Timothy Arrigo on Why Real Change Starts from the Inside Out

So at the center of the book is a single demanding premise that our lives flow from the inside out and that the problem is rarely our spouse, our boss, our past, our circumstances.

Walk us through that idea.

Yeah, well, your subjective experience with life is synonymous with how you perceive and experience life in general.

So You know, I kind of give the metaphor of, you know, if we're standing on a street corner and a car full of people drive by and they point in our direction and they laugh as they drive by, well, I might think they're laughing at me and I might feel ashamed and I might, you know, maybe yell back at the car.

The person next to me might have thought they were laughing at something behind us and he feels indifferent towards the whole situation and he just keeps walking down the street.

Whereas the person next to him might have thought they thought he was handsome And maybe he, you know, feels all excited and, you know, maybe he's gregarious and wants to go meet them and, you know, he wants to find out who they are.

So a lot of our interpretation of the world around us shapes and forms how we perceive reality and how I think affects how I feel and how I feel affects how I behave.

And those behaviors then feed back into that same feedback loop of thoughts, feelings, and actions.

It's what's called the cognitive triangle, which was originally developed by Aaron Beck in the 1960s.

So the idea of the inside-out method, things flowing from the inside, is that Everything is an iceberg.

And what most people consider to be problems are actually symptoms.

And the idea of changing your life from the inside out for a lot of people is... is scary because what we're used to doing is manipulating the external in order to meet our internal reality, right? So I'm hurt.

So I need you to apologize, right? Or this scares me.

So I need it to be easier for me.

right? So we want the external to accommodate our internal world.

And so we have a tendency to put demands, commands, expectations on the external.

And we externalize a lot, primarily because of cognitive dissonance.

If something challenges my worldview, then I have two choices.

I can upgrade my belief systems and actually acknowledge that I had the wrong information I didn't know, which studies have proven that the most intelligent people in the world are the people that can do this.

The people that can actually say, hmm, interesting, I didn't actually, maybe I'm wrong.

Or as people that dig in deeper to their position, So if I can be willing to upgrade my worldview, right? If I'm willing to face dissonance, right? And what dissonance is, is my beliefs and my actions are not congruent with one another, right? So I say that I, you know, I value spending time with my children, but I neglect them.

Oftentimes as a way to mitigate dissonance, what we do is we do a couple of things.

So we'll minimize dissonance.

Well, I

mean, come on, like what kind of dad has the time to spend