No Broke Months For Salespeople - Why High Achievers Burn Out: The Neuroscience of Emotional Resilience, Leadership, and Peak Performance Dr. Brian Paris

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

What you'll learn in this episode: ● Why emotional regulation is one of the most important skills for entrepreneurs ● How emotional intelligence improves leadership and decision-making ● The hidden connection between burnout, stress, and high achievement ● Why successful people can still feel unhappy despite reaching their goals ● How childhood experiences influence business and personal relationships ● The difference between reacting emotionally and responding intentionally ● The four pillars of embodied presence: awareness, embodiment, connection, and flow ● How to recover from nervous system overwhelm and emotional exhaustion ● Why intuition and logic work best when combined ● Practical techniques to improve resilience, focus, and sustainable peak performance 👉 Don’t miss out! Sign up here: https://link.cpi-crm.com/widget/form/bJZ4NbRp6ZpSVgGoNb4j?notrack=true https://link.cpi-crm.com/widget/form/bJZ4NbRp6ZpSVgGoNb4j?notrack=true https://link.cpi-crm.com/widget/form/bJZ4NbRp6ZpSVgGoNb4j?notrack=true Shadow Hour Updates to get the latest updates and reminders for our Shadow Hour sessions. Stay informed, stay ahead! To find out more about Dan Rochon and the CPI Community, you can check these links:Website: No Broke MonthsPodcast: No Broke Months for Salespeople PodcastInstagram: @donrochonxFacebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/NoBrokeMonths/Facebook: Dan RochonLinkedIn: Dan RochonTeach to Sell Preorder: Teach to Sell: Why Top Performers Never Sell – And What They Do Instead

You're listening to No Broke Months for Salespeople Podcast. My name is Dan Roshan. Help salespeople, business owners, and entrepreneurs to have consistent predictable income through Teach to Sell. Today, we're going to talk about the neuroscience of high performance with Dr. Brian Parrott, who's a neuroscience coach, speaker, and guide for high achievers, navigating the intersection of emotional intelligence, mental clarity, and physical resilience. So if you're a high performer, if you're an entrepreneur, if you are somebody who is getting a whole lot of stuff done, but maybe there's a little bit of dissatisfaction in your life. Today's episode's for you. Dr. Brian Perez, welcome to the show.

Thank you, sir. Thank you, Dan. Appreciate it. Look forward to your conversation. Am I, sir and Dan? I like that. I like that. Sir, sir, sir, is good.

Respect, man, you know. Well, Brian, I appreciate that you're here today. So we're going to talk about the neuroscience of high performance. and really understand how high achievers can master their emotional regulation, their mental resilience, their burnout, you know, and their burnout prevention, and without sacrificing success. So before we talk about that, tell us about Dr. Brian. It was a 30,000 viewpoint. 30,000 foot view is that I started as an ADHD child. And every room I was in, every person I interacted with, I was either too much told to stop moving, to be quiet,

So I learned that my existence was wrong, or at least that's what society was telling me. My parents were very loving and they supported me for all of my insanity no matter what and put me in sports instead of on medication, thank God. So my brain and body informed and adapted and did what it did. And I based my entire life. So I was a chiropractor for 20 years, built a multi-billion dollar integrated health facility in Rockville, Maryland, ran that for a long time. And I kept, you know, all throughout 10 years in, 20 years in, reach these cycles of burnout.

And I was like, what the hell's wrong? Like, I thought I chose the right career. And, you know, so I hit, like, these zones of competence and excellence, but I was missing my zone of genius. Right. So, like, I kept hitting these areas of burnout. Like, why can't I step forward past that? Not until I hit rock bottom, disintegrated identities, drop the practice, all of that. I said, what makes me feel alive, man?

And what makes me feel alive is the sensation that I felt in my body. And I finally said, wow, I'm a sensitive dude. Not that I'm sitting here crying. I want to get into first place. I want to lift hard and I want to eat well. I want to have fun and date and do all that kind of stuff. But my sensitivity was a tool for fulfillment. I've always been interested in movement, mastered that.

I'm like, okay, people are still unhappy even if they can move and get out of pain. So what else is there? The same thing for me. So I dove into the neuroscience of basically fulfillment and like what makes us whole. And I think also by the time I hit like my late 40s, went through divorce into my 50s. Like what am I doing here? Like my life is more purpose than just making money. So yes, I don't want any of our listeners, your listeners to have any broke months.

But it's not just about income. It's about what kind of impact you can have. Can you create freedom in your life? Can you live into happiness and fulfillment on top of all those other things? Yeah, I love that, Brian. I was on a show yesterday. I was not the host. I was being interviewed.

And the host asked me what my perception of no broke months was. And my answer was money was actually last in that. It was about mental health, spiritual health, relationship, love, connection, physical fitness. And yes, money. It's an asset time. You know, these are the different assets that we have. And when we understand that money is an asset that's as valuable or maybe not as valuable as time, you know, it just sort of depends on where you are in your life.

But then you could make better choices for your mental health specifically. So why is emotional regulation critical for high achievers? Great question. And like you can look at the studies, right? The most successful CEOs, executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, they have a balance, not of just intellect, it's intuition. Not just execution, it's empathy as well. So I, you know, science shows us that as we get older actually, like into our 50s, two halves of our brain that control those things, like empathy and execution, intellect, and intuition, they actually

can start connecting better. So when they dissected Einstein's brain, we thought it was going to be bigger. It wasn't bigger. It had more connections, different parts. So the ultimate But neuroscientific definition of evolution and growth and enlightenment is interconnection or integration. So emotional regulation is like, okay, can I learn and sense for my body to pause and take information from my body as intuition and also use my intellect to create a decision, right? Like I've got 20 years of experience and finance and the mistakes that I've made. Can I combine that together with intuition to learn how to listen to it versus ignoring

it, shutting it down. Thank you for explaining it. Talk to me more about like the impact on leadership and decision making. How does emotional intelligence impact leadership in decision making? Let's look at the lack of emotional intelligence, right? First, if I lack emotional intelligence, meaning that I am reacting to my emotion. So most of us, regardless of how old we are, our emotional reactions come from like our states when we were like eight years old, unless you've done the real deep work, the shadow work, and you've healed or you've befriended your childhood woots, which many of us are starting to do that and it's becoming very trendy to actually work on these things. But if we haven't fully healed those parts, we're making decisions for like when my brother beat me up as a kid or called me fat, right?

Versus like... You said you were fat, Brian. Come on. Well, I was and I can bid it now. I don't really care because I'm lean a shit now. So it doesn't make a difference. So maybe that drives me to do that. However, you know, if we let our emotions, if we're not using them as tools, e-motion, it's energy in motion.

So we all have these biological emotions that are across every human being, regardless of where we're from on the planet. And if we can slow ourselves down enough and create distance between ourselves and their emotions, they can actually feed us with information, right? So a dude walks in the room that we're negotiating with, and my body says, I feel weird, right? So we can listen to that and say, okay, I need to be curious about why I'm feeling weird about this guy. What isn't he telling he or she telling me? Maybe our spider sent says, this person's out

of integrity. They're not telling the truth. What else do I need to reveal before I agree or disagree to these terms of the negotiation? You mentioned that eight-year-old in human development, which I'm sure you can expand on, you know, the first 13 years of our lives is really about programming. And then from 13 to 22 for ladies and 29 for men, it's about socialization. So at the beginning of our lives, we were being programmed. So let's call it until nine years old. And then we enter into the modeling phase, which we're observing our parents, we're observing our environment. And then, and this was right. And then around 13 years old, now we get into socialization, meaning that our friends are going to impact us more, you know, more so. And so that's important

because what O'Brien just shared with us is that around eight years old, there's something that typically happens that we carry on for the rest of our lives unless if you do that deep dive work. And, you know, that shadow work is, that's a, you know, a way that he called it. I'm curious, can that trauma, can that instant that you held on however many years ago that happened before, you know, when you were a young kid, can it be healed? I would say yes, but first let's pull back the curtain a little bit. We're going to say capital T and like a small T. Right. So capital capital T trauma, meaning like car accident, God forget, some kind of abuse. You know, we can think of whatever disaster we can think of, right?

But small trauma starts way before eight years old. It starts like there have been studies that show babies reaching for a connection for parents. and parents denying that connection or caregivers. Caregivers will say caregivers because some people aren't with their parents, but it's whatever caregiver needs or does not meet your needs at that moment. And that need maybe I need to move to the breast for breastfeeding. I need, and we're talking about this early. And or I need just a hug.

I need attention. Like I figured out how to play with this toy and I want to show my caregiver, right? but when those needs for attention aren't meant, that's when we start to formulate our attachment styles and our attachment styles, for lack of the time to explain, but they get ingrained and how we operate from a business perspective, from a romantic perspective, and all of our relationships in life, right? So if I'm more anxious about attachments and my attachment behavior or style, and these are not fixed in stone, we vacillate between all of them. And depending on what kind of big T traumas we've had or little T traumas determine how we're going to do that.

So can they be healed? I don't ever think we're done. Like I don't think it can be like a past tense. Like I'm done. I think it's on. It could be developed and worked on. I think healed is almost like it has to be. I'm always healing, right?

Like better than I was yesterday, I respond instead of react. Or I can be more regulated when my kid drops the mill. out of the fridge instead of acting like an eight-year-old myself right yeah so so i i don't want to say like healed done but it can be a process that can be worked with consistent time that when i when i respond it's it's much healthier than when i react yeah and and you know as we're around the same age you know it's in you know similar experiences so like i i position myself to hopefully respond yet there's that subconscious that hijacks me sometimes It does. And react. So talk to us about how can you manage or regulate or make it less common that you're reacting rather than responding.

And describe what reaction and describe the difference as well if you could. Totally. Well, I would say, because it has to be per example, but if your response reaction is way above what the actual occurrence is, meaning like my kid broke his Legos that he, works on and I'm freaking out, right? I don't have little kids anymore, but I'm just trying to come up with the fastest example. We've all been in this where we totally overreact, but it has nothing to do with the current situation. So that's one, your first clue that you're reacting versus responding. The key is, it's like meditation is one of the most powerful tools for mind strengthening, emotional regulation, calming the whole nervous system in itself. But it's not, it's, you're doing meditation on a daily basis to prepare for those times when the situation occurs.

When you need it. It's like you're exercising when you need the strain. Correct. Correct. And it's like, I'm going to the range. I like to shoot. I'm going this weekend. I don't know when I'm going to use my weapon if I ever need to, but I'm going to be

preparing. I have that in my nervous system. Now, also, I think something that's extremely important and overlooked, we all experience ruptures in business relationships, romantic relationships, a rental relationship. the repairs the key. That's discipline. Say again? I thought I was the only one

experienced rupture. I wish. I mean, all shit breaks down, no matter how much work with it, we can get breaks down. And certain people in our lives, right, trigger us more, or bring up stuff more,

whether it's like family members, ex-lovers, whatever that is for children. But the key is, do we go back and debrief and repair? And what does your repair look like? I think that is what can define maturity and that's what can help you learn for the next time. And maybe I will slow down and breathe.

Let me see if I'm perceiving this correctly. So to be able to respond more frequently rather than to react than taking daily activities such as meditations, I'm going to assume that you would include in there prayer affirmations, visualizations, relationships, reading, podcasts, a lot. you know, just like a development on a daily habit will help you to be able to then sort of like strengthen your ability to be more in control of your emotions so that you're not letting those emotions, you know, get in the way and screw things up. Yes.

And when you do get in the way and screw things up, then what do you do next? Do you continue being an asshole or do you take the time to repair? I would say continuing to be an asshole just ruins relationships, right? Right. So we've probably both been there before. We're like, okay, being an asshole didn't work the first time, maybe I shouldn't continue doing this. Right. So I think I like the word process because it's like, okay, I need to process this.

I need to feel what's covered from my body. I need to compare that to my own thoughts. I need to observe myself. I actually, Dan, I break this down into what I call embodied presence. And it has four pillars. and this is what I teach in coaching and my keynotes and workshops as well. The first one is awareness itself. And awareness is related to what's called interoception meeting like, okay, what can I sense

that's coming from inside my body, skin inwards? And those are our feelings and emotions because they occur in our body way faster than we recognize them in our brain. The second one is embodiment. You know, what is my positioning? Is this my, where I'm constantly holding myself? When I'm in an argument, am I closed and contracted? or am I open? Also, how much space am I allowing myself to take up?

Third one is connection. Connection is related to what I call what is called neuroception, which is your sensation of threat or safety. Meaning like, do I feel comfortable and safe in my own body? Not just the environment. And it's a signal that you put out in a room as well. If my posture is closed and I'm all wretched inside, everybody in the board room is going to feel that. Right. So these are things that can all be practiced. When you stack all of those together, I like to consider that regulation and flow, meaning like I can get into flow states more regularly and have more time to spend on things like meditation or be with family and keep my regulation and flow is the fourth pillar? Yeah. Okay, gotcha. So say those four pillars,

just like each to the audience can get those again, please. Yes, sir. Awareness, embodiment, connection, and flow. Love it. Thank you. Most people don't remember the neuroscience terms, so we'll do that in 2.0 class. Thanks for making it simple for the, you know, for us common folk here. I'm the neuroscience geek over here.

So let's talk a little bit more about these emotions and about how to be able to regulate that and why, you know, why it happens that, you know, I mean, we're creatures, right? Like, we're creatures, we have emotions. Well, we have thoughts. We have emotions. We have feelings, everything. How can entrepreneurs and leaders specifically, how can they improve the resilience when

they're under pressure? Because those are people that are commonly under pressure. I know I am. I had a, I got subpoena to be in a witness out of court case last week or a business thing. And then I had somebody ask me like the next day, oh, is that Struttle Tea? I'm like, no, I was sort of like, like, that's just another. That was a Tuesday for me. Right.

You're used to getting some kind of letter in the mail and you're like, okay, but 10 years ago, were you able to handle it that well? Maybe, maybe there was a time in my life where I would not have been able to handle that as well. So it was probably longer than 10. But, but yeah, there was definitely was a time in my life. I would not have been able to handle that. And you developed those skills. So how do we handle that on a daily basis?

First, I mean, since we're taking a little bit of time here, we don't have that much time, but I'll try to break it down as simple as I can. So you have core emotions that we all experience, which are like anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise. These are all related to my body, right? So if I go in the fridge and I drink bad milk, am I going to smile? No. What am I going to do with my face? You don't fanny pupe right there. Right.

Right. You feel like in your body. Did it? So this is what my face looks like. Right? Like I do that because that is biology. Those are core emotions. The ones that go on top of that is pretty interesting are anxiety, shame, and guilt.

So most entrepreneurs that I meet are grippled with anxiety because they have to train how to learn to name these core emotions and locate them in their body through bodily sensations and then integrate them for myself. I was very addicted to anger. I grew up. God bless my dad. Rest and soul. I love your dad. But, you know, he loved being angry. I don't think he knew that, but like I learned anger for me.

And I didn't learn how to process it until later in my life. And by processing it, what I would do is I would get angry and reacting to myself, a bunch of hole in the wall, scream at somebody that was close to me versus, okay, I'm feeling angry right now. What boundaries were crossed? How do I need to connect? communicate gracefully so that those boundaries don't get crossed anymore. If you ever met or dealt with someone who's like,

dude, I'm feeling angry right now and I don't really appreciate the way you're speaking to me. Like I'm not there, but it's really a few, not a lot, but yeah, I mean, those are special people.

They are because they have mastered or at least learned how to integrate their emotions and express them gracefully. This is what I think we should be learning in kindergarten and like an elementary school, not like we would do better, regulating ourselves in relationships so we can do math later on. You think like the hard, like to be an entrepreneur, you've got to, you've got to be able to, you know, embrace fear and take action anyway. Hell yeah. You got to be resilient and persistent, at least if you want to, you know, to be successful.

You're going to have a, I don't want to create this as you anybody's destiny, but oftentimes, you know, there may be setbacks in, and struggles. And, you know, and, you know, you mentioned anxiety, right? So, so, so. it's almost as though if, you know, the leaders, the entrepreneurs, the business owners are like in this cycle of just dealing with, you know, test, you know, pretty consistently.

Moment by moment. Right. And then, and then that translate to anxiety. So how can you like manage that, limit it, heal it? What would you like to share about that? Yeah, I would say you're not going to heal it because it's a process of our human psychology.

Right. So it's something to heal. It's something to, and it's not something to look at like there's something wrong with me. That's the first piece. Because if you're saying, because I'm afraid to take this $150,000 risk on a marketing budget, like that makes sense, right? But the entrepreneur needs, well, if the ROI is going to be good, right? But courage is necessary.

Grit's necessary. And I think also regulation is what makes all this stuff sustain them. if you're just driving with grit and making decisions in a state of fight or flight, right? So if I can't regulate my emotions by naming them, processing them in my body, I'm typically making decisions from a fight or flight state. And I've done that myself. And then six months down the road, I'm like, God, why did I make that decision?

Like it wasn't made from a place of like, okay, I'm calm. I'm taking what my intuition tells me. I'm taking what my intellect knows. Now I'm making a decision. This is where the entrepreneur can be sustainable versus because the decisions are never going to stop. The challenges are never going to stop. They're going to get easier the process for sure as we start to learn how to take

information from our bodies and our minds. I'm okay with fight or flight. My natural is going to be to fight. But that's not like conflicting. It's like fight for what I believe is to be true and what I believe is to be right. And if I'm not able to do that in rare situations, I'll fly. I'll get the heck out of there, right? Metaphorically.

But the challenge that for me that I've experienced is when I cannot either find a solution or find a way out and then, and I'm going to literally uncover every single possibility to be able to find a solution first. And then if I can't find a way out, but then if I can't find a way out, but then if I can't find either, I'm going to freeze. And when I freeze, I am emotionally spent. Yeah. So talk to us about that of like when the options of fight or flight are gone and you have and then that freeze is the only thing left. Like, how do you manage to that? That's such a great question because freeze is actually the lowest level that the nervous system

gets into because that is like the ultimate threat. So you break it down to like animal biology and animals will feign death, and that's freeze. So all their blood goes to their organs. I mean, that's not like that. Just play dead and I'll be good. Yeah. But you've got to figure out a way to recover from Play Dead, right? Like, you got to get up.

So usually what happens is if the Sabertut-Tor-2 tag on National Geographic, what happens is the animal gets up, shakes it off, and then, boom, back to life. it doesn't sit there and contemplate the errors that it made and like shame itself and say, I'm too slow or I made a dumb decision. It says it gets the back up and lives its life, but it shakes it off through its nervous system. So one of the ways that of freeze is movement to is social engagement. So you have to have some supportive trusting friends and network to be able to call you out and say, bro, you're frozen.

I wish I had someone in that state that didn't say, hey, let's go get a drink. and they maybe said, hey, let's go do an ice plunge. Right. You know, like these things are valuable to, and it's not just the mind. It's using the, but like they're one. There's no separation. The mind is fed by the body. Right.

And it's a feedback and feed forward loop. So I'm not saying one replaces the other. I'm saying that there's an integration. So the way out of freeze, sometimes it's really hard because you're stuck, like you're sad. And it's almost like there's an acceptance, but social engagement, movement, good nourishment, some sleep so you can't actually give your, because like us entrepreneurs are like, shit, I can't stop hustling. I can't stop grinding.

I can't. But there's a sustainability. Even when you study flow states, if you're in a flow state constantly, that's vanian. Right. Like that's an unhealthy condition. You actually have to have intentional recovery. So I think one of the most important pieces is to put intentional recovery, just as much as we're working out.

Like put an intense, intentional recovery game. There's so many of these cool facilities around now where you can go do a nice plunge or you can go do a sauna. Yeah. Go for a walk or anything. All these things are so powerful. Red Light therapy.

There's EEG and there's so many other things you can do just to get your body down. And I respect the fact. Like, I fight too. I'm going to fight for what I stand for. It's a yes and. I can be calm. fight and stand instead of like fight for a place of anger i can say yeah i don't fight and stand for my

kids or my business or my beliefs but it doesn't have to be from a place of emotionalness or conflict yeah yeah yeah that's interesting yeah i i find for me the quickest way out of any pain is exercise and and that's you know um and all of the things that that brian just shared with us you know, I think maybe for some, maybe red light therapy, maybe more impactful or a salt bath or hanging out with a buddy. I mean, but, you know, I think it's just, we're all unique. It's just like, what is your flavor? And, you know, take a, you know, play around with those a little bit would be my expectation. Right. It's like we're all individual. So we have to, we have to find out what works for us.

Yeah. No, you're fine, man. You're fine. So tell me, what have I not asked you today that I should have asked you? And what's the answer to that question? I think we're going on. I'm the lazy podcast host and oral. I'm the laziest podcast host in the world. But show my show and you ask yourself the question. I think we've asked all these great questions.

Like, how do you find out where Brian is? Go to Dr. Brian Parris.com. That's easy. You'll put that at the end. But I think. B-R-I-A-N, by the way, Brian Parris.com. Is it DR, Brian? D-R-B-R-I-N-P-A-N-P-A-N-P.

8R-I-S dot com. Thank you. Thank you. So we spent billions of dollars on what to think or how to think and we barely put attention of money into regulating the system that drives our minds.

So our minds, again, are not just our skull-en-cased brain. It feeds information from the body. So what's the missing piece to sustainable peak performance, sustainable grit? because no entrepreneurs making it without grit or willpower us doesn't happen. But many of us have reached that point of burnout.

How do you take it beyond that? It could be as simple as exercising consistently, but I think it's a little deeper to understand what the body is telling you and create a relationship with your body and your emotions. And many of us, men especially and just high performers, are taught, like there's no crying in baseball, all like don't think, don't feel. And I'm not suggesting go out and cry in your board meetings. Not at all. I'm saying use your body and your intuition and what we were designed

to give and feed our minds as animals. We are human animals, right? So some of this goes beyond and becomes spiritual. We'll save that for 3.0 conversation. But but that's, if there's anything we missed, it would be that. Dear Brian Perez, thank you for sharing your wisdom with our audience today. It's pleasure. Audience, thank you for joining. Brian and myself. Until next time, have the best day of your life. Be grateful, make good choices, go help somebody, and God bless you. God bless. Thank you. If you're a real estate agent averaging four to 12 closings a year, and you want to know what it looks

like to join a team that sets your appointments, handles all your administrative task, and gives you daily live training. Visit www.nobrook months.com for slash join us. Nobrookmonths.com For slash join us. We review every application.