A friendly disrupter of the status quo, Timothy Edred has been inspiring people to live a full life for nearly 30 years. He is a husband, father, writer, speaker, seeker, coffee snob, pipe smoker, bourbon drinker and a person of faith.
Tim helps people and organizations release their potential by pushing limits without hesitation. He has influenced countless people throughout the world by helping them dream again, rediscovering perspectives and reaching their desires.
Tim is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in organizational management and leadership with an emphasis on aloneness and authenticity — two words we explore together in this interview.
Listen in here:
Subscribe: Apple | Google Play | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify | AmazonIn this episode you’ll learn:
- What Timothy does
- The transition he is making
- Conversations on paying bills
- Health crises on the way
- Encounter with a rare disease
- Water flows around obstacles
- Struggles that change your ways
- Follow the process
- Moving through one phase to the next
- Who are you?
- The process of grief
Resources Mentioned:
Software Generated Transcription:
Dan
Tim, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to the Meaning Movement podcast.
Tim
Dan. You know, our last conversation, which was our first conversation, was like I’ve just made like, a new friend. So to be able to just have a conversation with you, but then join you on your podcast, it’s just bonus. So thank you for having me.
Dan
Well, thank you for saying that. And the feeling is 100% mutual. Super excited to be digging in with you here and just getting to know more of you and more your story. The question I like to begin with is how do you begin to talk about the work that you do?
Tim
Goodness. You know, I was asked a question. I get that question all the time, and it’s not cut and dried anymore. At one point in my life was really Crystal clear. I’ve been in Church work, pastoral work, nonprofit work for about 30 years. And people say, oh, so you serve a Church? Well, no. I travel about 150 days a year and I train leaders and then I write and then I speak and I’m involved in two or three different non profits and I have my own programs. And that’s always kind of been the case. It’s still the case. But I was asked last week, I was at a skin cancer doctor, which is not a big deal for me. I mean, it can be a big deal, but I go every six months and she’s like, cut something off every six months. I just know it’s like question is, how many bandaids am I going to have on me? I’m going to leave her office. So she’s very aware of what I do. She’s read some of my books and asked me to be involved in some of their oncology gatherings. But her assistants or nurses who are in the room are never quite familiar with who I am.
Tim
And so the one nurse, after hearing the conversation said, So what’s your favorite place to visit in the world? Knowing that I’ve been to dozens of countries, I said, you might think it’s interesting. Like, if I’m going on vacation or holiday, that’s one location. But if I’m just traveling for work, I like to go where Mamas have to bury their babies, which sounds really morose, right?
Dan
Yeah.
Tim
But what I’m saying is there is so much beauty in some of the poorest places in the world where the need is so great, but people are usually so pure and undefiled by the additives or the supplements that we have placed in our lives. So what I’m doing today, after 30 years and finally getting to your question, I’m making a transition, and I don’t know what that looks like yet, which might be interesting for your audience who are searching for meaning, right?
Dan
Yeah.
Tim
To not exactly know. I was listening to a podcast today. I was going down to pick up my son and daughter in law’s dog, my granddog, I guess you call it, which my wife doesn’t like the word grand dog because she’s hoping someday it might be more than a dog.
Dan
Yeah.
Tim
I was listening to a podcast. The guy’s name is Dan Carlin and his podcast is called Hardcore History. He’s got millions of followers and he was just talking about when he started it years ago. He just hoped it wouldn’t be a failure, but he didn’t know what it was going to be. I feel like that’s where I’m at right now. I stepped out and left a 30 year career to say, I want to help people live with authenticity and I want to help remove people’s aloneness. Dan, I have ideas of what that’s going to look like. I just don’t know how it’s going to flesh out. And it’s scary as hell. It’s scary. I’m like, I don’t know if I can pay my bills next month.
Dan
Yeah.
Tim
And that’s the route we are wandering. So I know what I’m wanting to accomplish. I don’t know the how exactly yet, but we’re hanging on and we’re hopeful and we can tell that we are having an impact. Now, six months from now, I might be living with you in Seattle, I don’t know. But now it’s really good. We’ve got a good team around me. I have a lot of people smarter than me working for me. And that’s the goal. The goal is to help people live with a greater sense of authenticity because I don’t think a lot of us really understand what that maybe means.
Dan
Yeah, well, I want to dig into that, but I just want to comment on like, it just feels so familiar to when I started the meaning movement almost ten years ago, just wanted to help people figure out what to do with their lives and navigate the questions of purpose and calling and especially when it comes to work and career. But then what does that actually look like to actually do it? And how do I pay the bills? I feel like it’s an ongoing conversation around my house that I’m having with myself and my wife is like, okay, how are we doing this month? Which has let down all kinds of other rabbit holes and rabbit trails. But yeah, I guess it sounds like you’re the kind of person that has a lot of irons in the fire. And that I guess when you lift it off at the beginning of your answer to that question that you did Church work, pastoral work, nonprofit work, you mentioned some books. One of the first things I’m not sure how all that equates to paying the bills. So how have you thought about that in your life? Which is another way of saying what are all the different ways that you have paid the bills up until this point?
Tim
Well, first of all, my wife has been a school teacher, a public school teacher for 34 years. And I always tell people I’m thrilled to have a wife who’s a public school teacher because she teaches middle school, 7th grade, the entire time, which means some days a public school teacher, your tax dollars are going to pay for her mental health care. She needs it. She would say that, hey, you know what? You can tackle this new venture because I’ll bankroll it for a while, right?
Dan
Yeah.
Tim
And I just admit that, like, she is a consistent income. And there’s times when I’ve ventured out on something new that the finances dip and then they surge. And we’ve always been fine again, because I surround myself with really good people. Up until 2020, when most of us had to shift. That’s the word of the decade I was speaking about. I was on the road about 150 days a year, speaking most of that time, whether it be in a corporate gathering, leading a board through transition, speaking at large events or a school event or a Stadium event, whatever it was that was profitable. That was lucrative. I loved that. I’ve done that my entire life. I am a communicator all of a sudden. That had to stop. And it’s not just because it stopped because of covid. That was a short hiatus. But Dan, I shared with you I think I shared with you that in the midst of that two years, I come to some real health tragedies. I’d like to say I had a health crisis. That would mean singular, doesn’t work that way for me. If you’re going to do it, go big or go home all the way.
Tim
We just went with health crises. Let’s just double it up. I was actually taking three months off. I was going to make this change in my life in 2020. The transition I’m just starting to make in the last few months was supposed to happen about two years ago. But when I took three months just to kind of regroup and implement a plan that we had been architecting for a while, I come down with this very severe pain in my head. And I’d like to say it’s my throat or my face, but it was just like the whole left side of my head, from my ear to my jaw to my neck to my tongue and my throat. And keeping the story short, it took ten months to diagnose that. And when I say pain, well, listen, I understand pain. I’m a spine surgery patient with five disk repairs, and I’ve lived in chronic pain a lot. So that pain was severe. This pain made that look like a hang nail. And so ends up. I have a very rare nerve disorder called glossopherngal neuralgia, which is a mouthful. And only one in 2 million people have it.
Tim
If you have it on one side bilaterally, I happen to have it bilaterally. I have it on both sides. So once again, just do it right. One in 4 million people and there’s no cure for it. There’s some Hail Mary ideas that we tried to do it. They can do surgery, which I’m trying to prevent a craniotomy. We finally got under control, but it was debilitating. I mean, it will put you to the ground and sometimes last a minute and sometimes the pain will last an hour.
Dan
Wow.
Tim
So we dealt with that for a long time. And the depression that came with chronic pain. So I’m sure you’ve got audience members who dealt with chronic pain, others who’ve dealt with depression or some who’ve dealt with the combination of both. I’ve dealt with both, and I’ve been on medication for depression. And I’m not embarrassed about that because it’s a gift when you need it. I think it’s over prescribed too often. You know, I think we would all agree with that, especially the good old USA, that we really over prescribed in a lot of areas over medicated. But in the midst of them trying to find that, we discovered what is deemed as a huge aneurysm in my brain. So you can have a small aneurysm or a medium sized aneurysm that goes this way small, large and huge. For some reason, we don’t deem anything medium. No, we have small, large and huge. Once again, I’m just going to go all the way. We went for huge, and we put it in a location in my brain where even my neurosurgeon, who was renowned, said, Tim, if that were my brain, I would just tell you to live your life.
Tim
Because the risk of rupture, which we don’t know is unknown. But the risk of catastrophic, catastrophic results on a surgical table are not survivable. So all of that says, okay, we can’t just jump into this transition. So a lot of people out there are trying to transition into new careers, new ventures. They want to take a risk, and there are setbacks, and that’s fine. They can be financial, they can be mental, they can be relational, they can be medical. All of them can feel like real obstacles or boulders in our way. And so mine at this point weren’t financial or organizational. I had had enough profits build up that I could continue to pay staff while I figured out my medical issues and no one had to lose their job. It was a blessing. But I learned from previous transitions to work really hard to remember that water flows around obstacles. It’s fluid. You don’t have to demolish the obstacle. You don’t have to regroup or stop or feel like you’ve been halted because of an obstacle. You just have to be flexible and keep the end goal in mind, which is to not just trickle down the Hill until you become a stream, until you become a river, until you reach the ocean, which is your goal, because you’ll never reach it.
Tim
If you let every obstacle stand in your way. And if you’re trying to transition and making any difference and trying to figure out your meaning of your life, you are going to hit some obstacles that just naturally arise. And those were mine and I could have quit. You know how that goes down. I could have just said, screw it, I can’t do this anymore. I’m just going to go back to what was I thinking? Did I actually think I could 50 plus years old, I could change careers in the middle of it, switch and shift. Now, did those thoughts cross my mind? Oh, they absolutely crossed my mind. Those were some dark days that went along with some depression. Some of that was natural, and some of that was caused by the medication, one of the side effects of it. But again, I surrounded myself with a really good team that helped me keep focused on the future of what we wanted to do.
Dan
Yeah, man, what a challenging season. And I guess I’m just struck by how three months turned into an indefinite change in the way you think about your life and your future.
Tim
Right. And still a change, because even the blueprint that we had crafted, which included a lot of travel. But when the doctor looks at your wife and says, Cindy, 50% of all aneurysms are survivable, 80% of all people who survive them go on to live normal lives, 20% have maybe some lifelong struggles they’ll have to navigate. Your husband’s aneurysm is not that. If it ruptures, he will die. But the good news is he won’t even know it. He just won’t even know it. It’s that significant. But when you hear that, you say, I’m not spending 100 plus days in an airplane anymore, away from my wife. So now you’re figuring out how are you making a living behind a different kind of microphone instead of on stage sitting behind this podcast microphone, instead of communicating what you’ve been saying for a very long time to a different audience in a different way. You’re writing it, you’re creating more blogs and more books and more courses and resources, which I think in the end, Dan is actually going to be better for not just me, but for the people I’m trying to communicate with. Because it’s one thing to give a 45 minutes Yay rah rah message as a keynote speaker and light everyone on fire.
Tim
And it’s another thing to really walk them through a process. And process is long. There’s no shortcut. And you know this. Unfortunately, there are so many. I think I used this word earlier. There are so many supplements and additives that we consume, just like food or vitamins. There are so many things we consume that promise you, like instant results drop £30 in 30 days. That’s hogwash. If you do that, you’re not losing weight in a healthy way. Right? Eat this handful of Earth, eat this dirt. You’re going to get everything you possibly need out of it. And so the process that I’m taking my clients and audience through is long and hard and arduous that will take them to the destination they want. If they’re looking for a shortcut, you can buy those hacks anywhere and waste a lot of time and money, or you can follow a process to, like you say, real meaning. And that’s a challenge. Sometimes it’s painful, but the result is always, man, I feel better, I look better, I’m doing better. I’m accomplishing more. Sadly, though, with our Internet world and everything that we do, it’s just too easy to go.
Tim
That looks so much easier. And it’s only 999.
Dan
The grass is always greener. Yes.
Tim
Oh, my goodness. It seldom works.
Dan
Yes. A lot of times people come to me and they wanting to figure out their next thing and have gone through a process where they had a dream and that dream died in some way, whether it was taken from them, whether they aged out of it, whether whatever happened. So they have this vision in their mind of this is what my life is going to look like in X number of years. This is the destination I’m headed towards. Maybe even they might even say this is my calling that I’m pursuing and then all of a sudden that’s not a viable option for them in their lives. And one of the things that I always recommend people do in those situations is to really think about, like, what is the role of grief? How can they practice letting go of the life that they thought they were going to have in order to create space to welcome in something else? And I’m curious for you one, how that idea lands with you, how that process has played out in your transition. And if you have any steps for people to take in that direction.
Tim
Dan, we all gravitate towards safety, especially when things get hairy, right. Security and safety. And I get it. I hired a life coach at about the same time this was all going on. I started earlier. I’ve done programs of finding your strengths and your gifts and your uniqueness and your Enneagram and what number are you and all that. Not discounting any of that. But I finally hired somebody that I’ve known for a long time, and he does a lot of work with the executive leaders of large corporations and global organizations. And I called him, knowing dang well, I couldn’t afford him. Right. He was outside of my budget of what he charges his clients, but he made an exception. I think it’s called charity. He’s probably writing that off as like a gift in kind or something.
Dan
Pro Bono work.
Tim
Pro Bono work. He asked me three questions that I thought I had answered. So I’ll ask him of the people listening, because you’re not going to figure them out an hour if you think you can shortcut this one. But I thought I had my life mapped out pretty well, too, at that point. I figured, okay, I know what the next 510 years looks like. I’m going to be retired by 60. I’ll be just fine financially and the whole deal until he asked me, who are you? What do you want to do? How do you want to do it? Which I thought I had figured out until we went back to that first pesky question of who are you? I was asked that question back in about 2006 as well. I ran into an individual I barely knew in an airport in Portland, Oregon. We were both had flights delayed. And so we struck up a conversation. He asked me the same question. I gave him the same answer. I started answering with my title, my education, my experience. The last thing I said was, I’m a husband or a father. But that’s not who I am, right?
Tim
Those are still roles that I play, and all those roles are important. So I had to answer that question, who is Tim? And if there was nothing standing your way and you knew you couldn’t fail, what does Tim wanted to do? And if you had every opportunity, how would that exactly look? So he began asking me questions like, name the stages you stood on. And so he knows my world. He’s like, Is there a stage that you haven’t stood on? Like the top ten stages in your profession? Have you spoken to all of them? Yes. How many times you’ve spoken to them? Multiple. He said, but you want to do something different. I said, I do. I don’t know what that is yet. I just know I want to do something different. And for me, Dan, that was the first step, is just knowing I want to do something different. Now you asked an interesting question, like some things have to die. Oh, my goodness. It’s easy to say no to something that has literally died. Like, you are fired. You don’t have a choice in the matter. But if you’re choosing to leave one profession or one expertise and dabble in another and hoping that becomes your dream that you have manipulated in your mind for a really long time, you can always gravitate towards safety or others will try to pull you back in.
Tim
It’s like Finding Nemo, the movie Finding Nemo. Nemo needs to get out of the aquarium and go swim in the ocean because he was an ocean fish, right?
Dan
Yeah.
Tim
Well, most people listening. You know what? You’re an ocean fish, too. Maybe you’ve been stuck in an aquarium for a while and not the aquarium sucks. It just might be a little confining for you at this stage of your life and you’re feeling restless. So you’re going to try to leave the aquarium and then you’re going to realize that it’s really hard out here. I’ll go back to the aquarium or you’re going to leave the aquarium and your phone is going to ring and your email inbox is going to fill up and people going, Dan, come on back. Dan, come on back. We can’t live without you. And then they’re going to inflate your ego. So you’ll get this self inflated idea of I’m really important, and you’ll find yourself in a place where you feel really miserable because that’s what you decided, what you didn’t want to do and not because it was bad. It’s just okay to make a change. And depending on your age, like my sons are 24 and 27, they will have multiple careers. They’ll live in multiple places. They’re a little nomadic anyway because they follow their dad’s example, but they’re perfectly fine with that.
Tim
Some of us who are 40, 50, 60 or older, you get 30 years into a career, and then you’re going to change that is labeled as you’re loser, you’re failure. And so for me, I’ve wrestled through all of those emotions. Like I said earlier, I wrestled through what are you thinking? Maybe it’s just easier to go back to what you were doing. And when you have to let something die and say goodbye to something, I would tell your audience that I’m still two years into that, and I don’t think I’m a slow learner. I think that’s the real process of grief. And I think it is the five stages of grief. When you walk away from one career, one venture into another, you’ve got to go through all of it. And if you skip one, it’s always like you go back to go, do not go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Then you got to break out of that again instead of just going through the steps one at a time.
Dan
Yes. I love that. It’s so good. It reminds you the way you talk about like that. You’re two years in, you’re still going through it reminds you of William Bridges Transitions, a book by William Bridges where he talks about transitions as, like, conceptually. We think about them as a moment we’re at this job, and then we end this job, and then we find a new job. Then we start that job. But internally, it’s a much longer process that starts much long before that one job ends or that next job begins and then continues on longer than those moments and replace job with whatever transition that you’re in. Our internal space moves at a much slower pace than the externalities that are happening in our lives. And I hear you inviting people to think of a longer term scale, that it is a process, and you have to be willing to accept that process.
Tim
I think it’s even harder because transitions are slow in a world that just continues to spin out of control and is only going faster. And we’re wondering why our lives don’t match the pace of change going on around us. Maybe it’s the pace of change around us that is completely unnatural and what we’re going through is a complete normal process, but we’re not used to taking our time.
Dan
Yeah, well, that’s good. That is really good.
Tim
I just made that up. So there you go.
Dan
Yes. Well, I think it just reminds me of some conversation I’ve had recently around autism with a friend who’s a therapist who she was saying, everyone, we talk about the different ways personalities interact with society as if there is a norm, and then there’s the deviations from the norm. But it’s like capitalism or capitalistic society is saying, this is what how a person, a human, should be. But what if it’s just like completely organic and normal, that there’s all kinds of different humans, there’s all kinds of different personalities? We have the spectrum in the world of autism. That’s her expertise, but it’s reminiscent of that in some ways. What if the transition that we’re imagining in our head of how life should be and how our transition should go isn’t like the organic or natural process, but it’s something that’s being fed to us by society, by capitalism, by consumerism, by whatever else, by social media. And that something else much slower, much more authentic is like actually the correct or I don’t even care if I feel like the right word. But the more natural path.
Tim
Yeah. I’m not sure that linear is organic.
Dan
Yes.
Tim
We have a timeline in our head, and if it doesn’t go according to that timeline, because we mapped it out April 27, this is what I’m going to do. And then I’m going to be here by July 1, and then by October 1, I’m going to be here, not recognizing that this is a dance and it’s a waltz and the timing feels awkward this three, four times, and we’re dancing in a circle, trying to move in a circle. So I was a dancer when I was a kid. I was a music theater. I went to College for musical theater and did some professional work for a while. But I remember the first time that I was actually 15 years old, 16 years old, and I was learning to waltz with a dance partner who was about 50 years old and weighed about 80 pounds, which was good because I had to pick her up and spin her and I knew that we had to make it to the other side of the stage. I just didn’t know you meant when a straight line by spinning in a circle as you went, right?
Dan
Yes.
Tim
That’s how you got to the next point. You just didn’t walk straight. You had to spin as a couple while manipulating each other into a circle to get from point A to point B. And I wonder if that’s what transition looks like. You’re spinning in a circle, which sometimes feels out of control, but you’re eventually going to get there, but you don’t do it 1ft in front of the other as we normally walk or move.
Dan
Yeah, that’s a great analogy. That is really helpful. And I hope that listeners will take that to heart. That’s a messy process, and that is completely okay.
Tim
I dropped two or three times, so it’s a really messy process. Yes, I guarantee it. I mean, I know I did. I know I dropped it two or three times, and I ended up with bursitis in my shoulder. So I’m like, oh, my gosh, there was nothing fun about all of that. And I think all that plays into our conversation.
Dan
Yeah, well, I think related to that, I wanted to hear your thoughts on, especially someone who is transitioning later in life. There’s a lot of people who are listening who might be in a similar place are like, okay, I’m over 50, and I’ve been doing this one thing for a really long time. To think about leaving means leaving a career that has years and years of experience that looks really good on my resume. It means leaving maybe a grad school degree that I invested a lot of time and money into means leaving all of these things. And how do you think about sunk costs when it comes to making these kinds of transitions?
Tim
I’m not sure that I would call anything a sunk cost, but an investment. I was in Italy three, four weeks ago with my best friend. We were both speaking at an event. So we were sending out on a veranda in the evening overlooking room and sitting under the moon, smoking a cigar, enjoying the scenery. And he asked me, do you think I can do something different? So he’s 54 years old. He leads a very large organization. He’s COO of a very large organization, but he’s always been in the same field. And I said, you are responsible for a multimillion dollar budget with hundreds of staff in multiple locations. Those skills cannot be taken away from you. That experience is transferable. So when you walk away from a career path, if you want to call it that, that you’ve been in for a very long time, you’ve got a lot to celebrate, and you can pick up those skills. And those skills are transferable. Even more than that, those skills that you learned should be a reminder that I’m teachable, I’m trainable. I didn’t have all these skills 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. I gained them and gathered them along the way.
Tim
More than that. And if you’ve been in a career for that long and you are successful at any major of the word, depending on what you want to measure success by then you’ve had a heart that has helped you with your passion, accomplished things along the way and learned those skills that most people have let go jettisoned or failed at. Dan, one of the things I tell people all the time, when I’m looking at hiring somebody new, I don’t always look at their skill set. I look at their heart. There’s nothing that you need to know that you can’t learn. I can teach skills. I can get you trained. I can send you to a school. I can send you to a conference. All that’s easy. What I can’t do is put a work ethic and a heart in you. If you’ve got a work ethic and a heart for what you want to do, that will spell out your future success. Anything else you need to know, you either know it or you can gain it. But your passion is not something you chase. It’s something you carry in your pocket. People are always like, it’s my calling.
Tim
It’s my passion. No, you don’t find your passion. You don’t chase your passion. You bring it with you. And if you bring your passion along, you’ll be just fine. Just be patient with yourself.
Dan
Yeah, I love that. It just feels like such a generous invitation toward reimagining how we think about our experience. Maybe not as hard skills, maybe not our hard skills. I guess what I’m saying is there are markers of maybe recognition of who we are and that we’re carrying that with us, no matter what the expression takes and no matter where we put the energy in that effort in the world, which I think is a really fun and great as you make this.
Tim
Transition, there may be some things you have to let go of. I mean, for me, at this moment in our life, we really like our standard of living. But right now we’re having to watch things differently. We have to count the cost of everything we do because we don’t believe in debt, we don’t go in debt, we don’t use credit. And so right now we’re having to say what we are investing the resources that we have or we’re investing into a new opportunity. And so that opportunity is more valuable to me and to our household and our entire family right now than some of the experiences we may have to temporarily put on hold. So there’s always a cost to the transition. But the fulfillment of accomplishing something new is much greater than some of the activities, events, trips, whatever stuff you can fill your life with instead of it. And I think that’s what we do. Going back to that word again, supplement, instead of pursuing that passion or that dream or that idea that you want to do it 50 years old, we refrain. We hold ourselves back as the fear of failure.
Tim
And then what do we do? Then we fill our life with all kinds of stuff, which is just that’s what I mean by artificial filling your life with stuff that is not as fulfilling as you really want it to be because you’re afraid of failing.
Dan
Yeah, that is so good. I want to just circle back to some of your focus and your current work. Two words that I think are really interesting words, particularly paired together, which is authenticity and aloneness. I don’t typically think of those two words as relating to each other, but clearly you do. Yeah. I’d love to hear you talk about the relationship between those two ideas.
Tim
Well, it begins with the idea of aloneness. Now, not everyone uses the word aloneness to describe the feeling that I’m indicating they use the word lonely alone. Those are issues of proximity or emotional issues. In my research and my PhD work on aloneness, I’ve come to discover that it is a state of being, and it’s two sides of the same coin. And people would make this argument that you can have a sense of aloneness that is really healthy. It includes a confidence in who you are and a solitude and a peace where when you’re alone, you’re not miserable. And then there’s another side of the same coin that you’re not comfortable in your own skin. You don’t feel like you belong. You don’t sense a sense of significance. And so your aloneness there also turns into both the States of being just the question is, what side of the coin are you on? And so I wrote a book on the issue called Alone Sucks, and that will grab your attention as you walk down the airport and see it on turnstile Alone Sucks in the midst of that, because it’s always been since. Sadly, that’s been a passion of mine, a passion project from years ago.
Tim
And I explained in the book how the title came and where the story come from. But I was trying to figure out what is the root cause, because I happen to believe that alone is the cause of a lot of the symptoms that we suffer from in life. But if aloneness is the cause of many of those symptoms, what’s the cause of aloneness? And for me, that’s a sense of like I said a moment ago, it’s not a sense of being belonging. It’s fitting in. It’s faking. It. It’s wearing a mask. All of those issues are artificial. So the question becomes, why do we live an artificial life? What is it we’re afraid of? What are we trying to hide? What do we fear if we fear it, what is it we don’t trust? If we don’t trust people, we don’t trust ourselves, we don’t trust the circumstances of the situation that we’re in? Are we afraid of being hurt because the root cause of a lack of trust is fear? So what do we fear? And what do we compensate our lives with to eliminate that sense? And so we fill our lives. Like I said a moment ago, we fill our lives with other things.
Tim
We make ourselves really busy. My wife and I had a conversation this morning. Because of some of my health issues, I still struggled to get my exercise time in, which is very important to all of us. We should all move, but I always find an excuse. My podcast with Dan went long today. I’ve got a meeting tonight. This happened today or that happened today. She said you just have to stop making excuses and start making it the priority because that’s what you really want. So as long as you’ve got an excuse and she said using your own words, it’s an artificial reasoning to not be authentic to what you really want to accomplish. We all fill our lives with some kind of additive that supplements where we feel like we’re suffering because that’s what supplements too. My youngest son is really on me all the time about my health. And so we are talking about this issue the other day about supplements. He said no one need supplements. Nobody. If you want healthy nutrients, eat healthy stuff. Meat and fruit. Everything you need is meat and fruit. He’s on this big kick of why you don’t eat vegetables.
Tim
He’s got great scientific evidence behind it, but I’m still studying it. But he said that everything you possibly need, everyone needs is a meat and fruit. He said so you don’t need to supplement your life with vitamins and minerals if you just eat the right stuff. Okay. Isn’t the same thing true about relationships? Isn’t the same thing true about our career? Isn’t the same thing about our time? And so there’s some things we need to give up, like news. You could give up the news that’s just keeping you in a state of fear. You could give up forms of entertainment, you could give up addictions that you have inadvertently built. But it’s hard. So that’s the question for everybody. What are you filling your life with that is keeping you from the best? And how many of those things really are a mask from preventing anyone seeing the real you? Why are you afraid of people seeing the real you? Rejection. And those are all hard questions. Which is why, again, the meaning movement, my projects, they’re that long process of letting go of some things to discover. And then you don’t discover treasure without digging deep.
Tim
Real treasure is not typically ever found on the surface.
Dan
No, not at all.
Tim
It requires a lot of effort and painful effort to dig deeper to the real gold.
Dan
I love it. It’s such an important invitation to show up, to let yourself and not just let yourself, but find those ways to be the real you, to do away with.
Tim
Maybe it’s letting yourself. I mean, I disagree with you, but there is a level of permission required.
Dan
That’s true.
Tim
No one else is going to give you permission to be yourself if you don’t give yourself permission first. Yeah, you’re fine just the way you are. You’re a beautiful human being just the way you are. If you don’t have your own acceptance, you don’t need anybody else’s because it won’t fix anything.
Dan
Yeah, I love it. So good we’re coming up our time here. And so just to move towards wrapping up, I feel like these are the kinds of topics I feel like I could just plumb the depth with you for hours and hours. But for listeners who are enjoying your content and want to find out more about what you’re up to and learn more from you, there are specific things that you’d like to invite people to.
Tim
The easiest place to find out what I’m working on currently or what might be coming. It’s just my web page, timothyldred.com and just like it sounds don’t spell it Eldridge people get that wrong. I’m sure it’s in your show notes but Timothyeldridge.com yeah, there’s a blog you can sign up for. It’s free but you won’t miss anything. Sign up for it my podcast Square Peg Round Hole how to live with authenticity and artificial world. You can find all the episodes there and how to link to it on your favorite podcast. And like anybody today, if you are just going to attempt the Eldred under any social media channel, I’m not the most active poster but I post things that I think have value. But Timothyltrid.com is the easiest place. Damn I love it.
Dan
Well, Tim, thank you so much for that. It’s been so fun to connect and I personally really look forward to staying connected and continuing the friendship. So thanks for coming on the show.
Tim
Absolutely. There will be a next time. Thanks, Dan.
Dan
Yes, I can’t wait.
