Mindfulness Transformed Me, with Andy Puddicombe

(can fizzing) (gentle music) Headspace Studio. (gentle music) Hi, my name's Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning. I don't know if your parents or whoever looked after you as a child ever asked you when you were young what you wanted to be. I was thinking back the other day, I was chatting to my sister and I was thinking back to those days and sitting around the table with my parents as a kid and them asking me kind of what I wanted to be. And it was a tricky time in our household. There was a lot of tension between our parents. It was just before they got divorced. And I remember kind of the time I was constantly just trying to kind of make them laugh to sort of ease the pressure in their house, you know? So the first answer I came out with was I was gonna be a priest because I was the most unlikely candidate to be a priest ever. And I think I knew it would make them laugh. I laughed and they said "no, but seriously, like what are you gonna be?" And I said "maybe a clown", again, because I thought it was a ridiculous thing to say. Turns out I went on to become a monk and to join the circus. So who knows? I sometimes wonder how much of life we decide and we choose ourselves and how much of life is kind of just happening anyway. But it requires us to take a first step, to be willing to try things that maybe feel outside of our comfort zone that maybe scare us in some way. Maybe we're worried about being, I don't know, feeling humiliated or making a fool of ourself. Someone asked me a few days ago, they said, "so if I'm gonna live a life, an extraordinary life, what do I need to do?" So I somehow had the answer. I said "well I just have a very varied resume. It's not an extraordinary life, it's just a different set of things". And they said "yeah but what's the thing that's kind of helped you the most in making those decisions in life?" And as I thought about it, it was actually retrospectively after the conversation, I thought actually it is that, a willingness to fail. I don't even really relate to the idea of the word fail because I don't really think of that as life. Life just unfolds and some things we like the results of, some things we don't like the results of. People may interpret that as success and failure and everything else, but that's really just the commentary around the event. There's nothing sort of objective about it. And look, I've had a lot of practice in my life sort of looking like a fool. So in that sense, I had a head start. I played the fool a lot as a kid, so I...