UrbanUpdate

Maybe you’ve had this experience: you relentlessly strive after a goal for a long period of time, believing that when you finally achieve it, you’ll feel fulfilled. But when you do arrive, the fulfillment is not quite what you expected. Soon after, you’re off chasing something else. The cycle continues ad infinitum, and you feel like you’re in perpetual pursuit. It’s this hamster wheel of ambition, endemic to our productivity and optimization obsessed work culture, that Brad Stulberg tackles in his new book The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success that Feeds—Not Crushes—Your Soul.

In his work as an executive coach—he’s also previously co-authored the books Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox—Stulberg noticed that many of the executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes he coaches were stuck on this hedonic treadmill: wanting, striving, achieving, and then, ultimately, finding themselves back to wanting. He coins this process “heroic individualism” and says it’s most notable symptoms are a sense of restlessness, a feeling of frenetic energy, and exhaustion. (He also notes that it applies to a particular, privileged class of people.) 

He makes the case that the cause of this never ending chase—and the burnout it often leads to—is a sense of not-enough-ness. We expect external successes to solve internal worth issues. Stulberg believes it’s by accepting where we are (and who we are)—a feeling of “groundedness”—that we can exit this trajectory. He outlines six principles that help establish this firm ground (acceptance, presence, patience, vulnerability, community, and movement), and lays out ways he’s helped his clients incorporate these into their lives. GQ called up Stulberg to see if we could steal some of that coaching wisdom. Here, he talks about how he arrived at the practices he recommends, why new behavioral therapies aren’t actually new, and why, at a time when we all have too much to do, it’s okay to just let more things fall through the cracks.

GQ: Why is groundedness a solution to our excessive striving?

Brad Stulberg: Think about a mountain. When people look at a mountain they almost always gaze up at the peak. But very rarely do people pay any attention to the base of the mountain. What groundedness asks us to do is to pay really close attention to our own base by practicing these foundational principles of groundedness. As a result, it situates you more firmly in the present moment.

It's not that you can't still strive. You can still go for those peaks, but the texture of the striving changes because it's not so much out of compulsion. It's more out of a place of wholeness and love.

There's a real paradox here that is borne out in scientific research. We like to think that we need to be really hungry to achieve great things. That's partially true. But if that hunger comes from a place of emptiness, or insecurity, or if-then syndrome—“if I achieve this, then I'll finally feel whole or confident”—it gets in the way of peak performance. What supports peak performance is striving for those big goals from a place of already being enough.

I wonder how much of this is a problem of living and working in America. We have such an obsession with productivity, and we have the mandate that it’s up to the individual to find happiness.

I don't want the book to be a total critique of capitalism, because that's out of my wheelhouse. But if you zoom in on consumerism, it gets super problematic. The whole game of consuming is that you're not enough, and if you buy this service or product then you will be enough.

When I was first starting to think about the book I just started paying really close attention to television commercials. It is wild how there can be commercials for cat litter, or detergents, or for stainless steel cleaners, and the people are all beautiful! It has nothing to do with how the thing's going to clean my refrigerator and get the grunge off the dishes.

Much of the economy runs on us not feeling like we're enough. Then we try to buy or achieve our way out of it, and those go hand in hand, because the way that most people gain money to buy things is by achieving. There's no time left to focus on things like building a strong community, or having patience, because it's like you need this thing now to be happy.

How did you decide which practices are worth recommending?

I did a huge scan of the third wave behavioral therapies for depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder. In particular, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy. I started there because those all have really good, randomized controlled trials, and a solid evidence base. These things change behavior and experiences.

Then I looked at research psychology. So not clinical effectiveness, but when you take undergraduate students and measure them in a lab, or in an acute setting, what are predictors of a good life, or predictors of fulfillment? I looked into wisdom. What were the Stoics talking about? What were the Buddhists talking about? What were Taoists talking about? You start seeing these same patterns and themes emerge.

Then in reporting, I talked to people that seem like they're quite grounded now, and often people that went through periods of time where they weren't. I've asked them, "What's changed? What do you practice?" I started to hear all these themes. 

I’ve read a lot of the books you cite and it is interesting that like Lao Tzu is saying a similar thing to what, 2500 years later, psychology or self-improvement books are repeating.

When I was sick with OCD and I was going through therapy, I was seeing these principles. For me it was really eye opening. I read Mark Epstein's book [Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart], and I'm like, "Holy shit. Everything I've been doing in therapy is just Buddhism." The Buddha wrote cognitive behavioral therapy. Your thoughts, feelings, and sensations are all separate processes. You can watch them. You can separate from them.

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So then I started saying, "What would a Stoic say?" It’s maybe a less self-compassionate framework, but it’s all the same stuff. Taoism? All the same. These acceptance and commitment [therapies], cognitive behavioral therapy, they're branded as these cutting edge therapies, and in some ways they are because they're the first psychological therapies that have been studied with scrutiny and showed good outcomes, but the content is not cutting edge at all. It's just ancient wisdom.

There’s a coaching client of yours that you talk about towards the end of the book who knows intellectually all the things he needs to do to feel grounded, but he just can’t make himself do them. I think we’re all kind of that guy! We know what we need to do and we struggle to do it. Why do you think that is?

I think some of it is the human condition. We evolved very much in a way where we want to be lazy and conserve energy, and hacks definitely appeal to that. When you're out on the savanna and there's famine and constant caloric restriction deficit, you need to do everything you can to conserve energy. Then if you can get a big kill, you eat it and then you go back to conserving energy. It’s just hardwiring.

The other part is that we live in a candy store. If there's Peanut M&M's all around your house always, you're going to eat Peanut M&M's all day. If you've got Instagram and Twitter on your phone, you've got Peanut M&M's on your phone. The brown rice, the nourishing stuff, it just takes a lot more effort. It's harder. It doesn't feel good until you've been eating it for long enough where it just becomes a part of your lifestyle. Suddenly if you have Peanut M&M's for a day or two, you feel like crap. There's a delayed gratification element to a lot of these practices.

A lot of this stuff is swimming upstream. It is hard. I'm going to spend at least the next three days just gouging myself with Peanut M&M's, looking at Twitter and newsletters.

You're speaking specifically of looking at reviews, and press about the book?

Yep. Just kind of being in the external reaction to the book world. The most grounded thing I could do is hit the trail for four hours a day on hikes and then be working on my next book. Where I've improved is I know that it's going to make me feel like crap, so I have a much easier time on day three or whatever to be like, "All right. I've eaten enough Peanut M&M's. I need to wind this down."

That seems like a more sustainable and realistic way of approaching it, to actually let yourself indulge in some of that stuff. I feel like a lot of people would say "just don't look at it at all."

I don't think that's realistic for most people—I think most people say that and then they're sneaking looks. It's totally fine every once in a while to do it. There's got to be an awareness of what you're doing and how it's making you feel. Excitement is different than ease or happiness. This morning, I was very excited. When I checked in—and by checking in, it's not like an elaborate meditation routine, it’s like a minute while I'm making coffee—the excitement felt a lot more like anxiety than contentment. I felt a lot better three months ago when this wasn't on my mind.

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How did writing this book change the way you think about the role of work and how it should function in your life?

This is a really tricky question. The stock answer is work shouldn't define your life. But if you're the scientist that's working on the mRNA vaccine, I want work to define your life—and that's a pretty good thing on your deathbed! Like, "Oh, maybe I didn't have the deep family and friend ties, but I developed the mRNA vaccine to stop COVID."

The nuance here is to maybe not think about it so much as work or life, but think of it as, what are my core values? What are the guiding principles that I aspire to live up to, and that I see in other people that I admire? How can I practice those core values day in and day out?

At work, if you don't really get a chance to practice those core values, then you probably shouldn't think of work as foundational. You should show up, do your job, get paid so you can eat and pay rent, and then invest heavily in other areas of life where you can practice your core values. If your core values are aligned with the work that you do, then I don't think there's anything wrong with work being a fundamental part of your life.

A thing I run up against in some of this is that if I do the work of implementing all these practices—having the 20 minutes of stillness in the morning, or working in regular walking breaks or stretching breaks—sometimes there's just too much to do. There's this sort of disconnect of wanting to be more present and more grounded, but not being able to do it while keeping up with everything I have to do. What advice do you give to people in that scenario?

The first thing is to try to address why there is so much to do. This is more of the systems approach. If the workload is just overbearing, can you change the workload? If the household is just brimming with craziness, is there something that you can do to shift the household? People assume that the answer is no, but I've never had a coaching client not find at least something that they can take out that makes a big difference.

Something else is learning to be okay with letting things fall through the cracks. I wish that organizations could do this. Corporate organizations have like 32 priorities and they end up doing none, instead of just having like two or three and doing those two or three really well. I coach someone where something that's been integral to what we're doing is just letting him be okay with letting things that don't fall in his top three priorities fall through the cracks.

It's a less is more approach, or quality over quantity. Define your priorities to the extent possible, have them align with your core values, then ruthlessly prioritize those things and be okay with letting other stuff fall through the cracks.

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What other advice do you have about ways to work better?

This is changing as a result of COVID, and I hope some of these changes stick: the sit at a desk in an office culture around work, in almost all cases, is not conducive to problem solving, creativity, emotional control, all the things that you want in a workforce. My hope is that we start to—or at least we continue with—work that's not so connected to place, and not so connected to sitting all the time. If you do your best thinking out on a walk, then you ought to be able to go out on a long walk in the middle of the day if your work really prioritizes thinking.

What will be interesting is that as more workplaces have greater flexibility with remote policies, people, particularly people in big cities, are going to save lots of time commuting. With that time, are they just going to wake up, and pull out their email, and just do three hours more of work, or are they going to use that time to invest in their local community, to exercise, read, do spiritual practice, whatever it is? With these more flexible policies that people love, we have to make sure that we're replacing the commute time with meaningful activities, particularly around the community. Because for better or worse, for a lot of people work was the place that they had community.

At the end of the book, you write that focusing on these internal foundations requires us to think about success differently. How do you think the idea of success changes?

My definition of success is feeling good and doing good—or, to use the language of the book, being good and doing good—where I am. I think the biggest change is it’s less a focus on something in the future and more focus on what I'm doing right now. The way that I achieve being good and doing good now is by practicing my core values. You could say that success is building a life where you know what your core values are and you can practice them. Your sense of being is stable and solid. Your doing in the world reflects that sense of being, or your core values. It is very now- focused, and it's very much about the internal dashboard versus an external dashboard. The internal dashboard meaning core values, versus the external dashboard meaning book sales, promotions, gold medals, whatever it might be.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQQ&ABooks