Ep 196: Rich Friesen ~ Reframing Beliefs & Transcending Political Divides

What if the beliefs you've held since childhood are holding you back from personal growth and practical success in your life? Join us for a fascinating conversation with Rich Friesen, who guides us through the transformative process of reframing deeply ingrained beliefs. Rich, currently penning his new book "Healing the Political Divide," shares his "golden keys" process for developing self-awareness and agency. Together, we explore the impact of early beliefs on our identity and behaviours, and how consciously re-evaluating them can lead to extraordinary personal and spiritual development.

We also navigate the complexities of belief systems and community connections, discussing the challenges and rewards of moving from rigid belief structures, like for example Christian evangelicalism, to more diverse worldviews. Rich shares insights on embracing uncertainty and finding belonging in a broader spectrum of communities. We reflect on the powerful role of self-acceptance in fostering genuine connections across differences, highlighting how acceptance can transform how we interact within diverse circles.

In our exploration of political and financial landscapes, Rich addresses the "Trump trauma" phenomenon, offering insights into achieving inner healing by detaching our sense of safety from external events. He challenges prevailing notions around money, urging listeners to reconsider the "cult of poverty" mindset and recognise money as a 'certificate of appreciation'. By cultivating self-awareness and embracing personal freedom, we provide listeners with tools to navigate today's complex world while deepening their journey of growth. Join us for an episode that promises to enrich your understanding of belief and belonging in a rapidly changing world.

Find Rich here:
conversations.money
rich@mindmuscles.com
mindmuscles.com

Find Rich's book on Amazon: A Private Conversation with Money

Chapters

• 0:02 'Belief Reframing for Personal Growth
• 15:30 Navigating Belief Systems and Community Connections
• 26:34 Healing Political Division Through Inner Transformation
• 33:38 Unconscious Beliefs and Money

Transcript

Catherine Llewellyn: 0:02

Truth and Transcendence, brought to you by being Space with Katherine Llewellyn. Truth and Transcendence, episode 196, with special guest Rich Friesen. Now Rich is here today to talk about reframing beliefs, and there's a particular context for that that Rich is working on at the moment, because he's working on a new book called Healing the Political Divide, which I think most people listening could not possibly argue that that's not something that could be considered and looked at. I think we all know there is a political divide, not just in the US, but in the UK as well, and probably in other places that I know less about.

Catherine Llewellyn: 0:54

So Richard is the creator of the neuroscience-based Mind Muscles model. He's been a futures broker, a floor trader, he's founded an options trading firm and a financial software company. He holds 10 significant financial interface patents, a master's in clinical psychology, a master's in NLP and he's the author of A Private Conversation with Money. So this is a thoughtful man who looks into things deeply and has really explored in application a lot of what he's working with. So very, very exciting. And you can find Richard Friesen at conversationsmoney conversationsmoney. So, richard, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Rich Friesen: 1:46

Oh, this is my pleasure. I've listened to a couple of your podcasts and just love the depth and the critical thinking that you do as versus just symptomatic do versus just symptomatic bullhorn, just repeating things that satisfy some sort of a bias we have. So your thoughtfulness is much appreciated.

Catherine Llewellyn: 2:13

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. That is of course, what I'm going for. So whenever someone actually notices and appreciates it, I'm so grateful, and particularly coming up, we're just coming into the new year. It's very easy to come into the new year just thinking about what I failed to do last year.

Catherine Llewellyn: 2:36

It's really nice to get a compliment right off the bat. Thank you, rich, very much indeed. Now I'm just going to say a little bit about this business of reframing beliefs. It is my belief that we tend toward over-attachment to our beliefs, and I think the key problem with that is when we do it unconsciously, because that's when the attachment to our beliefs can actually cause us problems. When we're conscious of them, we're in a much better place, and I think that loosening this attachment is liberating and empowering. And, rich, I know that you've been looking at this in relation to the political divide, but in my opinion, reframing our beliefs is crucial in every area of our lives. I wonder what you think about that.

Rich Friesen: 3:23

Yes, what you're bringing up is so important is that when we grow up, we have embedded in us beliefs from our parents, from our community, from our religion, from our culture. And as we grow up, those beliefs tend to if we think of it in a neurological model the deeper they're buried, the sooner they're created, the more they impact all the other layers of our behaviors. It impacts our skills, it impacts our behaviors, our beliefs and even down to our core identity and, below that, even our spiritual values. So as we become more aware of it, in fact, I have a process I call the golden keys. The first is awareness. In fact, I'll do it right now.

Rich Friesen: 4:12

What am I aware of? Shoulders are a little tense on the physiological level, throat is relaxed. I'm slowing down a bit. Emotionally, I would say I'm really excited to talk to you. So there's some excitement that translates sometimes into tension and my thought process is this is just going to flow so nicely. So, awareness, but the next step is acceptance. In other words, if I'm aware of my shoulders are tight and I go, rich, don't have tight shoulders, if I and instead I go, ah, my shoulders are tight, I wonder what message they have for me. That's fascinating. And the final is what is our quality of our thoughts? So if we can bring these to awareness, then we can get agency. We can say, okay, now, what do I want? And so the process of awareness is the start of, I think, opening new doors to ourselves.

Catherine Llewellyn: 5:21

Yeah, absolutely. And, as you say there, you're looking at awareness in a number of different ways, aren't you? You're not just saying I'm just trying to be more aware. You're looking at the physical, the emotional and the thought process.

Rich Friesen: 5:36

Exactly.

Catherine Llewellyn: 5:37

Presumably as a way of sort of making sure you don't miss anything. It's easy to focus on, isn't it?

Rich Friesen: 5:44

Yes, by dividing them up into my physiology awareness, my emotional awareness and the quality of my thoughts, it's specific enough that we can go into each one where, if we just say awareness, self-awareness, it's more ephemeral.

Catherine Llewellyn: 6:04

Absolutely. And then you're saying then you have agency. You can then start to make a choice about what.

Rich Friesen: 6:09

Yes, yes if we repeat our awareness enough, eventually that awareness becomes a, an agent that we can start making our choices from, because normally, if somebody says something to me, I just react, and so there's no difference between the external stimulus and my reaction, whereas if I'm aware of it, and I'm aware of it repeatedly enough, eventually I can have agency from that level.

Catherine Llewellyn: 6:41

Yes.

Rich Friesen: 6:41

Yeah, so you're not automatic in your reaction.

Catherine Llewellyn: 6:44

Not as automatic Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, richard, you've obviously reflected on these sorts of things deeply over some significant period of time. If you cast your mind back, can you remember the first time that you realized that our relationship with our beliefs and that reframing our beliefs was something that was interesting and important to you?

Rich Friesen: 7:10

Yeah, that was five, six years ago. I read a book called the Book of Not Knowing by Peter Rolston. Wow Boy, it's a hard book. It's a tough book to read because I so want to attach myself to what I know and the realization that I grew up a Christian evangelical. My father was a preacher. I carried my Bible to school and in fact I didn't even like to date because some of the girls were Catholics, were heathens. And then in college I lost my faith and I went to the inner city in Chicago and saw the misery there, became a very liberal political person and believed that. Then I moved to California and read Ayn Rand. I became a dedicated libertarian, ran for US Congress as a libertarian.

Catherine Llewellyn: 8:11

Wow.

Rich Friesen: 8:12

And then, reading this book, it occurred to me at every stage Rich Friesen, the one person in the world that had the absolute positive truth, yes, the one person in the world that had the absolute positive truth, yes, and I'm thinking, huh, do I have the absolute positive truth right now?

Rich Friesen: 8:33

And the answer is, of course, yes I do. But so what I've done is how do I manage the fact that there's some human part of me that is so deep that needs absolute truth and a higher level spiritual agency that looks down on Rich and sees each stage where he's had the absolute truth? And so how I've managed that for myself and what I am starting to work with others and communicate is that Rich Friesen has an emotional truth. So rather than trying to say, rich, you don't really know, you can't know the truth, stop thinking that way I say, okay, rich Friesen has an emotional truth and again, that goes into our agency. So I'm looking at Rich Friesen's emotional truth from a higher level so I can step into it. I don't judge myself for it. I know that this may be temporary from a higher level, it's just so difficult. So I said, why don't I just accept it and just relabel it?

Catherine Llewellyn: 9:57

Yes, and when you say difficult to not have a truth, is that similar to saying it's difficult to not have an opinion or a perspective, or are you saying something different from that?

Rich Friesen: 10:14

Yeah, that's another way to do it. Say my current opinion is, for example, I teach communication and right now I'm starting a workshop on what I call Trump trauma people who are traumatized by our current political divide and we can have opinions, we can have perspectives, we can have strongly held beliefs, and so how do we label those? And one of the communications tools I use is my current model. Political model is my current belief is. So when we talk to others, that gives them the sense that we understand that we have a belief system that is temporary, or we appreciate that we're not so attached to it that we're going to beat somebody else up over the belief.

Catherine Llewellyn: 11:17

Yes, so we're not seeing it quite as absolute sort of absolute end of story. Yes, and given also that there's the part of us that wants that so bad, right? Yes, I understand. So you're accepting the fact that we really want to feel that we know our opinion to be right, and accepting what our opinion might be in that moment and how we feel about it, and accepting that that might not be the end of it?

Rich Friesen: 11:49

That's correct and that gives us some perspective. So if we all say, okay, I want to connect with you. We have different emotional beliefs. I can respect my emotional belief, I can respect their emotional belief and now we can connect on either, you know, depend on geography, or a higher level, or a deeper spiritual level, because we both recognize that we have a need for a belief system and we look at it from a higher perspective.

Catherine Llewellyn: 12:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, this reminds me, over here there was a lot of well, I don't quite know what to call it with the lockdowns and the vaccine back several years ago and there were a lot of people sort of falling out about whether you should have the vaccine or not, family members, families breaking up, one person believed one thing and one person believed the other. And I had this extraordinary conversation with someone very close to me where they were going to do one thing and I was going to do the other thing.

Catherine Llewellyn: 13:00

It's not really relevant which way round it was, and we were both very concerned about each other because we both thought the other person was making a choice that was going to possibly be very dangerous for them, and in the end we ended up saying, do you know what I love you much more than whether I'm right about this.

Rich Friesen: 13:24

It was a very sweet moment and I can even remember where.

Catherine Llewellyn: 13:26

I was exactly in that conversation and I hope what you're doing works for you. If not, I'll do everything in my power to help you. If it goes wrong, and that was an incredibly educational moment for me. Actually, I had to sort of peel myself off what I thought and suddenly go hold on what's really important in this relationship. Not a jab, you know that's not very important compared to the love.

Rich Friesen: 14:00

if we look at what you're saying, that if my belief system, in order for me to feel safe, I need to have this belief system and I need you to have this belief system, or else we don't have a relationship, the ability to step in to a world where it says I have enough confidence, my faith in myself, that I don't need external support and a belief system of everyone around me to be okay. That is a maturation level, almost a spiritual maturation level, where it says I can handle other people's belief system because my real connection, my real value system, is that connection with that other human being as versus. I need an external structure to feel and to be safe.

Catherine Llewellyn: 14:57

Yes, and you said something a bit like when we were talking before about this word safe. I found really interesting, because I don't think people consider that very often, when they think about people being attached to beliefs, they don't think well, they're using that belief to make themselves feel safe or their relationship with that belief is something to do with feeling safe. So I'd love to hear a bit more about the mechanics of that that you've discovered, to hear a bit more about the mechanics of that that you've discovered.

Rich Friesen: 15:26

Sure, imagine that you. Well, I'll use myself as an example. I grew up a Christian evangelical. My father was a preacher. I went to a very fundamentalist Christian point of view that I knew that God loved me, that the church had behavioral standards, that I was expected to live a certain life in a certain way. So I had all this external structure and I didn't need an internal one. So, as my faith fell apart for a bunch of reasons, then how do I face the world, since I depended on this external structure that is no longer there?

Catherine Llewellyn: 16:25

Right, okay. So how did the external structure give you safety? How does that work?

Rich Friesen: 16:34

Oh my gosh, I had the truth. I had a community of people who believed exactly like I do. My belief system was never questioned in that community. There was love within that structure because we all believed the same. There was no conflicts. In fact, there was a huge amount of benefit from that. I grew up in a dysfunctional family and I knew God loved me. The men at prayer meetings would hold hands in a circle and pray for each other. Oh my gosh, just a lot of great stuff. And as that fell apart, then the question becomes am I able to face a world where I don't know?

Catherine Llewellyn: 17:24

Right, because the certainty had gone.

Rich Friesen: 17:26

The certainty is gone and then it becomes. You know, the phrase for me was I don't need to know. No matter what happens, it's going to be okay. I am able to handle chaos and certainty and evaluate the world as it comes to me, and I don't need to do it from a place of absolute certainty. That was not trivial and it still isn't.

Catherine Llewellyn: 18:07

You know, I'm maybe 50% of the way there, or something as you said, is a piece of maturation in the life, isn't it? Because it's possible to go all the way through life without touching that possibility? And when you were describing that wonderful experience of the connection with the men's circles and the acceptance and the love and the certainty, and then you described. You mentioned losing, it Was there fear at that point.

Rich Friesen: 18:48

Oh yeah, and I still have it. I mean, there's still a part of community that I missed that you know I am friends with religious people, very progressive political, democrat people, republican, very conservative people, and the wonderful thing about that approach to letting go of absolute certainty is the ability to connect on a human level with a wider range of people and at the same time, it's really good to be in a community of people where you can just go oh, you know I don't have to be this magical guru whose understanding of everybody's belief systems.

Catherine Llewellyn: 19:42

Totally. I know exactly what you mean. I have a couple of communities I'm involved with, but you couldn't really call it. There are only communities, in that we all hang out together quite a lot. It's not like a formal community, but there is something in each of them. There's something we all have in common and that we're all kind of engaged with, and so there's a sort of common language. There's a kind of belonging, a sense of belonging, and there are differences of opinion of all sorts in there, but there's a place where there's a connection and that is comforting, but without being sort of numbing. You know it's not running away from life and it's very interesting. You know, you said you lost that lovely community experience that you had back then. Back then, but through your exploration since then you've now discovered that you can actually create and receive a wonderful experience of connection with a much broader combination of people than you could, then which is a flip, isn't it it?

Rich Friesen: 20:58

is and I still enjoy because I do have a belief system. Now I label it as my emotional belief system and to connect with other people in that emotional belief system feels really good.

Catherine Llewellyn: 21:10

Absolutely 100%, and I think it's really good to remind us of that.

Rich Friesen: 21:14

Yeah, we're clan animals. When we were in the clan on the savannas of Africa, if the clan expelled us, we died. Yeah, we have a neurology that is built to belong. In fact, in the book Conversation with Money, one of the exercises is what does your clan believe around? Money and wealth and success, and wealth and success.

Rich Friesen: 21:44

And if that belief system in that particular community is structured so that it limits your decisions, limits your abilities, limits the world you want to live in? When we change our belief system, oh my gosh, we leave people behind. Now, if that is unconscious and that is a drag, and then we wonder why. You know, we know what we want and we just keep going back and forth. Once we become more aware of the communities that will no longer support us or accept us, we can then now say, okay, rich Friesen is not going to be accepted by this community, perhaps. But what if I accepted myself and come to this community? Honestly, it's amazing how the imagination is sometimes very far removed from the reality, because when I'm myself, it's amazing. People of all different stripes kind of you know, they tolerate me at least.

Catherine Llewellyn: 22:57

Well, you know, it's interesting, the people, some of the most unappealing people that I've come across are the ones who are incredibly wedded to beliefs. And, funnily enough, I had this bizarre conversation with somebody where I said look, right now, the way you're behaving is completely intolerable. This person was banging on about their opinions about something and they said well, don't you agree with what I'm saying? I said I actually agree 100% with what you're saying, but you are currently assaulting me with this belief. I agree with you and the way you're doing it is intolerable. It's just you need to shut up. And they found it really difficult to understand that.

Rich Friesen: 23:39

Yeah, and if and I expect you, you do this you come to that with love. That, depending on their filters, if they can feel the love as the prime prime force in your relationship, it's amazing how much differences you can tolerate.

Catherine Llewellyn: 24:00

Yes, yes, absolutely, or how you can actually explain how it's difficult to receive that communication. Explain what might work better, what might be more tolerable. Yep.

Rich Friesen: 24:18

In the US here we have Thanksgiving coming up tolerable Yep. In the US, here we have Thanksgiving coming up, and so one of the big issues that's on X and on the social media is how do you tolerate Uncle Joe who's a big Trump supporter, or how do you handle your sister who's a big liberal who wants socialism? And so there are communication skills that we can use, and those become more powerful as you come to them with love. If you're just on a high skill level, they're still helpful, but if you can come to them with love, they become more leveraged.

Catherine Llewellyn: 25:01

Absolutely Well. I suppose it's important to also acknowledge that sometimes we lose touch with our ability to come at it with love. You know, sometimes we can get annoyed or kind of step outside of that. And I imagine you sometimes are working with clients where that's what they're grappling with. Is that my? Is that a correct guess?

Rich Friesen: 25:23

No, I don't. I've never felt annoyed with a client.

Catherine Llewellyn: 25:26

No, what I mean is where the client is encountering situations where it's difficult for them.

Rich Friesen: 25:32

Oh yes.

Catherine Llewellyn: 25:33

Love in the situation, even though they know that's what to do.

Rich Friesen: 25:36

Yeah, the more attached we are to our beliefs to feel safe another belief, that's different, means we're not safe. We drop down into our survival mechanism. And once we drop down into our survival mechanism, boom, boom, boom. Then communication and love disappear because we're you know, we're close to being threatened with death. Is how our brain interprets that.

Catherine Llewellyn: 26:05

Yeah, you were saying something you were mentioning before about. I can't remember what you called it, but it was something around Trump trauma syndrome.

Rich Friesen: 26:15

Oh, trump trauma. Yes.

Catherine Llewellyn: 26:18

Okay, I was interested in that because you were saying before that you're working with some people where their kind of relationship with that is actually causing practical, tangible problems in their life. Could you say a bit more about that?

Rich Friesen: 26:34

Sure. So, mike, I have a number of clients Most of them are around financial. They're professional traders, money managers and investors and I have a couple of clients now that they flew all over the country to elect Democrats. Big commitment to that, and now, oh my gosh, this happened. The world's going to come to an end. I'm going to pull all my money out of the market. What do I do?

Rich Friesen: 27:04

And so they are dropping down into survival mode in what I call Trump trauma at this point, but to separate their financial decisions and their career decisions from their financial decisions. So that is an interesting process because once again, it comes down to moving from requiring our external world to keep us safe to you know, this is going to be interesting, fascinating. Huh. I wonder what opportunities there are for me. I wonder if who's going to be in pain? How can I help them out? Wow, this is an opportunity for me, as an agent, to be able to spread love or create a a better world for people. How can I do it and how can I contribute as versus? Oh my god, the world's falling apart it's all over.

Catherine Llewellyn: 28:10

Yeah, that is that is how people talk or think sometimes, isn't it? They think it's all over it's all over I've had people saying, if, if trump gets in, democracy is dead there is no democracy ever again and people actually believing that um um and having a lot of distress as a result, which, if nothing else, is not good for your health, is it?

Rich Friesen: 28:40

Oh no, I mean having that belief system. You know, you can feel it in your stomach, you can feel it in your solar plexus, you feel it in your muscular tension. It takes. You know, if that stress becomes consistent over time, it's going to take years off of your life.

Catherine Llewellyn: 29:03

Yeah, yeah, so you're working on a book around healing the political divide. Is that actually the name of the book, or is the name to be the?

Rich Friesen: 29:16

same. Yeah, that's the tentative name. There's no other book of that title that I've researched. And here's the challenge and we've talked about this. It's about really healing yourself. And we've talked about this. It's about really healing yourself.

Catherine Llewellyn: 29:31

Right.

Rich Friesen: 29:32

Again, it comes down to not knowing. It comes to relabeling your belief system. It comes down to being okay in a system that you haven't designed. In other words, I'm okay, I don't need the external agreements in order to be safe and secure in my life. Well, that transformation goes well beyond just politics. It's a much deeper transformation and to make that, I have experimented with in conservative groups, making this presentation and testing it, and in liberal groups, and the response is like this oh, people can't see, but I'm folding my arms over my chest and I'm wrinkling my brow and I'm looking very doubtful.

Catherine Llewellyn: 30:25

Yeah, you're looking like what some groups used to look like when I used to do train middle management. They'd all be in rows with their arms crossed and eyebrows down. You're thinking I'm dead already.

Rich Friesen: 30:38

Yes, so you know what healing and political.

Catherine Llewellyn: 30:43

But what about the libertarians? How did the libertarians respond?

Rich Friesen: 31:13

Oh well, I ran for Congress as a libertarian. So the libertarians are more amenable because they've already, either politically or personally, developed a stance toward the external world. Where they are responsible, they create the world. I want to be left alone. I don't need the external world to be okay. So that's kind of built in philosophically and politically, and for some people it doesn't, but for others it actually translates into a deeper transformation.

Catherine Llewellyn: 31:29

Right, Great. I don't think a lot of people know that about the libertarians actually, because they can appear to be sort of weird, nerdy people.

Rich Friesen: 31:40

They confuse them with extreme conservatives, whereas the libertarians see the conservatives as going too far, as trying to legislate morality and uh, legislate behaviors yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me.

Catherine Llewellyn: 31:57

Yeah, great, I think it's great that you've actually gone and talked to groups about this. So how, what would you say if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, okay, I get the message, you know, in order for me to feel to this and they're thinking, okay, I get the message, you know, in order for me to feel um less, um, controlled or dominated by my beliefs and my relationships with my beliefs.

Catherine Llewellyn: 32:17

I have to do some inner healing um in relation to that, I have to embrace not knowing um. How do I do that? How do?

Rich Friesen: 32:29

I do that. It's again. It starts with awareness and what I need to do to feel safe, and as I say these words, I feel an emotional rush. We all want to feel safe, and where is that locus of safety? Is it with an external system or with our internal self? So we can do some exercises and start with something really simple feeling safe in a certain way that it's internally created rather than externally, and I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to start. You can always email rich at mindmusclescom and happy to have a conversation with anybody. We have a number of resources the book, a Private Conversation with Money also comes with an online course that touches on many of these issues and some of your earlier podcasts. You talked about the unconscious constraints we have to personal freedom and around money is one way that we have a number of hidden beliefs that keep us from really the world that we want to create for ourselves 100%.

Catherine Llewellyn: 33:59

Absolutely so noticeable, particularly at the moment. We're in a very materialistic time time, I think, and um, material things are of value and our relationship with them is terribly important, because we can cause ourselves problems if we have the the over attachment one way or the other. I mean um. I've also known people who embrace what we came to call um the cult of poverty. Have you heard call the cult of poverty, have you? Heard of the cult of poverty.

Rich Friesen: 34:32

Yes.

Catherine Llewellyn: 34:33

For anyone listening who hasn't heard of that. That's where you say the less money I have, the more virtuous I am.

Rich Friesen: 34:41

Yes.

Catherine Llewellyn: 34:42

And I've known people who are like that, and if you turn up with a bottle of water you are a bad person because you should be just drinking out of the tap. You know you should never pay. You know, it's a very, very interesting worldview.

Rich Friesen: 35:04

Yes, it's virtue. And the less I have, the more virtuous I am. And in the book I talk about a radical notion that money is a certificate of appreciation. So, catherine, if you do something for me, I give you not money but certificates of appreciation. Yeah, and vice versa, you give me certificates of appreciation if I give you some value.

Rich Friesen: 35:41

So our job in the economic world is to deliver values to others and collect certificates of appreciation. So if I close myself down and I say I'm going to be virtuous by being small, the question for me is how much value are you delivering to others? And here's what's going to make a lot of people's brains explode the more certificates of appreciation you collect by delivering value, the more value you have delivered to your family, your community, your employer, your employees and your clients. And so, rather than looking at the world like a pie, where if I have more you have less and I'm going to be virtuous by having less, I take the opposite the more certificates of appreciation you collect, the more value you've delivered to the world. And that's what we want to do is deliver value to the world.

Catherine Llewellyn: 36:42

That's so beautifully said, rich, and I completely agree with you. I think that's beautifully said. Thank you, honestly. I could talk to you for hours. It's so enjoyable and interesting and I've learned something I'll share with you. Something I've learned in this conversation, which is that it's so easy for me, and maybe other people as well, to think about some of the things we're talking about and then be judgmental about someone else's attachment to their beliefs. Yes, just another way of me being attached to my nonsense right and which then traps me just as much but I can make it sound really, really clever.

Catherine Llewellyn: 37:29

That's that I've really um, picked up on that. Not that you said that to me, but there was something that you said about if you're coming from love in the communication and I thought to myself, oh, am I always coming from love in the communication? I like to think I do a lot of the time, but sometimes I don't quite hit that. Sometimes I'm not quite right in that place. So that's been a valuable piece for me to take. But I would like to now ask you a question to do with we've kind of skirted around talking about some of what's going on in the world and I think to the degree that it's been relevant to our conversation about some of what's going on in the world, and I think to the degree that it's been relevant to our conversation, and there is a lot going on at the point that this is aired, early January, we will have had a few months since the election in the US and a number of things will have happened.

Catherine Llewellyn: 38:23

We've had a lot of very interesting and challenging things happen over the last four or five years and everyone's got different opinions about what's happening, what should be happening, who should be charged. Everyone's got all these different opinions and there are a lot of people who are trying to be helpful in that regard, whether they're just trying to be good leaders in their own lives, helpful to people, or whether they are educators or politicians or business leaders, whatever they are. And some of those people are listening to this podcast right now because they're interested in exploring ideas, they're interested in kind of expanding their awareness and perception, and I was just wondering if there's something you'd really like to say to those people in relation to what we've been talking about today.

Rich Friesen: 39:17

Yes again that you are okay, that if you look at yourself from a level of agency as versus reaction, if you look at your awareness of your physiology, your emotions, your thoughts and develop that higher level of awareness, eventually that has the power of agency where you can ask so, what do I want now? And once you ask that question, with awareness and acceptance of your physiology, your emotions, your thoughts, you can now create a new world for yourself and a new world of connections and relationships, self and a new world of connections and relationships. This is a lifelong process. It's not like black and white. You don't go from one to the other. And there's times when I do set boundaries, when somebody is so out of love and they're into destruction, then I'll set a boundary and I can do it with love, and sometimes I don't. But again I say, I'm a human being. Okay, I noticed that, I noticed Rich, you reacted bang, you know, without much agency, and I'll say, oh, that's fascinating. I wonder what triggered that.

Rich Friesen: 40:49

So, again, it's love for ourselves starts with acceptance, with that awareness and then, once we accept it, we can then create agency.

Catherine Llewellyn: 40:59

Amazing, amazing. So, richard, we've talked about quite a lot today, as I suspected that we might. Has there been a favorite part of our conversation today for you?

Rich Friesen: 41:13

Yeah, thinking about the, you know what's challenging me, given my original religious background, is the spiritual depth that this eventually gets to. And this is an arena that has been a challenge for me because there's been, you know, it's still this kind of confused ball around a specific religion and spirituality and I have kind of avoided that because it gets into this whole mess. So I think it's encouraging me to take another look at the deeper spiritual level. So, thank you.

Catherine Llewellyn: 41:56

Amazing, great. So we've each had a very valuable piece out of this conversation. Let's just hope some of the listeners got something valuable as well, even better. And my final request of you, if you'd like to, is to do you have a reflection question that you'd like to leave with the listeners that they could take into their week? That would help them to across the week, to help them kind of contemplate and go deeper into what we've been talking about.

Rich Friesen: 42:24

Yeah, look back on your life and look at how many absolute positive beliefs you've had and look at how they've shifted with time and not take yourself so seriously.

Catherine Llewellyn: 42:41

Wonderful, wonderful, excellent. Well, just to remind everybody where to find you, there's conversationsmoney, and you also gave an email address which I will put in the show note.

Rich Friesen: 42:54

Okay, rich at mindmusclescom.

Catherine Llewellyn: 42:57

Rich at mindmusclescom. And I think there was another thing you said which I've now lost another place people could go to find you, or maybe I just made that up place people could go to find you, or maybe I just made that up Mindmusclescom.

Rich Friesen: 43:13

Well, it's mindmusclescom, and that'll give you links to everything else.

Catherine Llewellyn: 43:22

Fantastic, great. So I'm going to put all of those things in the show notes so people can find them easily. Rich Friesen, it's been such a delight.

Rich Friesen: 43:28

Thank you so much for coming on the show show and have a wonderful day catherine, it is so wonderful to have somebody who can plumb a little deeper way of thinking and challenge me and uh create uh some, some doors, some possibilities for your listeners. So thank you so much.

Catherine Llewellyn: 43:47

Thank you. Thank you for listening to Truth and Transcendence and thank you for supporting the show by rating, reviewing, subscribing, buying me a coffee and telling a friend. If you'd like to know more about my work, you can find out about transformational coaching, Pellewa and the Freedom of Spirit workshop on beingspaceworld. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time.