What is a Good Life? #57
Balancing Effort & Letting Go with Dr. Bettina Palazzo
On the 57th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Dr. Bettina Palazzo. Bettina is a business ethics expert, a lecturer at the University of Geneva, and the creator of The Ethics Gym program, demonstrating how leaders can be credible ethical role models.
In this conversation, we delve into the question Bettina is presently contemplating in life: how does one balance making an effort and letting go? Bettina shares the challenges this represents and also reflects on the part social media plays in making us believe we have an immediate solution for every problem in life.
We explore the role of our natural selves and curiosity, noting how fear and perfectionism affect our capacity to handle uncertainty. Simultaneously, we observe the role that compassion for ourselves and others plays in our ability to handle uncertainty and develop more trust in the unfolding of life, whether this is cultivated through community groups she has created or by being attentive to the stories we tell ourselves about other people’s behaviour towards us.
This episode will give you much to contemplate regarding our attempts to control and our relationship with uncertainty. Bettina also shares in such an authentic and relatable manner that her reflections provide really interesting insights and nuance into the challenges we face in our culture with letting go.
The weekly clip from the podcast (3 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (52 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
I’ve set up a weekly conversation group that takes place every Wednesday at 7pm (CET) on Zoom. It incorporates silence and authentic communication - sharing thoughts and experiences from what is emerging in the moment. It is completely free, it’s for a course I’m designing and I’m experimenting with different themes. Recent themes have been Soul, Love, Home this week it is Intuition. Message me here to find out more or sign up.
2. My weekly reflection
'Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.' - Herodotus
As Bettina and I discuss in the clip above, we are living in an era in which we are being bombarded with information and solutions. Have a problem of any sort, and someone (whether an expert or not) who has never met you, doesn’t know the specifics of who you are, your individual constellation of character, experiences, and present life situation, is only a click away from telling you exactly what you need to do.
In recent weeks, with guests, we have touched on themes of aliveness in our lives, being connected to our environments and one another, and we have explored ideas around why we feel so disconnected or dislocated in our lives.
One of the ways in which we are becoming more disconnected from ourselves, and most likely some sense of reality, is the assumption that we are incredibly rational beings, that we just need to think about things the right way, have the right strategy, and absorb the right information, and life will be simple.
The quote above from Herodotus is over 2,000 years old, and I still see us putting ourselves through the same misery. Before you misconstrue what I am saying, I am not saying don’t think about life, reflect on decisions and choices, seek good counsel - I do all of the above. However, it is important to realise we are driven by far more than our thinking, whether it’s our past, biology, emotional states, environment, the actions of others, culture, fear, desire, evolutionary biology, beliefs, etc., and much (to all) of it is out of our control.
With the emphasis we put on intellectual information and rationality, we can sometimes look at ourselves like robots rather than humans, where we expect X to be the output if Y is the input. In my own experience, it doesn’t seem to work that way, and what’s more, an acknowledgment of this lack of control can bring a hell of a lot more compassion to myself and how I treat others.
I still grow and inevitably adapt, however, it need not be accompanied with a punishing internal soundtrack. The repeated self-flagellation that seems to go with a control and self-development narrative rarely seems to bring people peace or even shorten the list of things they need to do to fix themselves, tantamount to a game of Whac-a-mole, more keeps coming up.
What we often fail to notice is that change is happening all the time whether we have a story around it or not; what we are in relationship with and to (everything) is constantly fluctuating, and change is always occurring. The cells in our bodies, the beating of our heart, the tectonic plates on which we stand, the movement of electrons, the earth orbiting the sun, the changing of a tree’s leaves, the thoughts in our heads, our emotional states…nothing is standing still in that sense or remains the same.
(Just as a brief aside and inquiry for us. Do we fear ourselves as we presently are? Do we fear something wild inside of ourselves? Do we equate letting go of control with being out of control?)
So whatever way we are interpreting events that are playing out, whether we are the absolute master of our every choice and action, whether we are merely observers of an unfolding or expanding, or somewhere in between, change will occur. Like with most things in life, I like to explore and experiment with what feels more true to the experience of my life, and my experience suggests we control far less than we’d like to imagine. What does your life experience tell you?
If you’d like to work with me individually as your coach, to awaken your own self-inquiry, message me here to a arrange a free 30-minute 1-on-1 consultation
3. Full Episode - Balancing Effort & Letting Go with Dr. Bettina Palazzo - What is a Good Life? #57
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4. This week’s Questions
Is there someone in your life you are presently assuming is intentionally causing you trouble but may just be having a hard time of it themselves?
Is there some task or venture you wish to undertake but perfectionism is proving an obstacle to starting? What are you presently afraid of?
About Me
I am a Coach based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.