right? It's fine. There are other places where we are more complete people. And it's not going to be found in social media, it's gonna be found in our, in our deeper relationships that have multiple facets, social media is just gonna be one of those facets.

37:58  
That's great.

38:01  
Totally fascinating journey, I would like to ask you also some quickfire questions to start wrapping today. And the first one I always ask is, what does personal development mean to you?

38:13  
Oh, everything, it means everything. I believe we're here so that we can do whatever our soul was put here to do like whatever we contracted to do first, right? So personal development is just being alive.

38:30  
Awesome. And let's say you could go back in time and meet your 18 year old self, what's the one piece of advice you would share a

38:39  
dream so much bigger, and just go for it? Go for it huge. And if you can take a deep breath right now and recognise how incredibly lucky you are? To have what you have. It's been a hard road to get to 18. But in fact, there's been so much joy, and you have so much. So go for it right now. Don't wait.

39:05  
Do you think she would listen?

39:07  
I think that she would listen, I think that was actually the missing the missing piece for her. She didn't know that she was both lucky and had opportunity in front of her. She didn't imagine that she thought she was unlucky. And that the road was already carved out of her.

39:26  
And one more hypothetical question. And if you had a magic wand, and you could wave it and change something in the world as it is today, and what would you change?

39:37  
I would have us all put on glasses that allowed us to see with the same, the same vision that love is the feeling of love, I would have us look at the world that way. I believe that we all have the capacity to love the human and more than human world, but we're not practising it. Sorry. have us see it really every single second, because if we did, I don't think we would act the way we do. And everything else would change.

40:09  
The default sounds very spiritual the way that you said it. Totally emerging from the conversation we had today. If you were to give to the listener, one actionable item, something they can do, preferably with their relationship, since that was the bulk of our conversation, what's the some actionable advice, you would give them something to they can implement straightaway?

40:38  
straightaway? I would have you lean into curiosity, one of your relationships, choose just one and decide that you're going to make a practice of being curious in this relationship for the next 30 days, for 30 days. Think of a question to ask this person, and then allow them to listen as if you'd never as if you have no idea what they're going to answer, and encourage you to use those follow up questions, use your listening skills, use all of your active interviewing skills, to explore that with them. And you don't need to share your side of that. If they ask at the end. If you've spent five or 10 minutes listening to theirs, and they ask Go ahead. But let yourself enjoy being curious from your side. And if you need a question, you can pop onto my website because there's there's a whole list of 100 questions you can ask somebody

41:25  
awesome talking about that? Tell us how can people connect with you and find out more about what do you do?

41:31  
I am easy to find on my website. That's Jolie Hamilton, calm j. o Li and Hamilton, like the musical that's all over the United States these days. And I also wrote a book called Project relationship. And you can find that on Amazon.

41:45  
Raising

41:48  
your we've talked, and I'm sure that there are many things that I had the inclination of talking about today. But I want to ask you instead. So is there anything that you were really hoping we will discuss about today, and we completely missed it?

42:06  
You know, there's nothing we missed, because I think that when you talk about love and relationship, there's, there's an infinite possibility. And so I don't feel like we missed something. But there really is the infinite possibility. So I would just encourage people to lean into shows like yours about personal development. With with the full force, this is the opportunity, there will be no other time. So you asked wonderful questions. I feel like we explored the edges of a whole bunch of topics. And if any of it is interesting to people, I just want them to know that this is just the leading edge. It's just the tip of the iceberg. And there's so much more to it.

42:50  
Absolutely, indeed. Julie, I want to thank you very much. It's been a truly fascinating conversation. I really mean it, I learned a lot. And I took lots of notes, which I will show you here great. I was taking notes like crazy. So I want to wish you all the very best with what you're doing and allowing people really to explore and come to terms with their selves, their authenticity, and their sexuality as well. All the very best any last parting words from you?

43:27  
I just want to say thank you so much. It was a pleasure. You took this in a bunch of directions and you did it so seamlessly. I really appreciate that. And I'm gonna be tuning into other episodes because now I have to listen to more of the people that you're asking questions that well.

43:45  
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and rate it on Apple podcasts. And also share this episode with someone who you think will benefit from it. If you want to find out more about what I do and gain access to exclusive content, join my facebook group but for development mastery. The link is in the show notes or you can simply type bit dot L y slash PDM group and until next time, stand out don't fit in

Transcribed by https://otter.ai