[00:00:00] Jan Almasy: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Apex Podcast, but today it is going to be a segment of my co-host and partner in crime, Mr. John Kundtz's show, The Disruptor.
So, our guest today, I'm going to allow John to bring to the table because we're going to be talking about a little bit of a different topic than we were last time you met this gentleman.
You guys met David on a previous episode, which I would highly recommend. Going back and listening to it, The show was on ethnic confusion and exactly where we all three kind of came from and the trips that our families took to the United States and especially an exploration of the lineage, John's family, and some amazing humans that did some amazing things here in Cleveland, Ohio.
So highly recommend going back and listening to that episode if you want a little bit of context about our guests prior to listening to this one. But John, why are we so excited today about this different episode structure?
[00:01:01] John Kundtz: I'm really excited because this is our 11th episode of The Disruptor, Jan. Which is hard to believe that you and I have gotten 10 of these digits.
Yes. Yes. Double digits. And so I was thinking the other day, which is always a bit dangerous Now that we've entered the, the sort of what I call the third decade of the millennium and the volume of change and the subsequent disruption we're all experiencing is just truly unprecedented and at least in my four decades of being in the technology space, I've never seen so much change, so much churn, so much disruption, our mantra you're either being disrupted or you're the disruptor.
In other words, Are you Blockbuster or are you Netflix? Are you Macy's trying to deal with disruption from Amazon and so forth? With that said, for nearly two years, we've all been experiencing this form of disruption. And if you remember back, Jan, when you and I interviewed Gary Guller in episode eight in February of this year, we talked about 2020 throwing us the mother of all disruptive curveballs.
And here we are now, nearing the end of 2021. And so, I wanted to add a 3rd component to our disruptor theme. And that is, how are you dealing with disruption? What can you do to survive these waves of disruption that seem to be hitting us on various fronts? So today, as you alluded to, we are bringing back David Kundtz, and we are going to talk about surviving disruption.
By learning the art of stopping. So David, welcome back to our show. I'm really excited to be able to talk with you and get some insights, particularly about your most recent book, The Art of Stopping.
[00:02:54] David Kundtz: John, thanks. Great to be here with you.
[00:02:56] John Kundtz: For those that didn't or haven't listened to the last show, I'm going to let David give a bit of a more detailed introduction because it's, I think it's better when we understand that the backstory of the guest, but in a nutshell, David's a speaker counselor, who's now retired from private practice and an author of numerous books.
And I'm thinking you're up around. 8, 9, 7,
[00:03:21] David Kundtz: 7, 7 plus, depending on how you count them.
[00:03:24] John Kundtz: There you go, okay, that's fair because I was trying to, I was trying to do a count, and I kept coming up with different numbers, but David's most recent book, as we mentioned, is the art of stopping how to be still a friend of mine uses a saying, and I stole it as everyone is born into a story.
And I was hoping you could give our listeners a bit of insight into your fascinating backstory if you don't mind.
[00:03:49] David Kundtz: No, not at all, John. Yeah, my backstory is in Cleveland, Ohio, born into a Hungarian-Irish-German family in 1937, and went to school at U. S. in Shaker Heights. School at Georgetown then went to the seminary, was a priest for, oh, almost 20 years in the Diocese of Boise, Idaho.
And in South America, I served three and a half years in Cali, Columbia, South America, which I really loved. Came back, got retrained, left ministry, got retrained, and became a psychotherapist, and family counselor, here in California, in the Berkeley area. And retired from that several years ago, and in the meantime, I've been writing.
And my most recent book is the one you mentioned, The Art of Stopping. It's actually a rewrite of a book that was published back in 1998. And so much has changed that the publisher encouraged me to rewrite it, go through and update it completely. So it's really almost like a new book. That's why it's difficult to count how many books there are.
Yeah, that's my backstory. That's my been my last project and that's. What I'm actually working on now is marketing the book.
[00:05:10] John Kundtz: so David, tell us, what is stopping? Give us a little background. Is it a system? Does it have components?
[00:05:17] David Kundtz: Absolutely. Stopping is doing nothing as much as possible for a moment or a month in order to wake up, and remember who you are and what you want. In other words, stopping is doing nothing to become awake. My conviction, John, is this. Each of us has within us, and in this, I go back into all of the traditions, spiritual traditions, both of the East and the West. Each of us has within us the wisdom and the knowledge, the understanding, and the necessary wisdom to know who we are and what we want to do.
The world has become so distracting, so complex and so fast-changing. As you mentioned earlier we don't hear those voices, and we can't access that wisdom because there's so much going on and there's so much going through our minds and our brains. What we have to do is allow those voices and that wisdom access to our psyche, to our current, present awareness.
I'm convinced the only way we can do that is just by shutting up, being still, being quiet, being alone. Now, as that's very counter-cultural. That's not a popular mantra. People are afraid to be alone, okay? To do this, to practice stopping is totally, completely simple. Everyone knows how to stop, shut up, and be still.
That's easy. But to do it, we're terrified. All, again, of the Western and Eastern traditions tell us what is the most challenging spiritual problem of human beings, the self, conquering and knowing the self. So that seems to be probably, when you stop and think about it, the most important thing you can do in your life is to know yourself and to know who you are and what you want.
And if you don't... it's very sad.
[00:07:55] John Kundtz: Well, and this is only being exacerbated with the speed of change and the speed of technology and the speed on which we communicate. there are a lot of good things and innovative things that come about with entrepreneurs And start-up companies that are trying to actually, be disruptive. They're trying to make things better and do things faster and different. But, at the same time, there are some downsides, as you just pointed out. the, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or those kinds of things, It's almost impossible to disconnect from your network,
[00:08:32] David Kundtz: Yeah, I totally get that. If you don't disconnect, it's often tragic. Because if you miss the most important thing in your life, then what's the use, it is really, I believe, this is where it's hard to convince people, it is the most important thing you can do, and it's a very hard sell, I've been selling this now for years, it's a very hard sell, people give very quick intellectual assent to the idea of stopping and doing nothing and being still.
But they're very resistant to actually doing it. Here's a challenge for your listeners. Imagine a time, oh, say in a couple of weeks, when you can be free from any obligations whatsoever, no one's going to bother you, and you can go to a place where you'll be alone. It's your home or in a library or somewhere in a park, anywhere where you're alone and no one's going to get you.
And I imagine sitting there for an hour, totally still, or basically just sitting, and doing nothing, not reading, not checking your phone, doing nothing. And most people say, why would I do that? I've got a million things to do. And I say, why wouldn't you do that? Because the million things you do might be the wrong things.
[00:10:02] Jan Almasy: Exactly.
[00:10:04] David Kundtz: If they're the wrong things, then why do them?
[00:10:08] Jan Almasy: I'm curious. I'm going to jump in here for a second. Inside of that same vein, being raised with ethnicity, right? Being raised as a Slovak, I am very in touch with that. My grandparents would always tell me. I remember asking my grandpa, this man goes on at least two walks a day, minimum, and he just goes on a walk, he's with the dog, he goes by the river, out into the woods, not talking to anybody, My key is usually praying and going on a walk.
That's it. That's that piece. And I, when I started thinking about, okay, so that's how I was raised. That's how my lens is on the world. And I started encountering these people that are just like, go. More is better. Take an Adderall so you can stay up longer, so you can get more work done, and you're accomplishing tasks.
And so I'm wondering if this makes sense to you, David, I've been thinking about this for a while. I feel as if we're running into a place where people are not so much being creative, but they're being extremely effective mimics.
[00:11:11] David Kundtz: Interesting concept.
[00:11:13] Jan Almasy: They are, they're mimicking a structure that a truly creative person came up with and attempting to make it more and more efficient.
By calling it creativity, it's actually effective mimicry. And that creativity lies where you're really speaking and honing into is in that place where, for me, it's in front of my whiteboard. That's why I have an eight-foot whiteboard in my hallway. I will take an hour or two on a Saturday, and I just finished cleaning.
I self-clean on Friday nights. So I make sure my entire apartment's clean, and I have everything set, and everything does what I want to do. And then Saturday mornings, I always take an hour, and I just sit there and stare at it. Or I'll just relax and not really do anything. Look out my window at the view.
And those are where those original thoughts where I've almost put together all of the issues from the week kind of start coming together. But to your point, if you're even engaging in reading or anything, that's input. It's you can't be inputting and outputting at the same time.
You need to halt the input and allow the output to manifest. But does that creativity and mimicry make sense? What are your thoughts on that?
[00:12:26] David Kundtz: Makes total sense. I agree with you completely. I never thought of that concept, but it makes total sense. And your grandfather practiced stopping.
He did what I'm encouraging. Our grandparents probably mostly did. Because life was like that then. Life offered opportunities for quiet. I remember being out on my Irish grandfather's farm in Ohio when I was a kid. And he would take me out there, and he'd talk to the farmer, and I'd wander around the farm doing nothing.
But I was with him. He probably kept me within earshot. But I was doing nothing, just being still. And so he had it, yeah, praying and walking the dog. Absolutely.
[00:13:20] John Kundtz: that's an interesting concept because my dad, David, used to talk about business back in the 60s and 70s when he first started practicing law. And he said we would write a letter, we'd put it in the mail, and then we'd basically... Pause, and we'd wait, and then they would get the letter or the document or whatever. They would revise it. They sent a revised copy back in the mail. And so you would go this back and forth between negotiating and writing and communicating and just doing the art of business, for lack of a better word.
Would take. Weeks or days. Yeah. And then, by the time Andy retired, he said the same amount of work was done in four hours because of emails and faxes and those kinds of things. And he said, And there was no time to pause and reflect. It was just back and forth. And I want to tie that back, this whole discussion back to our audience, which is typically entrepreneurs, startups, founders, and even not for profits organizations to some extent, who again, are under extreme pressure to move fast, to grow, to do an exit, whatever it might be. And I think they.
Back to this whole concept. They don't, they're just reacting. They're just doing stuff. They don't know if they're doing the right things or the wrong things. One of my mantras with these guys is to try to give back the concept where 90 percent of startups fail, and depending on whose study you read or how you count, they fail mostly because of poor market fit.
In other words, they build something, or they create something, a product or service that basically nobody wants to buy. It could be technology, technically superior. It could be great, but at the end of the day, nobody cares because they don't buy it. And going along this theme, I'm thinking, and this is one of the reasons I wanted you on the show, is, if people...
Take a step back and pause and think. Just contemplate as opposed to trying always to move because entrepreneurs and people in technology are inclined to move as fast as they can. Particularly if you're trying to raise money or, like you said, you're trying to grow your business so you can get that unicorn out the door for a billion dollars or whatever.
[00:15:48] David Kundtz: let me say to those entrepreneurs, let me remind them of a saying from Milan Kundera, who is a Czech novelist, brilliant novelist. And he says this. And this is from his novel called Slowness. Slowness is to remember, as speed is to forget. So, the faster you go, the more you forget. And the slower you go, the more you remember.
So I will guarantee you that if you're speeding through life, you're forgetting a lot of things. You're not remembering a lot of things. So, slowing down. We'll bring them back. Slowness is to remembering, as speed is to forgetting. It's always true.
[00:16:41] Jan Almasy: In that same vein, I, I feel like I just had this conversation.
I'm having trouble remembering exactly what I had the conversation with, but that's not really pertinent. So, I'll just continue with the story. And we were talking about the reason why people struggle to be alone right now. And one of the reasons that we came up with, outside of the fact that people look at their distractions as like their phone, their computer, their TV, stuff like that, but I try to tell people, it's not just your phone is actually 50 different things.
Your TV is actually four or five different things. Your computer is actually 20 different things. So you really have somewhere between 70 and a hundred things pulling at your attention at all times, whether it's apps or notifications or
[00:17:27] David Kundtz: besides your kids and the rest of the people in the world.
[00:17:30] Jan Almasy: and the 3D world. And so now we, our brains, are having to deal with the physical reality and the digital reality, which our brains have never had to deal with. We're at the front end of this, like consciousness evolution, almost. We were talking about it, and he said that one of the things that he gets really nervous about is when he stops, he starts remembering all of the things that he was forgetting, and that there's an anxiety that comes with that initially.
But if he's able to, if he's able to tough it out for the first half hour... That he reaches this place of understanding of self and he's able to start working through stuff. But that initial knee-jerk reaction is like, Oh, I just remembered five, ten things that I need to go do. I'm going to go do them now.
[00:18:15] David Kundtz: He sounds like a wise friend. I think that's very true to human nature. And I think that the reason we have trouble being still today is the same reason people have had it for millennia. We are afraid. We're afraid of ourselves. We're afraid of what we might remember, but your friend says, and rightly so, if you can punch through that resistance if you can stay in the chair for the first three minutes and not get up and go back to your life and start forgetting again.
Then, you will begin to remember things that you really need to remember. And here's one of the good things about stopping that I really believe is that during your time of stopping, You don't really have to do anything, and that's hard for people to accept, to believe, but I'm convinced it's true.
Don't do anything. Now, is it really possible not to do anything that I don't know? It probably isn't because our mind is always going, the monkey's always running around, the monkey brain is always busy. But as much as possible, be still, just be still. Just be still, just vacate everything you possibly can be still, and see what comes up.
[00:19:38] Jan Almasy: I'm wondering if people that have been so over-simulated for so long. And this is something that I'm realizing about myself. It's funny that we're having this specific conversation. Cause I'm actually writing a course about this right now called Find Your Focus. And it's so much like how people would go through withdrawals from opiates or benzodiazepines.
I believe that it's a similar response when you start to try to stop for the first time.
[00:20:04] David Kundtz: Interesting.
[00:20:04] Jan Almasy: If you're a person that has been used to a level of dopamine hit that is caused by a hundred plus notifications hitting your consciousness every so often throughout the day, taking that away immediately would cause a drastic spiking anxiety that would be borderline unbearable.
[00:20:22] David Kundtz: Yes.
[00:20:22] Jan Almasy: But if that person is able to go grocery shopping and leave their phone in the car And take a physical list in, they're still engaging in something, and it's for a set period of time, but they'll still maybe be able to reap benefits from not having the technology because their brain is still wandering in between finding groceries.
[00:20:45] David Kundtz: Good, good, a good example of stopping as much as possible. If going to the grocery store with the list rather than the phone is the best way you can do Stopping for a while. That's fine. I had a friend, a member of one of my seminars, who said the closest I come to stopping is golf, and I thought, I don't know, that isn't great, but if that's what you can do, then that's what you can do.
Yeah, whatever way you can do it as much as you possibly can. One of the ways I try to help people to put Stopping in their lives is by dividing it into three ways to do it.
The first way is still points. The next is stopovers, and the third is grinding halts. And my encouragement to people is to start with still points.
What's a still point? A still point is a minute, a few seconds, a few minutes. Maybe, an hour or so, a relatively short period of time in which you do nothing and be still, be inward, turn your energy in, be alone somewhere.
One of the things I encourage people to do for still points is go into the bathroom and close the door. Look in the mirror, close your eyes, put some water on your face, breathe, always breathe; this is a still point, take in a deep breath, breathe four or five times, be still, just be still, you don't have to do anything, or you can say a prayer, or you can say an affirmation, or you can remember someone you love, that's all fine, but you don't have to do anything, just be still, be quiet, two, three minutes and go back to life. Do that 20, 30, 40, 50 times a day, and you will come to the end of your day differently. I'll guarantee you that you will come to the end of your day differently. And then my conviction is you will like doing still points so much that you will be motivated to do stopovers, which is like a day or a weekend of doing nothing.
Now, that really takes motivation. People aren't just going to go out and do that because they can't. They have responsibilities. They have families, they have kids, they have spouses, they have whatever they have, everything, life. But if you're motivated, if you're, if you really want to do something, you'll do it.
If you really want to do something, you do it. And I'm convinced the still points will make you want to do stopovers. And then you'll think, my God, I spent this whole day, and I did nothing. I walked the beach. I walked around the lake. Whatever, you use your imagination to do nothing as much as you can in some way.
One of the ways that the way I discovered stopping was very personal. I was a priest in Idaho, very busy very successful. Things were going great. And then, all of a sudden, the bottom fell out of my life. That's a long story, but that's for another program. And I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do.
My vocation had been very fulfilling up to that point. And all of a sudden, it wasn't. So I got permission from a very good bishop to go away for a month. I rented a cabin on the North California coast, and I looked at the ocean for a month. Why did I do that? Because I didn't have any idea what to do. I didn't know who to go to.
I didn't know who to talk to. I knew that if I had left, if I left the ministry, it would be a great disappointment to many people in my life and that people would not encourage me to do that. So I went away, and I did nothing, and when I came back to life, after a period of time, I realized what I wanted to do.
Would I have realized that had I not done the stopping? Probably, but I'm also convinced it would not have been as smooth. It would have been a much messier disruption than it was. And I knew in that time, I knew in that time, I could keep my values. I could keep my life together. I could remain who I was.
I could remain true to myself and not do what I'm doing. Do something else. That's how I discovered it. And that's what I call a grinding haul. That's a month. That's a long. Most people can't do that. In fact, most people find it very hard to do a stopover for a day or a weekend or something like that.
But I was fortunate. The bishop let me do it, and I did it. And it showed me the importance of being still. To sort things out, I use the analogy of a computer, but I don't think it's accurate. Somebody told me, don't use that, don't use that analogy because it's not accurate. But anyway, I use it because it means something to me.
I think a computer is always scanning things, zeros, and ones, right? Isn't that it? Isn't that the idea? So that's what happens when you do a computer is scanning. Your whole life and you think of things of your from your youth and from your family and from your people who brought you life and who gave you life and where you come from, and you think of all that stuff. It just comes; it comes by itself.
And that's what's going to filter your truth. That's what it's going to filter what you need to know. So, anyway, I got distracted.
Still Points is where to start stopping, and then you'll be motivated to do stopovers. And if you want, and if you can, Do a grinding halt, a long period of time, a two-week retreat.
Now, most people do grinding halts because they get sick or they have an accident. That's not the way to do it. Because even though you're not doing anything, you're sick. And when you're sick, things don't, and you can't do much. I had an old priest tell me once when he was very sick and in the hospital, he says Dave if you're going to pray now. Don't pray when you're sick because you can't. When you have an accident, you're hurting. No, don't wait for that because sometimes that's the only way life can get your attention is by knocking you over the head with an accident or a sickness.
[00:27:21] Jan Almasy: That's why I was just going to say that.
I feel like when you're talking about these three phases, the stopping points, stopovers, and the grinding halt, I feel like as people are attempting to grapple with and balance their intellect with their intuition, right? Because right now, we're very intellect-heavy. We're very left-brain. We're very left hemisphere.
And if people are, I think people are starting to wake up to learn to lean into their intuitive capabilities, almost. Using their intuition as their compass and their intellect as their way to map out the steps to get to the coordinates
[00:27:55] David Kundtz: good
[00:27:57] Jan Almasy: but if you allow your intellect to take hold and you almost get presented these choices in life, and it's, you know, one side is a stopping point, and the other side is increased productivity, and by no fault of anybody's who is experiencing these overwhelming feelings of anxiety They've been told day after day after day after day for the last decade to hustle, to grind, to push harder, to go longer hours, to make it to the next level.
And so inside of their mind, anytime they're presented with this split in the road, they're taking the road traveled by instead of taking the road less traveled by and sitting with their intuition and figuring things out. And if you do that too many times in a row, life will start by offering you opportunities for stopping points.
And if you continuously choose not to do that, it's gonna force you into maybe a stopover, and if you continue not to take that option, eventually, life will autocorrect itself. That's right! And you will get smacked to a grinding halt.
[00:29:03] David Kundtz: I like that phrase; life will auto-correct.
[00:29:06] Jan Almasy: Mother Nature has homeostasis, and that's a real thing.
She has her way of making sure that you are on the path that you're supposed to be on, whether you like it or not. And I feel like that's what I experienced when I transitioned from the military and nursing into entrepreneurship. It's I put off that decision for six to eight months, and then the world was just like, yeah, no.
Yeah. I'm going to make a whole bunch of things happen really quickly in your life because you've been backing this off for eight months now. So Merry Christmas.
[00:29:41] David Kundtz: Okay.
[00:29:42] John Kundtz: I have to jump in here with a little story just to reinforce the concept. I have probably never told you this, David, but I had a stopover experience back when I was in college and now, and it came to me while I was thinking and prepping for this show.
I went to school in Claremont, California. It was back in the seventies. So the communications and the distance was extremely long compared to today's world, right? There were no cell phones, and there was no internet. There was, if you wanted to talk to somebody, you got up and waited in line at the end of the dorm and waited till the rates went down, and then you'd have to call collect and, and it was like $10 an hour or $5 an hour and, the calls lasted about 45 seconds cause they were so expensive.
So I was struggling. I was away from home, a long way away. It was a beautiful part of the world. We had these 10,000-foot mountains just north of Claremont. And so one weekend, I went up there, went up by myself, and walked up into the mountains right above school was a 10,000-foot mountain called Mount San Antonio. And it was actually nicknamed Mount Baldy because it was just above the tree line. So there was all this exposed granite, and there were no trees. And so I climbed it, and I'm sitting on the summit and just. Contemplating and thinking of what am I going to do? What do I want to major in? What should I just literally spend all weekend up there by myself and the honest-to-God truth, I'm sitting there, and I'm looking around, and it was like. Poof! I'm sitting on a pile of granite, right? Big giant mountain pile of granite, and I'm like, I should study geology, and that's what I did. The rest is sort of history. I went on and I got my undergraduate degree in geology. I went and got my Master's degree and I had actually entered into a Ph.D. program to study geochemistry. And then, interesting enough, IBM walked along and came into my life, and I pivoted into the technology space, but I wouldn't have been there. I don't think if I had not taken that stop over on top of Mount San Antonio in 1979 just to reinforce this concept.
Yeah. Yeah, so it was like, wow, I was when I was, I had one of those. I didn't know it. Yes, you did. But now, now you now put a name on it. I don't think I've ever had a grinding halt yet. Although my trip to Nepal might have come close, I never had taken a 2-week vacation in my entire working career of 35-plus years.
And a couple of years ago, I went to Nepal for two weeks. The beauty of going to Nepal is it's a 12-hour time zone difference, so nobody can get a hold of you if even they want to. And it was the same thing for two weeks. I was walking along the trail, and we'd go for about an hour, and for each hour, you were by yourself, right?
Because you were just going at your own pace and you would go from one village to another village and do a lot of thinking, right? While you were walking.
[00:32:54] David Kundtz: Good examples. I think I have one actually in my book, very similar to your story about going to the mountain. Yeah. There are so many different ways to do stopping.
And one of the questions that a lot of people ask me is, What's the difference between stopping and meditation? And, the, in, in some ways, there's really no difference at all. Stopping and meditation have the same purpose. To wake up. To remember who you are, to be mindful. But meditation is more of a disciplined concept, more of a sitting concept, more of a daily routine that you do, which is good.
It's good. I don't negate meditation in any way. The problem is most people don't do it because it's, again, there's a huge resistance to doing that. True meditators are dedicated to it, and that's wonderful, but all of us can do stopping. And all of us can put those moments into our lives without all that much trouble.
Especially, John, as you, your theme says, people who are being disrupted. Out here, I was reading recently of the taxi drivers who have spent tons of money on their medallions, which are now worthless. Talk about a disruption.
[00:34:19] John Kundtz: That's one of our examples, right? Are you in the taxi cab industry, or are you Uber and Lyft, right?
And those guys came in and basically pulled the carpet out from under everybody. No fault to them, right? They were just doing what they were trained to do. Absolutely. And, but. You've got to be ready to deal with it, and sometimes it just stops, taking a pause and thinking about it and evaluating
What I love about your approach is It's like the crawl, walk, run approach.
It's a lot easier to start crawling, unlike meditation, which I actually tried to do. And you're right. It's really hard. It takes discipline. And it's, I think, that's why a lot of people struggle with making it a constant practice.
[00:34:59] David Kundtz: People are always asking, am I doing it right? Am I doing it right?
Which is the wrong question. And it isn't the question at all in regard to stopping because stopping has no rules and very few guidelines. One of the other questions I get asked a lot is, there are certain people that have a very high metabolism, are very anxious all the time, and have to keep moving.
I think we probably all know people like that. So, I talk about stopping while moving. And this is what I mean by this is... Pacing is one example of this.
It's pacing back and forth in a room, or outside, or in a park, in a known and determined path. Pacing back and forth, in other words, you don't have to watch out where you're going, and you know where you're going. It's a determined path, and there's nothing in your way. One of the ways to do that is what's called a labyrinth.
Have either of you heard of a labyrinth? Yes.
[00:35:59] John Kundtz: Yeah. I was going to ask if that was an example of one. Yes,
[00:36:01] David Kundtz: it is an example of that. It's a big circle on the ground, and it's got one way in and one way out, and you just follow the path. It's not a maze. It isn't trying to trick you.
In fact, it's trying to make it easy. You just walk the path, and you don't have to worry about where you're going because the path tells you exactly where to go. You walk slowly. And you're doing nothing. The only thing you have to do is walk. That's an excellent example. Or pacing, or anyway, like your grandfather, Jan, walking the dog.
I do that every day. And praying. Praying is a good way. One of the great definitions of prayer that I liked when I was a priest, I would visit an elderly woman. And she said, Oh, Father, I can't pray very well. And then I said, what do you, how do you pray? And she says, recently, I just sit and look at God, and he sits and looks at me.
Contemplative. That's a contemplative. What else is there? Words don't make any difference. What do words mean? Yeah, prayer is a great example of that. The other thing to do is to get out into nature. Nature is one of the best ways to help us stop. Because nature is still. Nature is happy with itself.
Nature is at home with itself or to be with an animal, a dog or a cat or any pet that when you stroke a cat, or you pet your dog, your heartbeat goes down, and your blood pressure goes down, and everything relaxes. So there are lots of ways to get into it. The thing is, will you do it? Here's a challenge for your entrepreneurs.
Here's a challenge for your busy entrepreneurs. Pick a time. I think I referred to it earlier. Pick a time in a week or two and put it on your calendar wherever you keep your calendar.
Pick a time, an hour, when you'll be alone. No one will get to you. You won't be distracted. And that might be a challenge for you. Because if you have a family, and when you go home, somebody's always there. Or if you go somewhere, but try to find a place, even if it's a public place, a library, maybe a quiet carol in the library.
But someplace where you can be alone. Go there and sit there and pick a period of time that you think you could do. Fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour, and just sit. And as Jan was saying earlier, if you find resistance coming on very quickly, punch through it. Just trust me on this. Just punch through it. Just do it.
Sit there. Keep sitting there. And pretty soon, you'll realize that your mind wanders. Oh, and maybe you'll even not quite realize where you were for the last minute. That's it. That's doing nothing. Do that for an hour. Do that for as much as you possibly can. And see if that doesn't feel good to you.
See if that doesn't get you into touch with the real heart of your own wisdom that you have from your family, from your heritage, or from your own soul. Because that's what stopping is about. That's really the purpose of it is to make us live the life we're meant to live. Live the life that we are called to live every day.
[00:39:48] John Kundtz: I don't have much more to add to that. I thought that was an excellent wrap-up.
Okay. Jan, anything else?
[00:39:57] David Kundtz: if I ask the questions, me and David just need like another two hours. Yeah, I think that's great, Jan; I get that feeling, too.
[00:40:04] Jan Almasy: I think so; it's so needed, not because people know they need it, but because they don't know they need it.
[00:40:14] David Kundtz: They don't.
[00:40:16] Jan Almasy: That's what is frightening me about what I'm seeing in my age demographic right around like those, like the 30 and younger specifically, are really scaring me because if that uncomfortability with being alone continues to grow, and we don't recognize that this is the first time that humans have had to live balancing two realities, the physical and the digital, it's just unknown.
We're going to end up in a really weird place. So
[00:40:48] David Kundtz: I totally agree. And I don't have any idea how to get their attention either.
[00:40:52] Jan Almasy: so everybody that's listening plan on in the future, this topic continues to be explored. I would highly recommend purchasing the book and reading it because I know that part of the reason why I have a million and one question for David is that I read it, and I just started seeing all of these blips.
That whole idea of life offering you stopping points and then actively choosing not to take the stopping point because of efficiency's sake, it came out of reading the book and taking a chance to go on a walk at the park. That's where that question came from. For anybody that feels as if they've been dealing with too many things, they're anxious, and you're not sure which direction to go in life, whether it's a career path, it's launching a new product, it's...
Trying to decide whether or not you want to take that promotion. This book can be universally applied across all of those places. So, I would definitely recommend picking it up, giving it a read, and spend time with it.
[00:41:46] John Kundtz: one other resource I'll give David's website a plug.
You can catch up on his writings. Or sign up for his bi-weekly inspirational newsletters, and he's at davidkundtz.com. So that's his first name and last name with no space dot com. We will put those into the show notes as well as a link to the Art of Stopping a How to Be Still when you have to keep going.
David, thank you very much for taking the time.
[00:42:14] David Kundtz: Very good. Thanks again. It's been a great pleasure.