High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 396: How to Be Positive in the Face of Adversity with Dr. Jonathan Aronoff, Therapist and Personal and Executive Coach

Episode Date: December 27, 2020

A Psychoanalyst, Certified Personal and Executive Coach, Sports Coach and Certified Group Fitness Instructor, Dr. Aronoff combines three decades of training and experience to help people rediscover and affirm the warrior within by regaining a sense of purpose, meaning, confidence, and determination to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. He believes that people are inherently driven to be masterful and successful. It is the warrior within that enables people to achieve this mastery and success. Yet, sometimes, life’s challenging moments and unexpected events get in the way and impede one’s drive and capacity to execute.   In his role over three decades as therapist or coach, he helps people recover from temporary setbacks and re-engage their inner warrior so they can regain their confidence, sharpen their skill set, identify a path forward, and get moving again.   In this episode, Jonathan and Cindra talk about: Why it’s difficult for us to be positive in the face of adversity, loss, grief, and COVID What “flipping the coin” means and how that is important right now How positive emotions enhance physical and mental health What humans are hardwired for The positivity of negative emotions, and the negativity of negative emotions HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/395 HOW TO ENTER THE PODCAST GIVEAWAY TO WIN $500 CASH: www.drcindra.com/giveaway FB COMMUNITY FOR THE HPM PODCAST: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2599776723457390/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong VISIT JONATHAN’S WEBSITE: https://jonathanaronoff.com/ Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901

Hey, my name is Cindra Campoff and I'm a small-town Minnesota gal, Minnesota nice as we like to say it, who followed her big dreams. I spent the last four years working as a mental coach for the Minnesota Vikings, working one-on-one with the players. I wrote a best-selling book about the mindset of the world's best and I'm a keynote speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. And I am obsessed with showing you exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your goals and dreams. So I'm over here following my big dreams and I'm here to inspire you and practically show you how to do the same. And you know, when I'm not working, you'll find me playing Ms. Pac-Man.

Yes, the 1980s game Ms. Pac-Man. So take your notepad out, buckle up, and let's go. This is the high performance mindset. Welcome to episode 395 with Dr. Jonathan Arnoff. This is your host, Dr. Cendra K Campoff. Thank you so much for joining me here today on the podcast. And if you know that mastering your mindset is essential to your success, then you are in the right place. And I'm really excited today to bring to you an interview with Dr. Jonathan Arnoff. I'm taking a positive psychology class with Dr. Arnoff, and I wanted to feature him on the podcast because I've learned so much from him already. We're about three-fourths through the course, and I've loved every class

with him, and I know that you will enjoy this episode too, which is really about staying positive in the face of adversity and how to flip the coin. Now, Dr. Jonathan Arnoff is a psychoanalyst, a personal and executive coach, as well as a sports coach. And he combines three decades of training and experience to really help people rediscover and affirm the warrior within them by regaining a sense of purpose, meaning, confidence, and determination to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. He believes that people are inherently driven to be masterful and successful, and it is the warrior within that enables people to achieve mastery and success. Yet sometimes life's challenging moments and unexpected events get in the way of our drive and ability to execute.

And that's really what we're talking about in this episode today. And in this episode, Jonathan and I talk about why it's difficult for us to be positive in the face of adversity, loss, grief, or even during this time period of COVID. We talk about what flipping the coin means and how to actually flip the coin and why that's so important right now. We discuss how positive emotions enhance physical and mental health, what humans are really hardwired for, and we also talk about the positivity of negative emotions and the negativity of negative emotions. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you.

I'm on Instagram at cindracampoff and Twitter at mentally underscore strong. We'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed today's episode, take a screenshot and share it with a friend. Share it with somebody who needs this message today. Without further ado, let's bring on Dr. Arnoff. Dr. Arnoff, I'm so excited to have you here

on the High Performance Mindset Podcast. I think you're a perfect guest for what we're going to be talking about today and just for the podcast in general. So thank you so much for joining me this morning. Well, you're welcome. It's a real pleasure. It's an honor. I think one of the things I've really enjoyed is taking your class on positive psychology. I've been doing coaching for a long time, but wanted to be official and get an executive

coaching certificate. So joined the College of Executive Coaching in April, and I've been taking your class and I'm absolutely loving it. So yeah. And one of the things to get started with is just tell me, telling everyone who's listening, tell us a little bit about your passion and what you're doing right now. So I'm a clinical psychologist. I became a board certified psychoanalyst in my training after I got my master's of science in experimental psychology. I then went into clinical psychology and got my Ph.D. And I had to make a decision between whether I was going to go to my pre-doc internship in neuroscience or I was going to go into psychoanalysis and where I had was born and raised in a small town Stockbridge Massachusetts only 3,000 people in that little town in the western part of the state there was a

renowned psychoanalytic hospital there Austin Rick Center and Eric Erickson who was Freud's Sigmund Freud's protege, was working there. And he influenced me as a child and growing up to become a psychoanalyst. So it's sort of hard to turn down someone who had this, looked like Einstein, had white hair, and he just looked so impressive. And so I was at that choice point. Do I do my pre-doc internship in neuroscience, got accepted to my pre-doc internship in Portland, Oregon, or I was going to go to Harvard or Yale to do my psychoanalytic training, my internship in psychoanalysis. So I chose the psychoanalysis and I ended up getting a job at the hospital

that Eric Erickson was working at. And then I applied to Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and eventually became a psychoanalyst. My passion really underneath all this was neuroscience. And the reason why is because it made sense. Even Sigmund Freud said, remember constitution first, but how the mind and the body work really is the foundation of everything we do. But I, I was, you know, I sort of got hooked into the psychoanalytic thinking. And at that time we're talking about the eighties, the nineties.

And that was still, still on the, on the sort of riding the wave of excitement of psychoanalysis but through that i was becoming more and more aware of the research on on the neuroscience how the mind and body really affect the the uh our feelings and our behaviors and our thoughts so my i then became a fitness trainer on the side and i was a high school coach in soccer. I played semi-pro soccer for six, maybe 10 years. And I just kept getting drawn back to the body and the mind and what makes it work. So I'm a fitness trainer at Caney Ranch Health Spa, which is near where I work. And I decided I wanted to apply some of the practical things I'd learned.

So I too became a certified coach at the College of Executive Coaching in 2003. And Dr. Auerbach, who's the CEO and the president of the College of Executive Coaching, asked me to teach positive psychology co-teach it in 2008 and that was the beginning of a shift for me that was quite profound passion for me is working with people being with people I being with people. I am an identical twin. My identical twin brother is a famous musician. He's a rock and roll star. He was a drummer for John Mellencamp for 15 years. And

he's sort of one of those hall of famers. And he's in LA. And I think my whole experience in life is through the lens of being an identical twin. And so it's always been sort of a passion for me to be able to work with people, whether it's at the individual level or whether it's a team level, to bring out the most and the best in people. And so I've devoted my life to being able to teach and to be able to work with people and help them reach the highest level of their potential. And that's simply what you know. It's your ability as a teacher to be able to get the most out of people. And so that would be the answer to where's my passion.

Perfect. So you started teaching positive psychology with the College of Executive Coaching, I think 12 years ago. Yes, correct. People who are listening, tell us in your perspective, what positive psychology is. And maybe let's just get started there. Sure. So the positive psychology, the grandfather of psychology was Donald O'Clifton, and he was doing his dissertation. And he decided to focus on what makes people good at what they do. So he started focusing on instead of the traditional model of what's a person's symptoms, what's their diagnosis, and what's the treatment, follow-up, the traditional medical model, he wanted to focus on what are a person's talents and then maximize those talents in their life. And particularly, this was useful when it came to corporations organizations and businesses but it was martin seligman in 1998 he became the president of the american psychological association and he made his

mission and that was his his his um his uh his commitment was to study what makes people happy. He's considered the father of positive psychology. Now, both of these researchers and psychologists built their ideas, particularly Mark Seligman, on 5,000 years of writings and philosophies of what makes people across all cultures and across time. He read all the great writings in philosophy and also Bibles and people who preached the essence of what meant to be a good person or a happy person. And he came up with six virtues and then eventually operationalized those six virtues into character strengths. So Donald Clifton focused on,

eventually came up with 36 talents and Martin Seligman came up with 24 character strengths. This started this, the trend of positive psychology as we know it today. And Martin Seligman and his colleagues and the subsequent researchers and theorists developed and advanced the whole idea of positive psychology, including emotions. And now I teach neuroscience of positive psychology, specifically focusing on what constitutes change and growth. But many others, like Sonia Vybomirsky does the studies of happiness, and Barbara Fredrickson's books that have a positive and negative ratio of emotions and there are many others who have done a lot of research in that

area and I think for myself positive psychology is really about finding a way to look at positive elements of life and be able to enhance them. Now, I have a certain take on it or a certain spin, as you know, taking my class, which is, and I coined the phrase, flipping the coin. And the whole idea of this is that positivity, to me, has no meaning whatsoever unless you are able to look at the negative side or elements of life. Now people ask me, why would you want to do that? And the answer is that because it's real. The brain is first and foremost hardwired to be sensitive and hypervigilant to danger, to look at what is potentially a threat to the well-being and the safety, the preservation of the person.

The brain is over 600 million years old in terms of evolution, 600 million years. That brain in the human being has survived in relation to the earth. Okay. So we sometimes have lost sight of the fact that technology and our ability to use the sort of the upper part of our brain, the neocortex, to develop all sorts of scientific discoveries and to advance ourselves so that we are not spending 99% of our time being safe, finding food, clothing, and shelter. We're not following the food source. Most of the time, we're sort of tribalistic. Eventually, we became agriculturists, which only lasted for approximately 20,000 years. And then we went

into the industrial revolution and now we're in the information age and that's a transition to something new. Probably COVID has propelled us to the next level as well. But the idea is that self-preservation was very much the cornerstone of our brain. And the brains that were handed down generation to generation, first and foremost, were able to keep a sharp eye on the danger of life. So what it really is about what we're talking about is the negativity, the negative aspects, the threatening aspects of life. And so the brain is hardwired to be hypervigilant to negativity or the things that can be potentially negative. So positivity is going to be on the other side of the coin. Okay.

And many researchers like Barbara Fredrickson have written about the fact that negativity sticks to us like glue. Okay. And positivity has a tendency to sort of drift off like mist. It doesn't stay with us. And I think part of the reason is that we have evolved to be very focused on negativity and it becomes hardwired in our neuronal networks. It becomes part of our brain circuitry,

fueled by neurotransmitters and hormones so that we do not put ourselves in danger. And people sometimes say to me when they, I'm so pessimistic, I'm so negative. How can you stand being with me? No one wants to be around me. And I said, yeah, but you would be great if you're an EMT or if you're on the, you know, a firefighter, I want you with me because you'd be the one that would say, look out for this, watch out for that.

You would keep the team safe, okay? Maybe it's not as much fun being a pessimistic person, but you have a valuable contribution to life. Now that's a perfect example of my flipping the coin. Let me say one more thing, a metaphor I use. People ask me, why do you have negativity as part of this equation? I said, remember the story of Petereter pan he cut off his shadow well that's the negative side of the coin the tail side of

the coin he tried to peter pan wanted to live in a life where he thought you could escape the negativity of growing up getting old uh we all die. That's a negative aspect of life. And so you can't cut our shadows off if we're going to be realistic. So that negativity is as important to our positivity as positivity is important to our negativity. So here's how I look at flipping the coin. Anytime something negative comes up in my mind or I think about it or I'm worried about it, I say, thank you, universe. Thank you, God, if you're religious, for giving me the opportunity to become aware of the negative aspects of life so that I can flip the coin and appreciate the positive. So the negative aspects of life give you an opportunity to practice seeing the reality of life.

I call it boots on the ground, ground zero. So that then it gives you a chance to practice being positive. If you can see negative in what it is, look in the mirror and say, this is how I feel today. Is this a good day to live or is this a good day to live? Or is this a good day to throw in the chips? I said, then at least you say, no, I want to live for, then the list comes, the things that you want to do, the positive aspects of your life. You embrace life in an honest way with integrity, and then you go out and pursue it. The same thing when I work with athletes. I say the same thing.

With my athletic teams, I'll lose a game. I tell them, the players, to go and thank the other team for giving them the opportunity to have a chance to know what you have to work on, what we have to work on to get better. A win is like Disney World. It's just our birthday. You're having a great time. Okay. It's a great feeling, but you don't learn from that. So a loss or a negative moment is a wonderful opportunity to ask yourself, what can I do to enhance myself,

tell myself to the next level? How can I be better than I was yesterday? How can I become the best I possibly can given who I am? And so flipping the coin is a way of honoring both sides of positivity, negativity combination. So good, Jonathan. And I'm, but a few things that I want to highlight, specifically that you were talking about, that our brain is over 600 million years old. So it's really programmed for the negativity and strive to survive. I really also like the flipping the coin because it's not like you're saying, hey, just be positive. You're acknowledging and acknowledging the ways that you can grow from the negative. And I think that's an important distinction that sometimes people think, Oh, I'm just okay. Positive psychology might just be like, just be, just be positive, ignoring the difficulty. It's really like flipping the coin, reframing the difficulty.

So you can see ways that you can grow and learn. Exactly. And, you know, positive psychology, if, if, if, if you can get a bad rap, if people are just thinking, it's just this like fluff and it's just going to be, if I just think positive, I'm going to be happy. I'm going to be, uh, live a good life. That's just not, that's not grounded in reality. And, you know, so the negativity or the negative aspects of positivity is when you are discounting the truth about your, what, what reality is. And I'll go a little bit into that with regard to the neuroscience of it okay and the negativity of um or the positivity of negativity is that negativity reminds you of who you are where you are what reality is how your mind and your body are feeling experiencing the world

so that you can then do something about it that's flipping the coin so you know you could say something as it sounds a little ridiculous thank you very much for a stomach for making me aware that my stomach hurts because i don't have any food flipping the coin would be because now i know i need to attend to my need for food and get a decent meal. So going back then to the body is that our body is the internal workings of the body is constantly registering information from what's outside the body and the mind and what's inside the body and the mind and what's inside the body and the mind. And the term that's used homeostasis is to make sure that the body is constantly trying to reach a point of balance.

While minds need to do the same thing, we need to find a way to create a certain sense of balance. I've identified eight areas of life or well-being and those eight areas and the eight areas I use to borrow some other people's as well is health, which is psychological and physical, relationships, and I'll say a little more about relationships why that's so important okay it's the self-preservation your career is number three number four is your home life number five is community number six is your financial resources and number seven is your relationship to nature which we have become so alienated from because of our technology you can amazon this you can uber that you can text anything you want it used to be that we were spending most of our time trying to just follow the food source and be safe uh and and away from predators um and the last one is

spirituality and um so the idea is that you, in an effort to try to balance your life, your mind has to make choices. Your body is taking care of itself and it's finding a way to make sure the chemistry is balanced. But when we talk about positive psychology from the position of homeostasis, you're looking at life in these eight areas. What do I need to do to maximize my performance and my health so that I can be, live as, as Seligman would say, you know, the thriving life to enhance your life to its maximum. Now, if you notice in my saying this, at no point do I ignore the aspect, the ground floor of negativity, that it's very much a part of what allows us to be honest and truthful about our positivity. And so when people talk about being motivated, driven, perseverance,

and like in your book, Brett, there's an element of what I'm saying that applies. You know, to have the perseverance and have the passion to stay in the game, to just never quit, never give up, and to keep going also requires the ability to appreciate the struggle. Appreciate it. Your negativity is what gives you the opportunity to practice flipping the coin. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to practice a positive element of being more successful this moment or today than I was yesterday. And that does foster perseverance and it does enhance passion, but it also gives you a chance to practice this flipping the coin constantly. And I do believe that it sort of parallels with this notion of homeostasis, of this balance. Trying to actually maximize your psychological well-being at every moment of your life.

And we can get very distracted. People can get very distracted because, you know, if you're not in a state of panic around self-preservation issues, people sometimes get overly excited about the fun things in life, whether it's food, whether it's alcohol, substances, whether it's sex, whether it's partying or whether it's having fun and you can get out of sync and out of line. You're trying to get away from the negativity, but at a cost. What you hope to get to is a place of calmness, centeredness, and with a clear mind about directing your intensity and your drive and your passion and your perseverance to goals that are going to enhance your well-being. Yeah, excellent. Well, I think what you said just now is really powerful that, you know, we can appreciate the struggle, the negativity. And because it gives us this ability to flip the coin.

And I'm thinking about right now during this time period of COVID, Dr. Arnoff, and I'm thinking about, I mean, for me, my son did have COVID. He was okay. And, you know, but it impacted my home, but also obviously impacted my work. And we're not socializing here in Minnesota. There's pretty much like a stay-at-home kind of order. So I think right now it's really difficult for people maybe to flip the coin and they're overcome with negativity even more. So what advice would you give people, particularly during this time period of COVID? It's a really good point because first of all, COVID will activate if people are open and aware. It does trigger natural instinct. The mind is first and foremost

oriented around self-preservation. So the metaphor that I would use with COVID, it's like a predator, like a lion or a tiger that's in the woods coming towards you. The thing about COVID also is that we don't really quite understand how it's affecting us, who gets it, how long. I do work a percentage of my week in nursing homes, so I do know what the front line, I am I am a frontline worker and I can see who's getting it and who isn't. And it's so unpredictable, even though you, there are certain patients who have, you know, have comorbidity factors. And so they're higher risk, but some people who have higher risk are getting it and healing, recovering in their 80s other people

are younger significantly younger are getting it in a week or dying and we're still not clear so that creates a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear okay so that's a natural response other people are going to try to say minimize it deny that it's as powerful as it is. That's a way of adapting to a threat to your well-being. Some people just will try to push it aside. And in my mind, if you push it aside too much without embracing it, you are not grounded in reality. There isn't boots on the ground.

You are not grounded in reality. There isn't boots on the ground. We're not at ground zero. It's very important to be able to get to a place where you are mindful or aware of the significance and the validity and the truth of this illness. That over the course of 600 million years, the species has been bombarded by these illnesses over and over again. Fortunately, we are at a point now where with our technology and our science, we have skills and abilities to be able to manage illness like this.

Now, what has happened to all of us is it's really forced us to get to ground zero. Some people have the resources to manage the psychological and the emotional stress, negativity of this experience. I'm fortunate. I'm a doctor and I have a thriving practice, but how many people are frontliners or people who cannot afford to continue to live a lifestyle

where they're struggling anyway? How many people are faced with having to decide, do I work or do I stay home with my child? How many people have financially destitute because of this? That's a very having to decide do I work or do I stay home with my child? How many people have financially destitute because of this? That's a very serious situation. And so the question is, how do you find positivity in a situation like that? Okay. And so here's what I would say.

You have a choice. You have a choice. The reality is exactly what you're saying to me. I'm not denying it. And I would say to you, your negative experience is real. And it's activating one of the three primary mental operations that the brain is wired to do to preserve the self. And so if you're anxious and panic, you are completely true to your physiology and how you are wired to operate. Okay. The question is, what are we doing? Because it can bring you down and through natural selection, some people are going to make it some people aren't physically and psychologically so what i would say is okay this reminds me a little bit of the sort of nelson mandela story who spent 27 years in prison and he found a way to appreciate yeah had control of what he didn't have control of or uh like victor frankl's book man search meeting people survived the concentration camps the people were strict

of everything that they had owned their body their integrity okay their physical well-being and yet the ones who survived had an ability to find the positivity in life, as did Nelson Mandela. And so what I say to people is under stress, you can, and it may sound a little bit hard, but I would say this is the opportunity to say thank you for giving me this opportunity to develop skills and to exercise an ability to find the positive element of life, despite the adversity, the disparity, stress, the anguish, the torment that I am facing every day. So as Viktor Frankl found, and I've actually met people who survived the Holocaust, the concentrated camps, who I've talked to, who said, yes, every morning I waited for the sun to rise. Every night I look forward to the stars. Blue sky, even the birds chirping. So they're on the barbed wire of the, of the fenced in area. I appreciated their song in the contrast to the horror of my situation and

the barbed wire and so the mind has the ability to juxtapose negative and positive and i feel like a covid experience is giving us a chance to practice this skill someone may come to me how can i practice a skill when i don't have food i said whether or not you have food on the, on the table right now, it doesn't take away the fact that you have the choice. Yes. Choice. The coin didn't ask to be born.

You can make a choice of how you live your life. You didn't ask to have COVID. You have a choice of how you're going to work with it. And I'm not asking you to deny or minimize your suffering. I'm just recommending or suggesting that there may be a way where you can inhale, feel it, clench your fist, shout, exhale, put that negativity street sheet in front of you, and then open your heart to what can I do to enhance my positivity. Thank your negative experience for giving you this opportunity to come better at being positive. Excellent. You said so many powerful things there, Jonathan. I think that a lot of people are appreciating

you're listening. And I'm thinking about just the practice of savoring. And I want to talk a little bit about that. I, I'm thinking about when at the top of COVID, I was kind of sitting in my house, my boys, they're, they're 13 and 11 and they wanted to play hide and go seek. So, you know, they don't, they don't like to play with their parents too much. And they're kind of, but we were sitting downstairs and I'm sitting there in the dark playing hide and go seek.

And I just savored that moment, you know, just like so grateful that we were together as a family. So tell us a bit about, in your opinion, why is it important to maybe savor things right now in this time period of COVID or just in general? So savoring is the ability to become acutely aware of the positive elements in an experience from the past, something you're experiencing in the moment, or even forecasting a positive experience that you anticipate you will have. And if you take the time to be,

to sort of integrate from all the primary senses in your body, sight, thought, feelings, taste, smells, be able to activate those feelings. It can also activate memories of positive experiences. That integrating that sensory experience allows you to feel a sense of positivity, which is going to activate what I call happy chemicals in the brain that will actually make you feel better, like oxytocin, dopamine, you know, and serotonin, endorphins. When you activate those positive chemicals in different parts of the brain,

there are some primary parts of the brain, different parts of the brain will reinforce that experience. You will have, you will actively choose to create positive emotions, enhance positive thoughts, and generate positive behaviors. Why is that so important? It's because if you are experiencing a negative moment, or even if you're not in a negative moment, you can actively generate positive thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors that will enhance your well-being and positivity in your life. You have a choice to do that. And so savoring is one of the ways to do that. like say with COVID, you're restricted from your social network of friends, like your sons, maybe what you might be able to do with your sons is to help them focus on this positivity. Okay. So they can have a positive moment. That doesn't mean that denying the restrictions that they are,

are imposed upon them, but allows them to experience that. Going back to my metaphor or the example of Viktor Frankl's Survivors of the Holocaust, there was a lot of storytelling by starving people in the concentration camps. They had very little to be happy about, but they did have memories to savor. And they would tell stories about when things were good. Some people, I'm sure, respond to the negativity, say, I don't want to think about it. It's too painful.

Savoring is the ability to activate a part of the mind deliberately with choice so that you can bring those feelings into the moment and experience them. And that very much is a way of enhancing positivity, which enhances a balance in your mind and body, which is good for your health and well-being. Yeah, excellent. So I'm thinking about people who are listening and they might be leaders of businesses or leaders in general, maybe of an athletic team. Tell us a little bit about the implications of positive emotions to, let's say, workplace or to leadership and why those are so important? I think when it comes to the hierarchy of authority or in a leadership where you're the leader of other people and those people are leaders of other people and you're part of a network of a team, it's very important to think about that there are individual differences.

Every person is going to respond to stress, to adversity, to conflict, to wins and losses, to injuries, to health-related issues, to conflict between people differently. But as a leader, what's important is one, to appreciate those differences. But what we share in common is the ability to take your own personal experience of what is going well for you and what isn't going well for you, to identify what you have a choice to do to contribute to making the situation better, not only for yourself, but for the team. And to be able to, if you're a leader, to lead people by first and foremost, respecting their individual differences,

to lead people to embrace this notion that you have something to contribute positively to the team, to the task, to the goal, to the mission, whatever it is that you're doing, you have something that you can do every moment. I'm from Massachusetts, so Bill Belichick is somebody that I used to listen to a lot as the coach of the Patriots. What you did say that i think some of the greatest coaches have said and leaders have said know what your job is in the next player yeah and just do your job so if you have something to contribute think to yourself

not whether my boss is annoying or my fellow teammate is annoying that's all that's all true and you need to know that when it's time to to engage in a play or to do something know what you have to do that can contribute something positive and do your job and if it doesn't work out put it aside and get ready for the next play. And that's the way life is. What can I do to do that, to contribute? And part of that might be saying, I feel horrible that I wasn't able to do my part and to take that in and say, now here's flipping the coin.

Even though, and this is an affirmation, this is another thing that I've talked about, affirmations. Even though I feel like I completely failed at that last play, thank you for giving me this opportunity to practice flipping the coin so that I can learn to recover quickly and to contribute something for the next play and do my best. So now you've embraced the negative experience and you've been able to then move on,

leave it on the side and move on to the next. I think leaders can honor people's sense of failure instead of shaming them or criticizing them for having those experiences and helping them appreciate about five seconds, feel the negative, let it go, exhale with breath. And now let's focus on what you can do for the next play. Yeah. I think that's so important because, you know, I'm thinking about flow and peak performance in general. It only happens when you're in the present moment and you can't think about the present while you're also thinking about what just happened. Correct. Yeah. We have one question here that came in on Facebook. So

there's some people who are listening to us on Facebook. So this question is from Julie and she said, how much time do you spend on acknowledging the negative? Like, is it a percentage of your day or can it just be a quick moment and move on that's a really like it's a really good question the first thing the first thing Julie what I would say is depends on what the issue is if you've lost a loved one um you know if it's your your family member you're not going to be able to quickly forget that. However, even with something as profound and significant as a loss, death, a loss of a job, financial destitution, even then, I use the word oscillation. That is, you oscillate back and forth. I call that flipping the coin constantly. Okay. Oh my gosh. I'm smitten with a negative feeling.

I try to inhale, feel it. I love to do something physical. I clench my fists and I feel the power of the negativity inside me. My strength is what allows me to feel like I can manage it instead of being passive. And then I exhale. Okay. And as I exhale, I imagine letting that negativity, I'm like emptying a cup. That's a metaphor that people use a lot of the negativity and try to see it three feet in front of me. Then I opened my mind to something positive.

This can happen very quickly. And the reason why this is so important is oscillations, quick back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You're honoring what I would consider can happen very quickly. And the reason why this is so important is oscillation is quick, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You're honoring what I would consider one of the primary, if not the primary mental operations of the brain, which is self-preservation. When you have a loss, something going bad, it's going to activate flight and fight. but you're also by flipping the coin you're also honoring the ability for the brain to create to be able to move forward to be able to build to be able to generate new ideas and and new activities so that you're going somewhere positive then you come back to the negative and you go to the positive so that you can oscillate very quickly but you really want to end up on the positive as much as possible. By the way that's the second of

the three major mental operations. I have to add the third which is social connections. As you can imagine you have to be safe in order to do the second part, social connections, which leads to procreation. Without those two, the species does not exist. You have to continue to pass on the genetic, the genes to the next generation. So you have to be safe and you have to procreate by having social connections. The third activity is to be able to build, generate, develop, design, think, problem solve. And this oscillation process, Julie, is really important. And it depends on the level of intensity of your experience. And everyone's different. But the key thing is to not get stuck. Constantly oscillate., constantly flip the coin. Breathe in, breathe out and do.

Breathe in, breathe out, then do. I hope that answers her question. Yeah, excellent. I think I appreciate what you just said there is like not getting stuck and constantly flipping the coin and it might need to be something

that you do more than once, which I think is important. Throughout the day. Yeah. Yes. One of the things that I learned from you that I didn't know before taking your class was the difference between emotions and feelings. And I'd love to talk a little bit about that and why that would maybe be important for just an everyday person to understand? So there's different theories about this, but I think one of the sort of the most sort of lead, the greatest leaders in study of emotions is Lisa Feldman Barrett from Northeastern. She's a faculty member there, a psychologist. And I'll just focus on her,

her view of emotions and feelings. And I think I'll get this right. I think for, for, for people who are listening, what's important is to understand that the speed at which the brain is taking in information is beyond our awareness. Our mind and our body is basically a sensory apparatus, constantly taking information from inside our body and outside our body. We are, the mind and the body is between the internal chemistry of our body and brain circuitry

and the external world. And constantly we're processing information. That information, okay, is unconscious. It doesn't just become conscious. You're not just consciously aware of every single feel, every single moment, every single sense, okay? Our sensory perception doesn't become conscious at first. So at a neuro chemical level, okay. We're not aware of that,

but then we talk about that neurochemistry is activates what we would call affect or that then get hard, become part of the hard wiring of our brain and that those neuronal networks which would be might be the feeling of anger or fear or anger of shame okay that's a negative emotion positive emotion to get stored in an area of the brain. I'm not gonna go into the details of where, but the fact is that information gets stored, but it's not conscious. Okay, so the unconscious part in a very simple way

is chemistry and then the feelings or the affect. The conscious part is then when that information is registered in the top of the brain, what we call the neocortex, everything I'm talking about is more at the subcortical levels, deeper in the brain. Okay. But when we start thinking about things,

we have a tendency to be really working at the top of the brain, particularly the frontal part. Okay. Let's try to stay away from all these fancy words. And what happens then is we have thoughts, we have emotions, and then we start thinking about problem solving and what we're going to do to execute a plan of action. Those are all conscious experiences.

Those are all conscious experiences. Those are all conscious. And that's a fairly simplistic way of looking at it. So feelings and affect are not aware of. Once you become aware of them, it's thoughts and emotions, and then that contributes to behavior. Some people say that you're not aware of your behavior, just acting impulsively. This is also true. If you're in a flight mode, you are not going to be able to think. You're just going to react. So your behavior is not always conscious. But once you're acting, you can observe yourself running down the hill away from some adverse

predator. But generally speaking, feelings are something that we're not consciously aware of, but they're tied very closely to the chemicals in our mind. Does that help answer the question? Yes, that's wonderful. First of all, I just want to thank you so much for joining us today. I think that you provided such incredible value for everybody who's listening. And I think especially the part about adversity and COVID and the things we talked about today, like flipping the coin and there's positivity and negative emotions. And it's not about denying the negative emotions, but acknowledging it and continuously flipping the coin.

I also thought what you talked about, just our brain is hardwired to keep us safe and to persevere or to keep going, right? And it's evolved over 600 million years. So those are the things I think were most important for today. Jonathan, tell us a little bit about how people can reach out to you. If you're on social media, I know you have a website and you may be taking some clients. So tell us a bit about how people can reach out to you.

So my website is www.jonathanAaronoff.com. J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N. Aaronoff is A-R-O-N-O-F-F. I do have an Instagram account. I'm pretty sure it's Jonathan Aronoff. And my email is Jonathan at Jonathan Aronoff dot com. So if people are interested in contacting me, I welcome you to reach out to me. And for those who have my cell phone number, they can text me. And I'm not going to give that up. Perfect. Do you have any final advice for people who are listening, who are working to be their best self and their best that they can possibly be? I guess I've just underscored something I believe in, which is don't be afraid to look straight in the mirror and look at the negative feelings and thoughts and experiences that you have.

Have the courage to look at it for what it is. Name it. Breathe in. Plunge your fist. Feel the stress and the agony of it. The anguish. Then exhale. Feel the freedom and think of something positive that you can do. Be grateful for the negative experience to give you the chance to become better than you were yesterday. Such a powerful message. Thank you, Dr. Arnav, for joining us here today on High Performance Mindset Podcast. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset.

I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com.

See you next week.