Good Life Project - Renee Jain | Reclaiming Ease

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

My guest, today, Renee Jain, started into her career as a tech entrepreneur who secretly suffered with her own sometimes dizzying and even paralyzing anxiety. One day, a panic attack led her to step back and re-examine her life, seek help and begin to acquire the skills and understanding to live with more ease. It was transformative. But, along the way, something she never expected began to happen, she began wondering why every child doesn’t learn those same skills early in life, so they can live with more ease and joy. Solving that problem became her driving cause. Renee earned her Master’s degree in Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and founded her own ed-tech company, GoZen!, to help a new generation of kids, parents and therapists. She is recognized as a pioneer in marrying technology and child psychology in a unique approach that nurtures the hearts and minds of kids. Through her writing, product invention, masterclasses, and children’s advocacy, she works to build the emotional intelligence of kids by creating media and experiences that speak to them in a way they not only understand, but love. Renee is also the co-author of New York Times bestselling book, Superpowered (https://amzn.to/3cDOJT1), a groundbreaking book that every parent needs, not just for their kids, but for themselves, too.You can find Renee Jain at:Website : https://gozen.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/gozenlove/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today, Rini Jain, started into her career as a tech entrepreneur who secretly suffered with her own sometimes dizzying and even paralyzing anxiety, rising to the level of straight up panic. One day a panic attack led her to completely step back and re-examine her life and to seek help and begin to acquire the skills and understanding to live with more ease. It was transformative for her, but along the way, something she never expected began to happen. She began wondering why every child doesn't learn those same skills early in life so that they can live with more ease and joy because she knew that if she

had learned it decades earlier, her life would have been profoundly better. Solving that problem, it kind of became her driving cause. Rini earned a master's in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and founded her own ed tech company, GoZen, to help a new generation of kids and parents and therapists. She's a recognized pioneer in marrying technology and child psychology in this really unique approach that nurtures the hearts and minds of kids. And through her writing, product invention, masterclasses, and children's advocacy, she works to build the emotional intelligence of kids by creating media and experiences that speak to them in a way they

not only understand, but also really love and want to engage with. Rini is also the co-author of New York Times bestselling book, Superpowered, which is this really cool groundbreaking book that every parent needs, not just for their kids, but for themselves too. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. I love what you have been up to. Thank you. And what you're bringing to the world on so many different levels. As a parent, I love it.

As a former kid, and arguably maybe not former anymore, still persistently never having quite matured. And as a parent, the value is just extraordinary to me. I know that you have described yourself as a kid, as being an anxious kid. Tell me more about that. I'm curious how that showed up in your life when you were young. In every way possible. It infiltrated every part of my life. Anxiety often does. It becomes sort of like a blob. I'm aging myself. That was a movie where this blob kept growing. The first memory I have of being really worried was worrying about a robber coming into the house. I really thought, even though we had never had a break-in, we lived in

a secure neighborhood, we had an alarm system, I just thought someone was going to break in. And so I kept begging my parents to sleep with what I thought was a weapon, was my brother's plastic wiffle ball bat. And my mom is like, why do you need a plastic bat? Just in case the robber comes in, to worrying about who I was going to sit with on the bus, to worrying about my future, frankly. I mean, at the ripe old age of five or six, right? What am I going to do when I grow up? And I just consistently felt like I was asking the question, what if? And I was not getting a satisfactory answer. What if this happens, essentially, and I can't handle it? And my parents are amazing. To this day, amazing, compassionate, loving, supportive. I think their greatest flaw is probably overbearing love, honestly. But the best that they could give me was what they knew, which was to say,

trust me, you're going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. So yeah, so that anxiety pervaded my life for a long time. And I grew up in the 80s. I was a huge Star Wars fan, massive. And it came to the point, I think it was maybe like eight or nine years old. And I said, I'm just going to build this force shield around me, right? Sort of an emotional force shield. And then I won't be hurt because I won't let those feelings in, the worried feelings in. And every time someone asks me what's going on with me, I'm just going to say I'm fine. Because I saw that my parents were suffering too. They didn't know how to help, so they felt helpless. So every time my mom would ask, so what's going on? Are you okay? How's it going?

What's going on with the worry? I'm fine. They thought I phased out of it. I'm fine. I'm fine. But the amazing thing, now I know from the research, but of course, I didn't know then about shutting off a part of your humanity really, is that you can't get rid of the dark stuff and not get rid of the light stuff. I essentially became an emotional stoic. I literally didn't know how to feel. And yeah, so those are my memories of growing up as an anxious child. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. And the story you're telling about your childhood is the story that I think millions and millions and millions of kids are still telling about their childhood and living to this day, especially around that notion.

It's kind of fascinating to me, the notion of where something clicked in your mind where you were taking in media and then it planted the seed of like, huh, I have this concept now of I'm just going to put up a shield and then I'll be, quote, safe. But it keeps you safe from, temporarily safe from the bad feelings. But like you said, it also cuts all the highs. It cuts all the feelings, the full diversity of it, which becomes just a brutally hard way to live. A very hard way to live. A very hard way to live. I mean, I even knew from a young age, I started to believe that I was failing at life because my parents would say to

me with love and great intention, we just want you to be what? Happy. And I was like, something is wrong with me. I'm broken. I don't know how to get to this happy place. Where is it? Why does everyone else seem to be able to get there, but not me? And so I'm just going to fake it. I'm just going to feign, put a smile on my face and say, everything is okay. And I kept going like that. I kept going like that and going like that, honestly, until I was, I can remember it. It was 24. I was in a very bad relationship. It was just a relationship.

It wasn't going well. And I was going through a breakup. And I had already graduated from college. I had already started my own business. And I was standing in my office, went to the bathroom and fell to the floor. And I literally started, I thought it was a heart attack. I was clutching my chest, gasping for air. I drove myself to the ER and I was telling the doctor, I'm having a heart attack. And he looks at me and he's like, how

old are you? And I said, I'm 24. And he's like, okay, come in here, ran these tests. And he said, you had a massive panic attack. And that was, you know, you have these moments of clarity in your life. That was the moment where I said, I need to change my life. I have been living like this for years. And it was such a blessing that I ended up in therapy for the first time. I don't even know if my parents had the resources when we were growing up, if they would have put me in. We didn't. But if they did, if they would have put me in therapy, it wasn't really a thing I think that would have crossed their radar. But I ended up there and I'm lying on the sofa. This is total caricature of being in therapy, lying on the sofa, therapist with his clipboard. And you know what he's teaching me? He's literally teaching me how to feel my feelings. Do you recognize that feeling? That's sadness. Do you recognize that? That's joy. I didn't know how to feel. And so I sat up in his office, this is like the third session, and I said to him, oh my goodness, you are changing my life. However,

why didn't I learn this when I was eight? Yeah, hi, do you have a time machine? Because I could have learned this when I was six, seven, eight years old, as every child can. They are incredibly sophisticated, more than we give them credit for. So it was that kind of point in time where I decided I need to learn as much as I can about therapy, about psychology, about working with kids. And I sort of changed the trajectory of what I was doing in order to create programs to help kids, the kid that I was. Yeah. I mean, that awakening is so powerful. And then I would imagine there's also a certain amount of remorse because you're kind of like, wait, so eight to 24, that's a lot of years that are kind of quote lost and it didn't have to be

that way. But it sounds like there could be a lot of different responses to that. For some people, it could, I imagine, actually put them into a deeper spin and then start to mourn the loss and go into a grief cycle. But for you, something in you decided to harness that, to say, okay, it is what it is for me. I'm doing what I need to do now. But what can I do to help every other six, seven, eight-year-old kid not lose those 16 years of their lives or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 as so many adults don't have any of these skills too? I'm curious about something else. You mentioned, and I know I've heard you say this before, you sort of come from a lineage of entrepreneurs

in your family. The thing that you were doing when you got out of school, you step into the world of tech entrepreneurship, which is notoriously loaded with high stakes, uncertainty, perpetual, even on the most skill equipped person on the planet, perpetual high stakes uncertainty that can be kind of crushing. And you had seen, you know, a family sort of like of entrepreneurs who, as you just shared, you know, like maybe didn't have the resources, even if they were able to identify therapy, it would be really valuable.

Yet you, something in your head, as much as you were moving through all this, still said, this is the space that I want to step into as my first move out into the professional world. I'm curious about that. Yeah, I love that question. And I think in that question is this belief that I was making choices, right, at that point in time. And really what I was doing up until that point was following a roadmap. Some of it given to me by culture. My parents are Indian immigrants. Some of it was my perception of what I thought I should do, quote unquote. But yes, as you mentioned, I came from a long line of

entrepreneurs, my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather, my, you know, and brothers and cousins, and I have lots of business people in the family. So I literally thought I was supposed to go to school, you know, get the good grades, graduate, start a business, find a mate, have my 2.2 kids, and happiness. I thought that there was a roadmap to getting to where I was supposed to be. And I completely ignored who I was, right? So I woke up from that ground at age 24, not living an authentic life whatsoever. And in fact, when I began to peel off those layers, oh, I don't want to be in the tech industry, right? I don't want to be with this person that I eventually ended up breaking up with. I don't want to be all of these things. But then was the big scary question. Well, who the hell am I?

All these years I've been living this life, I thought I was supposed to live, that I was doing things I thought I should be doing. And so it took me a good decade to reacquaint myself with, okay, yeah, this is Rini. This is, this is who I am. Yeah. I mean, again, such a common experience, I think for so many people, yeah. And I'm raising my hand. I think we've all gone through shorter and longer windows and, and sometimes reverted back to it even after we kind of quote, wake up or like, oh no, I'm going to go back to that other prescribed path. I remember, I have a past life in the yoga world. The first time I read a translation of the Bhagavad Gita,

and there's one line that has always stayed with me from that, which was, and it's a rough translation, of course, but it was something like far better to live your own life imperfectly than to live another's perfectly. And I go back to that so often when I feel if I'm struggling, I'm kind of like, huh, let's just check one box really quickly and see if this is part of the problem. Am I living my own path imperfectly now or am I actually trying to chase somebody else's because it just feels easier and the steps have already been laid out. And it's amazing how often I'm not able to answer that question in the way that I would like to, even at this point in my life, because the lore

of knowing what comes next, even if it's not your knowing, is just so tantalizing. Oh my goodness. It's amazing how we project forward thinking, oh, I'll have it all figured out in my 20s, in my 30s, in my 40s. It keeps getting pushed forward. I have come to embrace the idea that I will be a work in progress until the day I take my last breath. It just is. And I'm okay with that.

Yeah. I mean, what a blessing, actually, when you kind of look at it one way. You described that moment when you're 24 where the penny drops and it takes the form of a massive panic attack for you. And what it also sounds like is it's the penny dropping from your head into your heart. And when the heart becomes something that wakes up, you're not equipped to handle it. And I often wonder if that's sort of a different way to look at a panic attack. Yes.

Yes. That's amazing. It's interesting that you're not equipped to handle it. And also, for me in that moment, there was no going back. As you said, that line from the Bhagavad Gita, I almost probably would have lived with panic attack after panic attack after panic attack if I was walking in my authentic path. You know, I would have taken the pain essentially. But yeah, it's the interesting thing about panic attacks, technically speaking, I work with a lot of kids that experience them, is it is the most pure form of fear of fear, right? Fear of the fear itself, because your body is experiencing this fear response. And your conscious mind is afraid of what your body is doing. And so it perpetually keeps you there. But once you own

this idea that you're just having a response at the wrong time, you walk right through it. It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, when you can see it as a signal, right? Rather than project out what you think it means. Just see it as, okay, so this is telling me something. Let's figure this out. But terrifying in the moment. So that sends you, this moment kind of sends you in a profoundly different direction. And not only for your own context,

but also like you said, the realization that, but there are a lot of other kids out there who, it's not just me who missed this, but there are all these other kids. And I guess sends you back to school to a certain extent, because on the one hand, you're learning all these great skills from a therapist, but it seems like your brain says, I want to be on the other side of the couch. And then I want to decide how this gets put into the world because it's not out there in a way where maybe it's landing really well. You end up in a university, Pennsylvania, doing your master's

applied positive psych. I'm curious also about that choice because positive psych is this very discrete sort of approach within the much broader world of psychology. And it's gained a lot of ground over the last 10, 15 years. But I'm wondering whether when you had that awakening, you're like, okay, what is my next step here? And what body of knowledge do I want to know that will be most helpful? And who do I want to help? What pulled you in that direction? You know what really pulled me in that direction is looking back at my parents again, amazing, supportive, loving, but I really felt like they were just cheerleading and that never helped me, right? It never helped me when they gave me

the pats on the back and they told me I was awesome and everything was going to be okay. And I wanted to be able to give kids with something, give them something with more substance, give them something with some scientific rigor. And I was really attracted to this idea that you can study hope with the same rigor that you can study depression, right? You can run clinical trials and you can see what are the elements that create hope in someone's life, that create awe in someone's life, that create a quote unquote good life. And so I was so drawn to that. It was almost like I couldn't not go, you know, with the blessing of getting in. I'm like, I have to do this. I have to understand

how these studies are done, the people behind this. And as you've mentioned, you know, in the last 10 to 15 years, it has gained a lot of traction. But at this point in my life, what I started to do was really not bury my gut instinct anymore, you know, and there's been a lot of research done on gut instinct that there's actually a lot of research done on gut instinct that there's actually a lot of processing going on down there. Whatever the case, I started listening to what was coming out of my gut and it said loud and clear, listen, go to this program. Don't worry about the rest, follow the footsteps, go to the program. And so I did it. And it was amazing because I learned, you know, amongst many, many other things and meeting amazing people that one of the most amazing things that I learned

in the MAP program is that if you teach skills of resilience to kids before they're anxious, before they're depressed, before they're in the throes of some sort of mental health challenge, you can prevent it. I had never heard that before. I could not believe that this is something that's preventable. And what I know now from the work that I do in the research is that it's actually the only way that we're going to tip the trend of what's going on with our kids and the world. And so, yeah, my gut told me to go and it really has sort of unraveled this path that wouldn't have been there if I didn't. Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense to me. When you get out and you're sort of like at this

next precipice and you're thinking, okay, so I started my own thing. I'm unwinding and skill building in myself. I've now gone and done this incredible education where I really feel like a much stronger sense of understanding and mastery. And now it's time for me to turn around and step back out and build something new. And you know, you want to work with kids, which I think is also really kind of interesting. I'm curious how you decide, because you end up starting this company, this organization, Ghost Strengths, and then you do it in a really specific and very unique way. I think the average person would step out of that and say, okay, I'm going to start a private practice. I'm going to coach. I'm going to go and get my PhD and do this in a clinical setting or social work or whatever it may be.

But it seems like something in you then bridged the gap between that life that you had started and then exited from the new body of knowledge and said, oh, maybe these go together in a way where it all starts to make sense and I can be of service at scale. Yeah. I am, like many of us, just a product of all of my different experiences, right? And when I started GoStrengths and GoZen, this was coming out of my need as a child, and frankly, as an adult for my inner child. So what I thought about was, I thought about all those parents out there that are opening brilliant books, because there are so many amazing ones, honestly, parenting books, books on helping kids with anxiety. But what that requires is for you to be a very good student, right? You need to be able to read that and then translate it and implement it and make

it practical. And so what I was feeling like, what would I have wanted as a kid is to learn directly. It's not about cutting out the therapist or the parent or any kind of middleman, but it's about trust that kids can learn these skills if we meet them where they're at. And so for me, coming out of that program, it was just, it's kind of one of those things where, and I say this without ego whatsoever, it was obvious to me. I'm like, oh, let's wrap it up for them in a way that it will be engaging for them. So most of our programming rolls out in animated format and in some sort of game format. So kids are engaged. Now I can't really compete with like Fortnite and the other games that are out there as any educational software company suffers like this kind of thing. But what I can

do is teach you basic skills of resilience in a way that is going to engage you, make you laugh, hopefully. Why is this very serious thing that we're going through, why do we have to be so serious about it? I love to laugh. I love to laugh, have other people make me laugh, and I love to make people laugh. So there's a lot of humor involved as well. But yeah, it was kind of clear, very clear to me that I wanted to teach directly to kids. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

The sense of mission behind it is really powerful. But also this notion that you made an assumption that I think a lot of people don't, which is that kids can get this. I think a lot of people would look at kids, especially younger kids, like under 10 years old, and like, not yet. Or we have to figure out a way to just kind of get them to a place where they're really capable of understanding the concepts, maybe a little later in adolescence, and then really teach them the skills that we know legitimately work, where they can build a practice. But something you kind of said, no, kids are fully actually capable of operating from the youngest age. And I'm curious whether for you that was instinct or whether you had seen the research up until that moment. It was instinct, but I think the verification came when we had kids

writing into us with suggestions, which is so amazing because I'm going on instinct. At this point, I'm an adult and I definitely didn't do it the way they would teach you to do it in business school, which is test the waters and build some pilots and put it out there. I did a whole bunch of building. I built it and hope they would come. And I sent it out to schools. I sent it out to a bunch of educators, you know, the first batch of animations. And we had kids watching and responding saying, yeah, this is amazing. And, you know, I think this character could do this, and I think this could happen. And we realized that these kids are going to make the best teachers for us. We incorporate so much feedback that we get from kids, that we get from letters. Sometimes they're sending in scripts themselves,

which is also solidifying the learning for them. So yeah, it was definitely an instinct. And then it was cemented when that kind of feedback started to come in. How amazing to know that even in your 1.0 version of these videos that you're sending out, kids are not only engaged, but they're so invested that they want to write you back and actually say like, oh, I want to help make this better because it's going to help me more and it's going to help other kids if it lands this way or this way. I mean, I'm wondering what the feeling was for you when you start to get those notes from young kids having just worked so hard and created on largely just a really big guess, a gamble. And then all of a

sudden kids are writing back to you. I mean, what does that feel like for you? I'm going on 10 years of doing this. And I had a call this morning with a mom whose daughter has been using the program. And she said to me that this is the first thing that's clicked for her. And that she actually had been in therapy before she started watching any of the animations. And that she went to her therapist for her session and started to explain the brain to her therapist and how it works and that there's a character in the brain named Whittle the

Warrior and another character. And as she's telling me, as 10 years in getting that kind of feedback, I have goosebumps and tears every single time. No fail. Because I cannot help again, but think back to how this would have changed the trajectory of my life. that a child is now armed with the skills because it doesn't matter where you are in your life, right? It doesn't matter if your child, if you believe they have a disorder or if they don't, or if they have a label or if they're not. At some point, every one of us is facing a challenge, right? And frankly, we want our kids to face challenges, right? We don't want to knock them all down for them. That now this child knows that they have the inner resources to cope because a lot of anxiety and a lot of what we're seeing in our kids is that they have the tools inside of them, right? They have the strength inside of them.

They just don't remember that it's there. It just needs to be activated. So how do I feel? It really can't compare. There is a warmth. It's like to be activated. So how do I feel? It really can't compare. There is a warmth. It's like a glowing inside. I almost feel like ET. If you remember how ET used to glow from the inside, that's me. Like ET. Yeah. I love that. Let's talk a little bit about, let's get a little bit granular with some of the work that you're actually doing, because I think it's super relevant to the moment that we're in, both for kids and for adults, and not just for parents, but for just adults in general, because what we're talking about here is in the context of kids. But as we've kind of shared, most adults haven't activated these skills either. And I think maybe

an interesting, and this is something you kind of referenced. When you were a kid, your parents would, that classic phrase, I just want you to be happy. And I think a lot of us feel that same way about our own lives and our kids' lives, not realizing the burden and the expectation that it places. And it feels like it's based on this myth that we only want to, you know, a good life is a life that only experiences like a certain set of emotions and avoids the others. But that's not, in fact, the reality at all. It's not the reality, and it's also not scientifically possible, right? Because emotions actually are temporary. They only last for 60 to 90 seconds in like their most potent form, right? You can experience them over and over again. But I actually think to get granular, we need to go,

everybody needs an emotions 101 course. I needed it, right? We need to go back and understand the nature of feeling. Because when we say, I want my child to be happy, or I am, right, we attach our identity to something. How can that be? Have you ever been happy forever? Like, does one feeling ever last forever? The way a feeling is supposed, I tell them it's like a text message to your soul. Okay. It is sending you a message. It's going inside your body and you need to, you need to be mindful and locate where it is and listen to what it's saying to you. And then listen, and then you can take action after that. Okay. But every emotion has a message to send. You can ignore the message. It's not your master. You don't have to follow, right? But you need to be able to listen. So one of the things that I think has been really eye-opening for parents and for kids when they're starting to do this work is to realize that we don't need to demonize

any emotion. In fact, maybe there are no light and dark emotions. Maybe they're just all pieces of communication, right? Maybe that is the way that we need to reorient ourselves. So then it becomes not about getting rid of the anxiety. It becomes about changing our relationship with it. And that's the work. Yeah. Accepting, like just bringing in the full spectrum. I remember first hearing the term emodiversity and it kind of just liked it. So it stuck with me.

It's a cool term. Great thing to drop in conversations at cocktail parties. And then seeing research attached to the concept, the concept that we're not looking for to be emotionally monogamous to a single emotion, but the people who report that they are in fact living the most rewarding, the most fulfilling, the best lives, subjectively well, are the ones who don't actually say, I'm just constantly feeling happy stuff. But they're actually the ones that report that they are feeling regularly the full spectrum of emotions from joy to sorrow to anger to everything, which I think for a lot of people may be a little

counterintuitive. It's sort of like, so wait, to really do this thing called life, we want more of both the good, and I'm going to use those labels, the good and the bad, because that's the way we frame them. But first the good and the bad, but also then maybe there is no good and bad. We just want the full spectrum of feelings. And that even the stuff that doesn't make us feel good in the moment is a really, really important thing in the stew of our lives. Absolutely. If you're a really kind of science-y person, you can think about it as data, right? You don't want to ignore part of the data that's coming in. It's information. And you certainly want to navigate through that information.

You might discard some of it, but you don't want to avoid it. And, you know, they have done amazing research on the pursuit of happiness. And it's interesting that, you know, as you probably know, Jonathan, the relentless pursuit of happiness often just leads to the opposite, right? And so what do we do? Like, what do we do as parents? Are we not supposed to tell our kids to be happy? Is that something that's not supposed to happen? You know, one of the things I'm doing with my kids, I have a six and a seven-year-old, is trying to teach them about meaning. Because I really, truly believe that the pursuit of a meaningful life allows for the ebb and flow of these emotions, the coming and the going,

and allows for challenge and suffering. It doesn't demonize it. And sometimes they're looking at me like, what? But I do it anyway. I do it anyway. I love that. I do it anyway. You go back to Viktor Frankl's work where it's really about can you create a frame that allows even suffering to become a source fuel for meaning. That doesn't mean that you've just been through something happy, but if it increases, if you can translate it into meaning, and meaning is a central part of what makes life really good and solid and worth living, then yeah, I mean, it creates a different context, right? Because it sort of like lets you let everything in and then just say, okay, the aspiration isn't to be a hundred percent happy all the time. If the aspiration is just to have a meaningful experience, how does this add to that? And if it does, if I can find a way to make it add to that, well, then that's cool. There's nothing to be avoided here or shamed for or beat up internally about. I love the word fuel that you used because that's how I feel on the days when I wake up.

And honestly, I am exhausted from being mama and entrepreneur, and I made a pandemic move across the country, and everything that everybody is going through, and the challenges that you face just as a human. And I still leap out of bed because I'm being driven. I have a fire in my belly based on the meaning of the work that I'm doing, frankly. It really is this different type of fuel that you feel. Yeah. I'm curious about something else also, something that's sort of like spinning in my head right

now. I love your input on it. One of the values of this full spectrum of emotion, in my mind, when I think about it in a different way, I feel like it adds the experience of contrast to life. So I wonder sometimes, well, if you're happy 100% of the time, how do you actually know that? Whereas I think the notion that you're sad or suffering or in pain, nobody wants to, nobody actively goes out and invites it. Well, some masochists do, right? But it's that contrasting experience that lets you actually understand when you are not that. And I wonder, I'm curious what you think

of that just as a notion. Yeah. It reminds me of, so my son is six. And he, I don't want to say, you know, it's so early, but he definitely shows signs of having a fixed mindset and being a perfectionist and wanting to be at the finish line all the time, as opposed to doing the work to get to the finish line, right? And I do this similar thought experiment with him where I say, but, you know, what if you went, so it was basketball the other day, they were in the gym, they're playing basketball, someone is really good at shooting hoops or something. And I said, what would be, he's actually said, that would be weird. And I said, yeah, that would be weird. And I feel like it is the same notion. Yes. Where's the distinction in anything if we're all the same or you're always feeling the same thing and that's always a particular sense of, let's say,

joy or cheeriness. And I actually think they've done some funny studies on how overly positive people can be considered annoying. Especially to New Yorkers. Especially to New Yorkers. Yeah. I lived in New York for a long time, so I have that. I totally understand that. But yeah, I do think there needs to be contrast. Now, do I think that you need to live a terribly difficult, challenging life in order to achieve and derive meaning? No. But I do think there needs to be an ebb and flow and you need to be able to distinguish. They did this funny study where they asked adults how many emotions they could name and the average adult can only name three,

you know, happiness, anger, and sadness. And there are hundreds of emotions, right? And there's nuance in them. So really in educating our kids about these different ones, they really start to understand what's going on in their inner terrain, in their inner world. I think it's so important that they're able to get that contrast. So not just feeling it, but also being able to name it, right? Like what's the difference between sadness and jealousy or guilt, for example? Where do you feel that differently in your body? Some of the work I do with kids, I ask them to provide a color, a temperature, a texture, you know, kids are amazingly intuitive too. They'll do it and they won't even question it. Whereas an adult would be like, what do you mean a texture? It's not food. Yeah. You get them before all the shields go up. And I think you made a nuanced point in there,

which I think is important to sort of reinforce, which is that even if contrast matters, it's not that you have to go out and actively seek things that will cause you pain or suffering or anger or rage. They're there. That's life. It's more about allowing yourself to know them, to feel them, just letting them in, just living every day. They're all there. The stimuli for the full spectrum of emotion experience is there all day, every day, but we block all the other stuff out to a certain extent, I think, because we don't, even if we have no idea that we're doing it. So it's about, I don't think it's about going and seeking these experiences. It's just about opening to more of what's actually going on around us. You brought up perfectionism and fixed mindset, which is just like everything we're talking

about, huge point of struggle for adults, for little kids. And especially, I think it's caused so much suffering these days in kids who start to reach the real sort of like academic years and the expectations that they impose on themselves. And so much of it is around social acceptance and performance and the assumptions about success and having to check every box to go to that next step. Talk to me more about the phenomenon of perfectionism. And also you brought in this notion of a Carol Dweck's work, fixed mindset. Take me down that road a little bit. Yeah. You know, perfectionism, I think, is so interesting. I work with a lot of kids who are perfectionists. And oftentimes their parents will say something like, my kid is a bit of a perfectionist, and so am I. Now, most people

don't come in and say, my kid's a little bit anxious with a smile on their face, right? They do with the perfectionism sometimes because there's a little hint of pride in there. Because the idea is that you should infer from this that, you know, they're just really ambitious and they're really goal-oriented and they were hard workers, dedicated. But what I see with kids who are perfectionists is they are very risk-averse. They are not okay showing up as they are in the process. They are not okay revealing their flaws. They are the ones that eventually stop raising their hands in class. They will not take the risk unless they are guaranteed it's not a risk anymore, if there's a guarantee. I'm not going to go out for the team unless I know I'm going to make it. I'm not going to go out and try out for this thing unless I know I'm going to make it in the play or do this thing or be able to perform. So what happens for these

kids is their life becomes about performance. Can I show you what I believe you perceive of me in this moment? So if that comes to answering a question, and so these kids actually become paralyzed, right? They just don't want to try anymore. And so they take the least amount of risk. And oh my goodness, do we, we need kids in this world that are going to take risks, right? We need innovators. We need kids to live their full life. We need them to uncover their potential. So this idea of perfectionism, I think we need to take a really deep look at it. I think what we're talking about when we have a little bit of pride in it is we're talking about mastery. We're talking about this idea of going deep, right?

And being able to focus and being able to do hard things. And I think that that is super important. But in order to do that, I don't know who it is that said, you know, anything that you start is hard in the beginning, right? Anything that you try is always hard in the beginning. So we need kids to begin to embrace that. Now, when it comes to mindsets in Carol Dweck's work, I think a very interesting thing has happened. So Carol Dweck is the professor from Stanford that really popularized the research studies behind fixed and growth mindset, right?

And having a growth mindset is this belief about your talents and your intelligence and your abilities, right? So you believe that you can affect those things. You believe that if you make an effort, you can change your brain. You have control. And kids with a fixed mindset believe, listen, I came into this world with a certain amount of smarts and a certain amount of ability, and that's all I have. So what I've seen in education and working with a lot of educators is that we're just scratching the surface when it comes to mindset. And I'll give you a little bit more on that. We talk a lot about language, right, when it comes to mindset with kids. We don't want kids to say, well, I can't do it. We want them to say, I can't do it

yet, right? Adding a yet at the end is really changing the language and changing our belief system. Well, I think that the word belief is key here, right? Because there's a few things happening. Growth mindset and any kind of mindset, resilient mindset, growth mindset, when we're talking about mindset, it's the way that you look at the world, right? It is a belief system. So if I believe, right, that I can do higher level calculus, that doesn't actually mean that I can sit down and all of a sudden do it. I think we're stuck on focusing on the beliefs. We haven't moved on to habits and cultivating the effort to do it. So we are just at the beginning. Having a growth mindset is really just an invitation for growth. It's not the actual growth itself. Now that I believe that

I can do it, I actually need to make an effort. I have to do some deliberate practice. I have to focus. I have to cultivate the habits to grow. So I think these things around perfectionism and mindset, they're fascinating to me. I think there's a lot of work to be done in this area when it comes to practical interventions to help kids, especially in an educational setting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I know I think it was about maybe a year or two ago, Carol Dweck came out herself and sort of like wrote this piece and saying, hey, listen, I love the fact that people are running with the original research that we've done. But look, there's still a lot of work to be done here. And there's a misapplication and a simplification of it that may actually be causing more harm than good, especially in the context of kids and education. And I thought that was actually really powerful when you see an original researcher come out and say, not so fast.

This is an evolving body of work and we're all still just learning because a lot of times you see the opposite happening. And it was powerful when I saw that. I love that. I love that she did that. I think Angela Duckworth did something similar with grit when she was like, don't grade grit. That is not what we want to do. We're still figuring it out.

And yes, I saw that work with Carol Dweck saying, this is a false growth mindset, right? Or this is a false understanding of what it is and not a good application of it. Some of it is about mistakes, where we got really excited about telling kids that like all mistakes are good, right? And I think what we mean is that a mistake can be really useful for growth, but that depends on what you do after the mistake. It's not the mistake itself that's the growth, right? It's like, okay, now how are you recovering from this mistake? Why did you make the mistake in the first place? Was it a careless error? Was it because it was out of your comfort zone? So, yeah. Yeah. I think it's sort of like deepening into that process is powerful. You

also brought up this notion of the role of beliefs in it. And I had this really funny reaction that I want to share with you. On the one hand, I completely agree. And then this other study popped into my head and I don't recall the reference for it, where I believe it was college students were given an exam and they were given a prime in the beginning of the exam. And the prime was something like, I want to tell you, you're about to take this test. But what I also need to tell you is that we have done this with a million other students before. And we know for a fact that women perform 20 points better than men on this test. And then the students would take the test. And in fact, that would be pretty close to the outcome. And then a new group of students came in and were given the

exact opposite instruction. They were told men perform 20 points higher. And that happened, which makes me really curious. On the one hand, we can't let these sort of false beliefs drive us and there have to be habits and practices. But on the other hand, we are so much more, what's the word I'm looking for? Manipulable by primes. And it's amazing to me the notion that beliefs alone can sometimes profoundly change actual capabilities, not in an exclusion, but I'm also, I have been amazed at how much, at the role that they play sometimes. I think that when you have confidence, right, to be able to display and exhibit your skillset, so whether that be giving a speech or taking a test, you know, and you're primed, that basically you have those resources inside, you probably have the practice already to show that. And so now you're not nervous, or you're not doubting yourself, and you're able to do that.

I think beliefs will only take us so far, right? Especially, especially, you know, if we think about just anything technical, you can't have the belief, for example, that you're able to do a surgery if you don't have the practical knowledge to do it, right? The belief will only take you so far. But yeah, it is amazing. I agree. Those studies are amazing. There are also mindset studies, like the one, Aaliyah Crum did a mindset study on these chambermaids. And she told one group of chambermaids in a hotel that the work that they were doing to clean up the hotel room was exercise. And she told another group that it was just, you know, the work that they had to do to work. And the one group that was told it was exercise, they ended up losing weight and losing

inches. And they had all these other metrics basically that showed improved health. So it is amazing that when you change your belief system, it can physiologically affect you. So they have shown that when you change your beliefs about the way that you look at stress, it changes the way that it reacts in your body. So I do think that beliefs are really important, but I think it's only scratching the surface or really, you know, having a particular belief is just the beginning and an invitation to grow. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. You know, it's sort of like they're all ingredients and no one is sort of like determinative. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era,

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Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. You know, perfectionism, I think, is this that that we hear about a whole lot but the other thing that that um i feel like is this thing that that you know it really was the beginning of our

conversation is anxiety and you know the notion that i think a lot of adults have anxiety and now anxiety is not just anxiety they're all sorts of different classifications. There's generalized and social and work-related, which on the one hand is cool because now we're learning more about it. On the other hand, it is a little bit horrifying because it's that pervasive that now we're actually sort of creating this ecosystem of anxiety. It's something that is touching down in adults' lives nonstop. And I think even more horrifying when we think about kids, really young kids are experiencing this.

And I guess, you know, as you brought up, you experienced this when you were really little too. So this isn't a new thing, but it feels like it is so much more part of the conversation. Is the problem getting worse or are we just becoming more attuned to it? Both. So the problem is getting worse and we are also becoming more attuned to it. And I do agree that there is a lot of categorization that's going on. But I think that the good news for us is that the process by which we can work on these different things are generally the same. The techniques can be generally the same. So whether this is bedtime anxiety or going to work anxiety or going to

school or social anxiety, they're all happening in different contexts. But if we dig underneath and see what's going on and we begin to have a dialogue with our anxiety, you know, we make it a character and we begin to talk to it, we see it saying a lot of the same things. Anxiety is notoriously consistent and inaccurate, you know? And so if we remember that, we're like, oh, hey, anxiety, there you are again. You're showing up in bed, you're showing up at work, you're showing up in school, you're showing up at my homework, you're showing up when I'm going. And so that gives us some power, right? We're like, we don't really care where it shows up, right? And also, it's okay that it shows up. Now, let's set the bar at a realistic place. We've talked about the fact that it's important to have these emotions. And anxiety is one of those emotions

that it's part of your humanity and it's okay to have. In fact, it can benefit us in certain ways. And as soon as kids hear that, even though if we're working in this wellness space, we might already know that because kids have never heard that before. Most kids that I work with are their jaws on the floor. You tell them, what do you mean? I don't have to get rid of it? I thought my mom put me in this program or brought me here to get rid of it. No, how could you get rid of it? It would be like cutting your leg off. You cannot get rid of it. It's part of being human. So, oh my goodness, the sigh of relief. It's part of being human. And okay, so it's showing up and, right? And I guess it's grounded in fundamentally

a shift in focus at the base where first we assume that we actually have a certain amount of power, maybe not complete control over every circumstance, but we do have power and that we do have the ability to move through things and to be resilient, to come back, to not just get taken down by them, but to move through them. So talk to me more about the notion of resilience and then maybe a little bit about how we start to think about building that in our kids and ourselves. Yeah. So, you know, if we had a goal for ourselves as parents, let's say to get fit, you know, this is our goal. And if you want to go talk to any guru, any fitness guru about getting fit, they would

probably talk to you about what you eat, right? What's in your body, what's going on in your body, how much you move, and probably how much you sleep, right? There's some ingredients that are vital to living a healthy life. It's the same thing with emotional fitness. There are certain tried and true techniques that if you're not using right now to teach your kids how to transform their stress and anxiety, I would say that you begin to implement. One of those is the personification of these challenging emotions, right? And I'm going to call them challenging if they've been a challenge for you. So many,

many people have seen the movie Inside Out. It won an Academy Award. And what they did in that movie is they personified different emotions, anger, joy, disgust, happiness. And so you can do the same thing with the big feeling that you're having, whether that be stress, anxiety, guilt, whatever it is. For a lot of kids and parents that I'm working with, it's anxiety. So I say to people, well, who's your anxiety character? Have you created them? Have you drawn them? And they're like, what? No, I haven't done that. And I'm like, that is the first step. Let's give this voice that's inside of you, that's trying to get your attention, a form. Let's give it form and let's stop ignoring it, right? Because what do we know from every piece of research, it's pretty undisputed,

is that you cannot suppress your feelings and you cannot suppress your thoughts. Suppression just makes it erupt. So let's stop suppressing it. So the first step is to give it a name, create a character. You can do this at any age. I don't care if you're five, if you're 95, you can do it at any age. And if you have a tween or a teen that's rolling their eyes at you, that's okay. They can find a in written format too. But this is a skill because what you can teach your kids are the things that anxiety is trying to help you with and the things that they're actually distorting, right? So anxiety tends to do some distortions. They call them cognitive distortions, right? They distort your thoughts and feelings in very predictable ways. So they'll exaggerate, right? Or sometimes they'll minimize. They'll repeat, especially. So if you ever have a thought going over your head over and over and over and over again, the anxiety loves to think about the future, right? So what if this happens

and what if that happens? And so again, it's really important to not try to quash it, to not say don't, you know, stop thinking about it and to engage in this relationship with it. And I can give, you know, any specific techniques, you know, in any of those different things that we talked about. But again, the first step is really creating a character that helps you form a relationship with your feelings. That makes so much sense to me, even though I never really think about doing that. But it landed with me in this really weird way. I have tinnitus in my head, so I hear a sound 24-7. And in the early days, I really, really struggled with it. It was taking me to a dark place. And I realized that just like anxiety or these other feelings, what I was trying to do was

stop hearing it 24-7. All I wanted to do was find ways to distract myself from this thing. And the unlock key was actually when I sort of created my own mindfulness slash exposure therapy type of practice, where instead of blocking it out, I made it my mantra in a sitting practice. And I sort of like, I gave it space. I let it in and I explored it. And I was like, oh, it's not actually one sound.

It's like this complex blend. It's like a little symphony that changes over time. I didn't name it as a character, but it was this idea of, okay, so if I can't push it out, what if I let it in and acquaint myself with it and learn how to tell a different story about it so I'm more at peace with it? And it was a process, but that it sounds very similar to what you're talking about. It was really transformative for me. Yeah, that's amazing. It really is. It can be transformational to sit down and be like,

I'm not going to ignore you anymore. I'm going to give you room to breathe. And in fact, I'm going to give you a space to have a conversation. This is such an important thing that we begin to understand because what this does in the creation of a character or just having conversation with our feelings is we start to realize that it's a part of us. And that again, it's not about changing this part of us, but changing our relationship with this part of us. And it gives us so much power in doing that. Yeah, I love that. One of the techniques that I know you reference fairly regularly following this sort of like opening move is something you call laddering. Tell me a little bit more about

that. Yeah. So, you know, one thing that anxiety does for us is, or it does to us rather, is it doesn't allow us to savor progress, right? It likes to forget the wins. And so laddering is a form of exposure. Like, Jonathan, you were talking about exposure therapy. It's a form of exposure where you take a big goal, you draw a ladder, right? So any kind of simple ladder, you can draw it on a piece of paper, and you have the rungs of the ladder. And at the top of the ladder, you put your big goal. So if you or your kids are experiencing social anxiety, for example, you can put at the top of the ladder, going to a party with new people, or meeting someone new might be at the top. And then each rung of the ladder is a little mini step that you take to expose yourself to your fear, frankly. You know, so maybe the first rung is something like making eye contact. And then maybe the second rung is making eye contact and saying hi. And you try to do each rung of the ladder. It pushes you past your comfort zone just a little

bit. And you do it for a few days until you're like, okay, that step's easy. Now I'm going to move on to the next step. An important part of this process as you're going up the ladder, as you're ascending, is to savor the progress that you made. We are terrible at savoring progress, especially if we tend to have perfectionistic tendencies. We're like, oh yeah, I haven't had any wins. So you need to celebrate the wins of each of those steps until you're able to get to the top. Now, whether you're experiencing anxiety regularly or not, if you're human, you have a goal that puts you out of your comfort zone. So you can use laddering for any kind of goal to set up these kind of mini goals on the way to that bigger goal. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.

As somebody who's definitely more on the introverted side of the social wiring thing. I found myself without even realizing it when I would go to uncomfortable social settings or like parties or stuff like that, I would end up in the kitchen. I would assign myself a role and kind of have a place to hide, but I was there. And that sort of like gave me space to start to be more comfortable and more comfortable and more comfortable. And to this day, I find in new situations, I inadvertently do this laddering thing. I'm like, what's like the step in? I'll get comfortable there and then I'll take the next step out. So I think it's something that sometimes we do even without realizing it because somehow we've tried it once and we felt that it kind of works. Absolutely. Yeah. The notion, we've been talking a lot about how this applies to kids. And I think also constantly referencing back to how it applies to us adults slash pseudo adults. And I think for

parents also, I wonder how you feel about the notion of modeling. Because it's one thing to tell your kids, here's a skill. It's one thing to give your kids a book. You have this beautiful book superpower and you have this incredible platform with hundreds of videos and amazing stories, and it's funny and humorous. But I wonder what the role of adults, whether it's for a child, a niece, a nephew, anyone else where you're looking to in some way, you have a hope that they may suffer less and experience the world with a more open heart and confidence in a nourishing way. That no matter what else we expose them to, if we are a meaningful person in their lives and we are not also modeling that behavior,

that's still a really big issue. Where do you land with that? I think that as role models in the lives of kids, and this is all of us, regardless of if you're a parent or not, you're an uncle, you're a kid, you are a relationship to some child in the world, that we need to model our humanity in a way that has boundaries, right? So we don't need to, in front of our kids, process all of our deepest fears and feelings and vomit everything out. I think there are limitations to what we need to process in front of our kids, process all of our deepest fears and feelings and vomit everything out. I think there are limitations to what we need to process in front of them, but I think it's so incredibly important that they see us working on ourselves. You don't need to build a ladder with them necessarily, but they may need to see that you're working on something

hard too, and that you are managing your relationship with your stress and anxiety as well. And that you need to say this explicitly out loud, because they don't get all the nuance. Sometimes they can't read all the cues and they can't mind read. Same with our partners, right? You know, whoever we may be with. So I think it's super important that if we're asking our kids to work on these things, that we are also showing them that we can work on these things. And I, you know, through the book Superpowered and the work that I've been doing at Gozen, I rarely have met someone who hasn't said to me, oh my goodness, I had to get my own copy, or this was for my inner child too. We've all had experiences and continue to have them.

So one of the things that really clicked for me when I grew up is, oh my goodness, my parents didn't have it all figured out. Oh, I totally thought that they did. And I think it's okay to show our kids that we're human. I think it's necessary. No, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think as parents often, or teachers, again, whatever the role is in the relationship, we often feel like we are protecting our kids by not showing them our own struggle,

our own work in progress, when in fact we sometimes are inadvertently setting an unattainable expectation that actually worsens the problem. Absolutely. I've heard so many times from so many different people, including my mom, love you mom, but if you're with someone like a spouse or a partner to have a united front in front of your kids. And I just think that the united front is often just a front, frankly, right? It's just a total front. I think that what can be important is to show them that you can have diverging views, that you can have conflict and difficult discussions, and that you can be respectful, and you can resolve things. And then if something does blow up that you can apologize

and you can reconnect. I think that's what's important. We need to show our kids, not just tell our kids. Yeah. We need to all be human with each other, which feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out in this container of the good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? What comes up for me is to know that you are whole and that you are enough and that you are doing the best that you can with what you have every moment of every day. and try to achieve something in order to fill ourselves in and feel whole when we came into the world whole. So just the notion that we are enough and that we are whole, that's what comes up for me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Actual results will vary.