Most of us are looking for answers, but maybe what we need is better questions.

In this solo episode of The Lonely Chapter, Sam Maclean reflects on the questions that have kept appearing across more than 100 honest conversations about identity, difficulty, purpose, personal growth and what it means to live well.

Through personal stories, including leaving veganism after eight and a half years, working in gyms, becoming a firefighter, volunteering with Samaritans and learning the power of silence, Sam explores how our experiences shape us and how the stories we tell ourselves can change the way we live.

This episode is for anyone who feels like they are doing okay on the surface, but quietly trying to understand themselves, their past, and what they want life to look like from here.

If one of these questions stays with you, sit with it. Write it down. Ask someone else. Sometimes one honest question can open a better conversation.

If you enjoy this episode, please follow or subscribe to The Lonely Chapter wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show reach more people who might need it.

A lot of people who consume these sorts of podcasts are always looking for answers.

They're looking for answers to the questions that they have, but perhaps what they need is questions.

Over the course of over a hundred episodes now, I've frequently come back to a similar style of question.

Throughout my episodes, I try to find out things about my guest and more about what they've learned from the experiences they've gone through.

And to not give away too much straight away.

That's sort of where this episode's going.

So I've gone through and I've sort of distilled down the top five questions, I suppose.

And whilst they're not absolute quotes of questions that I ask, they seem to be the recurring themes and the recurring style of question that I ask in order to get out of my guests.

Now, as I go along through these five questions, I don't want you to just listen and sort of nod along as we so often do, but in fact, reflect on them.

Reflect on the question that I'm asking in that moment and think about your answer.

If you're new here, my name's Sam, and this is the Lonely Chapter, a podcast for the person who's doing okay on the surface, but they're still trying to figure out life below that.

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Make sure that you don't miss another episode.

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Let's get into the episode.

Question number one is, who are you?

Those three words, who are you?

And when I ask that, I'm not asking the person what they do, as we so often are.

We go to a party and we ask someone what they do.

It's the first question.

And we so often link that thing we do, whether it's our work, whether it's our hobbies, to our identity and sometimes lose ourselves within that.

So to start off with who are you?

I want to look below the surface.

So it's not about job or status or money or anything like that, your lifestyle.

These aren't the person at the core, because all of those things can be stripped away from you.

We label ourselves this way because it's how everyone does it.

So it's gotta be right?

Right?

Maybe not.

And I think by looking inside ourselves and working out what things relate to us.

So for me personally, as I've said before, things like service, clarity, creativity, these are things that I relate to and I think I have within me.

And regardless of which job I go into or what role I'm doing, or whether I'm moving through relationships with friends, all these things can come up and be there, and they can be molded to the situation.

Whereas a label of veganism, for example, to use my own example here.

So again, something I've not really mentioned before on the podcast, and I've mentioned it briefly maybe a year ago, was that I was vegan.

So I was vegan for eight and a half years, and I gave that up in, I think it was June last year.

So it's basically been a year now since leaving veganism.

And for eight and a half years, that was my life.

It was everything that I consumed.

So you'd think that it'd be very difficult for me to give that up at the end of it.

And as we see, and a lot of vegans, a lot of people from other walks of life really make these sort of things their identity.

And what happens then is if you need to give it up for a health reason, it can be a real moral dilemma because you're losing part of you and maybe all of you, if that's everything you've got and everything that you hold yourself to.

But with me, it was never me.

And I knew that it was a decision that I had made based on information I got at the time and based on information that I received last year.

It was evident to me that I needed to let that go and to try something else in order to benefit my health.

And because it wasn't my identity, it really helped me just move forward.

And a lot of people asked me about how I was feeling, like it's a long part of your life, that eight and a half years.

But honestly, it wasn't a big thing to me because the same way that I had gone into veganism due to decisions made off information was the exact same reason that I changed it going backwards.

So that's my personal example.

And again, I see this in my conversations all the time on the podcast in terms of people labeling themselves and maybe getting stuck in that identity.

And we see it in jobs where people have done a job for a long time and they retire and they find it really hard to give up.

So that difficulty and that danger around labeling yourself as something puts you in a cage.

And we need to get out of that cage and describe ourselves as something that's moldable.

So I want you to think now, if you were to take everything away from you, your job, your achievements, your beliefs, your labels that were used to describe yourself, who are you Question number two is, what shaped you?

So I often ask this as a way to get someone's background.

And when I first started the podcast, I was guilty of doing what I think a lot of interviewers do is, so tell me about your childhood.

So tell me whatever it is they want to get the background story on who that person is.

And I understand why, because it's important.

But I now try and start my conversations in a more current space, something that is interesting that the listener can grasp straight away without the need to spend those first 10, 15 minutes of an episode navigating that person's childhood.

And what I found is this thing will naturally come up.

So when I'm going through this story with this person, they may go and relate it to their childhood.

They may say, at this point of my life, this thing happened that then shaped me.

And it doesn't always have to be a big thing as well.

I think that's a common misunderstanding, is that a lot of people who are shaped by events in their life, and maybe the ones who are more prominent that we see online, have been through something massive and they've been through this horrific incident maybe, and come out the other side and learn so many things from it.

But there's also repeated, smaller exposure that shapes us and that's happening to us daily.

Everything that you do in life, every experience that you go through, shapes you moving forward and changes you slightly into the person that you then become ten years from now, or even five years from now.

When I think back to my own journey through this and what shaped me personally, I think starting the gym when I was around 17 has massively shaped me and kept me fit and kept me really excited about those things.

And when I decided not to go to university, I decided to go and work in a gym and well, actually get my qualifications to go and work in a gym before that and making that decision, following something that I was passionate about then taught me about stuff.

Because once I was in the gym and I was doing admin work, speaking to members, leading classes, I realized that I was quite good at certain things.

And maybe in a one on one setting, when someone's coming to the gym for the first time and they're telling me something that's maybe quite vulnerable for them about how they view themselves and how they've struggled in gyms before, I found myself quite good at listening to that and letting them have that space to talk, whether I knew it or not at the time.

And I think going forward into being a firefighter and working in the fire service.

I've used that ability to listen throughout.

And again, that's what led me to become a Samaritan's listener for a year.

I volunteered to do that, and the skills I learned there just amplified it.

And it all started from, like, that first experience and realizing that thing was something I was good at.

And it sort of shaped my path, I suppose, and even to this podcast, like, as an interviewer.

Yeah, I ask the questions, and there will be times where I'm reflecting on my own experiences in response to something the guest has said or something they've maybe asked me.

But a lot of the time I'm listening.

That's all I'm doing, because I'm listening to what that person's saying, and I'm trying to work out where the conversation goes next in terms of what's interesting to me, what's interesting to the listener from that.

From that section that they've just said.

And which bits do I feel the urge to go and dive into more?

And I think it's so important to ask ourselves these things about what shaped us, because we're always being shaped.

It doesn't stop.

It's not held to childhood only.

And you look at Sean Conway, who I spoke to on the podcast.

He got to about 30 years old before he realized that he wasn't living the wrong.

Sorry, he wasn't living the life that he wanted.

And he went and changed his life completely and broke world records and did all these crazy endurance events.

That's changed his life.

But it all starts with knowing what shaped us, because what has shaped us so far doesn't have to stay.

You can double down on it, like myself and the listening that I was speaking about, but you can also leave it behind and try something else.

But the first step of that is actually acknowledging that something has shaped you to be that way.

So when you look back at your own life and you're thinking about this yourself now, what shaped you?

Question number three is, how have you made sense of difficulty?

And I think this is probably the key one for this podcast and the way I like to ask people questions, because people have stories, and stories are amazing.

Stories keep us hooked.

They keep us listening, wanting more.

We want to find out what happens next.

But if someone's gone through an experience and they've got this story to tell, what's the use of that?

If there's nothing that's come out the back of it, if they've not changed something, if they've not made sense of that and the Wonderful thing is that people can go through the same sort of thing.

They can go through different things, and they can come up with different answers, they can come up with different responses, or they can come up with the same one.

And that's the beautiful thing.

It's so individual.

And I think when I ask this, it's so fascinating to me because it lets me into that person's mind a little bit, and it lets me understand how they maybe saw that incident at the time, maybe where they are now with it.

And quite often that's very different.

And the dangerous thing about this is that difficulty can become an excuse.

It can become something that we cling to, something that we hold on to and make ourselves a victim of.

And difficulty and suffering is not a nice thing.

It never will be.

But there are lessons to be had from it.

Ultimately, you speak to most people who have been through something difficult.

They've learned something from it, maybe about themselves, maybe about other people, maybe about the world itself, but they've learned lessons.

And I think we often originally will fall into that victimhood.

And Dakota Meyer spoke about this.

He said he was in that victimhood mentality originally, before he then realized that no one was coming to save him.

Nobody is coming to save you.

So he realized he had to take that step forward and make a decision to change and to learn from what he'd gone through and make sense of his difficulty, make sense of what he'd been through, which, I mean, if you know, his story is a very difficult thing to make sense of.

And obviously it took him many years to do that.

And I also spoke to Carl Smith, who told me this story about a set of twins who had the same father and lived with their father, grew up with their father, who was abusive, an alcoholic, not a very nice man.

And once they both left home, they took very different paths.

One son was very successful, started his own business, family, and the other one was an alcoholic and fell into similar patterns as his father.

And when both sons were asked, why are you the way you are?

They both answered the same thing.

And they said, because of my father.

So that shows that idea of you can go through the same experience but still have a different understanding of it afterwards, and you can use it to your ability or to your detriment.

And that's the beauty, beautiful thing about it.

And I think this is a really important one for everyone because we've all been through something difficult, and it's all relative to that person's life.

So it may be very different between people, but when you think about it, how have you made sense of that difficulty?

We often run away from it or ignore it, and that can be a common coping mechanism, but it doesn't last long.

So when you think back now, how do you make sense of difficulty?

Question number four is what have you learned that you now live by?

Now it's slightly similar to question three, but the difference here is less about going through difficulty.

Maybe it's something you've learned externally, maybe it's something you have learned through difficulty.

But it's also changed how you live and how you move forward.

And these difficult times or good times, or listening to other people tell us about their own experiences, they do teach us things, but only if we actually pay attention ourselves and do the work afterwards.

To say, I'm going to change my ways because of this, I'm going to live a different way.

So thinking about, like what I know now that I didn't before, where did those things come from?

And I think for me personally again, to go back to one of my previous examples, to use a Samaritan's listening is the thing I learned there.

One of the biggest things to me.

So you, you do training for a few months before you start taking real life phone calls.

And the thing they teach you is silence and the importance of silence when listening.

And it sounds sort of backwards because you think you're there to support this person.

Why would you want to be quiet?

But I noticed it when I started making calls and taking calls and it was that moment when someone is opening up to you and someone is talking about what they're going through, or maybe it won't even be this deep and you've recognized this in your own life, just chatting to someone, but they may be talking to you.

And then silence comes along.

So often when silence comes along, we try to fill it.

We try and rush into that space and stop the silence because it's awkward.

No one likes silence, but silence is so powerful.

And I certainly know what I found, and I think what you will find too is that if someone is opening up to you and being quite vulnerable to you potentially when you're listening to that person and they go silent, just sit in that silence for a little bit longer than feels comfortable.

If you start to feel uncomfortable, that's where you need to be.

And what you'll probably find is that that other person is also feeling slightly uncomfortable and they want to fill that silence.

And what they fill that silence with is usually a bit further into the rabbit hole of their mind and potentially Being even more vulnerable to you, telling you something that they wouldn't have told you before if they didn't feel confident that you were sat there non judgmentally listening to them.

So the power of silence is something that I've learned that I now live by.

And I take that into my day to day life.

I take it, take it, take it.

I take it into the podcast, I take it into the podcast, into every conversation.

I try to listen, I try to give my guest the time that they need to answer the question.

And I think the wonderful thing that I've noticed is different guests take different amount of time to answer a question.

And some people will speak for longer, some people will speak for less time.

And that's absolutely fine because it shows the beauty of humanity and that everyone's different and certain people need to relay something a certain way.

Some people don't.

And I can adapt to that because I can give them the silence they need to get their points across.

So that is how I've personally learned from things and what I now live by going forward, using those things.

But it is one thing to learn something, but it's another thing to start living by that and to build that into your routine and become who you are.

So thinking now to yourself, what is something that you've learned that you now live by?

The final question that is a common sort of thread from me to my guests when I speak on the podcast is how do you want to live from here?

And this is about looking at the future, this is about looking forward.

But I think this brings the other four questions together because it you need everything else to understand where that person's now looking.

You need to understand what's created them this way, what has led their experiences to get them to this point of thinking and have those experience.

What have they learned from them?

What difficult things have they been through in their lives and what have they made sense of out of that?

What are they living by that they've learned through that?

So all of these things come together into this question of what you want the future to look like, essentially.

And it's a difficult one in a way because the future isn't guaranteed.

So people may come up with these big plans and never get to live them out.

Things may change in their life and the world that they once had around them changes massively.

But it's important to look forward as well and to have an idea of your compass where you're going.

And it's about understanding all those first four questions that gives you the honest Answer for the fifth question.

When I spoke again to bring Sean Conway up, he asked the question at the end to the listener to go away and have a conversation with someone.

What's keeping you excited about life?

And I think it's such a nice twist on the.

As I said at the start, we often ask people what they do and sort of go straight into their job and it's quite boring.

That's why so many people hate small talk.

Cause it's just that question again and again.

But what's keeping you excited about life is more forward thinking.

It's not about what you've been doing for the last 10 years.

What are you doing right now that's exciting?

What's, what are you excited about doing next year?

What are you excited about in five years time?

Like, where do you expect to be?

And it's obviously not that deep a question.

You don't have to open it up that much.

But that's where that conversation starts to lead because you're looking forward to.

And some people may want to share their story, they might want to share what they've learned along the way, like, and come on podcast, be a guest, write a book, be on tv, talk about these things because they're valuable to people and other people can learn from their own experience.

They might want to not do that.

They might want to stay away and just live their life and be more present in their home life and be more.

Be a better father, a better son.

It could be as simple as that.

So it doesn't have to be the same size fits all.

And I think that's what's beautiful about it.

There's no universal answer.

But the final question that I would ask to you is that you don't need to have it all figured out.

You don't need to have this big goal up on the wall for 10 years from now.

I want to be here.

You just need a direction.

So if I asked you, how do you want to live from here, what would your honest answer be?

And with that comes the end of the five questions.

It was quite interesting for me pulling these questions together and seeing the repeated themes of the questions that I ask.

Because obviously every guest is very different.

There's no specific niche to the show in terms of a specific topic, but I think the niche of it is the fact that I'm learning from these experiences.

So regardless of what your experience is, what has come of it, and what would you like other people to learn out of it?

What's changed in you since then?

These are such interesting things to me because it's the human experience.

Like learning from life is the human experience.

It's what we do.

We have an experience and we may make a mistake, we may have a hiccup, not a failure, and learn from it and not make that same mistake again.

We might have a really good experience and learn something from that as well.

So it's not all about having suffering and bad experiences.

Obviously we may experience something positive and decide that we didn't actually enjoy that that much.

Maybe people get famous and decided they don't like that.

So to bring it in for you today, obviously I've left you with five questions and you don't need to answer them all today, but maybe write them down, have a brainstorm about them over the week or so and or you can come back to the podcast and re listen to it and maybe different thoughts will come up in your mind that time.

But to read out the five questions again in order Question 1 who are you?

Question 2 what shaped you?

Question 3 how have you made sense of difficulty?

Question 4 what have you learned that you now live by?

And question five how do you want to live from here?

I think if you ask yourself those five questions honestly, they may give you more answers than the answers that you may get from listening to this sort of podcast.

I think you need to reflect them on yourselves, think about them yourself and maybe some answers will crop up that you weren't expecting.

If you've enjoyed this episode and you are going to reflect on those questions, I'd really be interested in knowing which ones you resonated with.

Maybe if you'd share your answers with me.

Whether that's a private DM on Instagram or in the comments below, it depends on what you feel comfortable doing.

But I'd be really interested in knowing what your thoughts are on these questions and all I can say is thank you for listening.

If you have enjoyed it, please do subscribe to the show or follow the show and leave a rating as well if you haven't already done that as it really helps the show grow and reach new people.

And if you've done both those things, you're one of my favorites.

Thank you very much and I will see you in the next one.