#20: Discover Your True Nature with Robbie Fenlon

LIFEWISE: DISCOVER YOUR TRUE NATURE WITH ROBBIE FENLON

TANIA COTTON, LifeWise Show Host (00:00:00):
Welcome to the Lifewise Show where we explore the things in life that make you feel truly alive. Today I'm talking to Robbie Fenlon, who I met over 20 years ago when I first arrived in the Alps as a movement specialist. Robbie was a mountain guide in Chamonix suffering from disabling back pain as a result of accelerated wear and tear restricting movement in his hip joint. Robbie's story is featured in the MovementWise film, Robbie's story ‘A Vision of the Future’, and it highlights the importance of health professionals seeing patients not as an injury or a disease, but as a whole person in the context of their life. It is inspiring to witness Robbie over 10 years later in a short yet powerfully poignant eight minute MovementWise film ‘Fit For Life’ that we completed last year when he led Jack Lowe, an 82-year-old man up a mountain peak at over 3000 meters after a snowstorm.
(00:01:12):
Whilst Robbie began his MovementWise journey with me as a patient, it is subsequently I who have been on a LifeWise journey with Robbie. Robbie has introduced me to meditation and a whole new level of self-awareness through his input as a professional coach. Robbie uses tools such as the Clifton Strength Finder and the Enneagram that identifies personality traits. At first, I was skeptical that these tools based on multiple choice questionnaires could possibly reveal deep truths about myself I had not identified. Yet with Robbie's understanding and guidance of how these tools work and how to use these tools, I have become more familiar and able to live life according to my true nature and not according to who I think I should be and what I think I should do based on other people's expectations. Or on childhood patterns of survival that no longer serve me as an adult.
(00:02:16):
Robbie Fenlon works as a leadership coach and meditation practitioner drawing on more than 30 years of real world experience. From guiding mountaineering expeditions in the Alps and the Himalayas to coaching executives, scientists and athletes with a deep interested in meditation, neuroscience, and human development, Robbie helps people tap into their own intelligence, strength and experience to find practical solutions to their own challenges. He blends modern coaching techniques with insights from neuroscience research and wisdom traditions to help people live from presence, achieving meaningful results without being trapped on the hamster wheel of stress and time scarcity. Robbie is the founder of True Nature Coaching, creator of the Living Human Map Coaching System, and a longtime student of contemplative practice. His work is rooted in common sense, simplicity, truth and contribution. He helps others bring their own wisdom to their work, their relationships and their lives. Robbie, welcome to the LifeWise Show.
(00:03:42):
It's wonderful to have you here, especially considering the long journey we've been on together. When I first met you as a patient, you, your inner work was quite private work and I've seen the incredible impact it's had. Not only you but also on those around you - and the impact it's had on me, and really that's what really makes me want to share this with others today. Now, you call your coaching practice ‘True Nature’. Can you tell me a little bit about why you like this expression, True Nature, as I do, yet it's hard to pinpoint why?

ROBBIE FENLON: LifeWise Show Guest (00:04:29)
Well, thanks for that lovely introduction, Tania. It sounds really good. Of course, I'm very human, so we may aspire to have all these qualities, but we're still human beings every day. So, the true nature aspect, true nature is one of these words that comes from dharma practice and Buddhism, we say that we're trying to acquaint ourselves with and connect ourselves with our true nature. So our true nature is ourselves without all the complexity of our thinking patterns and our emotional patterns and all of these sort of overlays on top of our basic true nature. And our basic true nature is supposed to be goodness, kindness, openness, all of that sort of thing, which also corresponds very much with the positive psychology view that we've developed in the latter half of the 20th century, early part of the 21st century. And that's rather than seeing human beings as dangerous animals that are full of negative qualities that have to be reigned in, it's much more an attitude of human beings are full of great potential and we get all this stuff overlaid on us by how we grow up our society, how we interact with others, and we can develop these negative patterns, but they're not us, they're patterns and we can work with those patterns and clean them away and get back to our true nature.
(00:06:11):
So, our true nature is simple, open, caring and all of those sorts of things. I don't want to be too philosophical about it because there's a lot of different things that we can say about true nature. The other aspect I like about the phrase true nature is because I've spent most of my life working in nature. I've been an outdoor, I'm a mountain guide, I'm still a mountain guide. I've been a mountain guide for 30 years. And then I worked in what was called, used to be called outdoor pursuits, and then it was called Adventure Sports, and I'm not sure what it's called these days, Outdoor Education. That was one of my early jobs before I became a mountain guide. I spent about 10 years there. So this idea of nature being true, you can't lie to nature if you're not able to paddle the river, if you're not able to climb the mountain, the mountain's going to let you know.
TANIA COTTON (00:07:14):
Thank you. And I'd like to come back to that nature, the outer nature side of it later on and maybe explore the word rewilding that we've talked about in the past. But just staying with this whole subject that we have a true nature that is inherently good. And it's interesting for me to reflect that should it not just be second nature for us to know what's right for us, each of us as individuals, what's inherently right for us to do? What is for each of us within our nature and what's against our nature? How well, in general, do we actually know ourselves? Because I have learned so much I, I'm going to be 60 next year and I feel like the last three years have been my greatest growth phase and understanding. And largely that has come from what you have exposed me to in terms of exploring these different tools such as the Strength Finder and Enneagram that have made me realise, actually, a lot more of who I am and what allows me to bring out the best in myself and others.
ROBBIE FENLON (00:08:43):
So, if I just come back, so you mentioned the Strength Finder and the Enneagram, so I just want to put that in a larger context. So the larger context for me is self-awareness, and I just want to credit my friend Professor François Hamann for bringing this to my attention because I've worked with a lot of different things and working with François, working on cold exposure, breathwork and heart coherence and various things - he brings a very scientific aspect to this sort of work. One of François's phrases is ‘data talks, bullshit walks’. And I really like that. So, what François working with Francois, he has a very creative mind and in our conversations as we touched on all of these different subjects, we were sort of going, what is the common thread here? And the common thread is self-awareness and it's we can get the impression if we look at the internet that there's just one thing that's going to work for us. It's going to be the breath work or it's going to be like if I go to Tony Robbins or if I do this course or whatever, it's this idea of the six-week path to mastery, which is rubbish really. Nevertheless, nevertheless, many of these things are good for us.
(00:10:09):
So if I just come back to this thing of the Strength finders and Enneagram, not that this in itself is going to transform you, but they are tools that will help you develop. And it's the self-awareness aspect that really I see as the essential work. My essential work as a coach, but also as a guide, which is helping people see other aspects of themselves that they're blind to. We all have blind spots. And also because of the way we're brought up and our education system, we're not always taught about what our strengths are. We're taught about what our weaknesses are and where our problems are and the things we've got to improve rather than what we already have naturally and what we could develop. And I'm not just arguing for we're born perfect and we don't have to do anything, but often we get squeezed out of shape by the life pattern that we live.
(00:11:11):
We might find ourselves in an education system that doesn't suit us or in a family that doesn't suit us or a job that requires us to be different or only use of a part of our personality. And there's whole areas of who we are that doesn't get used. So this idea of self-awareness is also a key, I suppose a fundamental aspect of the work I like to do with people. And the other part of it that I would say about that the self-awareness is Tony Robbins made a film a few years ago and it was called ‘I'm Not Your Guru’. What I really like about that, I mean I like Tony Robinsons in many ways. He's a very special guy. There's nobody exactly like him. But what I like about that is this title of ‘I Am Not Your Guru’. I see there's too many gurus out there that have the perfect answer that they're saying, you pay me and I will solve your problem for you. Rarely does that work. I mean, most of the time that leads to problems, to dependency and all that sort of things, but whereas helping people develop self-awareness is giving people the power to reconnect with themselves, reconnect with their own power, reconnect with their own talents, and I like that. And then the job of a coach is much more accompanying, being a sounding board, asking people the questions they can't ask themselves.
TANIA COTTON (00:13:01):
Yes, it makes me reflect a lot on our education system that we get squashed into a certain way of doing things that the education system imposes on us as if we're all identical tomatoes for want a better word, which we are not. And there are two things during my journey of self-awareness and making films, making MovementWise Films that really highlighted this to me. One was meeting Dr. Dean Kriellaars who leads the physical literacy movement. I think physical literacy is misleading because it's how physical competency leads to self-confidence. But actually, a lot of it is about self-awareness through movement. And he, he's introduced me to lots of researchers that look at things like the importance of risky play in children and particularly play in nature rich environments. And when I went to Winnipeg to meet this group who got us all playing as adults outside, they told a story.
(00:14:20):
The leader told a story of how there was a principal of a school, a woman who at the end of every day, rather than focusing on the education, she had a line of boys waiting to be punished for bad behaviour. Then there was a whole new way of, rather than taking away recreation and getting people to work to focus on their studies, on their intellectual studies, this team came in and created an enabling environment outside of kind of self-discovery through play. And that line of badly behaved children disappeared. And that was a real wake up call for her. And that really woke me up as well. And especially then when we as all adults in the group were made to do exactly what was set up for those children outside places to hide, places to be creative, places to work together, climb a tree trunk, and work together and interact with each other with nature and how just creating those environments and then there is no attention deficit disorder. We just create an ‘enabling environment’ for that rich human experience and that rich human to be able to express themselves in the way they need to express themselves and the way they learn.
I'd like you to share a little bit about your experience with the education system and how, because it doesn't serve many people, how we could overcome that?
ROBBIE FENLON (00:16:12):
Okay. Well, I definitely would've been one of the boys in that line of bad kids, apparently bad kids. And I think if I go back to the self-awareness and how we get squeezed into different patterns. So I ended up in school believing that I was the bad boy and after school believing that I was a stupid boy. And I remember even in second class, so in second class you're probably about, I don’t now, seven years of age, something like that. I remember we used to have this thing, there was 52 children in the class and we used to have this thing where the bad boys would get X’s and the good boys would get bonuses. There was a boys class, the girls school was an attached school, but we were an all-boys school. And I would win every week, every month, every year, the worst boy in the class. So I had the most X’s. And at the time I felt I wasn't that bothered by that, but obviously it did something to my psychology and the way I thought about myself and my academic ability when it's six or seven years of age, you're not thinking what is my academic ability?
(00:17:37):
So just getting back to that school experience, I remember thinking for a long time, I mean years and years and years while I was in school, I cannot wait for this to be over, it feels like prison. And even as I got older and I became a teenager and I was still in school, I still felt that sort of sense of, ‘Why are we being locked up here?’ I mean, there's still five more years to go, four more years to go, three more years to go. And it just felt like an eternity and time moves slower at that age.
(00:18:15):
I think what I say now is, now I appreciate the situation when I look back as an adult and I look at how young the teachers were and the education system they had to work in. So I don't blame anybody, nevertheless. Nevertheless, it wasn't a good place for me. It wasn't a good place for a child like me and possibly for other kids as well. Some kids thrive in those atmospheres in those situations. I certainly didn't. I loved being outside. I was the kid the headmaster used to say to my mother at the parent-teacher meetings, when I walk into the class, I look down and there's 40 boys looking up at me and in the back I can just see the back of a head down in the corner of the class and it's your son looking out the window. And that was me. I was always looking out the window. I couldn't wait for the bell to go for break time, the bell to go for lunchtime, the bell to go for going home so we could sort of get on with life.
(00:19:15):
Now that might give you the impression that I don't like learning. I love learning. And actually, once I got out of school, I really started to learn. I suppose where I really started to learn even in school was doing certain sports. I wasn't particularly good at football, it was more individual sports. I remember being reasonably good at gymnastics and then judo I was reasonably good at, it's never brilliant. And then when I got out of school and I got my first job working as a mechanic, and I surprised myself at being actually good at the academic side of being a mechanic, you have to do night school and day school. And I actually did really, really well in those exams. And that was just because there was this link between the theory and the practice rather than just learn this page because I say so.
(00:20:08)
It was like, you better learn this because tomorrow you may have a truck in the garage that you need to try and repair and you need to understand what's happening. So that really motivated me to learn and what else would I say about that? And then I was doing martial arts, so I did Karate in different places or Kenpo it was called. And again, I didn't become a black belt, but I did do reasonably well. And it surprised myself in terms of how I learned how to train. I learned how to have some discipline. I learned how to toughen myself up a little bit without becoming a brute.
(00:20:45):
So, learning that I could learn was a fantastic experience. Where do I want to go with that? Yeah. So for me, the education system taught me that I couldn't learn. And when I got out of it, I learned that actually I'm a great learner when I'm pointed at the things that motivate me and when I have the opportunity to explore at my own pace to a certain extent, but connect theory to real life, I'd say that's the real thing. And now I would say I'm a lifelong learner for sure, and I can really feel that a real sense of that's a lot of where my excitement about life and work comes from is what am I going to learn today?
TANIA COTTON (00:21:49):
I can definitely second that. So I'm interested to look now from being a mechanic, how you started to, what you learned from getting involved in climbing.
ROBBIE FENLON (00:23:32):
So climbing is something that I still do. I’m definitely not a world champion for sure. In fact, I think my 9-year-old, 10-year-old niece is a better climber than I am these days. So if I start where I started climbing, I remember I had this experience of rock climbing when I was 10 years of age, nine or 10 years of age with my uncle in the rain in Kerry climbing up this wet crack with a helmet that was too large and we didn't even have harnesses. Then we had these belts that you used to tie around you. And I remember squeezing myself up this chimney wet chimney of rock and getting to the top and the feeling of satisfaction. I remember that. And also the praise I was getting from the adults, and I was not getting that praise in school. So maybe there's part of it there, but it was also just the thing of it was so practical.
(00:24:25):
I was outdoors and it was a struggle, but I was able to do it and I started wanting to get better at it. And I thought back then as an innocent 10-year-old, I'm going to get lots of opportunities to do this, but we didn't have climbing walls back then. This was back in the early seventies. So I didn't get around to doing climbing again until I was about 17. So a whole seven year gap, which is when you look at the young rock climbers of today, they started at age three or four, or at least if they start at 10, they keep going. So my next experience of climbing was being brought out by one of my dad's friends, Tony Ingram, a lovely man who's passed away since. But Tony then gave us his rope because he wasn't climbing. He was a very good climber in the sixties, but then he wasn't climbing anymore and he gave us his rope.
(00:25:26):
So myself and my brother started to go climbing together and working, reading books and working out like, well, how do you tie the knots? How do you do this? How do you do that? How do you keep yourself safe? And that started that climbing journey and that climbing journey started quite close to home in a quarry near where I grew up in Dun Leary in county Dublin, Ireland. And we used to be able to cycle up to the quarry in the evenings. I was doing that now after work. So I was working as a mechanic at that stage, and we'd climb, get to know other young climbers, and that started to open up the world for us. And then we'd start what we learned in Dokey Quarry. We then started to apply to other places, other bigger cliffs around the country and county Wicklow and Glenda Locke, and then across the country into the sea cliffs of the bur or the fantastic cliffs of Fairhead and that sort of spirit of adventure. And I think the spirit of adventure is a very important thread that runs through my life, and I still want adventure, even if I can't do it to the same extent that I would've done it when I was younger.
(00:26:40):
That then introduced us to new adventurous people. So I think that was one of the great things about climbing, is that it's not just being outdoors. It's not just the sport and the movement, it's not just the adventure of it, it's the people as well, because you're meeting people who have challenging ideas and challenging backgrounds. They're not necessarily like you, but they're definitely showing you possibilities and you're meeting older people as well who've done other things that inspire you to go other places. So then we went to Scotland and North Wales and then further afield, and then eventually to the Alps, and then eventually over time to the Himalayas. And all the time that was happening, I was trying to work out, well, how do I make a living? And then it seemed that I could make a living by rock climbing, working as a rock climbing instructor, and then doing other outdoor sports to supplement that. And then that gradually over time led to becoming a professional mountain guide. The first time I met professional mountain guides, I have to say out here in Chamonix, we're near Chamonix at the moment.
(00:27:48):
I remember asking, is it possible for me to become a mountain guide? I asked this French guide and he says, no, no, foreigners can't become mountain guides. So I was like, what? So I took it like, okay, so that's impossible. Anyway, I kept on climbing, but a few years later, the British Mountain Guides Association started to become stronger. And one of my friends, one of my older friends, Dawson Steal Fox, he had just qualified as a mountain guide. He later was the first Irish person to climb Mount Everest, but he was also one of the early Irish mountain guides. There's only a few Irish mountain guides, but that started to open the door. So it allowed me to apply, even though I was Irish from the Republic of Ireland, it allowed me to apply to the British Mountain Guides Association. And then I was able to train as a mountain guide, and that opened my eyes because I was really starting to meet some of the best climbers in the world.
(00:28:45):
And really, I was definitely a small fish in a large pond. But yeah, so where was I going with that story There I was making the transition into the outdoors and how, I suppose if I'd say one other thing, if I come back to the learning aspect again, what I really loved about the journey of becoming a mountain guide was previously I could remember in education, your homework was write an essay on blah, blah, blah. But here your homework was go and climb some grade five ice roots on Ben Nevis and don't come back to us until you've done them. And I was like, okay, that's good homework. I like that. I want to try. I want to try that.
TANIA COTTON (00:29:33):
Yes. And it's incredible. Well, one, how your relationship with yourself developed, and I think it's also valuable to realise how that rope created a bond between you and your brother and the trust that developed through doing that kind of endeavour when you're up at the mountains and there are real risks and there's real responsibility and you are responsible for another human being. And then how that led actually to you teaching to not only guiding but teaching. So yes, take us forward on how that led to you going up Everest, to you actually helping young climbers push the limits in as yet unexplored in Tibet. Take us on that whole journey so that we can then perhaps turn it on its head and look at how you had to challenge yourself to redefine was this success or was there something else that you were searching for?
ROBBIE FENLON (00:30:56):
What you've reminded me of there is actually the transition from pupil to teacher. And that was really a surprise for me, I think. I never thought, oh, I'm going to end up being teaching things and instructing and showing people how to improve. And that was really one of the great gifts of working in an outdoor centre - I found myself in a situation where, because I was a reasonably good rock climber at the time, that I could get a qualification in that, and then I could start to teach that to other people. And then I had to think about, well, how do you teach what you know?
(00:31:44):
And then that starts to put you in a position of not only teaching but leading. So how do you manage groups? How do you manage people? How do you develop people? And I didn't realise it at the time, but that was like the planting the seed of becoming a coach, a leadership coach. And in fact, many leadership coaches don't have the path that I had, and I think they've missed something because leadership isn't something that just happens in business. It happens everywhere. It happens in the world, it happens in hospitals, it happens in the military, it happens in families. And leadership, It's a skill that can be developed, but it's also got a lot to do with self-awareness. It's got to do with understanding yourself and knowing what your own limitations are, but also what your strengths are.
(00:32:33):
So for me, finding myself in my early twenties, being able to, being responsible for leading, for example, I remember I was working with a fantastic woman, Ursula McPherson. She was the director of the Gartan Outdoor Education Centre in northwest, in northwest of Ireland, in County Donal. And she gave me a lot of opportunities as I was transitioning from outdoor instructor to guide. I needed to develop abilities and skills in harsher environments like the Scottish winter. So Scottish winter is very challenging environment actually, because it's very arctic, you're in blizzards and navigation's very hard. Conditions are very hard. Your equipment is challenged, you are challenged. Keeping the group together is challenging. It's a challenge managing your energy, managing the group's energy, everything like that. So Ursula helped me by allowing me to set up these winter mountaineering courses and get more experienced climbers - to work on them. She would work on them as well.
(00:33:44):
And we would take off with a minibus full of people and drive from Ireland across to get the ferry across to Scotland, and then spend weeks and weeks and weeks in Scotland running ice climbing courses and winter mountaineering courses. And all the time you're leading and you've got the responsibility of leadership, and you've not just got the responsibility of leadership, of telling people what to do. You've got the responsibility of leadership where you've got to motivate people and keep people safe, and also help people grow in their own abilities as well and be able, so that part of leadership I learned is not just about the technical skill of whether you can climb - that's nearly second. That nearly has to be ‘second nature’, because where your real attention needs to be is on the people. How are the people doing? What's their energy level? Is this challenging enough? Is it too challenging? Should we adapt the day because the weather's now turned terrible and there's maybe avalanche risk on the original route we were going to go to, etc. Or we might find ourselves in situations where we headed out on a nice day and then it becomes a white out, and now people are starting to get really tired and we've actually overstressed ourselves, but we still got to get down.
(00:35:04):
So there you start to learn about what it means to lead and be responsible. And without having read any books on leadership, well, you learn from watching other leaders and you learn from your own successes and failures. But I think the key thing, and it may sound like a cliché, but if you're going to lead others, you have to be able to lead yourself and to be able to lead yourself, you have to develop your self-awareness. Because if you don't know who you are and what your limitations are and what your strengths are, you're not going to perform at your best. And it's a constant learning journey. So as you go into the harder, more difficult situations, you get challenged again, and you have got to ‘up your game’. And it's not always a success. It doesn't always, leadership isn't always about leading to success. Sometimes it's just dealing with failure and bouncing back. Okay, yeah,
TANIA COTTON (00:36:08):
Leading to success opens up the whole question of then what does that success look like? And the thing that, right from the word go, when I met you, your whole approach to climbing a mountain was different to other guides I had come into contact with. For you, success wasn't about reaching the summit. Success was always about how we managed ourselves, how we worked as a group, how - the enjoyment we got out of it. It was really, again it sounds like another cliché, that it is about what happened on the way and what we learned along the way.
(00:36:55):
And a great success could be having been brave enough and having had the courage to turn back when you know the weather isn't right, when it would be dangerous to move on - that is actually success. You are learning to listen to your own body, listen to the mountain, listen to the other people in the group. In other words, maybe you are strong enough, maybe somebody else's isn’t? And so I think this whole idea of success is quite interesting and in many spheres of life, we need to reevaluate what that is, both in schools and how we measure success, both in corporations, organisations and so on.
ROBBIE FENLON (00:38:28):
The year I qualified as a professional mountain guide was 1996. And it had been, I remember all through the nineties, I was going away a lot. I mean I basically lived in a tent, out of the back of a car and squatted in various people's houses for several years. And so I eventually qualified as a mountain guard in 1996. And I remember all through the training when I'd meet other mountain guides and I'd see their badge, I was like, wow, I want to have one of those badges! I sort of thought this badge, it's like that's the pinnacle of whatever achievement.
(00:39:20):
And then the year I qualified just through happenstance, I was invited by the UIA international organisation of mountaineering to be one of the guides on an international youth expedition to an area called Chola Shan in Tibet, right on the Chinese border with Tibet in, I think it was in Sichuan province or just outside Sichuan province. It may have been Kham. Anyway, but this area was a beautiful area. It had been visited by the famous Himalayan climber, Reinhold Messner when he was scouting to see what other peaks could be climbed there. So it was sort of quite new. There were a lot of new climbs to be done. So this international expedition, we travelled for days and days and days by truck, by bus. And then eventually Yaks and yaks are those black Himalayan cows, like the Scottish cow, but they are really the trucks of Tibet. Before modernity got to Tibet, everything moved around on people's backs or on the yaks backs or horses and mules. But yaks are built for high altitude. They don't like being down at low altitude. So anyway, we went in with these yacks and we set up this Base Camp near this beautiful lake, and we're surrounded by mountains and a bit of high alpine forestry. And then above that it's just glacier and virgin summits, as they used to call them. I don’t know if that's politically correct to say these days.
(00:41:04):
And that expedition was made up of a lot of young people, and I was still relatively young. I was 27 at the time and the group were an international group from all over the world. There was Israelis, Belgians, Dutch, Irish, French, I can't remember all the different nationalities. And the idea was that we'd be based there for several months and climb new peaks. I sort of was in that phase of - now I've achieved everything that I thought I wanted I’m being paid to go to the Himalayas. I've got my badge. I'm working with a very high-level group. Well, everybody's super capable, and I'm working with these other really great international guides. I'm sort of at the top of my game apparently. But it didn't feel like, yeah, it didn't feel so satisfying actually. There was a slight, although it was enjoyable, there was a slight sense of like, oh, there must be something else. Now I'm here, it still feels like there's something missing.
(00:42:33):
And then something happened that was totally unpredictable. It may sound very unremarkable, but this guy turned up at Base Camp. He used to turn up at base camp when we were in between climbs, and he was this scruffy guy in scruffy clothes, obviously Tibetan, long hair dreadlocks, and he didn't speak a word of Chinese or any of our languages, but he'd come in and he'd just sort of watch what we were doing and he'd just be around and being friendly, and we sort of got to know him. So he was just the guy that was in Base Camp. And then he would disappear and then come back and then he'd reappear. This is happening over weeks. So on one of our days off on the mountain, I was exploring around the lake and I realised there were all these rock carvings on the cliff, and they were painted carvings, and I didn't know what they were at the time.
(00:43:35):
Just big figures painted on the cliffs and these strange shapes carved out and then painted. And I realised years later when I got to know more about the Himalayas, that these were Buddhist Mani Prayers, Mani Stones - they'd been carved, carved with the mantra ‘Om Mani Padme Hum,’ was carved on the rock, and there was a huge, it must've been about 20 or 30 feet high carved sort of Buddha figure, and I think it must've been, now I think of it, probably Guru Rinpoche or somebody like that. So, I put two and two together and went, oh, that guy that's coming in here has got something to do with this here. And actually, I did know a little bit about it already because I'd already been to Everest and I'd already been to Manaslu, so I'd been to Nepal a few times.
(00:44:29):
So I had seen these things before, so I did know a little bit about what they were. And I visited a few monasteries. So I started to think, okay, so what's going on here? And on one of my days of exploration when we weren't in the mountains, I was exploring around the base of the cliffs, and I saw there was this log, a chopped log with sort of steps cut in it going up the cliff. And I climbed up that and I got to a ledge and made my way through what seemed like a very faint track, and then came to another cliff, and then there was another stepped ladder going up there. And I went up and up and up through the series of ledges up the side of this cliff until eventually I found this little wooden hut in the forest. And we are literally seven or eight days from civilization at the nearest village. And there was nobody there. But I looked in and I went, ‘This guy is living here!’. So if I cut that story a little bit shorter, and I just say, so what I realised then is this guy is a mountain yogi. This is one of these guys that you hear about in the books who retreat into the mountains to meditate and become enlightened.
(00:45:50):
So I was taken aback. I was like, wow, we think we are tough coming out here to climb these mountains. This guy lives here on his own. And what I understood, the little bit that I understood was his purpose is not to be famous. His purpose is not to be become a great athlete. His purpose is to become a better person and help other people. And I was sort of like, maybe this is what I need to think about doing with my life? But I only planted a seed. I didn't transform straight away. So yeah, that was the first time I ever came across a mountain yogi, a real Himalayan mountain yogi. And there's other things that happened, but I was left with a strong impression of like, wow, it is truly amazing what human beings can do. Because up to then all my heroes had been the people who could climb hard things, whether that was high Himalayan peaks or high alpine peaks or hard alpine roots or hard rock climbs or ice climbs. And when I saw this person, I was like, oh, there's another path.
TANIA COTTON (00:47:00):
Yes. Isn't it amazing how one human being can influence another in such a simple, simple way such that I would like to round that story off. And because then after those weeks and weeks and what could have seemed like, wow, bagging the summits - that you did actually want to say goodbye to him before went home. Just tell us about that encounter.
ROBBIE FENLON (00:47:36):
Okay, so again, sometimes we think these moments of transformation, we see we have this Hollywood version of the moments of transformation. We think they're huge and there's a lot of music and there's fireworks and all of that sort of thing. But this was a moment of transformation, but it was very low key. So the day we were leaving base camp, everyone's, all the tents are down, all the gears going out and the oxes are already in the distance and we're putting on, the last of us are putting on our backpacks to start hiking out. And I thought, I want to go and see that guy. So I dropped my pack and I ran off back to the cliff, climbed up. And when I arrived up at the ledge, he was up there with obviously some villagers and they were all singing, they might've been chanting prayers or something like that. But they were all singing and there was this great atmosphere, and I was really welcomed. I was a bit like, well, I've got to go. But I just felt it was just such, none of those people knew me. He knew me a little bit, but we'd never exchanged a word that either of us understood.
(00:48:51):
But I sort of felt I want to leave something here. So I took my guides badge off and I gave him my guides badge. And for me, for me, it was a small gesture just going, well, I have nothing else and this is the most important thing I have. So here you go. And then I left, and I'm sure I could buy another guides badge later, but that planted a seed that years later grew, it took me a while. Sometimes I can be a slow learner. I tracked down another mountain yogi in Dublin and he was able to start teaching me how to meditate. But that took a few years.
TANIA COTTON (00:49:35):
I know how hard you worked for that badge, what it meant to you.

ROBBIE FENLON (00:50:20):
When you made the point earlier that you hadn't met exactly a mountain guide like me because I wasn't that focused on the summit. And I think where that came from was working with Ursula McPherson at the Gartan Outdoor Education Center in the early nineties because she gave us, I was working with great staff, one of my great friends, Andy McAloon. He was a bit younger than me, but a great counterpoint to my seriousness, Andy was a great, so social and got on with everybody, and I was a bit aloof and distant and a bit too philosophical, but Andy sort of rounded that edge off for me.
(00:51:12):
Ursula allowed us to be imaginative about how we ran the programmes for the schools and the other groups that came in. And the normal way at that stage was like you'd have maybe two or three activities a day and they'd be running a bit of a rota, and you just do the same thing over and over again. And honestly, my mind is not built for that sort of, I find that boring. And I always think that if you're bored as a teacher, you're going to transmit that boredom to the kids. And I think I saw that being transferred to the kids two hours on the lake, two hours doing orienteering, two hours going climbing. And the whole thing was just a conveyor belt, and it seemed like everyone was just trying to get the whole thing over with.
(00:52:03):
So because I did those sports as an activity myself, and I'd learned a lot doing them like canoeing, orienteering, snorkelling, rock climbing, hill walking, all of those activities, I was like, we've got to give them a sense of the adventure and the essence of this. So we designed this idea of just the journey where we would put everybody in the bus with the trailer on the back and the canoes, and we would drive to a certain place and we would just journey across this landscape where we would have to navigate our way through some forest and then canoe across an inlet and then he'll walk across a hill and then scramble along some cliffs. So there was a whole journey. We had to use all of these different skills to go from A to B, and there was no summit, but there was what we learned and experienced along the way.
(00:52:59):
And so that sense of the journey, it's actually about the journey - that really worked for me. And it also made our days working far more interesting. You were with the people, the kids or the adults the whole day, and there was that adventure of the unknown, but also the skills were necessary. It wasn't just going canoe round in circles under the bell goes, it was like, go from here over to there. That's a challenge. How are we going to do that? What skills do I need to learn to be able to do that? What skills do I need to, how do I use a map to help myself navigate through this forestry, all of that sort of thing. So again, a little bit like when I was a mechanic, putting skills in context. So there's a theory and then there's a practical application.
(00:53:52):
And that sense of journey, I suppose I carried it into my alpine guiding of like, well, it's not so much whether you get to the summit or not. It's like you can have amazing experiences where you learn a huge amount on the day that you don't get to the summit just because everything's been so challenging and you've had to adapt so much and everyone's had to work together so much that you have the best possible day. And then there's other days where the weather is perfect, you get to the summit and it's all sort of like you forget about it. It's very forgettable. So there's something about the journey and the learning and the transformation that happens in journeys that I think is really important in how I thought about my work.
TANIA COTTON (00:54:41):
Yes, that really resonates with actually how I like to be outside. I've never liked, although I love doing long distance cycling and I love skiing. I hate ski competitions and I hate going down just runs. I'd like to put on skins on the bottom of my skis, and I like to feel like I'm going somewhere and that it's going to be an adventure. So I could see that I definitely would've been that child who would've gone, oh, great, we're going to go somewhere. We're going to go on this journey and there's going to be this adventure and that there's nothing about having to perform or succeed or anything about success or being judged. It was just about this kind of shared experience and that you didn't know what was going to happen and that were going to be these challenges that I would find exciting as opposed to threatening.
I found it quite shocking when I first started to hear these stories about the real moments and experiences that have kind of checked your childish curiosity and playfulness.
ROBBIE FENLON (00:58:02):
Well, here's the way I remember the story. Well, I experienced it. And I think if I just make a little point about how a child experiences the thing is the important thing. It's not like you can judge something from the outside and go, that's not traumatic because, but you didn't experience it so the child experienced it, the child experiences in a certain way. And we as adults, then we need to be able to process the impact of something, not by just the event, but the impact it has on the child, the child's brain, the child's nervous system. So my very simple story, I remember one of the things, my dad had a great head of hair, even when he was dead, he had a great head of hair. So he died with a great head of hair, and he used to go to the barbers, and I remember one evening in our house in Clunky Crescent, he was sitting in the armchair and we got to play.
(00:59:06):
We had different turns. As brothers, we could have turns being a barber for dad. And what we used to do is he had this pen knife, we'd have it closed and maybe a comb, and we would play at combing through his hair and making snip, snip, snip sounds and sort. We would play at cutting his hair. And we used to love doing that. It's very nice to be able to touch your dad and be very close to your dad. So I don't remember what age I was, I guess four or five, maybe touching six, I can't remember exactly. But what I do remember is being pushed away.
(00:59:47):
You're too old for that. And I don't know the particular words, and I know my dad was a very nice man, but the way he was brought up was there was a certain sort of thing that the boys had to be boys had to learn to stand on their own two feet. And part of that was sort of toughening them up. And I do remember that sort of being pushed away thing and that impact and the way you deal with that as a child. Now I have to hypothesise because I don't remember exactly what I thought, but you sort of take it in your stride without realising what the impact is. But the impact of a simple incident like that is that you sort of go, okay, I can't play with my dad anymore. I need to be more manly. I need to do more manly things. I need to toughen up and I need not to be upset. I need to not cry when something like that happens. I need to shut down my feelings and not go do what obviously my young 6-year-old self or five-year-old self felt like doing, ‘But dad, I love doing that’. You just go, ‘you're not allowed do that anymore’. So you keep a straight face, man up and move on and push down that emotion. Yeah.
TANIA COTTON (01:01:23):
Yes. I do wonder how men navigate these experiences and how they can find… I think women are expected to ‘man up’ as well. And I think especially in corporations, and I see how women let go of their, for want of a better way of saying it, feminine side or sensitive side. And I see wonderfully sensitive men having to shut down that sensitive side. How can men find a balance between being sensitive and strong? Something I've heard Daniel Ellenberg talk about and he's worked with men's groups and that, how can you be strong with a heart? Do you think modern life, it's modern life or just certain walks of life that make it harder for men to express sensitivity safely? Is there really such an overriding expectation of fear, of allowing men to express emotion? And of course, I have to recognise that for many women as well, it's hard for them to express emotion.
ROBBIE FENLON (01:02:53):
So I'm no expert on that. And I know my story is not, my story of combing my dad's hair is not a majorly traumatic story, but it's just one moment. I remember amongst many where you sort of have to ‘man up’ when you're maybe not ready for it. You're still five or six, you're sort of like, what's a man? But when I think of, as I got older, and in the climbing scene, there's a lot of toughness and hard men. There's books called The Hard Man of This and the Hard Man of that, they're about climbing, and there's this whole thing of being really tough and being able to put up with very hard conditions and just take it on the chin. And also, we were growing up in Ireland, so we're very influenced by the British climbing scene. And the British climbing scene is very influenced by British society.
(01:03:45):
And British society is very influenced by the whole education system, running an empire and the stiff upper lip and all of that sort of thing. Stiff upper lip is the more upper class way. And just being tough and hard is the more sort of working class way of being. And that found its way into how climbers behaved and expressed themselves. So there were characters in the climbing scene as I was growing up that were tough and they talk tough, and they were hard, and they were hard on themselves, and they were hard on other people as well. And you sort of take on that model without necessarily knowing you're taking it on. And it was only until later when I got out here and I came across French climbers and especially Scandinavian climbers who were climbing way harder than the so-called hard men. And they were these very sensitive, poetic, philosophical guys. And I was just like, oh, you can do really hard things and you don't have to swag around like you're a working class hero!
(01:04:53):
So I got to see that there's a difference between acting tough and being tough. That's one thing. And I suppose a recent experience I had, that sort of really shifted my sense of that too. Well, partly the whole trip in meditation and starting to meet these yogis and meditation teachers. Yeah, I remember the first time I met Lama Yeshi, he would've been in his late fifties back then, I guess. And he was a person who looked after people. He was compassionate. He was very kind. But I remember thinking, he's the toughest person I have ever met. He is the most fearless person I've ever met. He was just afraid of nothing and nobody. And so that showed me, again, there's another model of what really fearlessness looks like. And It's not a pretend thing. It's real fearlessness. And then I suppose another aspect that I came across myself, just one of the first breathwork sessions I did only a few years ago, and I was totally taken by surprise because I thought I'd been meditating for 20 years. Breathwork, what am I going to learn from that, it's just breathing, nothing's going to happen.
(01:06:24):
But I don’t know what happened to me. All these emotions came out, tears and all sorts, but in a very sort of manly way. But I remember when we were debriefing afterwards saying, wow, I never realised that you can be both tough and gentle at the same time as if we learned that you have to suppress all the sensitivity and the gentleness and the kindness to survive or to function. Whereas in fact, it's not true at all. You can actually keep all of that and be tough and strong and even more effective actually, because you're better able to feel what's going on in yourself and you're better able to connect with others. So for me, that was a real paradigm shift that I haven't let go of. So I don't know if that makes sense?
TANIA COTTON (01:07:18):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I'd love you to give kind us a little context around Lama Yeshi so that we can actually realise a little bit, just a touch of his background, what he came through. Because in fact, he had to flee Tibet, didn't he? So in fact, in that he had to endure great hardship to actually escape.
ROBBIE FENLON (01:07:46):
Yeah. So like many Tibetans in the 1950s, in the late fifties, there was a mass exodus out of Tibet, and that's where after the Chinese invasion and the country was taken over and Lassa was bombed and the Dalai Lama and various people and other leaders realised that it was unsustainable. So they crossed the Himalayas and came out into India. And India was a new state at that time. I think Nru was the prime minister and they just got their independence from the British Empire. So they were refugees and Lama Yeshi was one of those refugees, but he wasn't a llama at that stage. He was just a 16-year-old boy, 15 or 16-year-old boy. And unlike many of the Tibetans, he caught TB - lots of people died. They weren't used to living in India in the heat. They were all from, lived at much higher altitudes, 4,000 meters, 5,000 meters, 4,000 meters, where it’s much colder. So there's a lot of difficulty and a lot of challenge. But through the people who were working with the refugees, eventually he and his brother found their way over to the UK.
(01:09:14):
But again, he was now in the early sixties and at this stage he was not a Lama at all. He was just interested in the life of the sixties, Jimmy Hendrix and whatever was happening, Woodstock, that whole sort of thing. I don't know that he necessarily went to those places, but he was part of that scene in the sixties. I'm pretty sure I've seen pictures of him with an Afro haircut and bell bottoms and looking a bit like Jimmy Hendrix. So he has had that whole path of coming out of a very, what we would call primitive lifestyle, like a very mediaeval lifestyle into a more modern lifestyle, then into the swinging sixties. And meanwhile, his brother, his brother, Akong Rinpoche, was a trained Lama, but trained, that's a trained meditation teacher and had his own monastery. In fact, he was the abbot of a monastery in Tibet, but in the UK he was just working as a hospital order.
(01:10:24):
He was a nobody and nobody had any idea of who he was. He certainly wasn't treated as a special person. So somewhere along that journey, Lama Yeshi had a wake-up call and reconnected with his Tibetan Buddhist roots and went into a retreat and trained very hard for years and years and years and years and became one of the most respected Tibetan meditation teachers in the West. And I heard another teacher recently say that he is one of the most authentic Tibetan Lamas in the west. He's now in his late seventies and struggling with ill health, but his mind is as sharp as ever. So that's a little bit about Lama Yeshi.
TANIA COTTON (01:11:17):
And was it teachings with Lama Yeshi that you went to and you went to Samye Ling on that first meditation retreat that you nearly ran away from? Tell us about that.
ROBBIE FENLON (01:11:34):
Yeah, so as I said, I'd first met this man yogi sometime in the mid-nineties, and then I started thinking, how am I going to learn how to meditate? I tried reading various books and just couldn't get it together. It didn't make much sense. So eventually one of my friends said they'd met this, there was this teacher in Dublin, in this meditation center that I should go and see him. And I went to see him and I was sort of starstruck and it was Lama Yeshi. And he was sort of like, ‘Look, the problem with you Westerners is you treat us all like stars. It's not about personalities or anything like that. It's about doing the work yourself. It's not about adoring gurus, it's just like, you've got to do the work. We can teach you some things, but you've got to do it.’ And it really put me back in my box and I remember thinking, okay, I thought it would be meeting the Dalai Lama and I'd feel like a halo around me or something like that, but not at all.
(01:12:36):
I felt like a bucket of cold water had been thrown over me and I was told to wise up and start doing some work and learn how to learn how to meditate myself and not be thinking a guru was going to solve some problems for me. So, then I was like, okay, so I've got to go and learn and meditate. And I looked up the web, I think there was a website then maybe the book still booklets at that stage - 2001. And I realised, okay, there's this retreat on. So I went to this meditation retreat in a place called Purelands in, I think it was 2001 or 2002 up near Eskdalemuir in Scotland. And the teacher was a Spanish meditation teacher called Lama Sandro. And she was a tiny little woman, but really powerful. And we were all just sitting on the floor trying to learn how to meditate.
(01:13:35):
Nothing worked. It was really painful. I was just going, what the hell is this? I need to get out of here. The thing was, the retreat was to last seven or eight days, and at one stage I just, I'd had enough and I think four or five days into it, and I left the centre and we weren't supposed to leave the centre, you were supposed to stay on the grounds. I left the centre and I went for a walk. And as I was walking up the road, I heard this Nepali music playing, and I was going, what's that? And I was used to it, because this is now 2001, I've been to the Himalayas every year for 10 years in a row. So I hear this Nepali music, what's this Nepali music playing in Scotland? And I could see there was these builders working on a Stupa, one of those buildings that you see quite often in the Himalayas.
(01:14:28):
And there was somebody mowing the lawn with this electric lawnmower, or not electric lawnmower, a petrol powered lawnmower. And they were pushing this lawnmower backwards and forwards. And I looked at this person, I went, ‘He looks familiar!’. And I realised it was Doug Scott. And Doug Scott was one of the most famous British Himalayan mountaineers ever - really himself and Chris Bonington were the climbers in the seventies and eighties. And I sort of thought to myself, shit, if Doug Scott's here, there has to be, yeah, I can't leave. If he's done everything that he's done and he's still come here, comes here looking for answers, I need to go back to that retreat. So I turned around and I went back and that was it.
TANIA COTTON (01:15:18):
It's incredible. It's incredible what life presents you with and the lessons you learn that are so unexpected. And what that was 2001?
ROBBIE FENLON (01:15:32):
Yeah, 2001. 2002, yeah.
TANIA COTTON (01:15:34):
So since then you have been, yeah, you haven't looked back actually, but it began very much a personal journey, really a personal journey, very private. So when did that journey, that real personal journey, private journey that had such an impact on you kind of gradually work through your body into something that you realised could give you something really valuable to share with others?
ROBBIE FENLON (01:16:19):
So you're right to highlight the private nature of the journey. And one of the reasons was, I remember some of the early teachings, we were just being taught basic meditation. It wasn't rocket science. We were being taught, we were just being taught basic meditation. But back then, even in 2000, it was still sort of a strange thing. It was like people could think you were part of a cult or it was a weird hippie thing to do. And I remember people asking questions of Lama Yeshi in a question and answer session on that first retreat. He came in later and people were asking questions like people who'd been on other retreats, and they'd said, oh, when I go home and I tell people about my retreat or my meditation practice, they think I'm really strange and they think I'm weird. And he's going, well, that's your problem. Why did tell them? I mean, keep it to yourself. Just do your practice. You're not trying to show off. The purpose is to work on yourself. It's not to impress other people or convert other people. It's work you do on yourself. I took that message to heart of like, yeah, don't, it's not to be talked about. It's to be dumb.
(01:17:37):
And then I suppose the other thing that maybe I learned a little bit further was also if you do want it to change other people, it's only when people notice that there's a change in you that they're going to be interested and they might come to you and ask you, what are you doing? How did you learn how to do that? Then you might share. So I really liked that approach of ‘shut up and do it’. Don't be boasting about it. It's a personal journey. And if there's a change, if you want to change other people, actually you've got to change yourself first. And I'll just tell a very quick little story that I heard from another teacher about that, because often we live in this world now of influencers and gurus and everything like that. And sometimes people say to me, Robbie, yeah, you should put yourself out a bit more.
(01:18:32):
But I always thought humility was something to develop. It's easy to boast and it's easy to see problems in other people and not work on ourselves. And I remember this very simple story told by another teacher Ringu Tulku about, he says it in a very quick way, I think it started there was this Scottish pastor who decided he wanted to change the world, so he became this - he set out in his sermons to try and convince everybody. And after many years he noticed nobody was changing. So then he thought, right, I'll work on the closer, I'll work on the people in the village. So he was just telling the people in the village, you should blah, blah, blah, blah. And he realised nobody in the village was changing. And then he thought, okay, I'll just work on my family. So then he was constantly telling his family about how they should be and everything like that.
(01:19:28):
And he realised they weren't changing. And now he was very old at this stage and he said, now that I'm old, I realise that if I want to change anybody, the first person I have to change is myself. And it's only through changing myself that actually I can have any influence on people. And that's always stuck with me as very simple, but very true in many ways. And if I think of all the different teachers I've had, whether it's as a mechanic or in martial arts or in climbing, it's really the people that you see that are actually doing the thing that inspire you to ask yourself, well, how can I change? Not the people who are just going, blah, blah, blah, you should do this.
TANIA COTTON (01:20:14):
Well, I've certainly seen the evidence of that once I've felt it in myself. Having known you over the years from being in this private journey, well first meeting you as a patient and very injured. It's interesting to reflect how that kind of shook your reality of where your life was going and then seeing it as a private journey. And then you being interested in not just guiding to reach peaks, but guiding people along a journey, but inner journey, what people could learn and how you could help them with that and self-discovery, but also with how they can be well in the mountains, not just themselves, but in a way that made them thrive as individuals and feel alive within in that natural environment.
(01:21:18):
And then I've seen Geneviève, your wife, work for a large corporation and then she has observed your journey over many years and that affected her such that she, to start with, wasn't meditating and started to go on retreats in her own way. And how that's become a really important part of not only her personal life, but also her professional life.
ROBBIE FENLON (01:22:25):
Yeah, so the way I'd like to comment on it is just in case this interview sounds like it's going towards, oh, Robbie's now become a saint. It's definitely not that. That's definitely not how it works, but it's much more like in the same way I started to learn to ski and I got better at skiing and then I could help other people by, I've learned to ski off-piste and I've learned that if you do this with your skis, it makes it easier. It was sort of like over years working with my own mind, I started to realise, and I'd look at other people and go, they don't mean to have that problem if they just change their stance slightly. Well, that's what you would say in skiing terms. If they just changed their stance slightly, their skis would work better. But likewise, as you get to understand your own mind and the mind in general, the human mind in general, you realise, oh, if you just reframed that situation in a slightly different way, you wouldn't have to go through that difficulty that you're going through.
(01:23:23):
So for me, yeah, it's definitely not, I just want to make sure I really want to emphasise this. It's definitely not about me. Robbie's transformation, everything like that, it's much more discovering things that work, tools that work, methods that work, and it's the methods and the approaches that work. And it's more about sharing those and allowing people to experience those themselves. Because eventually you can read a book about skiing, but it's not going to teach you how to ski. It might help you or refine some of your technique, but you really have to get on the skis. So likewise, I don't feel like, oh yeah, I'm going to teach people how to be like me. Not at all, because there's still loads of work. It's definitely a lifelong job and it's an unfinished job. In my case, there's still plenty of things I've got to work on.
(01:24:15):
However, as you start to see these basic things that work quite simply, you sort of go, God, I wish other people knew this and the real opportunity for me because there's no way I was going to become a meditation teacher, a proper Lama or something like that, that takes full on 24/7 years of dedication just to be, and there's very few people who are at that sort of level. However, in the mid two thousands, around 2010, 2012, the whole sort of mindfulness movement started to build up. And this whole and the research and neuroscience started to come online. And we realised that actually some of the, if we just take some of the basic practices, some of the most beginner, beginner practices that nearly anybody could do from these traditions from the east, and there's some of those traditions in the west, these different meditation and self-awareness practices that actually it could really help people's mental and physical health.
(01:25:19):
And this whole movement of teaching neuroscience-based mindfulness started to work, started to happen. And one of the leading people to start that was Jon Kabat-Zin working in that hospital in Massachusetts, I can't remember the name of it, and showing that, actually he asked to have all the patients that couldn't be cured by other things to just send them to his mindfulness-based stress reduction classes, and they started to see results. So, this sort of raised the awareness of the possibilities of just very normal, basic meditation practices and mindfulness is a particular type of meditation that can be used to really help people. And then I went to a few lectures and I saw, oh wow, this is really interesting. It's even helping my more sort of traditional practice that comes more from the Tibetan teachers. And I was like, I wonder if I could become a mindfulness teacher. And that really was the start of me starting to realise, oh, I can learn this stuff even though it's very low level compared to what the yogis are doing, it's still very useful and I can learn this stuff and I can teach this stuff in the same way that I learned how to climb and taught climbing. And then that was sort of my path that started bringing me towards coaching.
TANIA COTTON (01:26:47):
Yes, one of the pivotal experiences I've had with you on your learning journey and sharing journey has been when you had started on your coaching journey – you had a really interesting broad journey of meeting incredible teachers.
ROBBIE FENLON
Yes, Jon Kabat-Zin talks to all sorts of meditation teachers from all sorts of different traditions and that's really great. But also he's a neuroscientist, so he's got that, he's bringing that background in as well. So not only are you hearing about how meditation works from meditation teachers, but you're also hearing how the brain works from modern neuroscientists. And then the other person that I really like as well is Rick Hanson and his son Forrest Hansen. So they have this podcast called ‘Being Well’, but I remember I actually met Rick in person, I'm sure he doesn't remember me, but I met him in person at this mindfulness conference about maybe 15 years ago, and he's a rock climber, and I was like, wow, another rock climber who meditates.
(01:29:49):
And so he had written a book in the early two thousands called ‘Buddha Brain’, and here he sort of showed, it was the first one of those books that was showing the benefits of meditation on the human brain because of the scientific instruments were starting to develop. And the functional MRI scanners were able to see what was happening inside a brain to a certain extent, let's say there's certain claims being made about what they can see and there's limitations as well. So we can't see exactly what's happening in the brain, but we are able to look inside and see far more, and are able to make these correlations between different meditation practices and changes in the brain.
(01:31:03):
Rick is also a psychologist, so there are also people who've been on the whole personal development journey, which there's all these different paths in. So some people are coming in through meditation, some people are coming in through yoga, some people are just coming in through their own personal development. There was a whole movement in the sixties and seventies in the United States. I can't remember what it's called, but places like the Esalen Institute were involved and all of that sort of thing. And then Spirit Rock Meditation Centre. So there's this whole movement towards being well - how can human beings thrive? How can human beings be better? How can we lead better lives? And what's the science behind it? What's the psychology behind it? And what I also like too, you mentioned Jung and Freud, we can also incorporate Western psychology as well because we all, and I think we all need different doorways to walk into the same building.
(01:32:24):
And if we just call it the building of developing self-awareness and self-development, some of us are going to just find some doors just put us off, but maybe we'd prefer to come through the door of psychology or we'd prefer to come through the door of neuroscience. Or some of us are just, I want to come through the door of traditional meditation, or those might want to come through the door of now psychedelics or breathwork or Wim Hof cold immersion or through just developing their athletic performance. They realise there are psychological tools that are quite similar to meditation that can allow them to develop. So there's all of that out there now.
TANIA COTTON (01:33:07):
Yes. And I think that's beautiful because I think your highlighting that there are many ways in, and I love the way you say that there are many doorways into the main building. I think I feel very strongly about this even just from my own journey. Somebody might encourage you to do one way, and then you realise actually there's a better way for you. My father always had this little story of the seven pebbles that I needed to hold in my pocket. And that as a physiotherapist and a movement specialist that you tend to have your favourite way of learning something or something that allowed you to feel something. And I will always use that way first because I think it worked for me, so then it'll work for you. And then you realise, and he says, no, okay, so if that first pebble doesn't work, go onto the next pebble and you need seven different ways because everybody needs to find their way that I mustn't as a teacher, somebody that helps people feel things in their body, think that my way is going to be their way.
(01:34:14):
And I really think this, if it's one thing you take away from this podcast, I would like that to be it. And by taking that away, I want what people hear today to give them the courage to try the different things and not to prejudge it. Because believe me, oh, I can go and try things with a perception. And always those preconceptions have been misleading. So you can only learn from experience, you can read all the books, all the research, you can listen to as many talks, but unless immerse yourself in an experience, you don’t know how it fits for you and if it works for you. And then also I'm interested in how sometimes we try things and we try things almost like we're going to go on a retreat and that's going to be the quick fix. But actually it's the practice. Something that works with us is something that allows us to take it on as a practice that it really has becomes part of us and our way of living. And that's the real benefit. That's where the wisdom is. So it's not the experience, it's the embodiment of the learning through the different doorways. And that doesn't mean that you just go through one doorway but through multiple doorways and always staying open-minded as that self-awareness journey can be multifaceted. Is there anything that you want to add to that?
ROBBIE FENLON (01:35:58):
Loads! Yeah, so I mean I think one of the things, just your story of ‘The Seven Pebbles’ is - you sort of see that in debutante meditators is they just want to transform everybody. They want to tell everybody about this fantastic thing. And I've heard so many stories from so many people who about in their early years of learning, they were trying to tell everybody and people just got pissed off at them, really. And it's this thing, you don't impose what worked for you on other people. That's imposition and that really doesn't work. And I remember also a story that reminded me, it's a different thing there, but I remember being at one particular retreat and there was this woman who was very distressed about something and she was talking to me a lot about it during the week and everything like that.
(01:36:55):
And I was saying, why don't you go and see Lama Yeshi or whoever, they know more than me. And she didn't. And then she was very distressed as we were coming up to the end of the retreat. And I went up and said to the teachers, it was Lama Yeshi, and I said, ‘Oh, that lady's very, very distressed. Can you help her?’ And he said, ‘You can't help someone who hasn't asked for your help.’ And that sort of stuck with me because at first I thought, ‘what you're not going to just run down and sort it out for her?’ But what I've learned over time is when people are not open, you can't talk at people. And it's when people are ready and they're open, then they're receptive, then they can do the work themselves eventually It's always us who has to do the work and do the transformation, especially when it's inner work, even for skiing and climbing and all these athletic sports. It's not the coach who wins. The coach can point the athlete towards it, but the athlete, it's the athlete that does the work. And I think basic things like that are really important to remember.
(01:38:05):
Just remind me, I went off on a slight tangent there, just remind me of what your principle question was there because it was very interesting where you were going.
TANIA COTTON (01:38:16):
The key of us being open to trying different approaches. We've talked to everything from meditation to psychotherapy, psychedelics, breath work or being courageous enough to join a compassion circle. And there are now lots of men's groups and men's circles that create safe space for people to talk about things or express things they've never expressed before or never felt before. And yet a lot of these can be quite scary places, but I think it's also a fear of the unknown. Sometimes they're not as scary when we get there or sometimes actually there's like you and you've had your first meditation experience and you thought, I'm out of here. It's interesting. Then sometimes once we go away, what actually then brings us back. So yes, it's the open-mindedness to be on a journey of exploration that I think is really important and that there's no one way yet in the same way, it's interesting for me to see that you've been on, you have put a lot of work in exploring different coaching opportunities and how you can develop yourself as a coach in parallel to you working on your spiritual journey.
ROBBIE FENLON (01:40:12):
So I suppose one of the things that I learned from my introduction to meditation and seeing people who'd been, because I remember there was a lot of disbelief in me about certain things. I remember people would say, oh yeah, they go into a retreat and they sit in the lotus position. And I was like, ‘Bullshit!’ There's no way people sit in the lotus position. So there's loads of things that I heard and I just thought, that's total bullshit. And then as the years went on, I went, oh, they really do. They really do sit in the lotus position. These ordinary people come in and they learn and they work hard and they develop the flexibility and they're able to sit in the lotus position and they can sleep sitting up and they can go into retreat for one year, two years, three years. And one of our teachers was in retreat for 12 years.
(01:41:03):
And you just go, your chin drops - It's just not the western way of seeing things. And in fact, I know when they started running the first retreats in the west in Samye Ling back in, I think the nineties or the late eighties, the medical profession was saying you can't lock people up for three years. It won't work. They'll go insane. But that's the way they did it in Tibet. So they transferred it over. So some of the teachers that are around now, they did three or four year retreats, three years of, well, it's not solitary because you're in a retreat with other people, but these things are sort of outside the western paradigm. The western paradigm of therapy is like you go and see your therapist once a week, twice a week or once every fortnight or whatever. So my point being is when you get some sense of what inner work people are doing, you realise what can be trained and what can be changed.
(01:42:07):
And here's one of the analogies I use for myself a little bit about, because I was so disbelieving, I was like, no way can people go for a retreat? No way can people stay inside for a week or two weeks and then I realised actually they could stay inside for years. I think about the rock climber, Alex Honnold, who famously, he's in that film ‘Free Solo’, he soloed a major rock climb on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Most people have seen it and it's incredible beyond belief, the difficulty of the climbing that he's doing, the sustained nature of it and the total danger of it. There was not room for one error or he was going to be in space and then he was going to hit the ground, and yet he completed this climb. But my point about that is we don't realise how expert people can be in a particular activity until we see something like that.
(01:43:11):
And he didn't just start climbing yesterday, he started climbing as a child and worked really hard at it, but was very passionate about it and the amount of work and practice and time and concentration and talent that has gone into that. So one of the things about the whole meditation path and the yogi path and everything like that is it's invisible. You can't see, okay, when you see somebody like Wim Hof because he makes it more external, you sit in cold water and you sit in all these cool positions, yogi in the lotus position in the ice and snow, that's sort of more glamorous and dramatic, but a lot of this work is internal and invisible. But if you think in terms of all that work that allowed and all that training that allowed Alex Honnold to be able to climb El capitan and realise that ther are people putting that amount of effort into their internal journey with their meditation and their dharma practice, and then you realise how far ahead they are of what ordinary day-to-day experiences of our 10 minutes of meditation using our small app.
(01:44:20):
So my point there is that we can change, but change doesn't happen with a six week training team to get your abs. It's more long-term and moving from as Dan Goleman and Richie Davidson say in their book ‘From States to Traits’ (Altered States). So how do we change from just having a particular meditation state or a little high that we might get from doing breathwork or a buzz that we'll get from and doing cold water immersion? How do we make the shift where that becomes part of who we are? And it becomes a trait. And it's the same with here we live near the Chamonix Valley. What's the difference between the skiers that come over from the UK and Ireland and from the Netherlands and they come down and they ski for a week, and those people who've lived here, grown up in families of skiers, trained to ski instructors, skied all over the world, there's a world of difference. We can say, are they just skiers? But there's a world of difference in the level of engagement.
(01:45:37):
So I think it's important for us to realise that we can't change that it takes work and it's more about the consistency and constantly turning up and not expecting the dramatic hit and being able to put up with not moving, but seemingly not moving for a while, but then you make the breakthroughs. So yeah, it's sort of like training particular muscles. I'd like to talk about coaching, so maybe you've got some questions about that. But my main point there is really this thing of certainly all of these different things we've been talking about, you can do them once or twice and you might feel an effect, but it's the investment of time and finding out what works for you. And then the self-awareness, and this is the point that François Hamann used to make, still makes, that it’s the self-awareness to know how to adapt yourself and how to adapt the activity so that it works for you. And that's really key. And that's where we can't just be passive. We've got to be active, proactive learners and in our own.
ROBBIE FENLON (01:47:05):
What Genevieve taught me about meditation and self-development and all of those sorts of things is - Genevieve's my wife, we've been together for nearly 25 years now, and when I first met her, I was really starting that whole sort of thing of going on retreats and learning to meditate. And it was still that very private journey. And so she saw that from the outside maybe I'd disappear for a few weeks and I mightn't be there for Christmas because I was going on the Christmas retreat or whatever. And she never stopped me, but she wasn't a meditator or anything like that. And then eventually, I can't remember what year it was, she decided she would come on a retreat as well. And I remember being quite nervous thinking, she's going to think this is crazy. I was going to this Tibetan centre on the borders of Scotland called Samye Ling.
(01:48:04):
And it can look like, okay, I grew up a Catholic, so I'm sort of used to crazy buildings, churches and all of that sort of thing. And her being in Quebec was, she's also used to that. Oh, Catholicism. So I suppose we're used to that, all this sort of sort of paraphernalia that can go with the religious experience. Now, I never thought of myself as religious, and I still don't think of myself as religious. So even though I go to Buddhist retreats, so going there with Genevieve, I was a little bit nervous. Is she going to think this is crazy and is she going to get up and walk out? And I remember Genevieve turned up and I remember that first retreat and I didn't know how she was reacting to it even as the retreat went on. I didn't, what I also didn't want to do is I didn't want to impose my way of doing it.
(01:49:08):
I didn't want to be saying, this is how you do this, this is how you do that. I wanted her to just experience it in her own way, a different personality and a different character to me. So anyway, then she started to develop her own meditation practice. And I suppose this is the point I want to make is she has got a different personality to me. She's more disciplined, she's harder working, she is a scientist, she's got a very rational approach, but she's also got a big heart and she likes structure, whereas I am more happy in a certain amount of chaos. And I noticed that we engaged with the whole journey differently. She would go to different teachers, prefer different practices, would practice in different ways, and sometimes we tried to meditate together. But I irritated her because my way didn't suit her.
(01:50:10):
And that was fine because it just really reminded me. So it was the person I lived with who we could do lots together, but yet her path is a different path to mine and she has to find her way. And I mean she, in many ways, I'd say she's way ahead of me. She started after me, but she passed me out just because she's got that diligence and hard work and intelligence and a particular type of intelligence. And also my mother, I also brought my mother on her retreat back in 2012 I think it was. And again, I sort of thought, whoa, she's going to think this is crazy too, but maybe it's good. It transformed her as well. But I've also been with friends that freaked out and they thought, let me get out of here. I hate this silence, for example, because you don't know how people are going to respond. So really at that point, I never impose on others.
(01:51:06):
And I if go a little bit further about Genevieve. So Genevieve really saw that this was working for her in her way. And she too then trained as a mindfulness teacher. She's also trained as a coach. She was working in a big corporate environment that was very, very challenging. But she saw she could use these tools and they really helped her with the sort of stress that people are under in those organisations and those situations. And now she's moved back into science. Her PhD was mainly in physiology, but now she's really interested, she's seen the health benefits that come from working on your mind as well. So really bridging this thing, the mind and body aspect. And that's where she has now reinvested her energy. So she still is a practitioner of meditation, which she also now is researching into the benefits of mindfulness and meditation from a more scientific way. And she's currently writing papers that I hope will be published soon.
TANIA COTTON (01:52:10):
Yes. And wonderful that you recognise and give each other the space to find your own path. And yet it is in fact the same path, but there are just different ways of walking that path. Yeah. So the coaching, your coaching, tell me how this has developed and how that's enabled you to give context and ways in which to help others in their self-awareness journey, but also in their leadership journeys.
ROBBIE FENLON (01:52:55):
So I was first introduced to coaching back around the same time I got into meditation by Genevieve's brother, my in-law, and he was following this coach, a Canadian American coach called Dan Sullivan. And Louis-François, my brother-in-law's name, he shared with me some of the coaching tools that had really helped him. And I started really applying these in my own life and found they were very effective in running my guiding business. So I was a mountain guide, but I still had to run a guiding business. And we had a Himalayan trekking business, trekking and climbing business, and then the guiding business here in the Alps. And one part of it is what you do on the ground, but then the other part is what you need to do in the office in terms of structures, in terms of websites and marketing and all the different things that businesses have to do.
(01:53:52):
So learning the tools from Dan Sullivan, then the Strategic Coach were very helpful for me. And then that got me interested in coaching and I read a lot of different things. Like there's the classic book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which I'd read back in the nineties. So I was always aware of coaching, but where it really started to make an impact on me and I started to think, oh, maybe this is a path for me is when I was doing the, I started training as a mindfulness teacher and I saw the different tools that were being used and a lot of them came from coaching and then I was meeting coaches and I sort of thought, wow, you're doing this sort of work with people in businesses and sports and just in general life, that's really interesting sort interface, a way of using, transforming these tools and making them useful and accessible, accessible for people in the world.
(01:54:57):
And then I was going through some challenges and I got coached by somebody who was training to be a coach, and I just found it so useful. I was surprised because really I think an earlier version of me would've just thought coaching is bullshit. I remember coming across Tony Robins, Tony Robins books back in the nineties, reading the few pages and just go, ‘Rubbish!’. And I think differently now, but being coached and feeling it work and seeing it work made me think, okay, let's investigate this. And then I went and then I went to investigate what coaching schools were available, and I came across the Integral Coaching School set up by New Ventures West in San Francisco. But I was able to train in Switzerland and that experience, I remember coming back and meeting Genevieve and some of her friends one evening after I'd been on a training course near Geneva and they were saying, so how's the coaching course? And I was like, ‘I love it!’
(01:56:05):
I couldn't wait to start trying to coach people, but I just thought it was pulling together all sorts of different aspects of my life, the whole thing of the transformation that I'd got through education and learning myself, learning that I learned in a practical way, becoming a teacher, even if it was teaching outdoor sports and then a guide and then running business and then getting coached. Then the whole meditation, the interior journey, all of that came together in coaching. I could use all of it, all of it was fuel for the machine and all of it was knowledge that I had developed and coaching was a medium that I could express that through. And also it allowed me to get that same satisfaction that I get from guiding, which was to accompany people on the journey to the summit, their summit and help them along the way. And also, I have a fairly philosophical nature and a lot of coaching is about asking questions and helping people to shift their paradigm - to realise how much knowledge they actually have in themselves already.
(02:01:22):
I learned from this archaeologist in Ireland, Michael Gibbons is his name. He transformed archaeology in Ireland. How did he transform archaeology in Ireland? Academics tended to stay indoors, read books, visit things that were easy to get to. So archaeology that was in cities or that was handy, you could drive to it. He was a mountain archaeologist. So he started to look on top of hills in Ireland and discovered reams of undiscovered, buried buildings because he broke the mould of ‘we're academics, we sit in universities, we talk at lectures’ - he got outdoors and he started to look where people actually would've lived when the climate was different. And it transformed archaeology in Ireland, this thing of just moving away. So I would say my analogy there is that there's a basic type of coaching and a basic type of therapy, which is this talk therapy where you stay indoors and it's about, it's very intellectual, it's questions and answers, which is still, however, based on Socratic dialogue, which comes from the Greeks, Socrates, nevertheless, Socrates wasn't sitting indoors.
(02:02:42):
He was out in the street. He was talking to people in the street, he was asking questions. So I'd see my heritage as being much more like that, an outdoor philosopher. But there's limitations to that because as a human being, we're not just what we think, we're also what we experience and feel in our bodies, we're also how our environment affects us. We're also what happens to us when we're in groups. So once you can get coaching to take all of those into there, you've got a much richer environment. So I've had the opportunity to coach people while we're at skiing or ski touring or when we're in a group sitting in a forest or when we're in a group walking up a mountain or when we go rock climbing, how we feel that experience. And then also, also just becoming more aware of our bodies and having what they call somatic awareness and also feeling the health benefits of exercise nature, cold water, warm water breathing and being - so the tapestry is much wider.
(02:03:54):
And if I was to draw another analogy, it would be like medicine that medicine's just where you have a specialist. And if you've got a back problem, which I had, if you've got a back problem, you go to a surgeon, they're going to give you a surgical solution. If you go to the physiotherapist, she or he's going to give you the physiotherapist one solution. If you go to the chiropractor, they're going to do their chiropractic solution actually, and again, I learned this through my own body. I needed a bit of all of those things, but what I really needed was personal agency. And I think that's, I would take, that is my big learning that I bring into coaching is you need a lot of different tapestries and types of environments that you can work in. But what you're really after is the giving the person, the agency to solve their own problems and do their own work. And that's where I want to go with my coaching.
TANIA COTTON (02:04:53):
I really like that. And it reminds me of from the beautiful book I read, kitchen Table Wisdom, Rachel, Naomi Remen.
ROBBIE FENLON (02:05:05):
Naomi Remen,
TANIA COTTON (02:05:07):
Yes, who came from a family of doctors and then she had a disease process going on in her body that was difficult. But she talks about how it's not somebody on the outside who's going to get that to repair, that injury to get better, that disease process to resolve. They can only create the environment for healing to take place or for us to be able to take care of ourselves. So if we're creating an environment, so it is our body that heals, it's inside where we heal, but it's not somebody outside who's going to do it. But we need to create the environment to allow that healing or that insight or that self-awareness to take place. And that for all of us it will happen in a very different way. So yes, I feel we have been on a real journey during this conversation that has been very rich and I know will be ongoing. And that using different environments to help us, I think is really critical.
(02:06:41):
And I've certainly heard, for example, people who've been through very severe trauma saying that they've tried different things. People in special forces in Canadian special forces and Dutch special forces who've been through traumatic experiences that I couldn't begin to understand in my body. But when they've tried things like cold immersion and breathwork and they say they've had insights and a connection to being able to feel again and their connection to their heart that they could never have experienced through just talk therapy or through taking medication or drugs. And I've heard this so consistently, I've been fortunate to have an opportunity to talk with people from special forces who've been through such experiences that it made me really sit up and listen and to start my own journey of exploration.
(02:07:49):
I think that journey is really ongoing. And then really my last question comes through in gathering all this up in looking at how education of the heart has become a theme for the Mind Life Institute and the Dalai Lama, who together they work with bringing traditional wisdom and all the contemplative neuroscience and different thought processes and science together to looking about what education can really be not just for children in schools. What is education for the heart? What's the opportunity we can bring now we are opening up to new areas we really need, we know we need to progress in a real way, not in terms of what we achieve, but in how we feel, how we connect, and how our inner journey will affect the outer experience. What is your reflection on that, Robbie, on the education of the heart?
ROBBIE FENLON (02:08:59):
So I'm going to bring it back to coaching and leadership, and I realised I've had really the great privilege in the past few years working with tremendous leaders in business, which is sort of surprising for me. I definitely was a bit of a lefty when I was younger. I'd say move more towards the centre now. But what I see is that every walk of life there are amazing people in even environments that are traditionally may not breed the best type of people. I want to bring my point back to the leadership and the heart because I've had this privilege of working with some of these great leaders and they're working in industry and in corporate cultures and also in military situations and stuff like that as well, is that we really want to, the best of them are connected to themselves as human beings. They are not just the job.
(02:10:03):
They're not just going through the rule book of leadership. They're connected to themselves, which allows them to connect to other people. So they are connected to their hearts. They may not articulate it like that. And I've seen that and I've seen also where leaders struggle when they're not connected to that part of themselves. They don't connect to their people that well. And there's a struggle and there's a lack of trust. And when there's lack of trust, you can have the best operational handbook and have all the best tools and all the best structures in place and things still don't work because people don't get on with each other, they don't trust each other, and everyone is playing a defensive game. They have to either defend themselves or defend their department. So what I love in my work with leaders and teams, because you have to be able to articulate it for the marketplace.
(02:10:59):
So I say leadership and teams I want to work with, but leaders and teams are not separate. A leader is part of a team and a leader is no-one without a team, but a team needs a leader because a team without a leader is chaotic. So working with leaders and teams, I really get to see that when we bring all of ourselves as a person to whatever that work that we're doing is, we make better teams, we make better leaders, we get better results. And that part of connecting to all of who we are also means taking time to sleep, well eat well, practice some physical activity, these things, you could look at those things and go, but I don't have time to do that. That's got nothing to do with my job. It's got everything to do with your job. I can guarantee you now that with the amount of leaders I've worked with now and seeing the transformation that happens when people dedicate some time to looking after their ability to perform.
(02:12:07):
Because if you just basically understand yourself, I use the analogy of a robot, that we're a sort of a biological robot and we have certain needs to be able to function optimally and those needs and create to make good decisions, to be creative, to lead well. Our brain needs to be functioning well for our brain to be functioning well. The rest of our body needs be functioning well. We need oxygen, we need movement, we need sleep, we need good nutrition, but also we need to be able to manage our emotions and manage how we think and access our intelligence and not just the academic thinking side of our intelligence, also the heart part of our intelligence, the feeling part of our intelligence. And it's not that we have to go fully hippie, but we do need to have a more balanced intelligence. And the people I meet, there was a great leader who unfortunately died recently in a tragic car accident.
(02:13:14):
I loved working with him. He was such an inspiring guy. Doug Mormon was his name, and Doug was killed tragically early. I learned so much from him as a leader. But I learned that from a lot of leaders. For all the leaders I work with, I learn from. It's not like I turn up and I know everything, for sure I don't. But he was a guy with a great heart. He could connect with everybody, but he had a great brain as well. And he used both of those and he was learning that about himself. And when you meet leaders like that, you're inspired. You actually, even, I didn't work for him, but I would've worked for him because you sort of went, he's a great guy. I like what he's doing, he's smart, but it's not just his intelligence. He tunes into people he knows. He doesn't have to speak to everybody the same way because he's tuning into what does this person need.
(02:14:06):
He even articulated to me that one of his strengths that he recognised was that he could talk to the physicist in the lab was, I think he had a PhD in physics, but he could also talk to the guy on the shop floor who was sweeping the warehouse because he had that ability to connect. So yeah, I see great leaders as having all of those aspects, and they are connected to their hearts as well. And it's good for them as well. And it's good for their families too, as well as it's good for their companies.

TANIA COTTON (02:14:43):
Is there a film that kind of shines through that you'd say, wow, I love this film, even if it's for reasons that are very personal? And then I would also like to ask you, is there a quote that you love?
ROBBIE FENLON (02:17:12):
So if anything, I would say that I notice when I go looking for something to watch, there's not one particular film, but I do tend to be inspired by that struggle between light and dark ourselves in our societies and what we have to do to stay in the light. What's the work we have to do in ourselves to stay in the light? And I can't think of any quote. There's a quote by Einstein that I really like, but I can't remember it. But it's the one where he sort of says that, and this will be a total paraphrase, that as human being our sense of self is a total illusion. That in fact, we're part of a greater universe. And this illusion of self is what disconnects us from other people and disconnects us from the best in ourselves. And as one of the world's greatest physicists, the fact that he said something that's so spiritual, I found that very inspiring. And just look up lots of Einstein quotes. They're fascinating. They're generally about that.
TANIA COTTON (02:18:23):
Well, we'll look up the quote and we'll include that in the show notes. And so yes, maybe just as a final word, I'd be interested to just mention Michael Singer I remember you telling me Michael Singer is the real deal, and I took myself off for 10 days and did his audio course and read his books. And the greatest skill that he's helped me develop is the skill of ‘letting go’. And that self-awareness and growth isn't about accumulation, it's more about stripping away.

ROBBIE FENLON
What I like about Michael Singer is that he tried to escape from the world. He did the whole yogi thing, he withdrew to the forest, but basically life followed him to the forest and he ended up running this massive big biomedical business. But what I like about him is the simplicity of his teaching, which is basically to relax and release. So he says that there's stuff that we feel coming up inside us.
(02:20:38):
We need self-awareness for that and rather than react to that - relax and release. But what I also think is really important in his message is the thing of you don't start with the heaviest weights first. You just work with the simple stuff like the driver ahead of you who's driving too slow and you feel yourself getting irritated. That's where the spiritual growth is, is being able to just relax and release. Don't honk your horn. Don't flash. Your lights just put up with being able to drive 10km slower. So his message is it's every day in every moment in ordinary life that we can just relax and release. And that is the work. And that prepares us for when those bigger, more challenging moments come. We've already been lifting weights or letting go weights. So I really appreciate the simplicity of his teaching.
TANIA COTTON (02:21:39):
Yeah. Yes. And that self-discovery is not an accumulation of new things, but a dropping away and the lightness of letting go, the lightness of getting go, and that that's a journey back home of who we really are. We began this conversation about getting in touch with our true nature, our true nature. So in terms of true nature coaching, Robbie, can you just let us know, let our audiences know how they can reach you. What is your website? Where can they see you? I've seen you on LinkedIn. Yes.
ROBBIE FENLON (02:22:23):
Yeah, I'm sure you’ll put something in the show notes. But anyway, so our website is truenature.ch because we're based in Switzerland, but we work internationally. And I'm Robbie@truenature ch. That's my email address and you can find me at LinkedIn, Robbie Fenlon. Just look me up on LinkedIn.
TANIA COTTON (02:22:43):
Robbie, thank you so much. I know we will have more great conversations, but I have really, really enjoyed this one. Thank you for sharing.