Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How to Thrive in a Distracted World | Psychologist, Emma Seppälä, Ph.D.

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

When was the last time you felt completely free? Not just “happy”.. but you felt a profound sense of clarity and calm from within?Dr. Emma Seppälä has spent over a decade proving that this state of inner freedom – which she refers to as “sovereignty” – is not only achievable but essential for our wellbeing.Emma is a psychologist, best-selling author, and leading researcher in the science of happiness and social connection. As the director of the Women's Leadership Program at the Yale School of Management, she's guided thousands of individuals towards greater emotional intelligence and resilience. In this episode, we dive deep into Emma's groundbreaking research from her new book, "Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power." She reveals how cultivating moments of clarity and calm can unlock a powerful state of being that goes beyond happiness.Get ready for an enlightening discussion that challenges our approach to wellbeing. Whether you're aiming to enhance your work, relationships, or personal growth, Emma's insights offer a fresh perspective on thriving in our complex world._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. Oftentimes I see the biggest thing standing in our way is not the external, it's the internal. No amount of success, no amount of love from others even, will make up for the hole in your heart from a lack of friendship from yourself. Which is good news, because I think we can do something about that. Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. By trade and training a high-performance psychologist.

When was the last time you felt completely free? Not just happy, but you felt a profound sense of clarity and calm from within. Dr. Emma Seppala has spent over a decade proving that this state of inner freedom, which she refers to as sovereignty, is not only achievable, but essential for our well-being. Emma is a psychologist, best-selling author, and leading researcher in the science of happiness and social connection. As the director of the Women's Leadership Program at the Yale School of Management, she's guided thousands of individuals towards greater emotional intelligence and resilience. Get ready for an enlightening discussion

that challenges our approach to wellbeing. Whether you're aiming to enhance your work, relationships, or personal growth, Emma's insights offer a fresh perspective on thriving in our complex world. So with that, let's dive right into this freeing conversation with Dr. Emma Seppala. Emma, it is so great to have you on the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm so excited to dig into

your research and your writings and how you're helping so many of us live just a little bit better in our lives. But first, congratulations on your new book, Sovereign. It's awesome. And before we dive into the meat of it, I just want to check in, like, how are you doing? How are you doing today? I'm good. Better because I'm here with you. Thanks so much. So fun.

Okay. So I hear buoyancy in your voice. Is that kind of how you go through life? Like with that bubbly buoyancy in how you do life? I hope so. But I think we all have all of the whole spectrum of emotions running through us constantly all the time. But yeah, I like to try and live it in this way, for sure. Very cool. Okay. So on that note, let's dig into the title of your book, Sovereign. It's a word that is not used very often, and it has such weight and gravitas to it.

Why did you choose that word as the title of your book? Yeah, thanks for asking. So, you know, I looked at the science of happiness and well-being for about 20 years, and also looked at interventions to help with things like trauma and anxiety and mental health. And then I realized after a while of both researching this and teaching about it, that you could do all the sovereignty and all the happiness practices in the world. I should say, you can do all the happiness practices in the world. And still, if you are buying into ways of thinking, acting, behaving that are binding you, you're still not going to achieve the happiness fulfillment levels you're looking for. You're still going to be stuck.

And I could not find in psychology, correct me if I'm wrong, a word for that sense of inner freedom. And we know that 70% of people on their deathbeds regret not living the life they wanted. Regret living a bound life in a way. And so I wanted to use a different word, a new word for this idea of inner freedom. Because again, you can do all the things, eat the right diet, do all the exercise, get all the sleep and still be wondering, why do I feel anxious? And why do I feel anxious? And why do I feel self-loathing? And why do I, why am I addicted to compulsive behaviors? And I don't know why I'm still not happy, you know? And so that's why I'm taking this to a whole new level. Cause my first

book was about the science of happiness. And this one is about this. It takes it another step further. And the step further in layman's terms, before we get into the science of it, is meaning in person, freedom, I'm sorry, meaning and purpose, freedom. Is that what you're looking towards? Inner purpose, freedom, self-agency, awareness, courage. I have an equation for sovereignty in my book. You know, after writing chapter after chapter, I'm realizing there's an equation to it. And the first piece is awareness, which, of course, as a psychologist, you know, that's what you're helping people gain. There's the awareness, self-awareness, external awareness. And then once you're aware of what you want to go beyond, then you need the

courage to do that. But what you also need is a full tank. You can't really do it on a depleted, empty tank, which our modern lifestyle often also conditions us for depletion. We can talk about that later. But with those three things, that's how I kind of have the equation for sovereignty. And I opened the book with two examples of one example of a female veteran that was in one of our studies, and she had been through absolute horror in her life. I remember, I mean, I heard a lot of horrible stories from veterans of combat trauma, but she had not just been to war by day, but at night she was for a year and a half at gunpoint, told that she would not return alive to see her baby if she said anything. So I had not heard something quite so bad because that was just really day, hell, night for a year and a half at the age of 24.

And when I met her, she definitely had post-traumatic stress. But she said to me, she had not an ounce of victim consciousness about her. She had not an ounce of self-pity. She just said, I just want to be a good mother. I just want to be a kind leader. And she was embodying sovereignty. And I like to share her story because, wow, she was so powerful, despite being so damaged in some way, but so powerful. She was in one of our studies where we used breathing-based practices to help veterans with trauma. In fact, she said if she hadn't been in our study, she would have ended up on the streets as an alcoholic. But she's now a top leader at a top tech company in this country showing us what sovereignty really means. So that's one of the stories that I share. And then was this the reason you wanted to write a book? Because you saw

sovereignty in others and you're like, how do they do it? Or was this, is it more personal that you were obviously studying happiness, trying to live the good life in your best way, but were finding yourself to be a bit more shallow in the good life? You know, happiness for me kind of runs on the surface. I know that sounds maybe blasphemous to others. I'll just kind of get into it. Like When I ask people, what do you want in life? People say, you know, I just want to be happy. And my antenna pops. From a young age, it always popped. What do you mean? If your loved one dies, you want to be happy? And of course, the answer is no. So what do you really want? And for me, it's not just happiness. It's the full range of emotional depth and expression as well as a full range of human experiences. So

getting back to my core question here is like, why did you personally want to write a book about sovereignty? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, I did see these models, rare, I should say very rare models of sovereignty that were really compelling and inspiring and just had this wow factor because I would say maybe 5% of people that I meet have sovereignty, 5% of people that I teach have sovereignty. And at the same time, it was also internal because I know I was doing all the practices. I'd studied all the things and I found myself so depleted after having my second child that I could not get out of bed. I had to take care of my own children. And it really made me think like, what have I fallen for?

Because it's not enough to be meditating every day. It's not enough to be doing all the things. If I'm also falling for ways of behaving and thinking that are binding me up. And I saw it a lot in myself. I saw it in people around me that were quote unquote, highly successful. And yet there's this dark underbelly. And I went through my own journey with that. And then I also just felt compelled to write it because I saw, I see also the suffering, even when I teach high level executives at the Yale School of Management. And oftentimes I see the biggest thing standing in our way is not glass ceilings, is not the external. It's the internal, which is good news because I think we can do something about that, as you know.

Oh, we can actually do a lot. It's almost like the work is actually simple in one respect, and I'll explain that in a minute, and then really deep and hard in another respect. And I think you need both. And so this is one of the things I want to talk to you about is like, there are a set of simple practices, meditation, maybe one or breathing practices or being pretty good with your self-talk and all the regenerative practices of sleep and eating. They're simple to understand relatively. But that deep work when you're, you know, you're getting down well below the crust, that's not easy, at least for me and folks that I work with. So maybe I'm doing it wrong, but like, that's hard work. It's not for the faint of heart, like to be really

honest with yourself in that light, you know, you point to the, to doing the inner work. Can you open that up just a little bit on what you found to be important? Yeah. I'll start with an example. So some of my colleagues did research with Yale undergrads, and it's so hard to get into Yale. It's like top 1% of students, right? And then they asked them, how do you feel on a daily basis? And you would think that the students are going to say things proud, happy, successful. What do you think they said? Overwhelmed, stressed, anxious. Yeah. They said so. Tired.

Yeah. You got it. Stressed and tired. And then they asked them, well, how do you want to feel? How would you ideally want to feel? What do you think they said? I think they would say, unfortunately, happy, content, the happy meaning that more surfacy, but like content, like a deep peace, inner peace, a knowing that I'm okay, that it's going to work out, you know, kind of the anecdotes, if you will, to the other stuff. Yeah. Well, the word that stood out the most, loved. Just crazy. And to me, it says it all. People everywhere, high achieving, perfectionists, whatever,

working so hard, burning themselves into the ground, but no amount of success, no amount of love from others even will make up for the hole in your heart from a lack of friendship from yourself. And that's how you see that. Highly successful people everywhere, Silicon Valley, New York, these campuses, whatever. Perfectionists everywhere. Don't have to be like at the top of your career to be that. Striving hard in the process, destroying themselves in order to get something that is not going to give them what they need. And I've seen that again and again. And that's one of the things I highlight in my book. Sovereignty, one of the aspects of sovereignty is developing a profoundly

life-affirming relationship with yourself. That's one of the, isn't it? The first chapter, I talk a lot about the science of that, how our society in a way conditions us to disconnect ourselves from ourselves. And in so doing, how can you ever find balance? How can you ever find fulfillment? How can you ever find fulfillment? How can you ever find what you're looking for, no matter where you're striving or how hard you're striving? Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true.

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Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat, and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals, on a demanding day certainly, I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein Bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put him on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening.

I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show, it's a great episode by the way,

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slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Do you address the directionality and the flaw in wanting to be loved, which it's a good want, but now you've put yourself out of control, needing something outside of you to be fulfilled inside, which is in my best estimate, really ineffective, less dangerous. It's bondage. It's bondage. There you go. Okay.

I differentiate bondage from sovereignty. Bondage is expecting something outside of me is going to fulfill me. And you can go looking for that in a relationship and money and power and fame or whatever you want. Not going to find it. You might get a short dopamine high, but how long does that last? It leaves you craving for more. And absolutely. And I have a whole chapter on relationships. I talk about that, how, and it's, but it's nobody's fault, right? Like our society, just starting from when you're a kid watching Disney movies, you know, like at least the Disney movies I watched, it's all about, you know, finding your love

or whatever, true love. And it's outside of yourself. I mean, now they're trying to make it a little different, the movies for kids, but still, you're just always sucked into this belief system. It's programming in a way. And yet, you know, from what our research shows and the research of some of my colleagues, yeah, like you said, our greatest levels of not just happiness. I agree with you. Happiness is trite. And happiness, I think of as those short dopamine highs that you get from the, you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll and fame and money and all those

things, the little dopamine high that crashes soon thereafter. It's a hedonic happiness, right? But then there's another form of happiness called eudaimonic happiness, or I think of it as fulfillment. And that comes, research shows that comes from being from from serving others from compassionate action from kindness from swelling with love as you say whether that's for your for the environment for people for whatever it is that you care about right if you're doing you know community service in some direction that speaks to you and what we know so how do you from research oh sorry that yeah what we know from research is that the dopamine the effect on the brain is not a happiness burst that crashes. It's long-term sustained fulfillment.

And one of my favorite studies looked at people who had been through really stressful life experiences like war. And usually those people live shorter lives because, as you know, stress shortens your life, especially severe acute stress like that. But they found that there was a subgroup of people that kept living and living and living. And they were like, what's going on here? Like, why are these people not dying earlier? And they found that all of them in some way were engaged in community service or in some kind of compassionate activity. And it's as if it erased the effect of this stressor. So I think about, I love that study

and I think about it a lot because we don't have to go to war to be in high stress. Like our society has got us all in fight or flight, just our lifestyles right now. You're hitting on something really important, which is the kind of the pace and rhythm of life. So you've got this energy cycle piece that you've put in your formula

and you've also got awareness practices. Let's start with the inner life. Let's start with some of those internal practices first. And specifically, I want to dive into intuition. And so this is like, oftentimes intuition is, I don't know, it's regarded as mystical or unreliable or the lowest form of knowledge, even if it is reliable in any sense of the word. So you're going at something that, you know, hardcore thinkers have said, what are you

talking about? And so can you talk about what you found with the science of intuition? Yeah, you know, people consider this woo, but it's really interesting the military's been studying this for decades and although it was made fun of in a movie called men who stare at goats i don't know if you heard about that movie i did yeah they're still studying it in a top secret way and it's still happening and i know it because i have insider information it's also intuition is also trained into the marine corps. And I also know my husband's a Marine, like, there, there are, there is a very keen interest in the military to study

this because of how many soldiers have come back saying, Oh, yeah, I didn't go down that road, even though I was supposed to go down that road, because I had a weird feeling, and they saved themselves from the roadside bomb there, right? There were so many accounts of that, that, speaking of human performance, it's definitely worthy of research, at least from the perspective of the military, but we also just wait, wait,

wait, just to interrupt you, just to add it to like go military. And then there's two other. So I was just got back from a world championships and they came in second. The team I was supporting came in second and afterwards, which is extraordinary. Yes.

And afterwards I was asking her about how, you know, how she, how she experienced the games. And she said, awesome. I played a really high level, but you know what? I just didn't trust my intuition. And so sport at this level happens with great speed and accuracy is often required. And if you're, if you're thinking you're late, and so even great performers outside of military operations, which is some of the most intense conditions of life, talk about the need for intuition. Our intuition, I think of often as like an instinct, because it is an instinct for survival that animals also have. I'll give you an example. So you've obviously heard of equine facilitated

therapy, right? Yeah. You're talking about with horses? With horses, right. Yeah. So I think everyone's had the experience of being around someone and not feeling comfortable and not knowing why and just having this sense of dread and wanting to get away. And so the question is, what's going on there? And what research shows is that let's say I were angry and I'm pretending I'm not. I'm suppressing, right? Your heart rate increases. You don't know why. Intellectually, you're like, I don't know why I'm not comfortable on this person.

But your body, your physiology has already set off a red flag, a fight or flight response to my inauthenticity, which your cognition may not have picked up on because, hey, she's smiling, right? But it's an instinct for preservation. I'm going to explain how, because therapists who work with horses in this equine facilitated therapy will tell you this. When a patient comes up, like let's say it's a kid with anxiety and the kid pretends they're not scared of the horse. They're like, I'm not scared of that horse. I'm just fine. But they're scared. The horse is all over the place moving around because horses are animals

of prey, right? They are looking for danger and their instinct registers inauthenticity as threat. They don't understand English, but they don't need to because they've already physiologically resonated and picked up the cues. And we are in this. We are the same. We're the same. And so we physiologically pick up cues that our intellect has not picked up yet. That's one way in which intuition can work and why we sometimes don't feel right in a

situation or with a certain person and we can't explain it so that's that's one aspect this is very physiological you know the way the military trains intuition they have a program called combat hunter training in the marine corps okay wait yeah wait wait before before we go into that one let's let's open this up yeah for humans and so this idea that I walk into a room and I feel something and I say to my wife or a friend, like, uh, I don't know, something's off, like we should leave. And then a friend or my wife looks at me like, what are you talking about? So then it damps it down. And then it, you know, it's like, oh, maybe I'm nervous, you know, Mike, or maybe I'm just kind of, you know, weirded out by something.

Yeah. So oftentimes the external world will create some signals that we're crazy to listen to intuition because it's, it's unobservable and oftentimes unreliable. And so the unreliable part is because it's competing with my thinking brain as opposed to my sensing brain. And how do you help people tune to their intuition? I think it's one of my, if there are superpowers that we all have, I do think intuition is one of mine. And then if I get too analytical, I think that it's maybe just my ability to pick up on micro expressions in people, just I'm practiced at it. And that's not intuition.

That's just picking up on small, subtle cues that are below awareness at some level. So how do we get better at intuition? And I'm speaking for myself and for everybody. There's so much to unpack here. And thank you for sharing that. First of all, your interaction with your wife example is exactly me and my husband. Actually, in fairness, it's often the other way. My wife is like, she's like spooky. Yeah, super fine tune.

And for a long time, I was the one like, what, come on. And so now I've really learned the value of listening to her and it's cultivated deeper intuition for me as well. So she's been a teacher. So I just want to make sure that that's explicit. Yeah. But on the other hand, what you're saying is true too. So there's two things that can interfere here. One is certainly our cognition. We are taught to think logically and rationally. That is what we're taught in school. That is how we're taught to perform. We're also taught to rely on outside sources of information rather than inside ones.

That's kind of how our society runs. It gets us listening to our leaders. It gets us believing what we are taught, right? And so that's helpful to society. But when it's at the exclusion of listening for internal cues, we're missing a huge part of intelligence and of information that we are blocking our access to. So that's one thing. But the second thing is you don't want your intuition to be mixed up with your fears or your traumas. Say, I have an intuition. I should not go up on stage and speak in front

of a thousand people. Well, is it your intuition Or is it your fear? And so that's where awareness comes in. Because sometimes it's just fear. And it's your fear that you routinely have when you get up to speak in public or when you routinely have when you go to the dentist or whatever it is, right. And so that differentiating factor has to be there. And that's why the self-awareness practices are so important. So you can differentiate between I'm getting a really weird feeling here versus it's just my old fear showing its head again. OK, so those are two things we don't want to have interfere. Now, in terms of how do you cultivate it? Definitely practices that shut out the din of life. And we know we take in over 60,000 gigabytes

of information every day at minimum across all our media channels. So our world is loud and noisy. And we are voluntarily taking it in. If we've got our media on all the time, we've got our phone all the time. We are active participants and consumers. But in that process, we're stuffing ourselves with so much input that it is hard to distinguish between that and perhaps input that comes from within, signals that come from within. So I really think any kind of contemplative practices where you shut things out and attend to your internal world are essential, absolutely essential. That's one. But the other aspect is, and Einstein knew how to use this himself. He talked about intuition a lot. He said that intuition is a divine gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. But we've created a society where we honor the servant and we throw away the gift.

It's very well said. And he attributed his insights, his scientific insights to intuition. And he would purposefully put himself in an alpha wave state, brain state. So we know that when we're in alpha wave mode, we're not highly focused. We're not staring at a screen. We're not actively focused, but we're also not in a really relaxed place. We're about to go to sleep. It's that in-between state, meditative state. It's the one you go into when you're just relaxing, when you're in the shower. That's why a lot of people say, I got all these ideas in the shower. Elon Musk says he gets all his ideas in the shower.

This is why we go into alpha wave mode. And if you think about when you get your best ideas, like when do you get your best, like when do you get your aha moments, your insights? Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company.

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great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 felixgray.com for 20 off so i when i read this i wanted to make sure that we're thinking about the same things and let's just kind of grok across all the the five different brainwaves alpha beta theta delta and then gamma and then of course correct me on how you're thinking about this but alpha is like a cruise control focus. Beta is that highly tuned, like you've got to be on to get this thing done, whether it's a, I don't know, a threat from the external world or something that you really are trying

to lock in on. And then delta is deep sleep. And then theta, I always refer to theta as where that transition phase between sleep, not alpha. And so it's like that slower brainwave where I think that I have more of the aha moments, but a true aha is gamma. That's the burst of insight like, oh my, that's how this works. And then theta for me is more it's slower tuned it's right out of a nap or right out of sleep or falling to sleep or falling into a nap for me where it's like like i don't want to disrupt the falling into sleep but i've got this really great idea or

as i'm coming out of sleep i've got this great. I need to write it down because it just seems to evaporate. So I point to theta for me, but you're pointing to alpha. Well, NG studies have shown that it's alpha, but I agree with you. I mean, it really is when you're in the state of mind that is not actively focused and that's not totally passed out. It's somewhere in between. And that's going to show up in different activities for different people. For some people, it shows up when they're running. For some people, it shows up right before sleep, right as they wake up. The point being is that it's in a time that our American culture would define as idle moments, which, by the way, we think idleness is the devil's playground. That's another thing, right?

Like, got to always be busy or always be consuming media, et cetera. But in that way, we, we rob ourselves of opportunities for not just intuition, but innovation, which you can also think of as a form of intuition, which is how Einstein thought about it. His creativity, he thought came through intuition. And so, and if you look at little children, they're the most inventive of all, right? Little children, because they're in that space and they're in the present moment.

They're in the present moment and their space, if they're in a safe environment, feels more relaxed. They are inventing, inventing, inventing. My little kids are always pulling trash out of the trash and building robots and it's non-stop. And we all have that. We all have the same gift. But as adults, we can engage in behaviors that bind us, you know, talking about that bondage thing of, I got to be hooked on my phone and my social media and my whatever it is that we're hooked on. Which creates more of a beta experience as opposed to an alpha or theta. In alpha and theta, there's more space.

Beta is like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, deep focus. And alpha and theta have more time in between the signal. And maybe that's not the right way to say it using an audio format here. But let's just use the word, there's more space to be able to have something rise up or that you can pay attention to in a different way. Is that what you're pointing to? Absolutely. And that's why there's different ways of thinking of intuition.

On the one hand, there's that physiological we're talking about, that internal sort of red flag that comes up. The military thinks of it as intense external awareness. You could think of as an intense form of mindfulness where you are observing any deviations from the norm with your eyes. So it's complete awareness on the outside. Again, there's an element of calm there. Because if you're highly anxious, your narrow, your vision is very narrow. We know that we see less things when we're in a calmer, aware place, which is something that meditation can really help with, but you become, you can observe the environment more. And then there's this Einstein approach, we can call it, you know, this being in a receptive, receptive space. You could think

of it as receptive, or you can think of it as your, your brain being an active problem solving mode. However you want to think about it. we don't actually know exactly what's going on. When we have those aha insights, we only know that we do have them if we make space for them, like you said, in our busy lifestyle. Before we dive back into the military intuition training and piece here, I've heard that it's urban legend, but I can't find the original research. I haven't dug enough to find this idea out. But that idea that it was Einstein, and I've heard it reported from other people, that he would take a nap with a tennis ball or something in his hand. And when he's trying to solve a problem, he would fall asleep or take a

nap with the tennis ball in his hand. And then when the tennis ball, when he was relaxed enough, the tennis ball would drop, it would wake him up. But he was in that theta alpha state that would allow for an insight to emerge. Is that urban legend or is that like, did you find that to be accurate? It's a story, but it's not about Einstein. So Salvatore Dali was the one. He would sit in a rocking chair holding a- See, I heard it from Einstein. Yeah. And you heard it from Dali. I'm pretty sure it's the Dali story because I mentioned it in my first book. So I researched that. Oh, you did. Okay. Oh, so you did. You dug into it. Yeah. And I mean, I hope it was sourced appropriately, but I would imagine if I

cited it that I did,, he would sit in a rocking chair and then try and get into that, that, that relaxed state of mind where he would get his insights, his visions. And when he would fall asleep, he dropped the key on a metal plate. It would wake him up and then he would start all over again. Yeah. And I heard Thomas Edison did it as well. Like that's where I've always been confused. Many of them did because I mean, I know for myself, when I'm looking for the answer to a problem, I go into meditation. And sometimes it emerges out of nowhere, you know? And so I think a lot of these amazing artists and scientists, they were tapped into this stuff early on. And when you do that work, meaning that you know that you want to get to a place that a brain state that is not jammed up with all of the beta waves, the deep focus kind of intense waves, that this is maybe a way to point to meditation or some sort – call it napping.

It's like there's a thin porous between meditation sometimes and napping. But I love that they're pointing to shifting their state. And whether this is urban legend or not, I really appreciate it. And one of the quotes that I love about Einstein, just while we're on him for a minute, is it goes, a question that sometimes drives me hazy, am I or the others crazy? And that idea that when we're different, when we're seeing something differently, is it me or is it them? And I just love that feeling of when you're onto something and the world is zigging and you feel like a zag is appropriate, that there's a aloneness to it and it can be quite unsettling.

And so that's also what I was describing earlier with that intuition piece, that sometimes it's really unsettling to have this flood of information when the rest of the world isn't enjoying their cocktails or having fun and laughing and smiling. You're like, something isn't right here. And it takes a lot of courage to listen to that intuition and maybe less courage if you're practiced with it. And so that's where I want to maybe drive us back to the practices. And I think you're going to teach us about some military intuition training as well. This is true, but it's all true what you said. And it can be lonely, and it can seem strange and weird.

And why aren't you doing what everyone's doing? And yet, if you think about the way showers on our planet, those who have done things differently because they did see things differently and that we're way showers, that's a new phrase for way showers. They showed the way, you know, where'd you get, where'd you get that from? Different people who saw things differently and decided to do differently. It's very courageous. Yeah. Way showers, you you know you could talk about leaders but the way showers are the ones that you know really transform this planet across history there are many oh my god i love it where did you get that word from or that phrase from i don't know i guess it

came to me but i've got a as i was writing sovereign sometimes i had poetry come so again i would say this was in the form of intuition or insight, because I certainly have never considered myself a poet before, but it would just come in my mind and I would write it down. And if you've ever read Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, she does talk about creativity that way and how it comes. And Wayshowers came possibly in one of the poems I wrote. I don't know. I know you talk about it in both your books yeah i i i loved that you use examples of poetry to to help your mind you know and do you want to can you share one of the ones that you wrote or something i'm happy to share it'd be awesome

give me yeah i've got a bunch right here ones that you wrote or something. Yeah, I'm happy to share about it. It'd be awesome. Yeah. I've got a bunch right here. Let's see. I have to find one. Let me see if I can find the one with the wayshowers. Let's see. While you're looking. Yeah. You know, I feel like we don't talk enough about poetry and I feel like we don't talk enough about poetry. And I feel like we don't talk enough about it in this podcast or in general. We don't because we're kept in this rational thinking mind. And yet poetry takes us out of it. And I think that's why, I mean, in all honesty, this book asked me to write it.

That's how I feel. I just feel like I wrote it because it came and was like, hey, you want to write me? Because I'm right here. And like, I really felt like, I mean, I was sweated through the science and the writing and the personal stories and all that stuff. But the ideas came and the poetry came. And then I realized why because poetry can help us open our mind to conceive of something in a different way than our rational logical mind can you know okay here's what i wrote about way showers way showers are leaders who have changed societies through their art spirit or ideas and brought in new ways of being. They are sovereign.

They know their song and its magic, and they're willing to sing it, even if it goes against the grain or makes people uncomfortable, even if they're criticized, even if it's hard as hell. Way showers aren't here to stay in their comfort zone or keep you in yours. They're here to pull the blinders from your eyes and to show you that you too have magic to share. They change the world for the better. Way showers. Speaking of poems, one of my favorite artists is Oriah Mountain Dreamer. I don't know if you've read her book. Oh, I have her book. Yeah.

I know. The Invitation. I mean, she's written a bunch of them. Yeah. The Invitation I have at home.. The invitation. It's so good. And like the first line, it just always sticks with me. It doesn't matter what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for. And if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. Yes. And I feel like that would sync so well with, you know, what you've been writing about as well. So for folks that want some poetry from you, it's in your book, some poetry from Oriah Mountain Dreamer, it's in her book, The Invitation. And then while we're here on poetry, part of this is about being unplugged and allowing and working in a different way to have access. And so the life unplugged, embracing idle time, both of those are really

tricky. I find that even when I'm doing anything where I've got some idle time, I want to flip open my phone. I want to answer emails. I want to do something. And I know the value, deeply know the value of contemplative practices. So can you point to what your practices are that you found to be valuable? And then really explain why idle time is so good for us. Make a pitch why having idle time is so powerful. I mean, first of all, why has idle time become such a bad word? You know, American society, I come from France where idle time is venerated. And in the U.S., it's, you know, people don't even have hardly have any vacation and then they don't even take it. You know, it's crazy.

I found that unplugging my phone, taking walks without it, walking through the woods without it, having it off for periods of time, you get to a point where you prefer that and you see the richness of your life when you are fully present to it and to receptivity. I know, I mean, I'm as somebody who writes and creates and I know that that's when I'm going to get my insights. That's when I'm going to think more deeply, as opposed to just consuming what someone else has been putting out there for me to see or read or give me a to do or whatever. So I think it's, we're, we are very much in love with the stimulation that we're getting every day. And we've gotten used to it and gives us these little highs and so forth and we've fallen really in love with that and but then we

get stuck and bound in it and then we get robbed of our own lives you know and i was talking to a teenager about this she's like i i take instagram off my phone all the time which means she puts it back on all the time but she talks about how it. It feels like it's robbing her of her youth, you know? And I just think how many of us are allowing our, our own lives to be robbed from us, our own special moments with our children that are being robbed from us because we're stuck on the screen and they're seeing it and we're not with them and we're missing the moments, you know, we're missing the moments.

And so. No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. like we're not missing the moments i don't know how that really works missing a moment because you're always in a moment yeah okay and so i i don't know we don't miss a moment because we're in a moment, the quality of that moment or the value of that moment, you can be misdirected to if you want the good life and you're attending to things that aren't providing or greasing the grooves or developing those qualities, then we're training for something. We're detraining from the good life and we're training towards something else. And so that's just a little bit of a soapbox narrative.

That being said is that I'm still not quite clear your take on idle time versus, let's call it meditation or contemplative practices. So a contemplative meditation mindfulness practice would be a practice to listen, a practice to hear, to tune, to create space, to be aware of what's coming from within, to be aware of your thoughts, aware of the environment around you. But that's not what idle time is. When I have idle time, I'm not necessarily saying, let me go be more tuned. That's not what I meant. So, yeah. Okay.

So help me here. No agenda. If I go for a walk, I go with no agenda. I just am, you know, I think we can make things too complicated. And I think especially in a world where meditation has come up as more popular over the last 20 years, but in the form of mindfulness, which is all about being aware, aware, aware. And I personally, I don't I don't ascribe to that so much. I also as having had anxiety because I was in New York during 9-11. I tried mindfulness at the time.

It's like I'm just super aware that I'm anxious and this is not working for me. But it's been really touted as like the thing. But there's so many different forms of meditation. But when I have idle time, it is with no agendas. It's like, I'm going to go for a walk without my phone, no agenda. That's it. Not being aware of anything. I I'm really not a proponent of just constantly being aware of everything in your mind. Cause I actually think it makes you more neurotic. And I have seen mindfulness teachers become more neurotic. I think I remember this one time where I was going to lunch with a mindfulness teacher and she was like, and I was, I think I was, I was complaining about something. I was like, oh, the IRB, like the,

the human resources, like thing that you have to do for research. I was like, ah, they're so slow. Or I don't know what I was saying. She's looks at me, she goes, no judgment. And I'm like, dude, like if I had no judgment, I wouldn't know what restaurant to go to. Like, is this how you talk to yourself constantly in your head? Because that does not sound like fun. So I'm not a huge proponent of that. So, but the idle time just means like no agenda. And I feel like also children teach you that, you know, even pets, I think.

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That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. Okay. So let me, let me take a point counterpoint. That's nice for an academician who gets to write for, for the busy grinder who their bosses email them at 10 o'clock and they're up to get the kids out at six 30. And then it's straight to shoving a few things in their mouth and jumping in the car, bang, bang, bang to meetings after meetings. And they can't find 30 minutes to do some fitness because of the responsibilities they have and the pressure to perform. And they're not getting bed till 11.30, how, how do you point to, I'm, I'm not, I'm not disagreeing with the value of idle time. I don't, I think many folks would say, oh my gosh, I love idle time. However,

you and I both point to some research that people would rather shock themselves than sit with themselves. So before we convolute it just a little bit more, how do you answer that narrative? Yeah. First of all, don't make assumptions about my lifestyle. I get up at 5.30. I got two kids. I'm going, I've got working three jobs. So I don't sit around and have nothing to do. I definitely have a busy life as well. But everybody has a few minutes a day. What do you do with those minutes? Are you mindlessly doom scrolling? Is it nourishing you deeply? What are you choosing to do? Everybody, I want to say everybody, I don't care how busy you are,

wastes a little bit of time every day. And it's like, well, what do you want to choose to do with those precious few minutes or perhaps hour that you have with yourself? You know, is going to be spent in an unconscious activity that depletes you, or is it going to be spent in a way that nourishes you? Is researching online idle time? I mean, going for a walk, I'm trying to draw a parallel, not to be too kind of tactical here,

but going for a walk and setting a clock, like I've got 45 minutes to go for a walk. I don't know if that's idle. To me, I'm so disconnected to idle time. I'm having a hard time even grokking. Oh yeah. Wow.

Yeah. Like I'm, I'm really scheduled. And so, yeah. So like at lunch, like do you over lunch, are you scheduling a call or watching a movie or listening to a podcast or doing something? Or if you have 15 minutes, half an hour,

20 minutes to eat your lunch, what are you doing? I like to go to lunch with people. So I'm having conversations and, or, and, or if I'm like, say I'm walking to go to lunch I do flip on a podcast or an audiobook that you know that I'm trying to yours that I'm trying to you know prepare for something so like just walking and cruising I'm but that doesn't seem like idle time to me it's not idle time yeah our society is antithetical to idle time like you said we're not even want we don't want it we don't even make make time for it you know what do you do the 10 minutes before you go to sleep what do you do 10 minutes before you go to sleep this is this is i

know that this is a problem because like i'll i'll flip on something on TV to not have my mind solve problems. And so I don't even care what it is. It can be something pretty benign that's boring and not a big volume change shift. And it just allows me to, and listen, I meditate a lot. So I'm like, I don't want to be with my thoughts as I fall asleep. I don't think it's healthy. I don't think it's healthy. I don't think it's great. It's a pattern that I'm in lately that is helping me fall asleep faster. I set a timer, you know, it's like a 20 minute timer and I fall asleep before the timer,

before the TV turns off usually. So that's what I'm doing. And I know that that's not what you're pointing to as well. Yeah. So how much do you meditate? It's somewhere between one minute and 20 at the upper limits per day. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I don't know in your particular case, but I definitely feel like our society programs us to be constantly busy and it's another program that binds us. And it's a lie. It's a lie. Because otherwise, you wouldn't consider it somewhere you're feeling this is a problem. And but you're not understanding it, but you somewhere it's a problem. And it's disconnecting us from ourselves, you know. But one thing I can only recommend, because we've done several studies on this, is not just meditation, but a breathing practice that we studied.

Well, actually, after 9-11, so I was in New York during 9-11, and I had anxiety every single day after that. At 8.30 in the morning, my body would shake before I had to go downstairs and leave the building. And I tried mindfulness at the time, like I said, just made me more anxious. I tried a lot of different things. And I didn't want to go the medication route. And finally, I walked into this breathing class that was being taught at Columbia by some classmates. I thought this is stupid. And then

I did it. And then they were like, you should do this practice every day for 40 days or whatever before to see the impact. I said, Yeah, I'm going to do that because I don't believe you. And I did it's called sky breath meditation. It's a breathing practice that is taught by a nonprofit called Art of Living out of India. And I thought, wow, like this really dramatically shifted my trauma. Like I was able to move on. I was able to sleep again. I was able to just it was amazing. Anyway, fast forward 10 years later, I'm working with combat veterans.

And I see that some of my colleagues are have them in mindfulness programs, and they're all dropping out. And I'm like, yeah, I know why they're dropping out, because they don't want to be super mindful of their anxiety. It sucks. Like, and you know, they I could see that many of them were dropping out of the pharmaceutical trials out of the therapy trials, because they don't want to revisit their trauma, and they don't want to feel the side effects of medication. So I thought, let's do research on this breathing practice. And they walked in the room and the ones in the active arm were like, so there was the active arm, the control group, active group. They thought this is some hippy dippy, you know, like they're like, we're just here for the money. I was like, that's cool. Like, that's fine.

That's why we want you here. Right. And after one week of doing the breathing, they were like, okay, like their anxiety had normalized. And the more their anxiety normalized, according to the self-report questionnaires, the more we saw that physiologically, when we put them in a situation that elicits startle response, their body, their physiology responded differently. The more they said they felt less anxious, the more physiologically we could see it was true. They were having less of a startle response. And there was a documentary made about this called Free the Mind. And you could see the before and after.

I mean, it's amazing. And one month and one year later, their anxiety was still normalized, even though many of them didn't continue the practice. So what I see, and we've since replicated the study with the Palo Alto VA, the bigger group, men and women, and we controlled it to CPT, cognitive processing therapy, which is the gold standard therapy for post-traumatic stress, I'm sure you know, found that it is equivalent to or superior to this treatment with regards to emotion regulation and anxiety and so forth. And, you know, I often think like we're in a society, going back to what you're saying, we're in a society that trains us into fight or flight. Like we are living in sympathetic activation. That is normal. That is considered normal. I mean, how many people do you know who

are calm and content and serene? Nobody, almost nobody, right? And so it's almost like we have to retrain our, not just meditation for the mind, we retrain our nervous system to be back in parasympathetic because we don't know what that is anymore. Most people need help sleeping or need help not waking up at 2am or need help not feeling exhausted at 2pm because all of that are signs of adrenal fatigue. And most people are walking around with burnt out, exhausted, depressed, anxious, don't know why bound bondage. And that's what our society is training us for. And that's why, you know, for me, some of the practices that I encourage are these practices that are radically reshifting how our nervous system responds, because we've been trained for

the opposite. And so on the sky breathing, it's been trained for the opposite. And so on the sky breathing, it's been around a long time. It's there's, there's, I remember some of the research, like 73% reduction in, in people with generalized anxiety disorder. Like there's some, there's a pretty incredible findings. And so, and folks that are listening can, can just simply type in sky breathing and you'll, you'll find lots of resources. It's also offered for military veterans and military families through Project Welcome Home Troops at no cost. And then for everyone else through Art of Living.

That being said is that to me doesn't seem like idle time. So I'm still struggling. I get that I'm so deconditioned. Idle time belongs to the devil. That phrase was like in my household from a young age. And then for the ambitious part of me, like, no, I need to go. I understand the yin and yang here, but I'm still having a hard time even thinking about what idle time is. Thank you for saying that. Because what I meant with the breathing is that once you've, when you practice the breathing, at the end of that, you finally come to a space that is that place, that calm place of contentment. And it's interesting because one of the Dalai Lama's monks, one of his translators had asked, had heard about my research and asked me to teach him the sky breath meditation. And went through the teacher I'd gone through the teacher training like learn to teach it although I don't really teach it much anymore but and I remember teaching him and I was like god I'm teaching this monk of 30 years meditating his whole life and he was like just treat me like a beginner he

was so cute was so cute he was like the epitome of the like enlightened monk and then at the end he when he learned it he said oh i get this now like when we meditate in our tradition when we go to the deepest level it's called clarity he's like this takes you right there it's the what do you call it it's the treadmill or the speed the fast track fast track he was saying um so what i'm saying is we're so it like you said it's so foreign to us to be in that space of calm but when you look at like a newborn baby or like a little one they're still there they're still there because they haven't been conditioned into the go go go but that's a program the go go go is a program and you know it's okay

it can run you for a little bit but eventually it takes a toll on health and you know i speak especially women if women have had kids and stuff they they're gonna feel it earlier, faster. I know I felt it. I was like, wow, this is what happens when this is when you live like that. And then you have kids and then forget about it. You know, it's like, Oh, well, why does everyone have postpartum depression? It's like, well, it's a body that is so completely depleted from everything that's been gone through plus buying into this go, go, go go i was reading an anthropologist's book the other day and he was talking about how in indigenous cultures that are still around today it's normal to be in parasympathetic mode 90 to 95 percent of the time

that's where we're supposed to be to regenerate to recuperate to to rebuild we're not supposed to be in this. So I understand. And thanks for being so vulnerable and sharing, you know, about your experience. No. It's not. It's everyone. It's everyone. You know, this is the program, especially in the United States.

Yeah. And like, I'm even arguing with myself, you know, is what would I'm still having the confusion about if I planned an hour of idle time, like what would I do? So there's even like a I'm even trying to schedule and plan idle time. So, look, I get the joke inside the joke here. So I appreciate I this is why I really appreciate your writings is like it. There's a forcing function to say, make sure you're counter-rotating, make sure that you are balancing the yin and the yang in how you're doing life.

Because if you really want to listen better to your intuition as a source of information and valuable information, you need to practice it because the world is, the busyness of the world is stripping us from the listening of that intuition. And so, yeah, I mean, I think we're talking about, you use the word imprints, like how The busyness of the world is stripping us from the listening of that intuition. And so, yeah, I mean, I think we're talking about, you use the word imprints, like how we've learned something at such a young age that it becomes like the source code. And that imprinting is so powerful. We walk around with this philosophy that we're not even sure how it's been sourced together. And it's more like a junkyard philosophy than it is an intentional set of first principles.

And in your approach, how do you help people rewrite the imprint or rewrite the original coding like the one I'm wrestling with right now? Thank you. And you know why we wrestle? Because maybe it's been encoded for 19 generations. So here you are, you're like, well, why is this so hard to get out of my system?

It's been your genetic makeup. Like you may very well be the one to break the pattern, but it's been going on for 19 generations. You know, no wonder it's so hard. You know, it's kind of like another imprint that runs us, which is the one of self-loathing. And a lot of people might think, I have self-loathing. It's like, oh, really? You know, every audience I talked to, when I asked how many of you are self-critical, 95% of people raised their hand, 95%. And from a psychological perspective, self-criticism is self-loathing. That's different from self-awareness. Self-awareness is like, I'm not that great at statistics or I got to watch myself around chocolate or whatever it is, right? That's

self-awareness. Self-criticism is beating yourself up when you make a mistake, when talking to yourself down, which 95% of people do. And talk about bondage and self-love. It's not normal. It's just not normal to have a self-destructive relationship with yourself. Even if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, it's not normal to have a destructive relationship. It's a short-term tactic for high performance with a long-term complicated sense of self and overall buoyancy, to go back to one of our first words. Because if I can be critical, it'll sharpen me up right now to be a little bit better.

However, over time, it just chips away, chips away, chips away, chips away. And it's really problematic. I recognize the same thing in high performers, which is like, it's almost a badge of honor of how hard they are on themselves because that mixed with anxiety will get you to the next level. And so self-critical versus being your best coach are worlds apart. And sometimes there is a critical nature of like, that's not good enough. That needs to get, but that's very different than I'm not good enough. And so, right. So being your best coach, the way that you speak to yourself and the awareness of how to be a great coach yourself, oftentimes our coaches external to us are not world-class. They're not great. They don't see us. They see our output. And so they don't coach the person, they coach the

external, I'll use the word again, output, which is only half of it, not even half of it. It's the result that matters maybe less than the way that we speak to ourself. And so driving right into support then challenge, I think is one of the unlocks for me that's been really important for myself. I need to support myself and then challenge myself. And I'm not going to chip away at my core based on any result or output I have. Matter of fact, I need to back myself to stay in it longer. And so I love that you're pointing to the self-critical problem. Yeah, imprint. It's an imprint that can also be there for 19 generations. And so it's so hard to combat and you're like, what's wrong? It's like, oh, because it's running in the family and society

and community, everyone's doing it. So I forget to question it, the insanity of it. What are some of the other limiting beliefs that you find to be problematic for folks? Can I just add one more thing about this, what we're just talking about? Of course. Yeah. Strike my question. Yeah. Just one more thing.

When I teach audiences and 95% of people say they're self-critical, what about those 5%? It's usually one person in the room, maybe two people in the room are so sovereign. They're so powerful. They're the leaders in the room that really stand out. What is it about them? You know, and I like to quote, there are two quotes that I love. One being Maya Angelou. I learned a long time ago that the wisest thing I can do is to be on my own side. And the other one is by Audre Lorde. Self-care is not self-indulgence. It's an act of political warfare. It's so powerful, you know, especially in a society like ours, which is like, oh, like self-love, self-care, that's just like weak and silly and whatever.

The truth is that how are you going to show up on the battlefield of your life or on the playing field of your life? Or how are you going to show up? Are you going to show up wounded because you kicked your way there? Or are you going to show up in brand spanking armor strong because you loved your way there? I think we forget to think about that. It's powerful framing, super powerful framing, radical self-love, radical commitment to, to taking care of myself is a preparation to be able to do well in life with those forces that are not designed for my success. Yes.

So I, and I love, it's pretty radical. I love that also with the whole idea of like, you know, people complain about toxic workplace, toxic relationship and he's like well yeah but many people are in a toxic relationship with their own selves with their own selves yeah yeah if you turn that around yeah you're going to show up differently in that in your life so you know you you use the word energy in your subtitle yeah and as a scientist like as an applied scientist and you as a research scientist, that word oftentimes needs something for me to go, wait a minute, what are we talking about? So the title is Sovereign and the subtitle of your book is Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos. So, okay, I get the freedom part,

but can we talk about energy and maybe even niche down into relational energy and the way that you've categorized people as crushers, sacrificers, and stars? Well, energy, whenever we're in a bondage, which I differentiate bondage from sovereignty, you're depleting your energy. Let's say the bondage is from this imprint of self-loathing. We know when people have greater amounts of self-criticism, self-loathing, it's kind of like you have a terrorist on the inside. It is depleting. It puts you in fight or flight. You are more likely to have anxiety and depression, fear of failure, less likely to try again. The opposite of resilience, it's draining, right? That relationship

with yourself is draining, or it can, if it's a self-compassionate relationship with yourself, it's not draining, you know, same as you would be with a relationship with another person. So there's certain people that we know when we're around them, we feel depleted and drained around them. And there's other people, and the term energy vampire has been around for a long time. And then the truth is that there are also other people around whom we feel energized and enlivened and inspired. And what some of my colleagues found is that in organizations, when you look at teams or big organizations, you'll see that there's these subgroups of people that are excelling. What is it about these people? Usually at the center of that group is someone that my researcher friends who were studying this said, it's kind of

embarrassing I'm going to use this term, but the only way we could describe them is that they're like a positive energizer. And somehow they have a life giving impact on others. What is it that's happening here? Usually those people, A, know how to fill their own tank. So they're doing all the self-awareness and their practices, and they're doing all the self-care practices on the one hand. On the other, they are interacting with others with profound human values, which is not challenging. It's kindness, compassion, empathy, integrity, humility, honesty forgiveness you know kind of stuff you learned at sunday school or something but at the same time when we think about well what does it

feel like to be around someone with a lot of integrity what does it feel like to be around someone with a lot of empathy i feel safe you feel seen you feel heard you feel appreciated you feel valued you feel respected all the things that after food and shelter we need we need those things everybody wants wants to feel seen, heard, valued, appreciated. And so you can think of this. So we know there's hard data on this, that organizations that have more of these positive energizers perform better, much better. Leaders that are positive energizers are much um more successful and so are organizations that have more such leaders in them and so the question is uh you know if you are um whether your relationship is with yourself or with others when you are uplifting someone else

when you're that you're a positive energizer it's not an energy that depletes with use like physical energy does or emotional energy does. But actually, in the interaction itself, it replenishes your own energy. That's what the research shows. That's what's so powerful. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health.

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a sense of positive energy to them, and I too am using air quotes when I say it. It does make me cringe a little bit thinking about it, but I know exactly what you're talking about. When I'm around those people, I feel energized. When I am that person, I also feel energized. And so when you say something specifically or you're pouring into supporting somebody to be their very best, it's one of the, let's call it behind the velvet rope practices that I think why we won a Super Bowl at the Seattle Seahawks and why we were contenders for such a long time is that when you strip down what we're doing at the team is we're helping each other be our very best.

So I was going to help you as a teammate to be your very best. That means I got to know you. I've got to understand you. I've got to support and challenge you and really make an earnest commitment to help you be your very best. Together, there was such a buoyancy and vibrance and electricity in the environment that you couldn't help but show up and be like, oh, I got to bring it now. But it wasn't like, man, I got to bring it or I'm going to get fired. It was like, I don't want to lay one down. And this is fun. Like this is so, so I felt it firsthand. It's palpable. And is that what you're talking about when you

say crusher, sacrificers, and stars, that the stars are the ones that are creating energy around other people? Yeah. I mean, and I, I, I just, I talk about the crushes and sacrifices in the, in light of, you know, crushers can also be people who, who uplift, and I just, I talk about the crushes and sacrifices in light of, you know, crushers can also be people who uplift others and who have this incredibly energizing effect. But behind closed doors, that's not how they act with their loved ones or their teams. So in a way, they're leaking energy, and they're not as powerful as they could be. And sacrificers are the ones who uplift others, but have a very sort of toxic relationship with themselves, drain themselves in the process. So the stars have that balance

of being there and having an energizing relationship both with themselves and with others. And those are the ones that climb to huge heights. Let's open this up a little bit more. I think this is so foundational. And there's like sets of practices that I hope you can point to to say, nobody wants to be a crusher, but they crush themselves because they're afraid that it's not going to work out and they just have to be a little better. And they're adopting some other voice that wasn't organic to them, but taught to them. And that's like self-crushers and crushing other people. Nobody wants to crush others. But when people are afraid that somebody is going to get ahead

or somebody is going to get an unfair advantage or somebody is going to outshine them, that there is that crushing mentality. So people don't want to be crushers. I think most people don't want to be villains in their own story. So can you point to some practices that are super concrete? If you want to be a star, which means that you are generating relational energy, both from your, to yourself and with other people, you're creating buoyancy and vibrance in a sense of electricity environments. What are some things that you would suggest people do on a database, day-to-day basis? Like if you're running a team? Yes, or a teammate. Be radically honest and radically willing to hear what others have to say

about you. I could think of one person, one example they give in the book about a crusher. He's very famous, became one of Time Magazine's most influential people, very well-known, wrote lots of books and all that. But back in his lab, very unhappy people, no mentorship, lots of backstabbing, toxic environment. Why? He was out there doing his thing. He did not take care of his people.

And I just think, wow, what heights could he have climbed to if he had also taken care of his people along the way? It would have been amazing. It terrifies me. I think that early in my life, I didn't know better and I defaulted to more of a crusher. And in the male aggressive group that I was in, it's like, that worked. We would talk a ton of trash to each other. We didn't have that, let's make each other great and better. We didn't have that. And so there was like a lobster type of thing where there was a clawing at other people. And man, it's like a great regret I have that I've done that to people,

including people that I love. And so I've made a commitment. That's not me. That's not how I want to do it. And I'm probably about, I don't know, 15 years into, I wouldn't use the word star for me, but into like pouring in in a loving way to other people. And so can you share a practice like how, what does it look like in a laboratory where people feel crushed? And how would that person that you write in your book have made some slight adjustments to bring energy to other people? One very simple practice I think I call micro moments of upliftment, which means everyone's busy. People don't feel like they have time. I teach leaders and they're often like, I'm supposed to interact with everyone in my team all the time. Like it's too much. No micro moments in which you show the other person that you see them, you value them,

appreciate them. Micro moments in which you share, you share a moment where you're asking them authentically how they are, how you can support them, where you're giving a compliment, where you're sharing a joke, even something positive where you're recognizing the other person where you're seeing the other person, you know, the other day I was in the New York subway and there's just, you know, so many people. And then there's this guy playing the guitar and nobody's listening. Everybody's walking by. And my son is nine. He's riveted. He's standing and watching and we're watching. And there's so many people walking by don't even acknowledge or clap when he's done, you know, with the songs. It's just like watching and we're watching and there's so many people walking by don't even acknowledge or clap when he's done you know with the songs it's just like before we got in the subway you know we were clapping then we left and we waved and he acknowledges you know give us a

head nod or something and it's just like just allowing people to feel seen is huge you know how many of us do that even for for the person, the cash register in the Starbucks we go to, how many of us acknowledge or even, you know, say a word of praise or thanks or, you know, so it's directing our attention outward rather than always having it on the self. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's like a great, um, selfout assessment or 360 assessment is just to ask that simple question. Does this person, do I, do fill-in-the-blank person bring energy to others or crush others' energy? It's a really simple toggle there. And then what is the sacrificers?

The sacrificers will be successful until they burn out. And then they can't do what they're doing anymore. And I know that's what happened to me. And that's not an option. It's not an option. If you want to give of yourself, really, truly, you have to have that relationship with yourself that is so profoundly life supportive so you can show up. Can you give me a handful of practices that you did that helped you move from a sacrificer to a star?

Well, I mean, again, I hope to attain that star level. I certainly do. Yeah, right. I mean, I just have some, I don't compromise on my meditation practice. I do both the sky breath meditation in the morning and a meditation practice and a little bit of yoga. I do like at least 45 minutes into an hour in the morning and then before bed at night. And, you know, again, my kids get up at 530. I don't have a lot of time.

But I know that if I don't do that, my day is not going to go the way that it could. And I know that. I've seen it. And I'm not willing to sacrifice that. So even if it means I get up at four in the morning or whatever, and I wait till everybody's out and down before I finish doing my last practice, I do that. So you choose meditation, breathing, and exercise over sleep? No, I don't choose it over sleep.

But if in a pinch, you would choose it over sleep? No, I don't choose it over sleep. But if in a pinch, you would choose it over sleep, like if you've got a five hour night, which is hopefully rare for you, that you'd say, I'm still going to get up and invest in rather than an hour of towards the end of sleep, it's more light sleep, or REM sleep as opposed to deep sleep. So you would say, I'm going to sacrifice my REM sleep for some internal practices it depends how much sleep you know i'm not going to go on three hours of sleep but and then like the other day i had to go to the airport and then i just did my meditation in the car i had i had an uber so i just sat and meditated my meditation in the car um but um, no exercise. I, I, I sleep is primordial. I realized, and actually part of

my healing, I did have to take naps and I had to compromise on my ability to work. And I couldn't work actually because of my health had gotten down so bad. So I did work, but I, I, I, when I could, I would nap, which felt, which feels in a productive culture like ours, like such a waste of time. Right. But I also, my body had, had gotten to such a point that I didn't have an option. I love, I love napping under 20 minutes for me. I don't get them. I like I'll get them on a Saturday or Sunday. And I, and I have a narrative in my head, like, come on, crack open another article. You should be reading some research, you know, or go get your ass in the gym or whatever it is.

Like I can hear all of that. And I wish I had the, I wish as if I'm a victim to my own schedule. I don't schedule a nap in my working rhythm day. I don't think that that's actually really good for me because I need like 45 minutes or an hour, call it 45 minutes to find 17 minutes of a nap, which I don't want to actually do. But on the weekends, I really love them. So are you finding a nap during the day? For many years, I had to, when I could, not when I couldn't, I couldn't. I had to. You were really struggling. I had to make it in practice.

You had to, like you were struggling. Oh, yeah, it was very much struggling. And actually, I've gotten to the point now that I don't actually need that, which is fantastic. But when you think about athletes, right? I mean, and you know, athletes, they have to take care of themselves because their bodies, their machine, like it's what they're going to be performing with. Why should it be different for the rest of us? Why shouldn't the rest of us also be sleeping well, eating well, resting well, taking care? We're the same. I mean, we may not have the luxury of time that they have to do what we need to do but in the time we have what are we doing you know and for my own self i had to now because i my health was such that i went down to part-time

work and all this stuff i had to i i i was physically in that place but yeah so now i don't actually need to do that anymore but i had to heal my adrenals um so that was and uh i try And I try to go outside also every chance I get. Lunch, break, outside. Yeah, nature. And the research would support it, of course. And I think that sport is ahead of business by about 10 to 15 years, meaning that their investment in recovery is so much more sophisticated than the investment that we take in businesses to personally recover. And so just that one practice alone about thinking about thin slicing of recovering

throughout the day, as opposed to what we do in business is like take a three-week sabbatical at the end of the year, whatever that, or vacation. It is absolutely garbage when it comes to best practices. And then one of the, this is, I love this technology. I'm such a fan of what they're doing, Apollo Neuro. It's a simple little device. Are you familiar with it? No. No, it's a simple little device. It doesn't measure or track anything, but it just sends a sound wave to your vagus nerve. And to activate your rest, digest your parasympathetic nervous system. Super simple. I do it after I do a keynote,

after I do fitness or right before I fall asleep, just to down-regulate. It's just a little wristband I put on and it's just gentle little vibrations. And I think it's like foundational for me at this point. So as much as I come up for intensity, this gives me, with breathing practices, a nice way to recover in a thin sliced way. Yeah, it's really cool. Very cool. Listen, I've loved this conversation. I love what you're doing. You're pointing to something far deeper than happiness and joy, which are both awesome.

You're pointing to that sense of freedom in life. And I just want to say thank you for ringing the bell. And I just want to make sure that we're really pointing people to your book, which is called Sovereign, Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos. And so well done. I'm a huge supporter of what you're pointing to. And I just want to say thank you.

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And I've loved our conversation. Yeah, very cool. Is there anywhere that you'd like to point people to for your book and other ways to find you? I'm at emmasepula.com or iamsov.com is my book website. And then I'm on Instagram and social media at The Happiness Track.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Emma. I appreciate the great work that you're doing and keep teaching. Oh, thank you. You too. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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