Join us as we explore the profound connections between love, compassion, and happiness with Dr. Ron Schneebaum, a retired pediatrician with over 40 years of experience. He emphasizes that true well-being encompasses the physical body and the human spirit, which thrives on love and understanding. Dr. Ron Schneebaum shares insights from his new book, "Bigger Hearted: A Retired Pediatrician's Prescriptions for Living a Happier Life," revealing how his journey through medicine led him to uncover essential truths about happiness and emotional health. He provides practical advice on reducing stress, developing self-confidence, and fostering meaningful relationships, all while encouraging us to embrace the present moment. This conversation offers valuable takeaways for anyone seeking a more fulfilling and joyful life.

Takeaways:

• Dr. Ron Schneebaum emphasizes the importance of love and compassion in medical practice, highlighting their role in healing.
• He shares how a background in various fields shaped his approach to medicine and patient care.
• Living in the moment and reducing self-doubt are crucial for achieving happiness and fulfillment.
• Dr. Ron Schneebaum advises incorporating heart and intellect in decision-making to enhance well-being.
• The book 'Bigger Hearted' aims to provide practical prescriptions for leading a happier life.
• Engaging in inner work and self-reflection can help individuals manage stress effectively.

Links referenced in this episode:

• biggerhearted.com
• amazon.com

Guest today.

Dr.

Ron, during his 40 year career as a primary care physician, regularly noted the power and importance of love for the human psyche.

Having seen the roots of childhood trauma, he developed a path to turning those hurts around.

He teaches how those worryless, how to worry less, control your emotions and have rewarding relationships.

While serving on the clinical faculty at Dartmouth College in Giselle School of Medicine, he taught medical students how to apply their intellectual based academic knowledge and how to add heart to their thinking by addressing their patients with caring and compassion, imagining their challenges from their patients perspective and speaking to them in ways which connect with who they are.

These Dartmouth students appreciatively voted him the best teacher in pediatrics.

Ron is a diplomat of the American Board of Pediatrics and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

We welcome Ron to the podcast.

Well, Dr.

Ron, welcome to the podcast.

How you doing today?

I'm good, I'm good.

Glad to be here.

Good to have you on.

Looking forward to talk about this important topic and highlight your new book, which looks like it should be a best seller from all the things I see going on in the world.

So it'd be good to help people live a little more fruitful and happy life.

There you go.

Exactly.

So I'd love to ask my guest this question, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

It's interesting.

I was thinking about that and listening to other podcasts and I don't know that I received a lot of advice in my life, but one was I used to be a schoolteacher and a fellow that I work with was a really hard working guy and he would always say two things.

The right way, not the easy way.

I love that.

Because easy way is not always the best way.

Exactly, exactly.

Especially.

And that haunts me.

Every once in a while I say to myself, whoops, Al Tomlinson would do it this way.

There you go.

I love that.

I'm curious somewhat of your esteemed background and your career.

Who were some people in your life who served as a mentor for you or even just a role model?

Yeah, well, first I'd have to put my parents.

Now, on the one hand, they were terrible parents.

Like they didn't understand children.

But they loved me.

They loved me.

And it wasn't because of what I did and what I achieved or anything.

They just loved me.

And that was the environment.

That was all that I needed to live my life.

Knowing I was Welch.

Yeah.

And they love each other.

That's important.

I mean we, we as parents know that we are not perfect at what we do.

We just kind of hope and probably don't mess up the kids along the way.

Right?

Yeah.

And.

And so I could see my mother's especially shortcomings and say, okay, now how do I work around them?

It would be as if it was rain dripping in my roof.

And I thought, okay, I can't put the bed under where the waterfalls unless.

You go to a waterbed.

Exactly, exactly.

I love that.

So let's talk about your.

Your book.

You have a new book called Bigger Hearted.

Tell us what inspired you to write that book.

So the full name is Bigger Hearted.

A Retired Pediatrician's Prescriptions for Living a Happier Life.

So I was a pediatrician for 40 years and very happy.

And one day, probably about 20 years ago, I was walking up the steps from our basement and I heard, and I don't know if I can say heard, but I knew, I heard that I should write down what I knew about happiness.

And I never had a thought like that.

And this wasn't anything to argue with.

And so I paused for a second and said, why?

And the two things that I then heard were, one, it seemed to me that it would concretize what I knew.

It would help me to really get a hold of it.

And the other one is it said it would be a way of saying thank you.

And I didn't understand that until now.

I've learned so much, and this trail has been such a pleasure that I can't help but say thank you.

That's great.

So think about your career as a pediatrician.

What in your career led you to kind of uncover some of these truths that you have in your book?

Well, what happened?

Actually, it was the way I went into medicine.

I had done a bunch of things before medicine.

I was a school teacher.

I had a master's degree.

I worked in a logging camp in Alaska.

I worked in business in New York.

And one day I was sitting on a bench reading the newspaper, and an ad fell out about a pre med program at Columbia University.

And the program was designed for people that had graduated from college but didn't have the needed math and science courses for medical school.

And when I saw that ad, an image came to mind.

I pictured someone in his 40s having a heart attack.

And I thought this person would want to have someone to take care of their heart disease, a good physician to treat that.

But then I imagine they'd also have questions about, what does this mean for my life?

Who am I?

How do I go forward?

What do I tell My friends and I thought they wouldn't speak to a psychiatrist about this.

They talked to the same doctor who diagnosed and is treating their heart disease.

And then I thought, that's the combination I want.

It's intellectually challenging and it's interpersonally challenging.

So during my whole medical school training and work, I was always interested in the people side, besides the, the academic side.

And that was never taught.

It was just material I had to teach myself.

And eventually I came to realize that it took two different kinds of thinking.

The traditional medical work took the intellect.

I learned all the material from medical school and learned how to process and think about it and treat patients.

The part of understanding people that took the heart.

With the heart, you can understand someone, see their perspective, and.

And you can even ask, how do I support them, how do I serve them, how do I help them?

And when you do both of those, then that led to my career.

Oh, I love that you have some key themes in your book that I want to kind of touch on.

You talk about love and compassion, living in the moment, self confidence, learning and communication, healing and letting go and overcoming self doubt.

And I see those all kind of interconnected.

You probably don't just have one of those.

It's kind of like, you know, the spiritual gifts.

You don't just have one of the spiritual gifts.

You try to kind, kind of work through that.

But as you, as you thought about this, when you think about your medical students, because I notice you have a.

Your medical students really liked how you helped them to see the human side of their patients.

What do you think today's medicine lacks most in terms of connecting the patient and the doctor?

Well, it doesn't understand that the human spirit is part of medical health.

We treat the body, and we treat the body in a way that's almost similar to the way we fix a car.

You know, we figure out which part is broken, which part's getting rusty, what we need to do to fix it, and that's it.

But a difference that happens between that car model and regular life is when I drop my car off, I get another car.

My.

I stay with my body.

And that thing that stays with my body, I call the human spirit.

And that takes love and compassion to treat and treating.

That enhances well being.

It affects the physical body.

We can't just ignore it.

We ignore it in our schools, we ignore it in our economy, we ignore it.

And at the same time, while we've made incredible technological advances, people are suffering from more depression and anxiety than ever before.

You can't ignore the human spirit.

I love that, like any good physician, you have prescriptions.

So tell us about how you develop these prescriptions for happiness.

Well, so once I had this idea that I had to write what I knew, I first had to say, okay, so what do I know?

And so when Einstein developed his theory of relativity, one of the things he did was he did thought experiments.

So he imagined being in a vacuum tube that was traveling at the speed of light, the fastest thing in the world.

And from that perspective, he looked at the rest of the world and saw how time and place changed.

So what I did was I said, let me picture a time of being happy and let me see what encourages that and what takes that away.

So let's say, for example, suppose you're in an intimate moment with someone.

And it could even be in watching the sunset.

It doesn't matter.

You're into the moment where you're totally lost in the moment.

If you suddenly have self doubt, then the moment ends.

So if that thing is so good, how is it that we get to not have that kind of self doubt?

And that takes a spiritual path.

One of the things I discovered along my way is I said to myself, when I saw how powerful love is, and I saw that, you know, it's as solid and as real as anything physical, if I dropped a physical boulder, I would know it would break what it landed on.

If somebody doesn't feel loved, it breaks their psyche.

So it's real and it's reliable and dependable.

And I realized that love is the doorway to the spirit.

You know, if, if I.

And that's through the heart.

So I think of Elijah hearing that still small voice.

It's the ears for hearing.

That still small voice is the human heart.

So if we think and what we do and include our hearts in that, and we have our intellects as well, then we're in incredibly solid shape.

So in the book, in the first chapter, I describe the place of the heart.

And then to level the playing field, I talk about childhood hurts.

I saw them in my practice and I saw them in life.

And they affect people forever.

And I think what happens when a child is in a difficult situation, the psyche for some reason, can't tolerate it.

It assumes the child is wrong and buries all that in the unconscious.

And it becomes a filter for how we see the world.

So, so, so one chapter is how do we heal from that?

And then I said, what are the things that block us from living fully?

Overly worrying is one.

So that's a Chapter Having self doubt and our feelings and emotions are another one.

How do we understand them and harness them?

How do we make them so they work for us?

Even the toughest of emotions?

It's really, I came to just really very interesting discoveries.

And then I talked about relationships and especially pointed out what blocks us from having good relationships.

You know, for example, if we think if we have older kids, all they want from us is our support, right?

Criticism.

So get rid of that.

Enjoy them.

And then the last chapter is about the work of being happier.

It's not work so much, but if there's a sport or an activity that you like, you put energy into it, you put effort into it.

You try to be the best you can.

If we do that with being ourselves because that's all it really takes, it's being ourselves, then we'll, we'll.

We'll have a great life.

You know, as I think about your topic of happiness, I notice that in this post Covid environment, we have more people that are more stressed and more unhappy than I can think of any other time in human history.

So I think your book is so relevant.

You talk about how do you reduce stress and it seems to me like most people are just at the top level of their stress thing.

What are some practical tips you have in the book to deal with dealing with stress?

One is before I wake up in the morning and you can do this.

If you set your alarm, set it for about 10 minutes early.

Don't look at any notifications or anything.

Just go back and close your eyes.

So before I open my eyes, I say, let me look ahead at the day ahead.

And I do it in three different ways.

And it just take about 10 minutes for this.

If in the beginning it takes longer, then just do the best you can so you don't spend too much time.

So the first thing I'll do is take a bird's eye view of the day ahead.

They'll say, okay, I'm getting out of bed, I'll have breakfast, I'm going to work.

And then we have lunch.

And after work I'm going to the gym and then I'm coming home.

Then I take a closer look at it and look at specific details.

I realize, okay, I have the kids today.

My wife is leaving for work early.

I'm giving them lunch.

I have this stuff ready for.

I know what I'm giving them for breakfast.

Their lunch is packed.

And then I have a.

I go to work, I have this meeting and I'll think through the day.

Then I so that way that helps with my seeing that I can get everything done.

It also helps me to remember certain things that take place.

I'll remember I forgot my sneakers, I have to put them in my gym bag or.

And then the third part that I do is I then say, how do I want to be in those situations?

So if I'm having breakfast with the kids, what kind of mood do I want?

And if I'm driving to work, I'll say I'm not looking at my emails until I drop them off so I can be with them.

And then before I go to work, what I would always do is before I got out of my car, I closed my eyes, got quiet and asked love to join me, you know, and said, we're going to be here the whole day, be with me.

And then before I came home, I would think I'm going to be with the most important people in my life.

How do I want to be?

Or suppose then it happens I was going to a soccer game after work and I was divorced and my ex was there with her new partner.

How do I want to be so that I don't confuse the kids and get into problems?

How do I know anything that happened?

Throw me.

And then what I do.

And so I develop a plan for how I want to do that and then what I do before I go to sleep, before I go to sleep at night, I'll do a quick bird's eye view of how the day went and I'll start with where I am now and then move to the beginning of the day and I'll think, how did I do with my wife?

With my ex wife?

You know, did I get triggered?

How did that go?

How did, how did driving the kids to school go?

Or that meeting that I was concerned about?

So I learned from it.

Just the way in a sport, people review what happened so they can learn from it.

And so they do that every day.

I get better.

I get better at being how I want to be.

You have a couple quotes I love in your book, and one of them is develop honest self confidence.

Tell me about that.

What do you mean by that?

Well, this takes spiritual roots.

You know, what I said was that if love lives within me and love has to live within me, because if love is connected to compassion, if somebody I'm sitting next to falls down, we're sitting on a bench and they fall, I don't say, wait a second, I've got to get my compassion together and then I'll bend down and help them.

No, it's right there.

And we all have that.

It's a matter of how much we want to open to it.

It's like we really have to prepare room for it.

If we want to do that, we have to do inner work.

And then it fills us.

So if I say that love is with me, another thing that I came to is I came to the idea that love is wisdom filled.

If we love our kitten, we give our kitten the right amount of food.

You know, if we love our dog, we give the dog exercise or whatever else they need.

If it's a rainy day, we don't say, I don't want to go out.

No, the dog needs its walk.

So.

And.

And then when we think about things for our kids or anything in life, we discover there's wisdom in our.

In our love.

It also turns out that if I look at my life, I realize there's wisdom in my life.

And so if wisdom is with me, I know that I'm never alone.

Love is with me.

I'm never alone.

So I can act the best I can in each situation.

If the heavenly is with me, if I make a mistake, it's there with me.

It understands, it knows I'm not perfect.

And suppose that changes things and shakes things up.

So I'll grow from that and learn from that.

But I know I'm not alone.

So with that, I can be present.

You know, people will talk about this concept of self, love, and it can be a little confusing.

You say if you love yourself, then you become too full of yourself.

Who wants to be around someone who just lost themselves?

You know, it actually, it turns out in Greek mythology, the name Narcissus, from being narcissistic, comes from this guy who was in the woods and had never seen a mirror.

And he passed this pond and saw his face in there and so fell in love with it.

He didn't move and became the flower, the narcissus.

So we don't want to be that.

No, we don't.

So what the deal is we want to love ourselves enough so we can drop it and be present.

So if, let's say you're a hitter in baseball or a dancer in a.

In a performance, you want to know you did your work, you're good, and then you can drop all that and be present and be at your best.

And you can have confidence because if you fail, all you did was your best, and you're not alone.

I love that you have a concept.

I think that's hard for some people to do or hard for Me to do sometimes is living in the moment.

You're always thinking about the next thing or the next step.

So how do you help people to practice being present?

Because we miss so much of our life because we're always either forward thinking or living on past mistakes.

How do you help people to kind of live in the moment?

So that's where this inner work is helpful.

This, this morning work.

Because now if I did it all, I can live, I can play, you know.

So suppose you're a football player.

You do all your practicing, all your training, all your ready, getting ready for the game, but then you just enjoy playing the game once you're there.

So we can only be our best and learn and so on.

And then when you're trying to live out of love, if I'm trying to say what's the best thing for me to do in this situation, I'm not in a void.

I'm in an active process of saying what's the best thing to do or say here?

How do I help this person?

And so that puts you in the moment.

So let's say when I walked into a room with patients, I would study their chart before I went into the room, think about what their problem is, think about the concerns they might have that they might not even express, and then walk in the room.

I did my work.

Now I can meet them and greet them and let them know I'm there for them and answer their questions.

I love it.

What kind of feedback are you getting on the book so far?

Very interesting.

One person told me that she cried.

She said, I never read books like this, but I did.

And you know me.

How do you know me?

Two people told me they put it, they couldn't put it down.

They read it, they just stayed and read it.

And yeah, so, so that's.

And, and others just felt like it was real.

They felt the moan.

I'm not preaching anything.

I'm talking about what I learned.

And everything that I write is what I apply in my own life.

And it doesn't mean that my way is the right way, but this is what worked for me.

As I talk to you, what I find makes your book different and unique from maybe other what I would call self help books is there seems to be a grounding in scripture and in biblical teaching because we, we can have a lot of self help books that says we don't focus more on yourself and work on yourself, but you have a grounding and there is a God out there that puts our life in perspective.

And if you Keep that in mind as you talk about how do I deal with the things of the world.

It helps ground us a little bit more than just rely more on yourself and be better a person today than you were yesterday.

That's right.

It's knowing I'm never alone and.

And it's not for me.

It's a little radical where it's not tied to a traditional religion.

I once did this test.

It was interesting, Keith, where for various circumstances I had to discover what I knew in life about spirituality.

So I said, if I let go of everything anybody taught me, anything I learned from reading, what do I know?

And what I realized is what I knew was love.

It was genuine, it was real, and I could see it.

Then one day I said to myself, is love itself a spiritual practice?

Is following my heart a spiritual practice?

And I felt pretty well connected to God or whatever term someone uses.

And I had to do an experiment that took about two years.

I had to say to myself, I have to find out if this is true.

So I am going to drop every spiritual practice I know.

I won't read.

I won't celebrate holidays.

I won't listen to things that are spiritually uplifting.

I will simply live following this concept of doing the most loving thing I can.

And then I said to myself, if along the way I discover I'm losing this interconnection, then I'll stop and say what's missing and go back to that.

That never happened.

So I felt I can follow love.

And for me, that that is it.

And it's really.

It's saying that.

It's saying that still small voice lives within now.

That doesn't mean there isn't the greater one that helps me incredibly in life.

Another one that happened is my life has been amazingly charmed in certain ways.

I was once decided after teaching school.

I decided that I'd been in school my whole life, since I was five years old.

I needed to gain perspective and understand why I was teaching.

And I decided I wanted to go to someplace beautiful and work.

To make a long story short, I ended up in Alaska and decided I was going to do any kind of blue collar job.

I never worked in my entire life and I just knew I could do this thing.

So I asked people where the prettiest town was.

They told me it's this town called Homer.

It's along the shore.

It's just below that chain of islands, the Aleutian Islands that goes out into the ocean.

Sure.

And so I was committed to.

I would do anything so Homer had this spit, this jut of land that goes out into the bay.

And at the end of it, it's kind of like a lollipop with some restaurants and a fish cannery.

So I thought, okay, this is it.

You got to work at the fish cannery.

So this is me again.

I never did physical things.

I grew up in an apartment building where the superintendent fixed any problem.

And my dad was legally blind, so he didn't do any chores.

So I walk in there and ask for a job.

And the woman said, you look pretty good.

You look like managerial material.

Where are you living?

So I said, I'm living on the beach.

She said, no, you need to have permanent residence if you're going to work here.

I said, where do I get that?

She said, we'll go back into home and go to the motel.

And she said, and you have to start working at nights and do the overnight shift.

So I go to this motel, and the guy tells me how much going to cost for a room.

And it was enormously expensive.

Wow.

And I kind of mumbled out loud.

I said, wait a second.

I came here to be in nature.

I'm going to have this job and work all night, so I'll sleep all day, and then all the money I make, I'm going to give to you.

And I didn't mean for him to hear that.

And I heard that and said, oh, I have a friend who runs a logging camp.

Do you want to work in a logging camp?

So I said, sure.

I grew up in New York, so I said, sure.

So he calls his friend, he says, I got something that looks pretty good.

And the guy said, send them over on the next mail plane.

So the mail plane was this two propeller plane that had pontoons because the Runway was at high tide, was in the water, and ended up working this logging camp.

It was the perfect spot to do what I needed.

And so I've been charmed my whole life in ways like that.

And so then I could say, I can't just look at these things as being statistically, they're just circumstances, weird things that happen.

Too much goes into that said, statistically, it doesn't make sense.

My whole life changed around this ad on the park bench.

So I said, there's got to be wisdom.

So then I did another test.

I said, okay, if there's wisdom, let's prove it.

So I will act as if everything that happens in my life is perfect.

So it even happened where I.

I dropped a salad coming out of Paneras, and half the salad went onto the cement.

I said, oh good, so I'll have a half a salad.

I want to lose some weight.

And so just I would do that with everything.

And then after doing that, it held.

If it didn't hold, things wouldn't be right.

I would be out of sync.

And that never happened.

So that's how I live my life.

So once, you know, once I know that wisdom is around me, love is with me, I have nothing to be afraid of.

That's such a cool story.

I love that.

So I love to ask my guests this question.

Now that you've done so much in your life, what do you want your legacy to be?

Oh, I still have a lot more to do.

I want to, I want to help people not only hear these concepts and think they're nice.

If they do think they're nice, I want to help them incorporate them into their lives.

So I'm going to do workshops through my website, biggerhearted.com and besides those workshops, I'm going to do a ton of social media stuff that I'm developing.

I really want to see if I can help people enjoy themselves more, live better lives and be rid of the stress and worries and, and difficulties that they don't need and still live effectively.

I was a physician while I did this.

You know, it's not a matter of.

It means you can't live effectively.

You can live more effectively.

Someone said to me, listen and because I never talk about my views, I've been a chameleon my whole life.

And someone said, how do you get through all these difficulties keeping level headed and happy?

And I, and, and that's what that, that was the best thing I think I ever heard someone say.

And that's what we can all do.

That's so cool.

So what's your next project?

Since you say you're not, you were near done.

What's.

What are you working on next?

So I want to do a podcast that reviews thinking with the heart and mind.

I want to do this one I think you'd like.

Keith.

It struck me people in the happiness world talk about gratitude.

Gratitude makes you feel.

When gratitude touches your heart, you realize you're not alone.

I want to do some things that talk about awe or is another way that you get taken out of yourself and realize this is an amazing world.

And I want to do that through things I found in the body.

So the black spot in the center of our eye, our pupil is completely clear.

It's as clear as glass.

You think, why is it black?

Well, it's black.

Because there's no light inside.

So if you looked at a car at nighttime, the windshield would be black.

If you shine the flashlight in there, you'd see what's in inside the car.

So.

So in a flash, when the doctor looks at the flashlight, they see what's in the back of her eye.

Now why is it like that?

If we were driving our cars on an empty road at night in the countryside, we wouldn't want any lights in the car because that way we could see the road.

Because we don't have light inside, we can see the world without getting in the way.

So things like that are just amazing.

So I want to do that.

So there's a lot of social media stuff I want to do.

So come to my website, biggerhearted.com and get the book.

That's so cool.

I was going to ask you where could people find your book?

So give us your website again.

So the website is biggerhearted.com and the book can be gone at Amazon or anywhere else where you buy books.

It's bigger hearted.

A retired Pediatrician's prescriptions for living a happier Life.

That's amazing.

Is there anything I haven't asked you that I should have asked you?

One other thing that's interesting that I thought of while I was talking.

People talk about the ego in the happiness world as being bad.

Well, that doesn't make sense because you want to be the best at whatever you do, right?

Be the best past you can possibly be the.

So the ego isn't wrong.

You want to go to see the best musicians and read the best books and watch the best athletes.

The deal is you want to be able to drop it once you're out of the moment.

So I could be the world's best musician.

My 6 month old doesn't care about that.

So there was a phrase that Gertrude to the poet said it was something called die and become.

So in each moment you want to get rid of whatever trappings you have and be present for the next moment.

I love that.

So as we wrap this up, Ron, this has been a phenomenal conversation.

What key takeaways do you want to leave with the audience from our conversation?

Be good to yourself.

I make a New Year's resolution every year that I've always held.

Now resolution is to breathe, breathe in and breathe out.

Because why do I want to set myself up for failure?

We have enough problems.

Be good to yourself.

You're just trying to do the best you can.

That's all you need to do.

Don't be so hard.

You have to be perfect.

Well, Ron, thanks so much for this enjoyable conversation.

I feel just happier.

Just haven't spent some time alone with you today, so and I pray the audience gathers some key insights and some practical tips to to live a happier, more fulfilling life as well.

From your book.

It was a pleasure talking to you and all that I said had so much on your questions and your interest.

It was great.

Thank you.

Ryan.