Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Curiosity Is Your Superpower: Beat Imposter Syndrome for Good- E216

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Even Dr. JC Doornick is not immune. One presentation was all it took to send his mind spiraling into doubt, comparison, and the question every high achiever quietly fears: what if I am not as good as I think I am? Then he did something small that changed the whole story. In this episode, he shows you the one move that puts you back in the driver's seat, and why it might be the most underrated skill in a world that never stops handing you answers. The people who learn this are the ones who stay sharp, stay calm, and stay ahead. And one more thing: you are going to want to hear how this one ends. Follow Dr. JC Doornick and the Makes Sense Academy: ► Makes Sense Substack - https://drjcdoornick.substack.com ► Instagram: /drjcdoornick ► Substack: /drjcdoornick ► Facebook: /makessensepodcast ► YouTube: /drjcdoornick MAKES SENSE PODCAST Welcome to the Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick Podcast. This podcast explores topics that expand human consciousness and enhance performance. On the Makes Sense Podcast, we acknowledge that it's who you are that determines how well what you do works, and that perception is subjective and an acquired taste. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at begin to change. Welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. Welcome to the Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick Podcast. SUBSCRIBE/RATE/REVIEW & SHARE our new podcast. FOLLOW Podcast: You will find a "Follow" button in the top right. This will enable the podcast software to alert you when a new episode launches each week. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/makes-sense-with-dr-jc-doornick/id1730954168 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1WHfKWDDReMtrGFz4kkZs9?si=003780ca147c4aec Podcast Affiliates Kwik Learning: Many people ask me where I get all these topics, which I've been covering for almost 15 years. I have learned to read nearly four times faster and retain information 10 times better with Kwik Learning. Learn how to learn and earn with Jim Kwik. Get his program at a special discount here: https://jimkwik.com/dragon OUR SPONSORS Operly - Take Back Control of Your Work Day and Get Rid of All Your AI Apps - Welcome to the new world of Time Freedom and Unlimited Scaling and Success with Operly - https://go.getoperly.ai/video?ref=jean-claude-claude-d-2a95 Blue Blinds Bakery - Handcrafted with all-natural ingredients - https://www.blueblindsbakery.com Timestamps 0:00 - 1:09: Cold Open and Welcome to the Podcast 1:10 - 4:49: How a Presentation Triggered 60 Seconds of Comparison 4:50 - 7:37: Catching the Thought and Saying Hmm 7:38 - 11:01: What Else Might Be True and What Is Your Superpower 11:02 - 13:29: The Need for Cognitive Closure and Intellectual Humility 13:30 - 17:25: Trait Curiosity, State Curiosity, and the Longevity Research 17:26 - 19:09: Why Better Questions Matter in an AI Driven World 19:10 - 21:59: Currency, the Currency of Care, and the State of Carelessness 22:00 - 25:08: Staying Present, Saying "I Don't Know," and the Closing Challenge 25:09 - 25:52: Outro and Call to Action Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So nearly 70% of people will feel like a fraud at some point, even the most accomplished ones. I felt it recently, where I found myself comparing myself to a brilliant academic speaker until I remembered one small word that changes everything for me. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you, that your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited, outside noise, how easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into

that role as the shock caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things, that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, Let's rise up and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Hmm. Makes sense. So today's episode is really about curiosity, the real superpower that sits patiently behind imposter syndrome, learning, and staying sharp in this fast-paced AI-driven world. And it starts with a simple question that I've learned to ask myself and I share with you guys all the time.

and that question is just a sound and it goes, hmm, remember, one of the tenants of the Make Sense Academy in our ecosystem is what Wayne Dyer used to say. It's when you change the way you look at things, that the things you look at change. A lot of people love that idea, but they struggle to execute on it. And what I'm pitching you on here is the idea that the way to that is curiosity. I want to share something that happened recently, like I said, that exposed me to something about the human condition that I think we're all dealing. with. It has to do with comparison, things like imposter syndrome, overthinking, confidence, and this

incredible human meaning-making machine that we have called the brain. I watched this short presentation, because a lot of people think that I don't fall prey to negative thoughts or fly off the handle. We're all the same. Nobody gets out of that. Nobody gets out of the human condition. We're all at different levels and we're all unique. But if you think about it, we all have the same knee-jerk reflex because we've all been trained by the same people and things. We'll all live in the same world. I don't watch the news. I still find out about the news. And it was basically the first few minutes that I was watching it, the presenter who's a very famous author that I love. And he began sharing a little bit about his background. So here I am kind of enamored and liking what he does and what

he writes about. And he started talking about his background where he got the way he is. You know, it was obvious that he was highly educated. He was a well-studied person, an accomplished academic, and a very successful author. And his latest book, his latest book had done incredibly well and continues to do so, selling millions of copies. So he knew his research. He knew his terminology. It was a very, very polished, intelligent, well-credentialed, and clearly successful human. And almost immediately, and I'm sharing this transparently, almost immediately, something happened inside of me. My brain just without asking me, started to compare. And here are some of the voices that popped up in my head. He's more educated than me. He knows more than I do. He sounds smarter than I do. Look how successful

his book is compared to mine. And before I knew it, my sense making machine had taken me from watching another human's presentation to questioning my entire career and identity. The voice in my head said, maybe I'm not as intelligent as I think I am. Maybe I don't belong in these types of conversations, because my genre of writing is very similar to his. Maybe I'm faking this whole thing. And I know a lot of people, a lot of flow burglars like to come into our environment and challenge me on this and call me a charlatan and poser and all that stuff. So, you know, like all that stuff is happening extrinsically, but right now it's happening intrinsically and it seems real. Maybe I'm faking this whole thing. And people are going to figure it out sooner or later and my career is just going to crash and burn.

So maybe I should just save myself all the embarrassment and suffering and just go find myself a nice nine to five job. It was like 60 seconds. I took note. About 60 seconds, my brain had taken one man's resume. He was just explaining where he got his information from and his background. In 60 seconds, took one man's resume and turned it into the collapse of my entire career. That's pretty impressive. right? But then something happened. One of the shirts that we have is something wonderful is happening.

And I believe that. I truly believe that. So I love reminding myself no matter what my situation is, something can happen. So what happened was is I caught it. Instead of simply becoming the thought, I observe myself having the thought and all the feelings. So think about the difference between becoming a thought and just observing it. What that does is it separates you from it. The way that I did it, or almost simultaneously when I felt this happen, I said one little word. And that was just, hmm. And as we know that, that stands for haven't made up my mind. But that's all I did. It doesn't mean that my initial thoughts were wrong. This is what is really fascinating. I caught myself doing something that I now know was disadvantageous, but we very, very easily

can catch ourselves thinking a certain way and assume that it's the right way to think. I mean, it's our brain, right? It just simply means, is that so? Hmm. It suggests, let's put it on a little timeout. That's what, hmm, says. I'm not throwing it away and I'm not suppressing it or replacing it with some sort of bullshit positive affirmation that says that I'm special. And I don't want to poo-poo on affirmations. So all I'm doing is temporarily suspending my certainty so that I can look around and check the facts. That's all I'm doing.

So our sense-making machine is remarkable. But we're also recognizing right now that it's also conditioned and therefore somewhat biased and more so incomplete. Do you ever take notice or just get curious if you have all the facts? There's a fascinating conversation that takes place. I always say, hmm, and I like to check facts. But when somebody is like very emotional and passionate about something and they tell you that, they want you to just agree with them.

And I know this because if I start asking questions about it, they interpret it as if I don't think the way they do. And it bothers them. So recently, my wife, my lovely wife, my world, we were just talking about some sort of a tragic thing that happened. It was an assault. She was watching the news and relaying it to me. And I completely felt the same way as her, but I didn't know all the facts.

So I started asking questions. She didn't like that. She didn't like that because it insinuated that I disagreed with her or I disagreed with the concept that she was behind. Finding your true north says, what you consume, you assume. Yeah. I've been saying that for a long time. That which we consume with regularity ends up being what we consume.

So what do you do there is you protect what you consume? It's a great power move for the day. Good one finding your true north. So the human meaning making machine is remarkable, but it's conditioned. It's biased, incomplete, and frankly, sometimes it's completely full of shit, isn't it? Anybody ever recognize that? So I opened myself up to what else might be true. Now remember, I'm having this moment where I'm in a comparative reality and I'm

doubting myself and almost feeling like, what the hell am I doing? You're going the wrong way. It's a waste of time. All because of a trigger. So I make this distinction. I caught it. I say, hmm, and it seems like a really good idea to think about it. I opened myself up to what else might be true. And I don't think a lot of people do that in this world right now. So what actually happened here? That's one of the questions that I ask as well. This guy was intelligent, true. He was accomplished, true, well-educated, very, very true. Successful, obviously true. But where did I get the idea that any of those facts that I was hearing meant that I was unintelligent, unsuccessful, unqualified, or even maybe a fraud? They didn't, right? Those things didn't actually happen. My brain added that to the story.

Almost immediately when I made that distinction, I felt better. If anybody here resonates with these kind of situations where you're kind of like doubting yourself and you're in the dumps and you want to feel better run the interface response system but you're going to see that there's a bigger thing happening so my anxiety started disappearing my confidence came right back online it was like a snap moment and suddenly i could see something that i couldn't see 60 seconds earlier 60 seconds my whole day was on the line 60 seconds earlier i couldn't see that this guy was not better than me he was just different than me Not that different is better or worse, but I was evaluating somebody that wasn't me. He had developed certain superpowers like many of you.

I celebrated him for that. But then I asked myself another question. J.C., what is your superpower? So I said, hmm, and I thought about it. And I thought to myself, maybe it's what I just did. Maybe that's my superpower. Maybe my superpower is being open and curious. Maybe it's the ability to catch a conditioned response

before it becomes my reality. My ability to look at something that scares me or challenges my identity and just say, hmm. So another thought occurred to me now that I'm in this space of curiosity. Somewhere, a highly capable accomplished academic might be listening to this episode, either live or recorded, and thinking, how the hell does this guy do that and comparing your own self to me, the guy that compares himself to others?

How does somebody get diagnosed with stage four cancer and feel grateful and lucky about it? You know, I think that that's such a cool thing that I have that ability. And they want me to teach them how to do that. Really just start asking them questions and teach them the interface response system. It's up to them to do the work. But how does somebody stop obsessing over things that are outside of his control? And how does somebody learn to care less? It doesn't say I couldn't care less.

It says, I could. How does somebody learn to care less about things that don't matter and become more present and care more about the things that do? Would you like that superpower? Perhaps my mistake wasn't underestimating myself. Maybe it was believing that either one of us needed to be better in the first place. Maybe that's the mistake is that being better is the goal. So that brings us to something fascinating about our brains. Human beings don't merely like answers. We don't just like answers. We like certainty.

Psychologists have studied something called the need for cognitive closure, which essentially describes our desire to arrive at a definite answer and escape the discomfort of ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to know. Is this good or bad? Safe or unsafe? Am I succeeding or failing? Compared to what? The need for cognitive closure? We have that. that urgency. The problem is that sometimes we close the case before we've gathered all the evidence. Becoming open and curious and allowing yourself to check the facts and look around and practice some of these things that we teach in the book, it's just a distinction. That's what my book makes senses about. It's like, oh my God, I didn't know that. I didn't see it that way before.

What I love about this distinction is that certainty is what closes the case. Uncertainty and curiosity reopens the case. So if you look in the book, I talk about the Life is a Line chapter where we can go back to anything that it took place and reopen the case and look at it with a whole new pair of lenses. Another concept, you're going to like this. Researchers call intellectual humility. You might think you know what that means. And I think people misunderstand intellectual humility. Intellectual humility isn't thinking less of yourself. It's having the confidence or having a enough confidence in yourself to recognize that what you are currently believing might be incomplete. That's what hmm does. Do I know all the facts? So this is an enormous difference. It's not I don't

know anything. It's I know something, but I might not know everything. Because if you're ready for that, your whole life is about to change. This is why I teach things in the book called holographic vision. that's the IRS. The interface response system is all about moving you into an open and curious space where you can ask different questions. There's nothing new here, guys. Making distinctions is about taking something that we already knew and bringing it to the forefront of our brain and making ourselves aware and conscious of it. Well, before, we're just hiding all this stuff. We've read all the books in life. We know everything. We even know what's right and wrong, but we just have this miraculous way of just deciding on something and calling it right because we need to know. Curiosity gets even more interesting

when you understand that research distinguished between trait curiosity and state curiosity. This would be a good one to grab for the day. Trade curiosity is more like a general characteristic, something that is kind of like inborn. Some people seem naturally curious. We all were when we were kids. But state curiosity is the curiosity that arrives in a particular moment. So this is huge for us, because it means that I'm not telling you to become a different kind of person. What I'm saying is, is you can learn to enter a different state. You can enter a state of being open and curious, a different, more efficient version of who you are and how you show up.

So something happens. Your conditioned brain hands you a conditioned interpretation. So something happens. In this case, I heard this guy speak. My conditioned brain handed me a conditioned interpretation of it. Instead of automatically believing it, I paused, I said, hmm, and I said, what else is there? What do I know? What's fact and what story? Congrats if you can do that. You've just entered curiosity. So there's some fascinating research as well, and I think it's out of MIT. An extended study followed

more than a thousand older men and found that higher levels of state curiosity in the moment were associated with a greater likelihood of surviving the five-year follow-up. Like when people would come in and they would have some sort of an ailment, it was correlated to them having a better chance of surviving five years later when people that weren't open and curious would not. Even after researchers adjusted for risk factors and all of that stuff. So researchers found a similar association in a separate sample of more than a thousand women. So what's that saying?

There's a correlation between being open and curious in lose. living longer and surviving because when we're closed and fixed, we're in trouble. More recent research examining curiosity across adulthood found that although general trait curiosity tended to decline with age, so if you have a natural propensity to be curious, they're seeing that it declines as we age. State curiosity, on the other hand, increases with age. And other recent research has connected epistemic curiosity, and that's the desire to know and understand with measures of successful aging. So I want to be careful here. I don't want to say that curiosity makes you live longer. We're just noticing now that there's a correlation between people

that are open and curious and living longer. That's all I need. That makes me go, hmm. So maybe curiosity isn't merely something that makes life more interesting. Because sometimes it's like a game. It's kind of fun to just be open and curious. I like that. I like to gamify life. If you've read my book, I talk all about that. But maybe remaining engaged, interested, adaptable, willing to learn, and willing to discover what we don't know has something to do with aging as well. What are your thoughts on that? If you have the ability or you adapt the ability to remain engaged, what I see is people when they disengaged, that usually ends quickly. Remain curious, interested, adaptable, willing to learn, willing to discover, willing to dispute things, maybe it's not just what we eat and exercise. And I think this is a big reason

why you see people like George Burns who smoked cigars and drank alcohol lived so long. You probably would find him to be a very open and curious person. So my take on this, curiosity doesn't just potentially help us put more years in our life. It helps us put more life in our years. And I can just tell you that is where I am living right now. I am not worried or concerned or predicting how long I'm going to live. I'm looking at the quality of how I live. Think about how important this becomes in the world that we're entering right now, where we're living in a time of artificial intelligence, whatever that even means, algorithms, instant information, hot takes, 30 second clips, and a culture that demands immediate answers. AI can give you all of those.

those things. It can give you an answer with almost anything in just seconds. But this creates an interesting paradox. If you're looking for some of the value of being a human being, here's one of the things that you might like. As answers become faster and cheaper and accessible, better questions become more valuable. Now, here's where you're seeing that right now. The value in using AI efficiently is more about the prompt. That's you. But as we look at the way the world is programming us and affecting us and whatever we consume being what we assume, asking questions about that and about what's going on in your mind becomes more and more valuable. So I don't think human intelligence in an AI-driven world will be defined only by how much information we can remember. Because that's

what we're worried about is like we're not going to need to remember things and we're offloading cognition and we'll start to like not know anything. Machines are always going to beat us at remembering things all day long. You're not going to be able to remember things like a machine. However, our advantage is going to be staying open and curious. This is our trait to challenge things like assumptions, to notice context, to recognize that the first answer may not be the whole answer. And that's what I recognized about how I felt when I was listening to this guy speak and I felt imposter syndrome. Maybe that's not true. Maybe it's not the whole thing. And then ask the question that nobody else thought. to ask. And this is where curiosity connects directly with something that I'm working on right now,

and this is going to be part of my new book, and that's something you've heard me speak about, and that's called currency. Carency is the currency of care. And that's your time, your energy, your focus. You wake up every morning with this limited supply of currency, and everything that you care about costs you some of it. So be careful where you spend it, or else you won't have it for the things that really deserve it. So now think about how much currency we waste defending stories that we haven't even investigated yet. I was about to care about what I felt and make a whole day of it. It was going to spend all my currency and I didn't investigate it. So I'm in a place right now where before I spend my currency that if I come home at the end of the day and I've spent it all,

I don't have it for my family and the things that matter most are going to the gym or making those health decisions. If you ever find yourself saying, oh, there's too much going on, I can't do this today. You've spent it. Someone else succeeds. You decide their success means something about your failure. Something might happen six months from now. So you spend today worrying about it. Open curiosity interrupts the transactional sequence because you question your spending. I saw that somebody this morning we're calling October, October fast. If anybody's ever interested, just reach out and ask me. But October fast is to be not just on program, but to choose something that you will go without and fast.

So somebody said that they're going to go without impulse shopping. How are they going to do that? They're going to question it first. And that's cognitive distancing. That's hmm. But what hmm does is it makes you open and curious and say, wait a second. Before I do it, I'm not abandoning impulse shopping. Is it something important?

So open curiosity interrupts the transaction. before I spend another ounce of my time, energy, and focus on this, I'm going to say, hmm, is this true? Is this mine? Is it within my control? Does it even fucking matter? That's what I mean when I talk about being careless. The state of carelessness.

I love to sit in the state of carelessness. Now, you might think that that means that I'm fumbling and I'm not thinking things through. No, I'm caring less about things that don't do. deserve my care. That's the state of carelessness. And it's not apathy. It's not becoming cold, indifferent, or someone that doesn't care about anything. It's about becoming more selective and conscious about what deserves your care and what doesn't. Curiosity helps you care more intelligently. So if you're looking for a reason to be open and curious, it helps you live more intelligently around caring. And nowhere has this become more real for me than in my

cancer and I love to give this situation because people don't understand why I feel lucky that I have it, why I'm grateful for it. Stage four cancer has given my brain an unlimited supply of opportunities on the negative side to predict an unknowable future. I'm constantly offered things that I could predict that will scare the hell out of me. What if this happens? What if the treatment doesn't work out? What if the scan comes out bad? What does it mean? I could spend every ounce of my currency that I possess on my mental stuff, living inside futures that haven't even happened yet. And believe me, my brain is perfectly capable of that. I'm not impervious to that. I'm just the guy that stops and goes, hmm, is that right? Ask yourself what's happening right now. Right now, I'm here. You're here. I'm breathing.

I have people I love. I have purpose. I have people that love me. Right now, I can laugh, I can create, I can serve, I can give my family a hug, has this funny way curiosity of bringing me back to the present because if I'm genuinely curious about the future, eventually I have to admit something about the future. I don't know. And you don't either. Finding your true North says you can make a prediction of it. You can assume you know, but you don't know. We've treated those words like weakness for too long, I don't know. We've been taught that intelligent, confident, and successful people know things. Leaders and experts know. Maybe so in certain situations, but real confidence is being able to say, I don't know without feeling like you've lost yourself. Maybe I don't know isn't the end of

intelligence. Maybe it's actually the doorway to intelligence. So here's my challenge to you in closing. Catch yourself being certain and knowing. Catch that moment where you're conditioned operating system tells you exactly who somebody is, what their behavior means and what it translates to. What somebody thinks about you, knowing that. What's going to happen next, knowing why you failed or why somebody else succeeded, like my case. What's your diagnosis means or what your future supposedly looks like. You don't have to reject the thought, by the way. Remember, when we pause, we're not rejecting and abandoning the thought. You're just going to put it in a little time out, give it a little lunch break and say, hmm, what else might be true? Catch this. Your first

perception does not have to become your final perception. Your first perception does not have to become your final perception. And perhaps one of the greatest human superpowers in this incredibly fast-moving, technologically driven world won't be knowing everything in it. It will be having enough confidence, awareness, and intellectual humility to remain open and curious, long enough to discover something that you couldn't see before. So get open, get curious, and protect your currency. And every once in a while, just have the courage and the bravery to say, I don't know. I respect people that say that. Make sense? Good. That's it for today. To support the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. podcast, be sure to subscribe, like, and share, as well as follow the Make Sense substack

for free daily quotes, live streams, and blog. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time. Makes sense. If you like the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow.

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