Rick Smith, Authentic Relating - Going deeper, connecting in meaningful ways

Moving at the speed of love, living at your tender edge and having more interesting conversations in your life.

If you're feeling the pull of vulnerability and opening your self and your heart, or if this is a regular thing for you and you're seeking to peel back the veil to a more mystical presence - this is the access structure, have a listen to the learnings!

Rick Smith - https://www.thetenderedge.com / https://authenticrelating.co, a teacher of teachers, speaking to over 100,00 students, selling over 300,000 copies of Conscious Classroom Management, running workshops in Awakened Leadership and Leading from the Heart - dive into the learnings of Authentic Relating, and a past weekend of where I participated in https://authenticrelating.co/courses/... led by Rick.

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Transcript

- Rick, welcome to The Interview. Pleasure to have you here.

- Thank you.

- For the people back home, you are a teacher and a teacher of teachers. I believe you've spoken to 100,000 students, you have a book called Conscious Classroom Management which sold over 300,000 copies now. You run workshops in Awakened Leadership and Presenting and Leading From the Heart, your website is the tenderedge.com,

- and you've just taken myself and a group of about 25 others through level one of Being Human.

- The ART of Being Human.

- The ART of Being Human, what's that about?

- It's authentic relating. It's structured for allowing people to go deeper in themselves and to connect with others in a more meaningful way. As I was thinking about this interview, I thought I want to make a statement, because I've never said this in this way before. What I found this weekend, what was really interesting was the training serves the needs of three levels of motivation or interest. You have people who are coming because they want to have more interesting conversations in their life. And then you have people who are really feeling the pull of vulnerability and opening themselves and opening their hearts. And then you have people who are doing that on a regular basis, the vulnerability and the openness and the training and the structures can allow them to peel back the veil into a more mystical presence, because it goes very deep. So the same structures, the same games we play, the same focus can be for better conversations, vulnerability in the moment or this deeper, abiding presence, which did arise, in the workshop.

- And we've just sat and edited some of the testimonial videos. That was the first time you've seen them. Is that what you expected? What stood out for you from hearing these people on their way out the door?

- You know... I get positive feedback sometimes, but it's always a bit shocking how much people were touched & moved in a two day, training. how much people were touched & moved in a two day, training. It makes sense. And I can see as they're speaking, yeah, they have a different angle. A different trajectory moving forward than they did when they arrived, before it started, and that's very cool. And I'm very touched, I feel, as I said, at the end of the workshop, I feel well used, which is, if I have a goal in facilitation, it's to be empty and to be well used. it's to be empty and to be well used.

- The structure of the weekend was a series of games. I don't if you call them, why you call them games, maybe the game of life?

- Exercises, game structures, there's kind of two pieces. There's the structures.. each structure eliminates one or two principles or key threads of presence. So if you look at presence as the centre of the wheel, the spokes or the avenues are the games that we play to bring people into an awareness of how to access that presence. So that's one side of it, and the other is a more open-ended kind of group sharing where, the real magic often happens. Where people just be present and see what's arising and with curiosity and slowing down, oftentimes when someone speaks, they skip over like the lily pads, there are these moments of potential dropping into deep presence, deep aliveness and vulnerability. So in the shares we slow down, and people get a chance, to feel themselves in a way that they normally don't. So it's both the structures, and the present tense, sort of hanging together.

- And I heard you reference the moment within the moment, discovering the moment within the moment.

- What led you in your life to discover there there were moments within moments & then set out on a huge body of work to facilitate it?

- Wow, it's going to take a long time to answer that I mean, when I was a teenager, I had a series of profound mystical experiences or I realised there's way more to life than what I thought. And from that point forward, I've been exploring and learning and stabilising and grounding those experiences into the form of what it means to be a human being, in the world, on the ground, connecting with others, in form, finding kindness and weaving that through the conversations and the activities of our lives. So this has been my biggest focus.

- Beautiful. Bit of verbal ping pong, I'd like to read a quote to you and then you tell me what that means for you or what it brings up for you. So "inside of presence is an innate curiosity".

- I think I said that.

- Yeah, these are your quotes. I think that's really profound, I'm so, I think it's cool that I said it. When we are allowing ourselves to be, to kind of step underneath the noise that goes on in our heads and the functionality and all of that, we arrive at kind of our centre and inside the centre is this, it varies, but there's a sense of hunger for more, a hunger for filling the space with presence. There's this innate curiosity, like I was saying, in the workshop, little kids, often are very curious and they don't really edit their curiosity. They've not had that kind of repression training. When we're present, we become that childlike place where we're just curious about everything. It could be like this microphone, I could just go, I could get into, just exploring what this is, rather than as an adult, oh, it's a microphone, it amplifies the voice, it records and moving on, there's so many places of wonder inside of presence, as we enter into that.

- Yeah, my experience of playing the curiosity game in context was moving around a room with a whole bunch of people, firstly labelling things and then mislabeling things and then grabbing objects Looking at them as complete new things. It was this really wild kind of like, what is this and then when you said to everybody, "Sit, now, look at everybody else with that curiosity," the love that was transferred in the room, the energetics were just, the lid was taken off then.

- That's very cool that, you almost equate curiosity and love, the openness yields both, the love, the curiosity, and they come together.

- "The best I can do right now is consciously blame".

- *laughing* I didn't know I'd be quoted on that. That's great. So sometimes when I'm in a situation, when I feel a lot of charge in my body, I feel like I don't know how to get to neutral. If I'm with someone, a friend or a partner, and I have permission, to what I call consciously blame, I can say, look - this isn't real It's going to dissolve as I speak it, but it really helps if I can, to navigate, If I can speak it or write it, and know that you're going to hold space for me and watch what's underneath it, which is invariably the love and the kindness. Sometimes the best I can do in a situation, I can't just disarm and drop everything right away, but if I have permission to kind of walk down the staircase, from blame into responsibility, That's what I would call consciously blaming. I know it's not true. I know you didn't do this, and it's not your fault, but it's in my head and I want to be able to narrate it, so I don't have to hold on to it.

- Stepping over to verbal tools, you said a lot "Being here with you I'm noticing", "hearing that, I'm noticing". How do you use that?

- So this is one of the, kind of the foundations of authentic relating is to relate in the present moment. of authentic relating is to relate in the present moment. So as we're sitting here, now I live in Bali, We're in Melbourne, it's cold. I'm cold, so my body's a little shaky. To notice that is a doorway into the presence. To notice that is a doorway into the presence. Oftentimes we skip over sensations thinking, what really matters is emotions they do, but also physical sensations. "Being with you I notice" is, what I'm noticing inside myself physically, what my feelings are, my thoughts, perhaps how my feelings and thoughts are being influenced by being with you. So that's the opening, And when you say "hearing this, I notice" it implies that you're being affected by me. This is relating, authentic relating is being authentic, and relating to the other person. Yeah, if that makes sense. Those sentence stems are good ways into the present moment.

- Another thing I wrote down, that noticing and naming context opens the possibility of changing it. This is more a statement than a question because it seems like the capstone to the tools that you were just talking about.

- Another way of understanding, noticing and naming is being conscious, That would be consciously blaming, for example, to be able to notice and name, this is what's happening, opens up space for something new. Beccuse if you don't drop to the root, you can't change the stems..

- I had quite an amazing time getting access to a karma free bitch zone, which was AKA The Complain Game. I'm backtracking a little here, I've had it said to me that, by friends that, we never really know what's going on for you, because I always put the positive stuff out there. I don't sit down ever and be like "Oh, this is really irritating me. "This is bahhhh" and to have the opportunity to be heard in that, was wonderful. I really liked it and the person opposite me said, "Ah, wow, I really feel connected to you, you've really shown up."

- It was fascinating when we did that one, I said, "Look, we all have judgments, we all have complaints, and we're not here to sandpaper those out. we're not here to be better than we are." When there was permission in the space to consciously complain, Okay you have two minutes to complain, then the energy in the room was just so big. Because "oh my gosh, I can do that, and it's okay?!" Now you don't want to.. it's good to notice the thoughts and feelings. You don't want to take them to bed with you. You don't want to make a whole civilization out of those expressions, but to be able to name and notice them, opens up space for a deeper truth to come through. opens up space for a deeper truth to come through.

- Not quite a koan, though, "It's not how we are with how we are. It's how we are with what we do" It's how we are with what we do" I said that? I think I probably did, I said a lot of things. I'm sitting here being interviewed. I'm sitting here being interviewed. There's a thought in my head that says, I should do a good job, I got to get this right. I have to catch an airplane. We have to do this efficiently All of the doing and the content. There's this other part underneath, I think the underneath or behind, where I'm noticing all this. I have the opportunity to be tender with myself, I have the opportunity to be tender with myself, as I'm having those very normal human experiences of wanting to rush or do it right. There's a softness that's possible, as I'm being videotaped. Being videotaped is the what we do, and the softness or the possibility, the softness is how we are. In any moment, regardless of what's happening on the outside, I have access to an internal resource, on the outside, I have access to an internal resource, to more welcome myself to take a breath, to slow down to, be present. That will influence what I do. Initially, it's just noticing what I do, noticing how I am inside that and making, when I can, a choice to welcome myself.

- I sit here balancing the clock in my periphery, your time, remembering that I didn't put the phone on airplane mode, so if somebody rings it's going to interrupt the video production. Figuring out what I want to ask you and just slowly moving through the process because..

- Exactly.

- Two things that really I loved, "Whatever is happening, the good news is, we have ourselves"

- Yeah.

- Thank you for that.

- You're welcome

- "We have ourselves and there's no better place than where I am."

- There's no better place than where I am, yeah. I was talking about, when you were forming groups one time and "Okay, find the person you want to be with and if they're taken then find someone else, I guarantee you, it's the perfect person that you're going to partner with because you get to be with you". That's really what it's about. There's no place like home. If I could quote a movie I've seen a few hundred times. We don't.. well, there's always time but right now, we're not going to go into the word purple, unless you want to wrap it up quickly..

- You like that one?

- I did.

- I'll just share, it's a personal story. It came in the conflict transformation part of the weekend. It came in the conflict transformation part of the weekend. Sometimes there's so much charge in a person energetically that they don't know how to ground. The story is, this is years ago, I was with my girlfriend and we were living together. When sometimes we'd have these big fights, back and forth and back and forth, in the middle of the fight, in the middle of a sentence, she would turn and walk out of the house. I would feel like, I was kicked in the stomach, "Oh, how could you do that?" She'd walk, go out on the hills, you know, walking in the woods for a couple hours and come back. She'd come back and I'd say, "How could you leave?" "You know I felt so abandoned," and she said, "Well, you know I'm going to come back." I said, "My mind knows it, but my energetic body, The young boy, I don't know that, I'm emotionally freaking out." And she said, "Well, the reason I'm leaving is "because I feel so much charge, if I continue the argument, I'm going to say things that are going to just make it worse." Hello.. I love it. I got that. I realised, well.. It's too many words for her to say all that, in the heat of the moment, for her to say, "I'm going to leave now because I love you. I'm going to take a walk and I'll come back." All that was just too hard, there was too much charge, so we came up with the word purple, which was a signal, if she said purple, all that was what was going on. The next time we had a fight, back and forth, back and forth, and she says purple, I'm like, "Have a good walk." I'm like, "Have a good walk." It always touches me, because when she left for two hours, we were together. Like I knew why she was leaving, my body could relax. She was going to.. because she was honouring the connection rather than leaving me. That simple tool really, it still touches me today, because there's a way to remember to step out of the trauma of being abandoned and it's the opposite it's like, "Oh, I'm being supported." There's a tail in the video. I wrote it down, because I know one of the biggest transitions in my life ever was a situation where I walked out on a situation I couldn't handle and I'm fairly confident if I'd have said the word purple, there would have been a lot more space for us to resolve, a conflict that still probably sits in the hearts of both of us today.

- Sure, and of course you could choose your own word. It's not universal; People, it's not a universal word, okay? Don't just say purple without setting a context because they're not going to know what you're talking about.

- All right, wrapping this up so you can get out of here and get to somewhere warm, Bali, What's one thing in the world you want people to know about Authentic Relating? to know about Authentic Relating?

- There's a lot. The practices of Authentic Relating. The first one is, welcome everything. Not so easy to do.. When we welcome everything, we automatically let go of our agenda, we drop into a place of openness and graciousness. we drop into a place of openness and graciousness. The second one is we drop our assumptions. There's that innate curiosity and that aliveness. Authentic relating is a series of structures and focus to bring more aliveness, more connection, more openness, to the extent that people want. There's no force, we're not pushing people to be different. We're actually inviting people to be themselves and in that invitation is where the real magic happens. and in that invitation is where the real magic happens.

- If there's one thing you wanted people to know about being at the tender edge, your own website, thetenderedge.com?

- Thetenderedge.com Well, you mentioned my background, I have two websites. So the other one is consciousteaching.com, that's for school teachers and administrators, but this newer stuff is a more, in my world, edgy and alive and a vulnerable focus. On the website, I give my philosophy of life in two sentences. 1. Love is unconditional. and 2. Life gives us conditions so we can love them. That means a lot.. but one thing it means is that every experience we have, good, bad, positive, negative, right, left, it doesn't matter. Every experience, is a doorway into love, is a doorway into ourselves. We don't have to change the experience to find our soft centre, because every experience, we can welcome, we can breathe, we can be tender with ourselves. So that's one piece. And the other side of the tender edge is that we expand our comfort zone by entering into discomfort. But we do it in small doses because if we go too far too fast, we can traumatise and slingshot back into contraction. It's a way of moving and growing where we don't have to step back again and recover. Recover means to cover again, we don't have to do that if we go at a pace. I call this going at the speed of love. If we can move at the speed of love, and bring that tenderness in, we can actually move quite quickly into welcoming ourselves and others.

- Beautiful

- Beautiful Thank you so much for being on The Interview with Philip Bateman Thank you very much for watching. I'm really committed to bringing you more wonderful insights from leaders in business, politics and community around the world. So if you can give me a little bit of support by sharing, commenting, liking and getting this content out into the world it does mean a lot to me. And means we can speak to and hear from more amazing people like Rick here.

- Thank you so much, it's a pleasure, really.