Dr. Ellen Langer

You know, I have an acronym that I use in teaching at the end of my classes.

It's called GLADO.

G-L-A-D-O.

So it's my recipe for happy life.

Be generous, loving, authentic, direct, and open.

And each of these leads to the other and all of them follow from being more mindful.

Being present, being there.

And it's funny because people say, sort of stop and smell the roses or you should be present.

And that's sweet, but it's an empty instruction because when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there.

And so the way to be there is to notice new things about the things you think you know, you see you didn't know them, your attention naturally goes there, or top down to start off recognizing that you don't know, nobody knows, you can't know, and that not knowing is exciting rather than scary.

Thanks for having me.

Once you understand what I mean by mindfulness and how easy it is, it has nothing to do with meditation.

No matter what you're doing, whether you're doing a podcast, reading, eating, taking care of a child, playing tennis, you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly.

And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous.

Everything changes.

I had this slide when I used to give these lectures, as I still do, and I say on the slide,

virtually all of our problems, whether personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect consequences of our mindlessness.

Now, it's interesting because then I tell them, just among us and the other 10 million people I've said this to, I really mean all.

So that's enormous, right?

I'm saying all of our problems are a result of our mindlessness.