The Secret to Building Resilient Relationships: A Conversation with Topaz Adizes.

"It's not about the answers. It's about your ability to sit in the discomfort of the questions." - Topaz Adizes

Have you ever stopped to consider not just the strength of your relationships, but their resilience? Can they withstand discomfort, uncertainty, growth, and adversity, or do they crack under pressure? In this episode, I sit down with Topaz Adizes, an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and experienced design architect who has spent over a decade exploring human connection through his experience design studio, The Skin Deep. With over 1,250 filmed conversations between people in various types of relationships, Topaz brings profound insight into what strengthens and challenges our connections with others.

Our conversation dives into the power of questions and how they can deepen our relationships, the role of emotional maturity in communication, and why self-reflection is essential before making big relationship decisions. Whether in personal or professional life, this episode is packed with insights on how to engineer better conversations, foster resilience in relationships, and embrace discomfort as a path to growth.

Key Topics Covered

• Why resilient relationships thrive on uncomfortable questions
• The role of emotional maturity in communication
• How self-reflection strengthens decision-making in relationships
• The importance of crafting powerful questions for deeper conversations
• How relationships require consistent effort, just like physical health

Bio

Topaz Adizes is an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and experience design architect. He is an Edmund Hillary fellow and Sundance/Skoll stories of change fellow. His works have been selected to Cannes, Sundance, IDFA, and SXSW; featured in New Yorker magazine, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times; and have garnered an Emmy for new approaches to documentary and Two World Press photo awards for immersive storytelling and interactive documentary. He is currently the founder and executive director of the experience design studio The Skin Deep. Topaz studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and Oxford University. He speaks four languages, and currently lives in Mexico with his wife and two children.

Contact

Website:  https://shop.theskindeep.com/
Website:  https://www.topazadizes.com/ 
Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/the_skindeep/ 
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/TheSkinDeep/ 
X:  https://twitter.com/the_skindeep?lang=en 
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/theskindeep 
YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/theskindeep/videos 

Chapters

• 0:16 Introduction to Resilience
• 3:04 Meet Topaz Adizes
• 11:04 Misunderstood Aspects of Relationships
• 19:09 The Role of Leverage
• 27:23 Navigating Major Decisions
• 29:16 Engineering Better Questions
• 40:34 The Power of Questions
• 49:18 The Importance of Relationships
• 55:33 Final Reflections on Connection
• 57:25 Key Takeaways from Our Conversation

Transcript

[0:00] Music.

[0:06] Welcome to It's an Inside Job, the podcast where we equip you with actual skills to build resilience, enhance communication, foster well-being,

[0:14] and lead and coach with impact. I'm your host, Jason Lim, and every Monday we bring you expert insights and real-world stories to help you thrive and succeed. And with that said, let's slip into the stream.

[0:27] Music.

[0:36] Well, welcome back to the show. Thank you for joining me for another Monday. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself not just how strong your relationships are, but how resilient they are? Do they have the depth to withstand discomfort, uncertainty, growth, adversity? Or are they built on fragile foundations that crack under pressure? Recently, I just finished a book, 12 Questions for Love, a guide to intimate conversations and deeper relationships. It was a moving book. It's a manifesto. It's an instruction manual, per se, on how to build relationships. And I really wanted the author on the show today to speak to this. Today, I'm sitting down with Topaz Adizes. Not only is he an author, but he's also an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and experienced design architect.

[1:27] Now, he spent over a decade exploring human connection through the skin deep. His experienced design studio where he's filmed over 1,250 conversations between people, diving deep into what strengthens and challenges relationships. He has an enormous body of work and it's been recognized by Cannes, Sundance, South by Southwest. His writings have also been featured in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. And he has earned an Emmy for new approaches to documentary storytelling. Now, Tupaz and I unpacked some of the most misunderstood aspects of relations today. Why sitting with uncomfortable questions is a sign of resilience. How emotional maturity shapes communication. And the role of self-reflection in making better decisions. We also talk about the power of questions. And actually how to engineer those questions. To explore our relationships. Because I think many of us, sometimes when our relationships are okay, they're kind of working, we kind of take them for granted. And we don't spend the time to deeply explore how to enrich, strengthen, and create more resilient and robust relationships. I think you're going to find this conversation enriching, intriguing, and inspiring. So without further ado, let's slip into the stream and meet with Topaz Adizes.

[2:50] Music.

[3:05] Welcome to the show. I was wondering if we could start the conversation by you briefly introducing who you are and what you do. Yeah, well, who am I and what I do? I was a film director for, well, I can always start this. I studied philosophy at UC Berkeley in Oxford. I spent a semester studying in Lund University in Sweden and then a year and a half working with my good friends in Malmo. So i i can speak a little swedish and i love scandinavia i just love that part of the world and the values and and the culture um so i have a close affinity to where you live um even though i'm here in mexico because my wife is is from mexico um and for the first 20 years of my professional life i was a film director both fiction and documentary just traveling the world and making films, talking to people, interviewing, fiction, doc. And then, you know, I had a short film that went to Cannes. After two years in a row, I went to Sundance, the third year I went to Cannes, and it was, holy shit I'm a director now I remember my parents because they're European when they realized I went to Cannes I was like oh my god my son's a filmmaker I was like yeah I've been a filmmaker 15 years now I went to Cannes now I'm like so you know that was a big deal and I remember.

[4:28] Um I had a project with a very good friend of mine who had actually died um a month before I went to Cannes he had a film his name was Tim Hetherton he was a famous war photographer, and he died in misrata a month before we had a project going together so i kind of had this whole thing lined up you know i did what we traditionally supposed to do which is you make your film you have a feature script uh and you go to the festivals and then people go great you're in can what's your feature script and this incredible feature script and basically nothing really happened and a few months later by accident i put the film on vimeo without a password, this is 2011 so back then you still had the thing about don't put it online before we go to festival blah blah blah and i forgot to put it on the password and a few days later i get a notification that i have half a million views half a million people saw my film and i thought wait what what kind of game am i playing right now because how much time money and energy would it have taken me to get half a million people to see my short film in the theaters or even get to half a million people to see my feature film in theaters. And look, it just happened in a week. Vimeo picked it up a shorter week and boom, it went. And so it really brought up the question, what game am I playing? At that point, I'd been playing the game of being a film director. I saw film as a modern day meditation. Cinema is modern day meditation. People are in a room. They're focused for 90 minutes. They're not moving. The beating panel is consistent. They're looking forward and they're ingesting some kind of idea or movie or storyline.

[5:58] What about injecting ideas in the mainstream? That's an interesting game to play. And if that's the case, digital media is a much more interesting place to play that with. And that started the question and the shift for me into, yeah, let me start playing with digital media and creating content. But then the question is, what do I want to share? What ideas do I want to inject into the mainstream? And so that came up with my own personal life where, look, I lived 18 years in New York.

[6:28] Around 35, 36, 37, I'm dating single in New York. And I have a brother who's 16 years younger than I. And he's also living in New York. And I see how we're dating totally different because he grew up 16 years, you know, younger than that with a totally different relationship to technology. So whereas I at this time, you know, would want to talk to people, not text them. He was texting left and right, letting up date. I was embarrassed to go on OkCupid and ask for, you know, like my relationship technology was fundamentally different than his. And we were both relating to our potential partners and relationships romantically in a fundamentally different way. I thought, isn't that amazing? Everyone's talking about how technology is changing financial structures with crypto. How it's changing politics. How social media is changing how we see the world. And we relate to one another. What about the emotional experience of being human?

[7:21] How is technology shifting the emotional experience of being human? That was a question I was really interested in. So, inject the ideas in the mainstream. What was the idea? Emotional experience. How is it shifting? How is it changing? And so, therefore, I launched Skin Deep, which is an experience design studio, focused on that question. And I started with just the question. I didn't know what we'd do. And early on, we started this project where we'd bring two people in a room, we'd face them together, and we'd offer them questions. And we'd film it with three cameras, a wide shot and two close-ups on their faces. But you'd always see both faces at the same time, whether it's a bipedal or triptych. You'd always see two faces at the same time. and that we call the and because it illuminated the space between the and is the relationship it's not you or i us or them it's you and i it's us and them it's the and that connects us it's the and that that is the space between and so for the last 11 years now that we started the 12th year i've been filming over 1250 pairs who come in and have a conversation and we film it and that's been an incredible experience for me. And then obviously like last year we released the book, which is distillation of the learnings. And, and I, last year I've been doing the podcasts and more filmings and that's kind of my story up to now.

[8:42] Yeah. It's, it's, I got to here. Yeah. It's interesting. Just as a side note, you know, you know, I have three teenage kids and one of them asked that I really don't know what to do in university. And I said, you know what? I didn't really figure it out. And what I hear from you, your experience of traipsing through life, It was kind of serendipitous here. It was a chance here, a possibility here, when one thing led to another. And sometimes, as I tell my kids, and you know, it sounds like you have this, Topaz, your own experience, that you never know when, you know, a dog leg comes into life. And then you go down that alley and it opens a whole different world in the sense of what brought you to this space now. Anyways, that's just a side issue. But what I really wanted to have you on, a former guest, Dr. Gary Krohtaz, recommended you because we on the show, I like to talk about resilience and resilience is a really broad topic, has a lot of altitude and latitude to talk about it. And when you were generous enough to send me your book, I read through it and I saw you had these QR codes that take you to these different films of these couples and such. 12 Questions of Love, sorry. That was the book.

[10:00] It really kind of inspired me because what we talk about a lot is sort of individual resilience. But at a private and professional level, we're talking about relationships. How do we create resilient robust relationships and what your your book really spoke to me and it resonated because my backgrounds in clinical psychology and the cognitive sciences and working with individuals and such that was before now i work more in the corporate space but that's kind of what i wanted to explore with you today you know we are all in relationships some we would characterize as very healthy and deep and functional and then we have others that are sort of superficial and dysfunctional whatever adjective we want to add to it however we want to qualify it what do you think from you did 1250 of these a filming of pair of couples, what do you think there's some of pairs because it's not just couples like romantic it's fathers and sons best friends my bad story every kind of relationship yeah just no just clarify because it's a whole spectrum of relationships we've filmed.

[11:05] Which is even more dynamic. But what do you think, what do you believe, or from your experience, is the most misunderstood aspect we have of relationships? Well, okay, in terms of resilience, and you're going to love this. Okay. I think, I hope. But it's super simple. Here it goes.

[11:27] It's not about the answers. It's about your ability to sit in the discomfort of the questions.

[11:36] It's not about the answers. Can you sit in the discomfort of the questions? Whether it's your colleague at work, whether it's your best friend, whether it's your parent, your son, or your partner, your spouse. Can you sit there and ask a challenging question? You don't need to answer it, but can you sit in the discomfort of the question? That, to me, is an indication of the resilience of your relationship. Before you even get to the answer because in our society western society specifically, we are so focused on the answer it's all about the answer but the truth is in my opinion for doing this for the last 11 years i've seen that the question is the answer the answer is not the answer the question is the answer and a sign of resilience is your ability to sit in the discomfort of the question because and just to be clear discomfort and safety are two different things are not the same thing and that should not be confounded you want to be safe and you want to be uncomfortable because if you're uncomfortable that means you're growing you're stretching.

[12:44] If you're comfortable great but you're not growing per se right you want to be safe but you want to be uncomfortable in the sense of if you want to grow the relationship if you want to grow individually, and the ability to be resilient is the fact that you can sit in the discomfort, and have the faith and understanding and the trust that, hey, we'll figure this out. But we can sit in the, we can weather the storm.

[13:07] And two points to that, you know, the brain loves to surf between a sense of certainty and uncertainty. If there's too much certainty, then we take everything for routines and patterns. But uncertainty, a level of that means growth and evolution, a development, a learning process. And what I hear is just that. That's where the brain, that's its happy place between the certainty and uncertainty, one foot safety and one foot, just a little outside into the wilderness there. And I like the way how you said that the, the distinction or the delineation between safety and discomfort.

[13:43] But my question is that would take that, that, that relationship, that pair, father, son, daughter, mother, whatever, uh, romantic couple, what have you. That would would say they have to be at a certain maturity level to actually ask those questions but if you look at a lot of relationships sometimes when they when they go when they go south or they get derailed they never actually get to that stage i mean how do how do couples move from that stage which is like forget it there's no point you know it's no communications No one's listening or whatever the standard saw is. But the question is, from your experience, Topaz, how can they move across that threshold where they can actually start to ask those deep, well-engineered questions to sit in that discomfort?

[14:38] Good question. What comes up for me is the word leverage. Leverage. If you don't have the leverage, you don't make the action. And that leverage could be probably in two forms. One form is you don't want to have this conversation because the discomfort is so much that you don't want to have it. But if you realize that if we don't have it now, the pain we're going to have in the future is going to be so much worse, we might as well have it now. It's almost like the dentist. Like you want to postpone the dentist because it hurts a little now. But if you postpone for too long, you're going to go, you're going to have, the pain will be so bad that you're going to have to go in there for a two-hour surgery. So you might as well deal with the like 20-minute now than the two hours in the two years. If you know that, that creates leverage. The flip side is leverage is also on the idea of payoff. Like, okay, it might be a little uncomfortable. What if I know that the sense of fulfillment, the sense of accomplishment, once we get to the other side, is going to be so great, it's worth it.

[15:37] Now if you look at your life if to the listener right now and jason for yourself too all of us, if i ask you like point to me a moment of great achievement when you are super proud whether it's of your relationship whether it's something at work you got an award anything just a moment with your child so the colleague at work tell me a moment where you feel, you really accomplished like boom that was great i did that that was awesome okay think about that moment i guarantee you that whether it was five minutes before that moment or a month before that moment you were shitting a break you were anxious about something because that moment that the sense of accomplishment is inversely related to the challenge that's offered in order to achieve it, you don't just have a moment where you go ah that's amazing you didn't really like work for or face some kind of consternation.

[16:31] So that's what I mean by the payoff. If you look, that's how the system, in my opinion, works. Most payoffs come because you're facing overcoming some kind of challenge. Some kind of, okay, you gave a great speech. Well, before that, you were fearful of speaking in front of people, but you worked at it. You didn't make a marketing presentation at work. You weren't sure.

[16:52] You did the analysis. You practiced, you practiced. You were anxious, you're nervous. You did it. You crushed it. Your colleagues were like, wow, that was inspiring. Thank you. You were worried. Every time there's something, there's a, does that resonate for you? Do you believe that? Or how does that land for you? Do you think that's true? For me, when I used to work with trauma way back in the day, it wasn't always capital T trauma. It does resonate for me just from my own sort of experience that we have to come to a certain place. We have to come to a certain, maybe maturity, but we have to come to a certain perspective. We have to reach that before we can actually even have that conversation. And I think that is going through the gauntlet. And that's not always easy to get to that place from my perspective to get to that place. Yeah. But I guess the thing is you need leverage to want to go to that place, you know, because I mean, I have, look, I have family members who are very comfortable and don't want to be uncomfortable. And when I ask the questions, I'm the black sheep and I get pushed out, which is fair enough. But to me, they're staying in the comfort, which is only leading to future pain. Because at some point, life is going to throw something at you when you have to deal with it. And you have to talk about it. And if you're not stretched, it's like, look, if I don't exercise every day, fair enough. But at some point, when I need to go for a jog, I'm going to pull a hamstring.

[18:18] I'm not just going to climb Kilimanjaro today. I can't do it today. I want to get injured. I won't make it. I need to stretch. I need to practice. I need to prepare. So and life throws challenges your way all the time how resilient are you how capable are you to weather that storm you need to be practiced you need to be in good shape so are we practicing the communication tools in our relationship the emotional ability to sit in discomfort and to to practice that and to also not only practice what i call emotional articulation which is putting words to your emotions and articulating them, but also holding the space for the discomfort. Being practiced and holding the space of like, okay, we're going to sit here and we know we don't have to get to the answer right now, but we could sit there and ask it, come back to it in a week, come back to it in an hour, sit with it.

[19:10] How, how much are we practicing? Because then at some point, something's going to happen in your life where you're going to really have to overcome that challenge. And how prepared are you for that in your relationships?

[19:20] Whether it's at work, whether it's, yeah. Yeah, no, no, I think that's really what you said, you know, sit with the emotions, because a lot of us characterize emotions as either good or bad. But for me, from what I've learned, you know, through my education and my experience, is that emotions are not good or bad. They're either uncomfortable or very comfortable. There's a valence. And all emotions are sort of chemical messengers from physiology to psychology to give us something because it doesn't have grammar, doesn't have syntax. But then there's also intensity of those emotions and as you said with the um the analogy of the dentist it's better to go when you have a small cavity and maybe it's just a quick drilling and filling instead of something you know where your teeth are rotting and then they're falling out it's it's just that emotions are you said it's such a salient point it's sitting with emotions and understanding what is that emotion trying to communicate with me or to me sorry yeah and that that speaks to deep listening for me, which is sitting with your emotion and feeling that and engaging in that space versus coming from the mind. Cause the mind is built to protect you.

[20:28] And it does a great job at that. But the heart is built to connect you. And it does a great job at that. But then which one am I, where am I speaking from? Oftentimes when we're in conversation, we speak from the place of the mind. Someone is speaking and you're listening. And actually what you're doing is you're thinking about your own response. Okay, so they're talking. So I'm going to respond. Why? Because I want to make look like I'm smart. I want them to feel like I really understand what they're saying. I want them to end up in the same conclusion I have. Whatever it is you're thinking about the response instead of go to your body and your body is the holder of the emotions feel it and speak from that place you will have a different conversation, you have a conversation that is more emotionally engaging that's more speaking from the heart that more connects you to the other person than when you're speaking from the head and the and just going back to the dentist analogy which i really like because first i'm using that but, the other part too is like look we brush our teeth every day in theory we floss every day so we don't have to have the cap right are we doing that in our relationships.

[21:33] You know i mean we every day you're morning and night you brush your teeth and you floss.

[21:38] You're maintaining your teeth do you maintain your relationships you might be exercising stretching every day do you maintain your relationships well yes no well how do you do that and that's the key what i've learned from this last year not just writing the book but i've learned for the last year of doing a hundred podcasts, because you see what sticks, you know, you're in conversation with people like you. It's amazing, right? I love that. This to me is going to amp my day up, but do people learn how to actually have constructive conversations that explore the relationship? You don't, we don't learn that. We don't learn how to hold the space and we don't learn how to construct well-constructed questions.

[22:18] We model it. We model it from our families and maybe our friend groups, maybe in the culture and the company. And you don't know if that modeling is good or bad. And what I've been fortunate enough to see is how to construct it yourselves and learn it. That's what's been amazing for it's control. Well, how do you create the space and how do you construct, you know, well-constructed questions? That's, you do those two things, you can have incredible conversations, exploratory conversations that will be different than anything you had before. And through that exploration of your relationship, it will make your relationship more resilient because you've had the ability to sit in the discomfort of the questions. You've been able to articulate, emotionally articulate things that you haven't before that make you realize certain things that reaffirm you're connected to the other person. Or even more interestingly, is that through the conversation, you actually get a greater sense of who you are through the reflection of the other person.

[23:08] Well said. That's a very astute point. So before we explore the conversation with that other person, for me, having that difficult conversation, that's the secondary conversation. I think the primary conversation is one we have with ourselves. If someone's struggling with a relationship right now and they're thinking, they're wondering, should I stay in this relation or walk away? And that primary conversation they have with themselves, from your experience, Topaz, what do you think should be some of the questions they should be asking themselves before making such a decision? Great, great question. Are you ready for this? I think this is incredibly helpful.

[23:51] Because I actually had this, a friend of mine called me a month ago. And ask me this question and i it's like you know how you're that friend you're like everyone has that friend in the friend group you have the friend that you go to drink with you have the friend you go on adventures with you have the friend you might exercise with or meditate i seem to be the guy that people call for advice you know and recently my advice in the last few years has gotten so much better why because i'm not giving advice my advice is ask a better question, and so when someone says should i break up or not i'm like here it is listen to your audience listen right now if you find yourself asking a hard question that you banging your head against the wall because you can't figure out the answer where should we live should i break up should i quit the job should i start this company and you're banging your head whatever the question is and you can't figure it out and you're going in circles very circles circles circles stop and ask another question you have to ask another question a better question and this is how you do it so if we're doing the example of should i break up or not okay stop and you're like i don't know stop first you're going to create 30 to 50 questions and this is how you create the question first you have a you have three blanks that you're going to fill one is time frame.

[25:08] One is how it makes you feel and the other one is how it affects or serves others, So for example It would be like What can I do For the next six weeks That Now you're going How it makes you feel That inspires me Now you go to the last one How it affects others Such that.

[25:29] I can support others that I love. Okay, another question. What can I do for the next three years that will challenge me on the level of personal intimacy such that I'm in a position to start my own family? Right? You create 30 to 50 of these questions. And each question has three kind of things you need to fill in. Time frame, how it makes you feel, and how it affects or serves others. Okay. And we can talk about why those are the three things. But you create 30 to 50 of those. Then you circle. Then you look at it and you ponder on the question. And you're like, which is the question I want to answer? Which is the question that gives me energy? You circle it.

[26:12] Then the answer, whether you should be in this relationship or not, becomes obvious and simple. So the question is, you know, if it's like personal, what can I do for the next six weeks, two months, a year, so that I challenge myself on personal intimacy such that I prepare for family. Okay, if that's the question, is the relationship I'm currently answering that question? And you'll know, yes, no, done. Right? If the thing is, what can I do to go, you know, what can I do for the next year so that I can explore the world and whatever it is, explore the world such that I can find a deeper understanding how I can serve others or my community or my family. And you circle that. Then should you stay in the relationship or not? So when you're banging your head around, oh, wow, find a better question. You find a better question. You construct them, time frame, how it makes you feel, how it affects others and serves others. You fill that out. You create 30 to 50 of them. You look at it and you say, which one do I want to answer? You circle the one you want to answer. And then you apply the first question.

[27:18] Music.

[27:24] Has given him a unique lens on how we connect, communicate, and navigate emotional complexity in our relationships. One of the central themes we discussed was the resilience in relationships, and that's the ability to sit with uncertainty, to ask difficult questions, and to embrace discomfort as a path towards building more robust relationships. You know, Topaz highlighted how true resilience isn't about quick answers, but rather about being comfortable with not knowing. I completely agree. Our brains thrive on balancing certainty and uncertainty. Maturity, we agreed, well that comes from being willing to wrestle with tough questions rather than seeking immediate clarity. We also explored emotional maturity in communication, emphasizing that maintaining relationships requires ongoing effort, action, much like maintaining our physical health.

[28:18] Topaz, he compared it to dental hygiene, small, consistent practice that lead to long-term well-being. One of his key insights was the importance of self-reflection before making major relationship decisions. So instead of focusing solely on whether a relationship works, we should ask ourselves, am I ready for the challenges that come with it? Now, another intriguing topic that we explored was how we frame decisions through the questions we ask. Topaz shared a structured way to navigate big decisions. He said setting a time frame, consider how a choice will make us feel and how it might impact others. We also discussed the importance of open-ended questions over binary ones. Too often, we try to force a decision into a yes or no kind of framework that's binary on and off, when in reality, the best answers usually come from allowing space for deeper exploration. In a sense, who we are and the quality of our lives, well, it comes down to the quality of our relationships.

[29:17] So now, let's slip into part two with my fascinating conversation today.

[29:21] Music.

[29:31] What you've just given is a sort of the combination, the nuts and bolts to engineer a question. So can we reverse engineer each of those? So there's time frame, how it makes you feel and how it affects or services others. Serves others, sorry. Serves others. So time frame. I mean, can we get a little more specific? Are you looking at sort of 24 months, 36 months, a decade into the future? I mean, whatever you choose, whatever you choose, the point is it has to have a time frame. Because when you say, where should I live? Well, I mean, you and I both know where I live when I'm in my teens is different when I live in my 20s, different when I live when I have children that are four or five, then living when I have children that are in their teens, that are different when I'm an empty nester. Where should I live? I mean, life is changing all the time. You're changing. And if you don't put a time frame, then your subconscious is like, this is forever.

[30:22] Time frame is essential because the nature of life is it's always changing. And if we don't put the boundaries and the constraints around time frame, We don't know what we're talking about because forever is forever. But yet there are so many different versions of us in that forever. So we need to give it a timeframe and you could choose it. You can say 10 years, fine. You choose a month, choose a week, you can choose six weeks, you choose chapter. But there has to be a, you have to be aware that this is a, there's an end, start and end point because you're going to transform. And if you don't acknowledge that, chapters in life, if you don't acknowledge that, it It makes it impossible to find the right answer because inevitably there'll be multiple answers for that question if there's no time frame because there's different chapters of you. There's different versions of you. So you have to give it a time frame. It helps constrain and bring more narrow focus what the need is now. If someone's thinking, okay, I'm with Jason right now or I'm with Jane right now. Can I see myself two years in the future with him or her? You know, is that kind of a time frame or is that just one element of that question? And we have to add the other elements such as how is it going to make me feel? Well, that's why the second one is you have to fill in how it makes you feel.

[31:37] That you have to put in time frame and then it has to make, then the second time is how does it make you feel? And also, I wouldn't start a question with can, is, are, do, would, or have. Because if you start any question with those words you're getting a binary response which is left or right sometimes you need a yes or no a binary response left or right good or bad, but oftentimes life is not binary it's nuanced so if you start the question with what why how, you're already shaping a response that is nuanced it requires you to answer in a way that's non-binary, um but to your point i think i think it's even if you do can we can i stay with jason for the next three months and it makes me feel this way you have to put in the way the way it makes you feel, because that is connected that that is the state that you want to be in or the state that you want to challenge yourself whatever it is but it it's like how is this affecting me and then the third part is how it serves others because we are network organisms you know and regardless whether you're a narcissist or not you still get energy from other people so it makes it more resilient and sustainable when you take into effect account how it affect or serves other people.

[33:02] And that makes it more sustainable more resilient so it affects me but how is it serving or affecting others to what end right so to play the devil's advocate here when it comes to the emotions because if someone is at this point where they're having a conversation you know not should they stay or should go but entering the three points having an open-ended question so it's not binary but right now subjectively they're in some sort of emotional storm and sometimes where you know this to pause but just to just to articulate it when we are in an emotional storm we can see that we just see that that's continuing we sometimes forget that it is only temporary that this too shall pass but when they're thinking about the second element of engineering questions about emotion is it how i want to feel with jason two years into the future like is it quite difficult for someone to move from that subjective to a more objective emotional state they want to arrive in saying 24 months with a particular individual great question.

[34:11] I don't, I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. That's a good question. What, what, well, what comes up for me is even though you might not feel it now, if that's what you want to feel in the future, you need to take actions and do practices and habits to put yourself in a position to feel that. So asking the question can lead you to an answer that puts you in a position that have that. So if you're in depression right now, and I've been there where it's hard to get out of bed for me, I mean, And I always know when I'm having a hard time and what helps me is like I get in the shower and I can sit all the way down at the bottom of the shower and look up at the shower head and it's so far away and seeing the water just shower down. So I found comforting and I've been in that place and a few times, but when I'm in that place, it's like I have to ask a different question. Because maybe I'm asking myself, you know, why am I so sad? and if you ask yourself why am I so sad your mind, the faithful servant is going to, it's like a faithful dog it will run out and find all the sticks to give you an answer why you're so sad. But every stick that comes back, every answer you get what can you do with those sticks? What can you do with those answers? Instead if you change the question if you throw the stick to a different area, they'll come back with different answers such as.

[35:36] The challenges that i currently feel what are they teaching me.

[35:41] How is this challenge that i'm going through now preparing me for a future version of myself, what is the precipice i'm currently passing over in preparation for what version of myself you know what am i learning through this experience that makes me more resilient, those answers come back are more constructive and with that you can work with, and so i find that when we are always asking answering questions we're not aware of the questions we're asking and so bringing more conscientious to the questions shapes the answer and that's why i think that would be helpful in terms of when we're in a challenging position And that's why I say create a new question. I think it's just sad because what I hear is you need, it's not need, you will want to be sort of present, sort of have a little more self-awareness and be cognizant of how you engineer the questions. Because what came to mind, just to riff on what you're saying. Yeah, please. These three different elements of time frame, how do I want to feel, how does it affect or serve others? These, you know, one thing is coming up with the 30, 50 questions, sort of divergent thinking. so you have a, you know, a choice to which question you want to answer. But each of those time elements also, to help sort of self-exploration, they could actually be sort of.

[37:07] Prompts or journal entries like journaling the idea okay what time frame i'm thinking 24 months well why 24 months why you know what i'm saying you can almost do an exploratory a journal in each of these things to help you engineer those 30 to 50 questions because then you understand maybe the the dna of each of those elements again i'm just spitballing totally totally and the flip side too is maybe you just do brainstorm 50 of them and then you start looking the ones that attract you why are these attracting me because they're all short term or because they're all long term or because all of the personal feelings about challenge and discomfort versus safety and like this or I want adventure now, not in, you know, so you could ask yourself that because here's the thing. We are always answering questions, but we're not always creating the questions. Sometimes we take other people's questions. We take our parents' questions. We take society's questions. We take the culture's questions. How many entrepreneurs do you talk to who are like, I want to create a unicorn?

[38:04] How many uh activists you talk to who want to or philanthropists you want i want to affect building people's lives and it becomes a cliche you're like why is that because they're just taking on the culture's questions why do you want to have a company that affects them that that is a unicorn why do you want to affect a billion people's lives why not just create affect one person's life profoundly starting with your own what are the questions we're asking well usually we just we take questions i mean i knew until i was 37 i was answering my father's question which is how do you prove your genius to others that's a high bar to set until i was 37 i was chasing that question and it took me a few years to shed that question, right what are the questions you're answering are you creating your own question.

[38:52] And once you do, you're creating your own life that's unique to you.

[38:57] And that's where you become more empowered in the creation of your own identity, really, and your own actions.

[39:06] I just think it's often over-skipped is the power of the question. We're always so pursued on the answer that oftentimes we're answering the questions that we've adopted from other people or other points of view. I mean, it's a simple idea with a deep eloquence. Because for me, what you've just said is one of the foundational things to help us shift mindsets. Now, we're only talking about paradigm shifts and mindsets. But if you actually look at the nuts and bolts of what a mindset is, you know, it's this human operating system from head to heart to hand. What we think, what we consistently think or the pattern of thinking will trigger certain emotions. And emotions are just that, emotion, sort of evoke motion. We either move away from something or we approach something, which then the hand is the behavior. It's the doing, the action or the inaction or indecision. And for me, what you've just said is to become cognizant. It's not always searching for the answer, but maybe we have to start from the blueprint of, I just dated myself, but started from the design of designing the question, a well-formed question. And you've given us sort of the DNA from years of experience working with this of how we can have that first primary conversation with ourselves before we go into a difficult conversation with someone else. Because sometimes we need to clarify things for ourselves, right?

[40:27] So it's the thing, understanding the narrative, the story, the question we're

[40:31] asking ourselves. At least that's what I'm pulling from what you've just said. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. The question is the answer. That's the next book. The question is the answer. Yeah, the answer is the question and why I mean I'm wondering why are we not taught how to ask really quality questions because maybe that's not what.

[40:51] People want people want applying critical thinking to someone else's question. But what really the power is in the question. Another form, another format that's really helpful is called question loops. Right. So if you're having a challenging situation and you just don't know, you're trying to figure it out, you're journaling about something, you're exploring something.

[41:14] What's really helpful is sometimes to do a question loop. And the most famous question loop is why? And just keep asking why. okay why should i break up well because why that why that why that and you just do why to whatever and you just go deeper deeper okay but here's another one you go why what if what would that give me what if i already have it why well that give me, what if i already have it do that loop you know i want to sell a billion dollar company, or why because this was a financial what if you already have it well i mean if i already had it i would do this and that is it okay sorry what would it give you well give me this what if you already have that you know how how often is it like you know you say you want to make a lot of money so you have free time you can spend it with your kids but right now you're you can you have time to spend with your kids because you're not working you know 80 hours a week so you already have it right sometimes the thing we're searching for we already have we just don't acknowledge it so just saying that's a help question loops are super helpful in terms of peeling the onion and finding where's the source and what are all the different nuances that are involved with the processing that we're in.

[42:36] It's, it's, I've heard of question loops before in the sense of why, why, why, and then up, what, what, what. But I really like those two other questions that you've added. You wrote a brilliant book on just exact 12 questions for love. And I went through it. And as I said, there are QR codes where you can go in and you can watch a film on your smartphone, your pad and such, and see these couple, not couples, these pairs talking about their relationship. I'm not going to go through all the questions but yeah there's some questions here you know what are you hesitant hesitant to ask me and why what is the biggest challenge in our relationship right now and what do you think it is teaching us now i went through all these and i when just before recording i told you one of them really struck me deep and it was just in a certain period when i was and it was this question if this was our last conversation what would you never want me to forget. Now, the reason I talk about this, because I was diagnosed with cancer about 12, 13 months ago. And, you know, when you get such a diagnosis, you know, you're thinking, okay, there's an end loop. There's an end game. This circle will come to an end at some point. And, you know, I have a very rich and deep and healthy relationship with my wife of 30 years. And this really struck me.

[44:03] My question to you is how, with your own relationship or relationships, was there some, when you came up with this question, I guess it's multiple, multiple questions about this question, but how did you come up with this question? First of all, what triggered this, this insight?

[44:26] Because you never know when the end is going to come. But was it an experience you had? Was it through a conversation? Well, I was. Okay. So there is a doctor who passed from cancer named Dr. David Servin-Schreiber. He wrote a book called Anti-Cancer. It's a New York Times bestseller. And the thesis is that we all have cancer cells. All of us. But we also have anti-cancer cells. so the question is how do you change the terrain of your body to be to support the anti-cancer cells and not support the cancer cells such as you know less glucose because of inflammation and you know and the foods you eat and the emotional well-being you have and this was a gentleman who, you know at 33 was like head of psychological neuroscience or something at the university of pittsburgh and he was a hot shot and da da da da and he went in they were doing a test mri scan of the brain and he went in because the person didn't show up so he kind of filled in the gap for that is they were you know doing a large testing he just filled in the gap and his colleague said oh my god you have you have some crazy cancer i don't know what it is but it's in the brain and, he's like okay so he went down to that path and he did everything the doctor did everything and when he was done he asked the doctor what do we do next oh we'll just check your t-cell counter whatever it is your blood cell count every six months and you know psa i'm not sure what it is but he said we'll just check every six months he's like no but is there nothing i can do.

[45:52] To proactively uh you know treat this and handle this and the gun no no we just so he spent the remaining what was it 18 years of his life researching he wrote the book anti-cancer, i was making a film film filming the film called uh the c word you could see it online, I was director of photography. So I spent time with David. And when I first filmed him, he was trying to get headaches. And little did we know, that was the beginning of the last year of his life because the cancer had returned.

[46:23] And a year later, he passed. And I was there towards the end when he was passing and filming him when he was with his family and basically hospice. And he wrote a book based by whispering. It's called The Last Goodbye. Or is it called The Last Goodbye? The point is you can say goodbye many times over. You can say I love you many times over. And that's what informed me of that experience, which was you never know when the end can come. And it doesn't mean you have to wait till the end to say the end. You can say the end many times over. And that's what I learned from him and his book. And that's why I think it's important to have these conversations and to ask and to acknowledge the temporal nature of our lives and that instead of you know, it's not going to be served up at a platter all the time and so let's create the platter now and eat from that dish of what is the one thing I'm going to tell you and I could tell that to you now I could tell that to you in a week I could tell that to you in a year and it doesn't have to be the same thing every time, but i think it's important to acknowledge the temporal nature of our relation of the human experience and how our relationships are fundamental that human experience.

[47:38] Yeah for me that question it's a single question but you know before i read the book i had multiple conversations right because when you when you get such a diagnosis you know things are going in in the direction where i want it to go right things are stabilizing it's you know but when you first get that news it's like yeah okay you're thinking death sentence okay i gotta get my life in order i mean your brain goes there yeah and with all the training i have right but it's something i i'm dealing with i'm living with it doesn't really impede my life per se and i'm very lucky in that how are you doing with it sorry how are you doing with it how are you doing i i'm i'm you know in my head i've already made this sounds maybe a little trite but i've already made peace with death in that sense but i find it hard to make peace with saying bye to my kids my wife but yeah that's more doomsday thinking i'm i'm far from that i'm very lucky that it's a very slow growing cancer can i just point that out for a sec which i think is beautiful what you just said said oh yeah you said you said i've come to terms with death meaning your own body leaving and but i I have a much harder time coming to terms with saying goodbye to my wife and my kids. So what's more important, and I think this is true for all of us, it's not necessarily dying. It's saying goodbye to our relationships.

[49:04] For sure. For sure. And so to the listener, hopefully, you know, which I think I just want to point it out because it's a thread that bind us that we cherish. It's not necessarily our own living of ourselves.

[49:18] It's our connections that we cherish. And so how much are we nurturing those connections? I i think it's such a stoop point for me the quality of life comes down to the quality of the relations you have i mean you could live you could be healthy but if you're lonely, and you know in in a sea of people in a whatever city but you feel alone i mean.

[49:43] I don't think any of us are wired for that i mean there may be a a few people that are wired for that but i mean the majority without talking about outliers the quality of life of i think comes down to the quality of the relationships you know i don't have a lot of friends i have a handful of really close friends and i know they have my six i know they will be there for me they are there for me my wife my kids and that that's the hardest thing right but yeah those that's where the mind goes when you get such a diagnosis i mean i could live decades with this i don't know yeah right I don't know or I could be gone in six months I don't know I can ask you a question yeah how do you feel how have you noticed it's changed you like you're being your identity not your body per se but like what what have you noticed a change and how does it change anything in you.

[50:38] Generally, we all know that, you know, none of us get out of this game alive. Right. But when you get a diagnosis, it comes it's like smack in your face. You know, I mean, it's right there, full and present. And there's no escaping it. You know, with a lot of the times when you're healthy, you can you can push it aside. Right. You can avoid that storm for now. But this storm is raging around me. Right. And what it has done is it has forced me to find equanimity. And I've pulled into the eye of the storm because I can't escape the storm. Maybe I can't escape it at some point, but right now, no. So I pull into the eye of the storm where there is a certain calm, a collectedness. The best word I can find is equanimity for this.

[51:25] I'm at peace with it. I'm at peace with it. You know, the diagnosis at first, obviously it sounds like bad news, but you know shit happens sometimes and it's neither good nor bad what it's what i've framed it it's it's been a wake-up call for me to really appreciate the most important things in my life i mean again that this might sound trite but when you're faced with you know the grim reaper right in your face and he's got his sickle there and he may not be swinging it now but i know at some point he'll be swinging it to harvest but right now that's what it's done it's taught me to to find that sort of the stability that inner resilience i can call it and that's why i enjoy doing this podcast man because i don't earn money from this but i just have these rich deep exploratory conversations on something that really means a lot to me resilience well that to me that That sounds like, and I've thought of that before, but what you said of there's a storm swirling around you, and I step into the eye of the storm to find this kind of peace amidst it. That sounds to me like a possible definition of resilience. Yeah. When shit hits this fan and things are going, and you're in the storm, find the eye of the storm and still operate from that space amidst the storm. That sounds to me like a form of resilience, like a way to be resilient.

[52:55] Yeah, it's a metaphor that really works for me and physiologically, cognitively, emotionally, it really resounds with me. It really resonates with me. And I do find calm, right? I mean, don't get me wrong. I've had my dark and depressing days. I've fallen down that rabbit hole, but I've managed to claw myself out of that rabbit hole. And sometimes I slide back in, but it's easier to claw myself back out, right? So I'm standing on top. And, you know, again, it comes back to the crux of this conversation is about relationships. But I think it's also relationships with ourselves. A lot of the questions you've articulated in your book, I can turn those questions back on myself. And these could be, I don't do a lot of journaling, but I do journaling when I feel as needed. But these questions of, you know, like, what are you hesitant to ask me? What am I hesitant to ask myself and why, right? I just changed the pronouns a little, right? I think they're really good questions to answer. Yeah, no, 100%. 100%. maybe that's, I had I had four friends diagnosed with cancer in the last year and two of them did pass and.

[54:21] It's interesting and I well my wife's best friend last year I don't know if that's helpful to I'm sorry if that's not good information to share with you but I guess the point is that.

[54:35] I think that everyone reacts differently to that, to that, uh, diagnosis. Like I haven't seen one. I have, they've re people react differently. Um, and it's interesting to see that like there's similar common threads, but it's also different. I'm glad that you're trending upward. Yeah. Thanks man. It's, you know, I think a lot has to do with also mindset, right? Um, but we don't need to go into the depth of that, but you know that's what i found but uh i'm just wary of the time we're coming to the top of our you've been very generous topaz if you of all all these films you've done with these pairs and such if you had to leave an idea or a food for thought for our listeners today when it comes to, building deeper, functional, healthier relationships.

[55:33] What advice or suggestions would you have for them? Or would you like to share with them? Well, what comes up for me now is something I haven't shared before, but I would say slow down in discomfort and speed up through comfort.

[55:52] That's what comes up. You know, like I think we do the opposite. When we're uncomfortable, we speed up. When we're comfortable, we slow down. I would slow down in the discomfort and then speed up through comfort. Well, maybe not necessarily speed up through comfort, but don't become apathetic in the comfort. You know, search the safe spaces to be uncomfortable because we are temporal. And how are we growing? How are we utilizing this opportunity of living to be expansive? Whether it's expansive in your actual experience, physical experience, or in your emotional experience, or in the way you articulate with the relationships in your life? How much are you really drinking from that cup of life? That's what I would say. Thank you, Topaz. It's been a blast. You know, I've learned a lot and you've added depth and eloquence to a lot of these conversations, you know, because we all go at some point have a rocky relationship And sometimes it's good to actually have a well thought out manual based on experience and knowledge to help us through that. As you said, you know, we get in relationships, but there is no manual. But in a sense, your book and your work is that manual. Thank you. I'm glad I have used, you know, utility. That means a lot. That's what is functional.

[57:15] Music.

[57:26] Things that took away from this conversation with Topaz was reflecting on just how essential, how critical the questions we ask are. It's not always just the answer, but the quality of any answer is going to be dependent upon the quality of the question. The depth and the insight and the eloquence of any answer, again, well that's triggered by the quality of how we ask questions. Topaz also introduced the idea of question loops, a way to dig deeper into our understanding rather than just responding to the questions imposed by others or by society. We also touched on something deeply personal for me, the fleeting nature of life and the significance of relationships. You know, my own experience with illness, it has reinforced just how vital it is to nurture the connections that truly matter. Resilience, as we've discussed, isn't about avoiding the storm. It's about finding your own center within it. And often the relationships we build are what anchor us in that process. It's the relationships that can help us through turbulence, through adversity, through uncertainty.

[58:38] Maybe some of you listeners out there are not facing illness, but maybe your relationship, whether it's a friend, a lover, a colleague, is rocky, and it's unstable, and it's fractious, and maybe upon reflection, you're thinking, I do want to save this relationship, then I would highly recommend you picking up Topaz's book, 12 Questions for Love, A Guide to Intimate Conversations and Deeper Relationships. Those questions, you may not be ready to ask someone else, to ask that other person on the other side of that table. But maybe as we talked about, those questions can be the primers to help you explore your own thinking, to explore your own inner dimension of what you want from the relationship.

[59:26] And then when you're ready, it's to turn around and have that tough conversation. It's to sit in the silence, to get used to the discomfort, to find that equanimity. Because in that silence, Maybe there is an answer to help you and that other person move forward in your relationship, Again, the quality of our lives Well, that's represented by the quality of our relationships At least that's my take on it, And a personal thank you Topaz I'm very grateful and appreciative of our conversation today I hope we have a second one at some point in the near future So cheers for that Well, folks, that brings us to the finishing line of yet another episode. If you think this could be of help to someone else, please share it. And please take a time to recommend and rate the show. Until Friday, keep well, keep strong.

[1:00:18] Music.