What is a Good Life? #72
Feeling True To Who I Am with Reuben Christian
On the 72nd episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Reuben Christian. Reuben is an award-winning edutainer: a cocktail of event host, motivational speaker, facilitator, TV presenter and comedian. He's the founder and facilitator of Dream Rehab: a live show and curriculum that harnesses the power of community to help people achieve their personal goals. He co-hosts the award winning (GQ & Esquire) What Is This Behaviour podcast, and his work is all about inspiring new possibilities by creating uplifting spaces for people to connect, collaborate, and grow.
In this beautiful episode, Reuben shares his journey of feeling true to himself. Whether it’s paying attention to what brings fun to his life, embracing responsibility, exploring and excavating through therapy, or following what makes him feel alive and aligned in his work, Reuben highlights several important areas for us to consider in feeling true to ourselves. We also explore our experiences with engaging more with our emotions and feeling more of life.
If your life has lost a sense of feeling, engagement with emotion, fun and experimentation, or a sense that it truly is your life, this conversation will provide many themes and areas to explore further. While Reuben’s openness and willingness to explore and experiment will offer much inspiration on your own path.
The weekly clip from the podcast (3 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (58 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
From my own experience and Reuben's insights, it's clear that being true to oneself is not a final answer but an ongoing conversation with life.
For both Reuben and me, it is also clear that a big part of that process, or that ongoing conversation, is opening ourselves up to our emotions and our feeling of life. Once again, a commonality for us in developing this capacity was therapy, and for me, an ongoing part of this is mindfulness.
Not in the sense of dedicating a specific time of my day to meditation—though that can be helpful—but more as a consistent paying attention to my feelings and experiences. As our attention to life expands, so does the subtlety of our awareness and our appreciation of our reactions. Whether that is merely in noticing whether I like something or not, moments where I feel most in alignment with my own nature, realising how I am feeling a certain way in a particular setting, with certain people, or in themes of conversation, all this noticing provides me with so much more data from my encounters with life.
Life is constantly offering feedback but we are often simply not paying attention.
I don’t mean this in a very mechanical way, like I am tensing in my effort to pay attention or that I am cataloging reams of moments while assigning metrics. Not at all—my feelings do all this naturally, while my attention is one of openness rather than directed-ness.
By openness, I mean that very little makes me want to look away from what is. I can find life as uncomfortable as the next person at times; however, the more I observe my emotions and feelings, share them with others, and hear about other people’s inner worlds, the less shame I attribute to them. I see them all as being very human, more part of the human condition rather than a defect or an error to erase. Therefore, I expand my capacity to stay with what is. It is interesting either way.
By expanding the aperture of my observations and the subtlety that comes with consistent observing, it also informs me that all of what we are holding is transient—our moods, judgments, emotions, reactions—they are all so fleeting. An appreciation of this makes it hard to hold onto a particular feeling and completely identify with it.
As I watch my own baby in her first nine months of life, I oddly recognise a lot of my own present emotional processing aligns with hers. It may sound strange, but I can go from a moment and expression of anger to exasperation to a burst of laughter in a much shorter time frame than before. An emotion in a moment rarely paints the picture of my whole day.
The emotions are not repressed nor avoided but rather acknowledged as quickly as they come and go. I am certainly not saying that I won’t frequently get caught or attached to particular loops of thoughts and feelings that accompany those thoughts. However, overall, internal states generally play out much more naturally as I suspect they are intended to.
As a result, when someone asks me how I am doing or, more specifically, how I am feeling, I can seldom give a one-word answer like good, happy, sad, angry, etc. There is usually a mixture of things floating through me simultaneously or within close proximity to the question.
What’s more, they may sound almost contradictory or at odds with one another, like moments where I feel frustration and hope, flow and friction, and so on. Even when an overriding feeling in a day may be sadness or frustration, there will be moments where I may still laugh, moments where I feel so connected to another human that I feel joy or love. When I am not completely attached to a transient state, I can observe gaps, spaces, or an unevenness to its experience, or the presence of more.
None of these states are in competition with each other, like we sometimes like to make out. They simply appear and disappear, not canceling each other out or making amends for what we perceive as negative or positive—they simply are.
I believe our consistent problems in life are less about what happens and more about our desire for things to stay or change. I’ll leave you this week with a question that often lingers in my mind: 'What if the problem isn’t life itself, but how we respond to it?'
3. Full Episode - Feeling True To Who I Am with Reuben Christian - What is a Good Life? #72
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4. This week’s Questions
Can you think of a decision or a path in life you committed to that you knew immediately didn’t feel true to who you are?
What pivot have you made in life that resonated most with who you are?
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 for individual or executive team coaching or executive silent retreats, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.