Nuanced. - 150. Kylie Bartel & Chris Bertram LIVE: Boosting Performance with Mental Health Insights

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Marking 150 episodes and four transformative years, this anniversary episode of 'Bigger Than Me' delves deep with mental health expert Kylie Bartel and features Dr. Chris Bertram's insights on the interplay of nature, trauma, and peak performance, highlighting our journey from resilience to growth. Tune in for a riveting live discussion in Studio C at Cowork Chilliwack, as we explore the intricacies of therapy, the influence of the natural world, and the psychology behind achieving flow states, culminating in an interactive audience Q&A.Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host, Aaron P. Cheers to everybody. Please raise your glass. I'm so excited that you're all here. So this month, the podcast is four years old. I started this thing on the drive. back from finding out that I wasn't going to be able to go to university at Allard anymore and that everything was going to be online. We started this in the middle of the pandemic. When I found out

that news, I was like, how do I utilize that eight hours I spend in traffic going to Vancouver every single day? Because I couldn't be apart from my partner who's in the front row tonight. I didn't want to be on campus anymore. I wanted to be with her. And so I took that drive, usually three hours there, three hours back in rush hour traffic to be with her and to make sure that I was able to keep that home life. And so with getting rid of that, I started thinking, what could I do with that extra time, those six hours? And I was listening to so many podcasts and hearing from so many interesting voices

that I was like, how can I utilize that? How can I share other people's stories? You hear people who are doing amazing things and they get like a sentence in the local newspaper. They don't get a thoughtful opportunity to tell their story. and I wanted to share that. I grew up without a father, and so I thought about all the role models

that I didn't have growing up and all of the people who influenced me, but who weren't my parent. And so I thought about how I can utilize this platform to share other people's stories and how to look at the world in a way where people are doing amazing things that you might have not just heard about.

And they're right there. They might be in the line at the coffee shop, and you just don't know their story. We often talk about networking and building relationships, but you don't get that depth in a person in just a regular coffee conversation. And so I was eager to find a way to share these people's stories in a meaningful way. And I was committed to doing that.

And Thus Born was the podcast, and I was listening to one of my favorite songs by Big Sean. And he talked about how he made it wealthy. He made all the money. He's a rapper. He did well. But it was bigger than him. And he needed to inspire others to do the same. And I wanted to share that type of story.

the type of person who's willing to think above themselves and make a difference bigger than themselves. And I think in a lot of ways, so many people are like that, whether you agree with them or don't agree with them, many people are thinking about the ways they can make a difference bigger than themselves, how they can share a story bigger than themselves, and inspire others to do the same. And I've had a blast over these four years doing exactly that. So it's with great honor and privilege that I'm able to bring out someone who's been on the podcast two times already and every time, I just can't get enough. There's so much to learn from Kylie Bartel,

and I'm so excited. Kylie, would you please consider blessing us with your presence and coming on stage? Hey, good to see you. Appreciate you. So good. Oh, my goodness. Thanks for having me.

And welcome here, everyone. This is so fun. Can't talk mental health without you. on the show you know we've had a few good rounds of this so far and I always look forward to them so much the first was when I did three hours I think right yeah yeah that was a it was funny because when I left I was like was that really three hours and then I could feel like the after after we had finished I could feel the energy was was used up but in in that three hours it went by like that it was just so much but talk about it felt like a flow state for sure I agree and then the second

one we dive more specifically and I started to hone myself skill of asking specific questions and trying to develop a story in an episode. Right. Let's get a little bit more heavy. Yeah. You're a counselor. I am. You work with people who are at trying times in their life.

Yeah. Could we start maybe with what makes somebody go to counseling? Like, it's not the best part of their life that anybody ever walks into your office or calls you. Yeah. It's in some of the lowest points. And I want to understand that deeper because. It's an important piece of the process. What makes somebody go to counseling?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the specifics of each person's story is always quite unique to them. It would be impossible to give you the nitty-gritty, which I wouldn't even do anyways because of confidentiality and all those types of things. But what I can say is that, you know, the felt human experience of being alone. Like, loneliness is at the root and the core of so many things. And it's interesting how with today's technology, we're often the most connected we've ever been, but we can also be the most lonely we've ever been. And also, you know, thinking about even being in the Fraser Valley, we've been through some big ups and downs as a community with the floods that happened a couple years back in 2021.

I was actually right on the front lines of doing mental health work with some of the farmers that were hit hardest by some of those circumstances. So I think that what usually brings people into counseling is a mix of loneliness, desperation, and sometimes it's even other people who have really encouraged them to come. And I think those people that encourage their loved ones to come to counseling because I'm so encouraged when sometimes people show up

and they're not at the most extreme of where things are hard, but we definitely do see as well, like just this feelings of hopelessness things that feel really low and also just you know I think when when things are hard and we have some sense of purpose and knowing how to go through it we can sometimes be resilient in those experiences but a lot of times it's that I've tried all the options I got nothing else in my tool belt and then they're coming in to try to develop more tools or find another path forward I'm thinking about the high high opioid crisis that we're facing right now, some of the challenges you've described with

floods and all the challenges people are facing. And I'm wondering what a person should do in those dark circumstances. Like, they go to counseling, but they also go to drugs. They also go to different coping mechanisms that you would never recommend for a person. Yeah. How do we make sure that people get the help they need in those darkest moments? Yeah. Well, I think that in some of those darkest moments, you know, isolation and struggling by yourself is one of the, one of the hardest places to be. And a lot of times, it takes a lot of courage to be vulnerable and actually share where you're truly at with someone that you know and trust. And so, you know, I'm thankful for all of the public figures, the speakers out there that are trying to encourage more and more

that we speak up sooner. I was really encouraged, even the Abbottesford Police Department a couple years back, one of their officers was killed in action. And one of the broadcasts that the police chief gave was, like, if you're struggling with something, take a knee. Like, take a knee and let someone know. One of the biggest resiliency factors against PTSD is the willingness to stay connected in community and to turn towards others and ask for help,

which is crazy, right? Like, you think that maybe resilience against PTSD would be, like, cognitive, like, strength or grittiness. It's like there are so many relational aspects of what develops our resilience and helps us keep going in some of these really difficult times. So I think that, you know, for even with opioid crisis and things like that, just being able to let your heart be moved by the reality of some of your circumstances and to listen to the people around you who have earned the right to. speak into your story. Can you give some examples as to what drives people in that first day? I think of people who are in marriages that have failed. I think of people who have been struggling with addiction for some time, who are ready to

try and do something else. What are some of the common reasons that people say, I had to pick up the phone and do something else? Yeah. A lot of times it is for a loved one, like their kids or their spouse or job stuff. Like, it's become so intense that they've been on leave from work or, you know, some of the financial pressures these days are really, really challenging for folks with inflation and everything else going on. So they kind of get to this point of being just, but just being stuck. So it can be really heavy.

And it also would probably be a bit of a disservice not to say that I've been really inspired by some people lately that do come in in the middle range as well. Some people that are like, you know, it doesn't always have to be super heavy, even though. it can be at times. But a lot of times, the quicker you come in, the less time it takes to come back to a place of feeling like life is a little more stable and meaningful and worthwhile. So the quicker we catch it, the more hopeful the outcomes are. We hear the word trauma a lot. Yeah. And I'm wondering if you can put that in a context of somebody coming into counseling. Yeah. Yeah. The working definition of trauma that I like to use, there's a big formal definition in the DSM-5, which is just the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders.

It's kind of like the big book that they use to check the checklist to see how disorders are categorized. So they have a checklist for PTSD, but the working definition that I got from one of my professors at grad school that I really like and seems to make sense to people is just that trauma is anything that's negative and unexpected that leaves people feeling confused, overwhelmed, and powerless. So that's why someone could go through a car accident, and that could be really traumatizing for them. And another person could go through a similar severity car accident and maybe not be quite as traumatized.

So this idea of like your felt experience of something and how you've made sense and meaning of it often contributes to how much it impacts you. And so that's why it becomes so personalized. One of the first steps I think for so many people is like recognizing that there is a problem. Yeah. And so you have to kind of like scale it

on where you're at on the spectrum. How bad is your circumstances out of 1 to 10? Yeah. Like one being everything's great, you're having a great night, eating pizza, banics, stuff like that. That's so good. With a good group of people.

That's right. And then 10 is nothing seems to go right in my life. Yeah. On that scale, where are people at when they come to see you? Yeah. I mean, most are sitting somewhere around the 7, 8, 9. I've sat with some tens just in a first session.

And thankfully, even with the process of coming to counseling when they look at the studies and research, if someone's really struggling and then they book the appointment, they actually, even before they receive any treatment, they start to feel better just knowing an appointment's coming. So that's a really cool, a really cool bit of science to just understand that our anticipation and the knowledge of the resources available to us impacts our ability to be resilient and hard things. But I do find that, you know, for the most part, we're accessing counseling usually at the higher ends of things, especially in a traditional sense. When I work part-time doing traditional counseling, and then I also do part-time in my private practice of nature and equine-assisted counseling.

And I find that people are a little quicker to come to that one because there's a little bit more of a draw that feels a bit more positive, which is one of the reasons I love that work so much is because we catch people a little sooner because the amount of effort and time it takes. takes to come down from like a nine out of ten suffering down to like a four or a three, it takes more time and energy and resources when we're coming from that high level compared to if we catch it at a six or a seven. And so I actually, I think in my own journey and in my journey with clients, I feel really passionate about catching it early. And there's a great quote around the idea that like an ounce of prevention is worth 10 doses of cure.

That's a quote that comes from a really great TED talk from Dr. Nadine Burke. She has a, she did a lot of work with ACE's studies. So adverse childhood experiences studies. And her TED talk is how trauma impacts health, like physical health across the lifetime, lifespan. And so this whole idea of prevention work, how do we screen for mental health? How do we help people validate the idea that like, oh, that's something that people like take seriously as a problem? So like, that's actually where I'd encourage people to start with by even if you Google, like, what are the aces? They actually have a list of like 10 things. that if you check off, yes, this happened to me, like a parent that was incarcerated or substance use happening in the home or witnessing domestic violence, all of these types of things contribute to if you, you know, a score out of 10. And when you have higher ACE scores, it is directly correlated to challenges with health outcomes towards the end of your, throughout your lifespan. This is actually what blows my mind. And I did an interview with Amanda McCormack where she raised Aces, and I worked with First Nations people in the criminal justice system

and got a deep understanding of the trauma that arises in order for people to end up with crimes of domestic violence, theft under, all of these different types of issues. And it doesn't seem like we always have the tools to have these complex conversations. And having Aces as a tool seems so valuable because it gives you like a good metric and understanding of like how this person ended up here. Totally. And it's not excusing the crime, but it's adding that context in so you can better understand what they're dealing with.

And one of the challenges I felt like I faced was that you send someone to counseling or you recommend them to go to counseling, but you never talk about the therapy they might receive. Yeah. This is one of the areas where you give a list, it's a hotline, or you give a long list and it's a bunch of names on a screen, but it lacks that what therapy is going to align with that person. Totally.

And through our interviews, I started to think about what are the types of, types of therapies that are going to work with some of these people. What are some of the tools that they need to develop in their own life that's actually going to give them the tools to succeed? Because you say, that counselor didn't work for me. Well, was it the counselor or was it the therapy? And that's something it feels like we almost never talk about, which is the therapy. So can you lay out some of the therapies that people could choose from if they're looking at counseling?

Yeah, that's a fantastic point. You know, even as you're describing that challenge of how, you know, sometimes you try, therapy and you feel like it just didn't work. I'm reminded of an experience when I was in grad school and I did an internship at an equine facilitated wellness private practice. And we actually did a residential school survivors group. And we heard stories of how one woman was exposed. She had been offered free counseling, but it was exposure therapy from a cognitive perspective where she was asked to retell her story over and over again until it just didn't bother her anymore

and it felt like such a mismatch for her, it really didn't work. But when we were able to be outside in nature with the horses and creating space for stories and narratives to be honored and heard and held with reverence, it was probably one of the most memorable moments of my grad school time because she was like, you know, she just reflected at the end of our time in our group outside in nature with horses

how much that had really, from her perspective, helped her. And that was really meaningful. So I think that, you know, there's a wide range of therapies. And a lot of times when I think about how I categorize them, we often kind of break things into three groups, whether that's cognitive, working with your thoughts and your mind, affective with an A, working with your emotions and your feelings, or somatic, working with your body and what's happening in your body sensations. And all those three things are connected.

and we tend to live and feel our best when we have skills and tools in all those areas. But depending on where someone's struggling, probably helps me start to point them in the direction of where they need to go. So, for example, some things like OCD tendencies, compulsive thoughts, those do really well with some more of the cognitive approaches like cognitive behavior therapy. But things like trauma, there's a fantastic book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. and he's a medical doctor who has worked extensively with trauma and builds a whole case for how our emotional trauma is actually stored in the body. Like a lot of times when we're experiencing,

like, stomach aches or migraines or muscle tensions or things like that, there's a psychological and an emotional connection to how our body's trying to tell us that something's not okay. So that's where somatic therapies exist, where you're working with the body and working with understanding that.

And then there's a whole other group, too, of emotion-focused therapy working on how do we understand emotions. You know, emotions, feelings aren't facts, but they are really important feedback about whether things are going our way or not and whether our needs are being met or not. So, you know, two things can be true at the same time that I feel something and maybe it's not like a fact, but it's also really important feedback to pay attention to because we tend to feel good when our needs are met and things are going our way. And we actually have more negative emotions than positive ones because it's the negative ones that are trying to point and tell us like, hey, your needs not being met or, hey, this isn't going well. And the brain's job is always just trying to keep you alive and keep you safe. So. You chose equine therapy. And it's one of your favorites. It is. Would you mind explaining how that came about for you? Yeah. Well, how much time do you have? Depends on that. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah, I don't want to steal all the time from. Chris, because I'm excited to hear what he's got to say to. But I have loved horses for as long as

I can remember. So there's something in my DNA that has always drawn me to them. It was the horse crazy girl that just never grew out of it. But what I started to notice as horses were always a part of my life from a hobby perspective, they always felt like therapy to me personally. Even going through middle school, I struggled with finding good friends and I struggled with with bullies and finding where I fit. And it felt like the horse barn always felt like a place that I could belong. And that was insanely powerful. That was a lifeline to me on some days that were just really hard.

And as I progressed through my journey, I was studying communications for my undergrad. I didn't think I was going into the mental health field at all. I was more involved in events and sports and things like that. But it was cool that in the summertime, I happened through a friend of a friend to hear about a job where I could take my horse to a ranch and work with kids that primarily

came from group homes, foster homes, and single parent homes. And they could come for a week of camp out at this ranch and they worked so hard to fundraise so kids could come for a full week of summer camp with horses and everything for $25 for the week. They were trying to make this really accessible. And if you couldn't pay the 25, they

would just wave it and say, come on, come on. And they'd bus kids in and out of the city to this ranch outside of Edmonton. This was the special place I was like, so I get to go, I get to take my horse, I get to camp and live outside, and then be with these kids. And that was a big pull for me. And I went because I loved horses and I like working with kids. But that was where I started to see a whole different level of how being outside and being around horses had profound mental and emotional benefits for kids that had been surviving a lot of trauma. And it was cool how sometimes with counseling and therapy, we do need to talk about the hard stuff because it's important. And sometimes we need to be able to focus on something positive and almost like take that heaviness and that difficulty

and displace it with something good and something meaningful. And so by being able to focus on a riding lesson, you know, I wasn't having to like pick at some kid who couldn't focus, but they actually, by sitting on a thousand pound animal, we're encouraged to pay attention because there was actually like a safety threat and an existential threat of like, if you don't pay attention, there are consequences.

And in that all of a sudden, you just watch kids like start to be able to hear and take direction. And then they learn a new skill and they start to build their self-esteem. And then they get to go ride with a friend and all of a sudden they're building a social bond that's like positive

and not about just like picking on someone else so we feel close. And so there's all of these cool benefits that are being re-revelling, without it having to be this like, well, here's your worksheet on how to make friends and here's your activity of like how to focus. And the amount of times I get kids that come out of school and they're like, I don't want another worksheet.

I'm like, I feel yeah. Like, let's go get our hands dirty in the river and ground ourselves and practice mindfulness and embodiment through like crawling over boulders on the side of the riverbank. Like it's just, even as a mental health counselor, too, like the job can be pretty draining and taxing on some days. But when I get to go out and be around the horses and around nature, my cup gets full simultaneously and it makes the job more sustainable too. So some of my favorite experiences, even after grad school, I did a year and a half of nature-based group therapy and leadership training for high school students, local high school students that were nominated by their school counselors as, needing some more support. It could be a lot of different reasons, but it was one of the most draining and fulfilling and wonderful experiences to date of my career. So, yeah.

This is a throwback to one of our first interviews, but you had a student there who attended who got a lot of benefit from this program. Would you mind sharing their story? Oh, well, there's so many, yeah, I was going to say there, I was actually thinking there's There's so many names that come to mind. It's hard to even pick one because they all have such, like they touch my heart, you know, as much as the work can be hard sometimes. Being able to do good mental health work, I think, means that you have to be able to keep your back strong, but your heart soft. Your heart has to stay movable.

But I think of, gosh, one of the stories of the one that comes to mind, she was a really special student, was having some really tough stuff happening at home and just. just also some really tough stuff happening with friends and friends that should have been friends and didn't have her back when they should have. But we were out on a sailing trip. And she was having, you know, you can see when people are feeling good and they're engaged in the group and then other times when they withdraw. And there's just a lot going on.

And so I found her in the below the decks of the sailing boat that we were on. And she was having a headache. And I just took her seriously at her word and just met a very, basic physical need and spent some time with her. And it was cool to watch just me taking that time to build that connection. Really, really kind of formed our bond in a different way. And then the next day she came to me and she's like, will you climb up the ladders up to the crow's nest with me on the sailing ship? And I have a fear of heights. And I'm like, okay. But all these times I'm asking kids to, you know, expand their comfort zones, you know.

approach their anxiety. And I'm like, this is the moment where I'm like, I can't talk the talk and not walk the walk. And I was like, I would never do this. But for you, okay, we'll try. And I had an amazing, amazing boss at the time. He also was another counselor in Chiloac. His name's Danny Gray. And he's like, I'll go up with you too because the ladders come up either side. And so he's like, he's going up one side and he was helping me on the other side and she was going up the other mast. And I was just like, I definitely said some words that are probably not okay for live YouTube, but I was trying my best and working through it. But there was something so cool about knowing her backstory,

knowing everything she was navigating and working through at home. And then just seeing her delight, she wasn't afraid of heights. She like rocketed right up there and was just sitting up there. We're all harnessed it. Don't worry, it's safe. But she's just sitting up there and just swinging her legs and was like, Come on, Kylie, you've got this. And it's like, I don't know if it's like the grinch.

You feel your heart swell two sides is bigger or something like that. And it was just one of the hardest things, but also like such an incredible experience of challenging ourselves and I feel like the three of us were bonded in a different way after that. And she did. She went on to, she was holding down a job and doing amazing things after the fact that were just, it was really cool to watch. She wasn't one of the more extrovert. ones that you could tell, but she, you could just see a different kind of light in her eyes

after that trip. And it was, yeah, I think about her fondly very much even to this day. Beautiful. Yeah. One of my favorite things that I learned from you is thinking about like animal therapy more generally. And so many of us go to dogs. I know dog is my favorite type of animal. Yeah. And they're all over you and they're ready to give you love the second you get home. And there's that strong energy. But one of the things I didn't realize was the importance of understanding that horses are actually prey animals. Yes.

And so they're not going to jump all over you. And if you've been through some traumatic stuff in your life, that might be more appropriate. Would you mind saying like how animal therapy works and how do you choose what animal might be right for you? Totally. Well, that's a brilliant question. I had a chance to work for a few years at a really cool farm in Abbotsford called empowered by horses. I love the team there. I'm sad not to be there anymore, but they had a whole

range of animals from horses and cats and chickens and sheep and all the things. And it was just so interesting how, and they had dogs that would come on site at times too. And a lot of times people are drawn to the animals that are best for their healing even if they don't consciously know why. Like I found that at the ranch I worked at as well, that summer ranch, we had horses, but we also at a petting zoo and things like that. And the interesting thing about horses being prey animals is that two things, you're right. So dogs being predator animals, when they're just interacting with each other, you know, they sleep on each other, they're touching each other, they're wrestling with

each other, that's how they bond. But with horses, as prey animals, they're a lot more focused on presence and attunement. So like if one, if the herd is looking and one looks up, everyone else looks up too. But they don't actually, once in a while, they'll mutually. groom each other, but for the most part, when you go and see horses, they're standing next to each other very close and they're very connected, but they're not touching. Because the other thing is they don't have fingers to reach out and touch. Like as a prey animal, they think a bit differently, but also for them belonging in the herd is absolutely crucial to their survival. So they have a

different way of valuing relationship in that way. And I do find that even with my clients who who seem to be really drawn to horses. They often feel understood a lot of the times by these animals who spend a lot of time wondering, is that going to get me? Is this going to get me? You know, horses spend a lot of time wondering if that rustle in the bush is the cougar

that's coming to get them. It's just naturally baked into their nervous system and how they see the world. And sometimes for people who have felt like the world was out to get them or people were out to get them, horses can bring this sense of like empathy and understanding that's hard to match so yeah we're in a beautiful area we are blessed to live in the Fraser Valley with so much nature around us

some people are just needing to reconnect with nature would you mind talking about nature therapy yeah and the Fraser Valley yeah I you know uh I was I was reflecting on this today how um when I was growing up in Chilliac I've been in Chilliwack living in Chiloha since I was five and spent some time going around a little bit as well, but mainly Chilliwack has been home base for a long time. And I grew up going to Coltis Lake and hiking Mount Shiam and things like that, but I took it for granted a little bit because I just thought it was normal. It was home. But after spending some more time traveling around the world and actually even it stood out to me, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine from high school, Sam Waddington,

and owns Matt Waddington's outdoors in Chilwack, which I love that desire to get people out into the outdoors more. He was saying he's traveled a lot too, and he was saying that out of all the places he's been in the world, Chilowack stands out to him as some of the best accessibility to the outdoors, right at your back, in your backyard, basically. And it struck me. I was like, I never thought of Chilohawk that way until he said it so clearly. And I found that to be true. Like, you know, we've got Chilowack Lake and Coltis Lake and Harrison Lake, and we have ample hiking all over the place. The Fraser River is one of my favorite places to ride horses. And when you dig into some of the research around how beneficial nature is for

our mental health, you know, they did a study at one point where they had people take a walk through a city, an urban area, or through nature, and the amount of ruminating thoughts or rumination of walking through nature, it was significantly better for mental states to walk through nature. Even the walking exercise is still good for mental health both ways, but being in nature had an even more powerful effect on reducing rumination of thought. So this idea of being more connected to nature, spending time outside being in our bodies, because a lot of times when we go through trauma, we get disconnected from our body sensations and what's happening below our neck. And so when we get outside in nature, it's almost like, you know, you can't help but

maybe pick up a rock or look at the moss or take in the smells and it's this reset that we've spent how many as a species how how many thousands of years spending a bunch of time outside and even something as simple as light from the sun that can have just being able to go out and look at the sun and have it hit your skin and hit your face has a huge impact on mood and and levels of depression. So I think both from research and from my clinical and work experience and my personal life, I just noticed so many mental health benefits for getting outside and exploring nature and this idea too that when we are trying to survive in the wilderness or having

to navigate uncertainties in nature, there's this thing that existential anxiety will often and displaced neurotic anxiety. And if I could give an example of what I mean by that, I even found when I worked at the horse ranch with youth, you know, they would show up and they didn't realize we were sleeping in a wall tent all week and riding horses all week. And they were like, well, where am I going to plug in my hair straightener?

And I was like, we're not going to be straightening our hair this week. And they were like, you know, the anxiety around that was huge or how am I going to keep my Snapchat streaks going or things like that? And so that was a big concern and a big anxiety for them, at the start of the week. But then as they started to realize, like, how are we going to eat? Oh, well, we have to chop the firewood and figure out how to light the fire and keep the fire lit, and then we get to eat, like, these different existential anxieties of, like, how are we

going to stay warm at night? Like, how are we going to get from A to B? And these types of things, all of a sudden, like, the hair straightener didn't matter so much. Or, and it was, like, one of the most delightful memories I have from the ranch was one of the girls that came in. She was probably about 13, 14, but it came across quite a bit older, quite a bit more mature and had big makeup on, which was, she looked great, but you could just feel this kind of like this need to look a certain way and present herself a certain way to be accepted. And it felt a little bit like, wow, she's quite mature for her age and together.

And sometimes actually when kids have to grow up before their time, that can be their own developmental trauma in a way as well. They've had to, you know, step up and be an adult in their life when maybe they haven't had the most steady adult figures to lean on. And I just remember as the week progressed and less and less makeup got put on in the morning, even though sometimes they still did it in the tent in the morning. I'm like, hey, if you want to do it, go for it. Like, no judgment, you can do whatever you need to do. And then we got to the end of the week, and she discovered that in the pond where the horses

were drinking, there were like these tadpoles hatching in the sides that were kind of jelly and squishy, and the mud was kind of jelly and squishy. And she just went in there and, like, let her toes sink into the mud. and like the giggle of delight and disgust all mixed into one was just this heartwarming and like beautiful thing to behold. And I kind of felt like, oh, there you are. Like without all the other things that, you know, there's no judgment with the other stuff,

but it was just like, it was just kind of her essence and her soul and her smile came through. And I was just so honored to encounter her in that moment. It was really special. That's beautiful. Yeah. Two more brief questions. One is what does healthy look like?

It feels like we're so consumed by what ailment looks like. When we see it in the news, when we see people struggling, it seems like when that becomes the story, when that becomes the narrative, we stop looking at what success and health looks like. What does a meaningful, full life look like? Would you remind us? That's great. You know, when I think about that question, I can feel like the academic in me thinks of like, oh, well, this theory would say this is healthy and this theory would say this is healthy. But that's not the question you asked.

So I'm, you know, I'll lean into more of my own experience and the things that I have found meaningful, both with clients and for myself personally. And I have really, I've really enjoyed studying humanistic and existential therapies, philosophy, I've found a lot of really good stuff in there. And in the existential framework, this idea, existential is just this fancy word of saying, like, how do we find meaning and purpose in our existence? Existential, our existence.

And what they say for in that school of thought is that when we are going through the motions of life, thinking, the thought of feeling like it's like a push, like I have to, I must, I should do this. And it's like your outsides are doing the thing, but your insides are different. There's an incongruence there. That would be where the most fertile soil for mental health pathology to grow. So anxiety, depressions, all those things come out of that inner world of, I have to, I must.

I'm like kind of a victim to my experience and to life. I'm just going, like, it's happening to me. I have no agency in it. Whereas on the flip side, then health is kind of like when you're moved in life by pulls this like, I get to do this. I want to do this. I like to do this. I value this and I am bringing myself to the table. I'm engaged. And, you know, I can give what we say is living with inner consent or giving your inner yes to life. And in the notes, they'll spell it. Y, E, S, like all caps, apostrophe, like, or exclamation point. It's like this inner yes. And then people can

live from that place, that we tend to be the healthiest. And then people will say, like, well, there's a lot of things that I have to do that I don't want to give my inner yes to. And I'm like, absolutely fair. I totally can appreciate that. But this is where this school of thought comes out of existential work. And there's a great book by a man named Victor Frankel who wrote a book called Mansearch for Meaning. And he was a Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp in World War II. And you think about all the places where you don't want to get up and work. Like, that seems like probably one of the most dark and dire.

And so he was able to kind of work through this idea of a greater yes. Maybe I don't want to say yes to this hard thing in front of me. But by doing this thing, does it still align to a greater, a greater value, a greater pull? So for him, he's like, I don't want to get up and work in the concentration camp. But I do want to see if my family's still alive. or, you know, his manuscripts, his life's work that he had been studying had been taken and burned when he arrived. And he's like, I want to survive this so I can republish my life's work and have it be passed on for other generations. And so this idea that sometimes being gritty, digging deep means maybe I don't want to do this thing in front of me, but is there something the greater, yes, that I do want more?

And even when I asked people like, what got you out of bed this morning? They're like, well, I have to. I'm like, well, okay, sure. Yeah, you have to go to work. But like, what does work allow you to do that you do want? And when you think about going to work like, this job helps bring in a paycheck so that I can do this thing that I really do care about or that I want to do, it starts to change the way we engage both the hard things and the good things. But also then gives you that reminder that sometimes, I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but sometimes even our hobbies and the things we love can start to feel a bit like, oh, have to do that. Like, I can get sucked into the thought of, like, I have to go to the barn and do my horse chores.

And then I have to just pause for a moment and go, like, no, whoa, no. Like, I get to go to the barn and do a horse chores because I have a horse in my life. And that's a really special thing that was a childhood dream that's now realized. So sometimes to remind ourselves, too, of, like, what's the thing you have now that past you dreamed of? Or things like that, too. So that inner yes is usually what I'm hunting for when I'm working with clients or in my own life as an indicator of health.

Kylie, this has been fascinating. We're going to have you back out here in a little bit to do a Q&A at the end. But please, can we give a round of applause for Kylie Bartow? Thanks so much. Awesome. Thank you.

Good? Good. We have food over there, snacks. Please breathe and have some food, if you like. I just want to reflect on the fact that we are four years into this, but it's unique that we're here in Co-Work Chilliwack, and it didn't come with a plan. My partner and my mom who are in the front row, one morning, all of a sudden water started pouring out of our apartment out of all the light sockets, and we were panicking. and it was three in the morning, something like that. And we were wondering what the heck was going on and what was causing this and what we were going to do. And about 10 minutes into the water pouring into our home and flooding the ground, we were like,

we're not sleeping here tonight. And we're going to have to move. And so we moved out of there very quickly and started trying to figure out where we were going to stay, booking an Airbnb, contacting insurance, trying to figure out that plan. But I had an interview booked with the mayor of Abbotsford, about the 2021 floods and how he managed it. And it wasn't an option to say,

no, Mr. Mayor, I don't want to proceed with the interview anymore. It was, I really want this interview. He was working with Justin Trudeau. They were trying to figure out how are we going to navigate the 2021 floods. He wasn't going to run for re-election again, so I knew he could be honest about what he had experienced. I was super excited, and I was trying to figure out what a solution might look like. And so I reached out to Tim McAlpine. I had the privilege of working with Chanel Prasad upstairs at Alpine Legal Services. And I said, I have an interview with the mayor of Abbotsford about the floods and I really want to proceed. And so right back there is where I filmed that episode. That is the studio space. We usually bring out a table over there and we do a one-on-one.

And we went three and a half hours on those floods and on what it was like to hop in a helicopter and oversee all of that work and communicate with people and he didn't sleep for two days. It was an amazing interview, but it opened this door that I wouldn't have had the confidence to go through had all of that not happened. And so I'm grateful for that experience. I'm incredibly grateful for Tim McAlpine, who was like, we'll figure out the finances. We'll figure out how to do all of that later. But yes, you can use my space.

We'll figure that out and we'll proceed. So I'd just like to really quickly pause and thank Tim McElpine for all of his considering to support. But you didn't come here for these stories. You came here for quality interviews with people. And I set this up in my head thinking, yes, we go through dark things, and we need to discuss that piece. But I feel like sometimes the conversation gets stopped there. How to figure out your life.

How to get that organized. Some people have that stuff figured out. Some people are just living a good life, and they're looking. looking how to take it to the next level. And that's how I set this up. So that was some heavy conversations about where people are in their darkest moments. But I also wanted to add that piece of what people's lives can look like in their best days. And so it's without further ado, I have to invite Dr. Chris Bertram, who's going to talk to us about flow states and mental performance. Chris, would you please join us?

Okay. Thank you so much. I appreciate. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Okay, here we go. How are you feeling? Great. Brilliant. Congrats on four years, by the way.

Thank you very much. Very nice. Big round for this guy. It's a great way to celebrate. So people have their good days and they have their bad days, but you have the privilege of watching people at their best. Would you mind telling us a bit about the work that you do? Sure. Yeah, it's a bit of a complicated story. I work here at the university. I work in the School of Kinesiology there, studying human learning, for lack of a better word, how we get from where we are to where we want to be. Somewhere along the way, I sort of started stepping out of the research lab and into the real world and trying to find out the people who have the most skin in the game of learning, at least in my first foray out into the world, were the athletes. And they were really curious about, you know, okay,

So that's their job to get better faster. And so that's what I started doing there. And that sort of grew into some other work that sort of spreads around the professional athlete world and also now branches into the corporate world, talking a lot about corporate well-being and those sorts of things these days. So, yeah, I'm kind of all over the place. Fascinating. Would you mind sharing a little bit about the athletes that you've worked with?

Sure. Yeah. So, well, one of the things I did here for a long time at the university, I actually coached the golf team. That was one of my sort of living laboratories I had. And so I'm really interested in golf. I find it if you're going to study learning, you have to study something that's really hard and watch what happens over time. And I started having a real interest in the sort of science of golf.

And that really got me into the golf world. And so I spend a lot of time these days with golfer. So Nick Taylor made a 72 foot pot last year. He's one of my clients, a couple of other people on the tour. but I also work with Canada snowboard. So sort of the opposite end of the athletic spectrum, golf to professional snowboarding, big air snowboarders, insane human beings, super talented, super courageous.

And then, yeah, and some of the other stuff down in the States, athletes from just about every major sport. I think about it, and it seems like a stupid question when I really think about it, because who's not fascinated by the human mind and the human perspective, but what made you interested in psychology? It's a good question because I'm not a psychologist. I always like to get that on the table right out of the bat, right off the bat. My primary academic areas in human learning. And so I would study things that could maybe optimize the learning process a little bit. How do you get from there to there? And how do we seamlessly, you know, move you along that path? And very quickly in that process, you come to realize that these things don't really matter because there's this mind hovering over top of everything that you're doing. And if you're not paying attention to the psychology of the human brain, you're really missing a

big part of the story. So, you know, I'm not a psychologist, but I kind of play one on the internet sometimes. And I work with a really great psychologist that helped me along too. I'm also interested, there's these moments in your life that are incredibly meaningful that I don't know if we give enough credence to. Like when I'm on a good run, I hit that eight kilometer mark. I hit that 10 kilometer mark and the endorphins hit. And I start to understand things. differently. I start to think about how would I do this with the podcast? How would I move that around? And it's these thoughts that I don't feel like would come if I was just sitting at my computer looking for an idea. And we can so often get into the nitty gritty of life and we can get

busy. But in these special moments that you kind of get to help people work with, you get to see these moments. I'm wondering from your perspective, how do people go from just living to starting to thrive and find these moments? Yeah. Well, the example that you gave is a really good one because one of the things we know about how your mind works is that when we really start to feel our best and perform our best, like when you're out for a run and you hit that eight mile mark, really interesting things start happening in the brain. There's a term, it's big, it's a mouthful, it's called selective transient hypofrontality, which just means that temporarily the frontal lobes of your brain start to get very, very quiet, which is the part that we're using all day long.

we're kind of living in our executive control of our frontal lobes. And we think that's great. And it's really helpful in a lot of ways. But it's that sort of oversight that causes all of the rumination, all the thoughts that we're having that aren't necessarily productive. And one of the things that happens when we move our bodies, especially at a certain cadence for a certain amount of time, is that part of the brain starts to go very, very quiet.

And so what you're left with is a feeling of liberation and that you're not just stuck in your own head. You sort of step outside of yourself. And that's where creativity is born. That's where this thing called flow lives and all the rest of it. So to me, that's sort of the ideal place to be as much as you can in life. We don't need to be there all of the time. But the more often we can seek out these kinds of experiences, I think the better off will I'll be.

I feel like in our culture, we chase happiness so much. It's all about, like, do what makes you happy. And I've always, it just, it's like chalkboard, like fingers on a chalkboard. Like, I just don't like that. because that's not going to sustain you over 50 years. That's not going to sustain you over your life. And so finding what's meaningful in these moments, to me, are so important. When did you stumble across flow states?

So, well, I'd stumbled across them in my own life. I grew up playing a lot of sports. I was really active, and that was sort of my main source of flow. So I'd experienced it a lot. But there was not a lot of science around it, to be honest. it was just this mystical fleeting experience that, you know, I just felt really great and everything felt really easy, and everybody here has felt that at some level. But I was actually reading a research article one day on the subject of flow as it pertains to learning, which is, again,

my main interest. And one of the things they'd shown in this paper is they did this thing called a flow intervention, which I didn't know what it was at the time, and then had people do a learning task. And what they found was that group that had this intervention, we can talk about what it was later, but they learned anywhere between three and five times faster than a control group. And I thought, that's probably bullshit, frankly, is what I thought at the time, because I do this kind of work. And you just don't see those kind of massive learning effects in a study. And it turns out that that's a pretty robust effect. And so if I, like me, I'm in the game of human learning, I want to figure out the best way to do it. So that's where I sort of started

really digging into it. And so I got my PhD in 2002. I like to joke that I feel like that expired in about 2010. And that's when I started this other curiosity of flow and ultimate human performance. What do you think the experience of flow is like for a person? Because it's called different things, being in the zone, it's called these different terms.

But what is the actual felt experience from your perspective? Yeah. So it's good that you pointed that out. Terms like Runners High that you were describing a minute ago being in the zone or in the pocket musicians talk about. They are all synonyms for this thing. And the scientific term is flow state. So that came from a Hungarian psychologist. His name was Mihai, Chikseni, he was speaking of chasing happiness. That's what he was interested in. This was where humanistic psychology that Kylie was talking about a few minutes ago was born. This idea that there's more to the study of psychology than the study of what can go wrong in the human mind. They were really interested in the upside of the human experience. And Chiksetmiha was really curious about what are the elements of happiness. And he went around the world and asked thousands and thousands of people and ended up coining this term flow state because it's what people describe. So when you're at your best, what are you feeling like? And people would say things like, well, it's like when I'm talking, it just seems like one word is

seamlessly flowing into the next. Or if it's an athlete or somebody moving, it's like one movement is just seamlessly flowing into the next. Musicians talk about this. So the word flow was born there. And one of the things he found out was that no matter what kind of flow experience you're having, the same, it's about eight to ten characteristics show up. So the lived experience of flow is what he really unpacked for everybody. So it's things like time passing very, very strangely. So we have this altered perception of time, long conversations, you and Kylie had three hours, felt like five minutes, that's flow. So we perceive time differently. We feel a real sense of connection. That can be to an instrument or an object or to another human being. And there's a

sense of ease there. There's a sense of calmness about it. There's about eight or nine of these kinds of things but they all are the kind of lived experience of being in flow and then the really fun stuff for me was when we started looking inside the brains of people when these experiences were showing up and trying to understand what actually is happening underneath the skin when we start to feel this way and that's been really fun too because that actually is what leads to these other things like when you understand the mechanisms like what are the things that switch on and switch off inside the brain and the body when these experiences show up, we can figure out other ways to activate those mechanisms. And flow can go from being this fleeting mystical experience

to one that you can sort of program for intentionally if you do it properly. Do we have any like Olympic golfers or experts in snowboarding? So I think it would be useful to like bring this back for people and understand how they could apply this. And one of the things I didn't know about prior to interviewing you the first time was microflow stage. And that's more accessible, I think, for the average person who's not a professional golfer. Would you mind telling us about microflow stage? Sure. Yeah.

Well, that study that I mentioned, what they did is they used a magnetic coil and they sent a little magnetic pulse into the front of somebody's brain. And it started to shut down their frontal lobes and this thing that happens to you when you run was happening to them. But here's the interesting thing. I've actually had that done to me. And you feel no different at all. You don't feel like you're on a high. You don't feel like, oh, it's the best moment of my life. It's sort of almost imperceptible that anything has happened to you.

And yet, there, increases in rates of learning from three to five times, even when it's not really perceptible. So to me, that says, like, the value proposition for these things called microflow states are really, really powerful. Because flow is a spectrum of experience, like every emotional experience we have. You can be really, really happy, or you can be just kind of in a good mood. You can be really, really mad or just a little bit agitated. Flow is like that, too. You can be in these peak moments of your life, birth of your kids, getting married, right? Those are peak life moments. We call those macro flow states. But then there's all these other things where all the dials of flow maybe get turned down to three. And, you know, time passes really strangely or you feel really connected to somebody. but it might not be the best moment of your life. There is still power to be leveraged there and there's all sorts of great outcomes that you can get in terms of learning,

in terms of performance, in terms of just feeling better. The definition of flow is an altered state of consciousness where you feel your best and perform your best. We usually talk about the perform piece, but it also is a source of great joy and happiness. And that's, you know, so it's both of those things. There's also a really great lesson

in this and that for the most part these flow states don't come by accident by just walking down the road and then all of a sudden this happens it's often from people working incredibly hard for a long period of time improving at their at their craft or their skill or what they're working on then they find these moments would you mind walking us through how people get into these states when they're professional golfers when they're putting in their best because i think it's a reminder that we all need to live up to our own potential whatever that looks at looks like if you're a great painter, you need to practice painting to get into the state. If you're a great runner, you need to practice running. So would you mind walking us through that?

Well, I think the easiest way to think about this is any kind of flow state generally follows three or four steps. And the first one is called the struggle phase. There is no flow without struggle. There's an expression that flow follows focus. And focus comes about a lot of times. We get really locked into something when there is struggle and we feel agitation in our system. that's where a lot of people quit and stop. But if you can kind of navigate your way through that, there is this release phase and then flow can show up on the other side of it. But when you go for a run, for example, I'm sure that the first five minutes don't feel super flowy. That's the struggle part of the run.

But then if you get lucky, you feel that release and then you can start to feel that runner's higher, that flow show up on the back end. It's the same as if you're working, sitting at a desk like I do, writing things. You don't just sit down and have creativity flow out of you. It's always a process of I overthink. I'm too choosy with my words. But I know that when I start to feel kind of agitated by it, I've learned to say, that's the signal. That's what you need to pay attention to. You need to lean in here.

And when you do that, you have a chance of sort of. breaking through onto the other side where flow can show up so you have to be willing to lean into the fight i agree with you and i think about it in terms of the interview process because so many people can think you could just sit up here and ask these types of questions and i find that there's such an important nobody thinks that this is a hard job well i often think some of the questions that i ask seem like they're simple but what i try and do is i do a ton of research prior and then I have kind of the flow of how I want that conversation to go. But then if you or whatever guest comes on and says something interesting,

I don't want to be so tied to my notes that I focus more on the next question than I do on hearing and experiencing that answer and kind of having. And that's what, to me, makes great interviewers unique is they don't stick to a list of questions and then say that they're done. They hone in in those specific moments. How do people make sure that they hone in and they experience? experience these benefits when they sort of arrive? Well, I think you've got two parts of it here. Number one, you do the work. You prepare. You sort of sharpen your tools, right? Then when you know

you have that in your back pocket, that gives you freedom to play, right? You couldn't just show up here and freestyle, or maybe you could. I think you'd probably be pretty good at it. But I think when we have, when we've put in the time and we've put in the work, so you do your version of practice there. It's what athletes do, right? It's put in the time in the gym, working on your skills so that when the moment shows up, you've got that set of tools, but you can be creative with how you deploy them. That's the really interesting pieces. You don't just go through it one at a time. You're able to kind of move freely and you have confidence that you know those things are there, but I think it gives you some freedom to be creative is what you're talking about there. Do you see health benefits from people

who are in these states more regularly than people who are just grinding at the grindstone and just working hard every day and not really having the fun moments? Well, yes. I think there are, this is not work that I do, but I can tell you that flow is highly correlated through other research that shows that meaning overall life satisfaction, flow is a massive predictor of those great things. There's some really interesting research that came out after. COVID that show that people who were engaged more frequently in what you would call your primary flow activity, that thing that makes you feel really happy and connected, could be gardening, it could be racing something, it doesn't matter, whatever you feel those things.

The people who do that more tended to navigate the challenges of COVID at a much higher rate and fended off a lot of the negative outcomes that we saw there. So the mental health benefits are huge. Again, flow is synonymous ultimately with joy and happiness, and the downstream effects of those things are pretty obvious. That's fascinating. Would you mind telling us you work with people who are professional, like they know what they're doing,

but you've also worked with novices. You also work with novices. We use these terms a lot in society. You're a novice, you're an amateur, you're learning. What are some of the differences between somebody who's a novice and someone who's an elite professional at what they do in terms of getting into these states. Well, I'll give you a sort of an academic answer, but I'll try to make it somewhat interesting. There's a stage of learning that we go through.

The first one, it's called the cognitive stage. We're trying to think through everything, right? Learning how to drive a car, you have to learn which pedals do what and which handles do what. We're stuck there for a long time, most of the time. Then we start to move through this middle ground where there's a lot of trial and error. we're not having to think too much. But then we get to this place. It's called the autonomous state of learning

where we can use our attention and point it towards the outside world. So you can now drive a car and be watching things around you. And your attentional resources aren't all gobbled up by having to think about which foot does what now and what does this do.

So this process of moving away from the thinking brain into the more subconscious element. of movement or performance or whatever it is. It just becomes more, it feels reflexive now. Like you don't think about how you drive a car unless you get in a new car maybe or a stick shift or something.

But most of the time what happens is this gradual movement away from overthinking into the place where you want to turn off the thinking and let the skills just naturally emerge from you. That is not a permanent state though. Professional athletes, struggle too and the concept of overthinking, you know, those are very real challenges for all of us and certainly professional athletes too. When we sort of revert back into these more cognitive

states where we're thinking about things, trying to use the front of our brain, again, the thing that Kylie talked about that is there to protect us, not to put us into states of high performance. We have to try to think of ways to manage that. You're all going to love this next question. Would you mind talking to us about the anterior mid-singulate cortex? Sure. Doesn't that sound interesting? Right on the edge of your seat. I'm impressed by your neuroscience knowledge there. The anterior mid-singlet cortex, yes. So it's a part of the cortex, the outer part of your brain, the highly evolved human part of your brain. It's a little bit deeper down in there, but it's the part of

the brain that tends to come online when we do really, really hard things. So if you take, they do this with little mice and labs and other animals where you can sort of stimulate that area of the brain, they're more willing to engage in hard work and do more things. If you lesion that part of the brain, people seem really unmotivated to do much of anything. And if you look at people who tend to lean into hard work. work a lot. So people who take on a new exercise program, over the course of literally a week, this part of your brain starts to grow in size. And so it's the part of the brain that sort of shows up

when we need tenacity or grit or perseverance words like that. There's an actual part of the brain or it's a part of a network, but it's a very important hub in this network where if you have that part working and working hard, you seem to be more inclined to do hard work. And the reason is, by the way, if you want me to bore you a little more of this, is that effort center plugs right into your brain's reward centers. And so you start to connect the idea of hard work with reward. And so there's this central rewarding feedback loop. And it gets to be pretty addictive for some people, right? That's why when you start to overcome challenge, it's like, I want more of that. There's a real sort of biological component to that, this thing that you mentioned.

I'm at... Mid-singulate cortex, yeah. It just rolls off the tongue. Yeah, right? I hear this a lot, and I think about it in my own life, that some of the parts of me that are the most interesting don't come from people thinking that I was going to do well in high school, that I was the smartest person in the room,

that I had the most things figured out. It was because I was willing to take whatever was given and figure it out when other people wanted to quit, when other people wanted to fold, particularly in law school, where you're reading documents that are just like, you'd want to close the book and go to sleep, and you keep going despite this. And I remember taking, here's another fun one,

taxation of corporation and shareholders, which was... Neuroscience sounds dry. But I took that course with the mindset, like, I want to learn these things, because these are the things you hear about in the news, like, oh, like this company moved this money, and they managed to avoid taxes on this. Like, I wanted to understand that process,

and I knew it was going to be boring, but I wanted to push myself in that regard so that I could understand that different side of the world. Would you mind describing more of, like, how people continue to do this in their life because it seems like there's benefits? Yeah, what you're talking about their... So when I start talking with somebody

about the subject of mental performance, there's a lot that goes into that. there's a lot of basic foundational things around sleep and how you fuel and other things. These things all ladder up to mental performance, but there are a certain suite of mental performance skills that can be trained and cultivated that can be really, really useful for not just athletes, but for everybody. And number one on that list is curiosity. Then that's what you just described, right?

It's, I want to know why, right? So I think it's probably why you're a good podcast host, too. because you have a general inkling towards curiosity. It correlates to all kinds of success metrics. And here's the interesting thing about curiosity. It is running all through kids, right? Every kid's favorite question, if you have ever had a four-year-old, why? Why, why, why?

Curiosity is the software that runs on this change machine called your brain. That only works until you get to be about 25 years. old. And this magical window of neuroplasticity really starts to shut down. And we stop being curious. And I always joke with people like, tell me your favorite music. And the answer you invariably get is, well, it's the stuff that I was listening to in high school or when I was maybe in my early 20s. And since then, all music is shit. Why? Because we stop being curious about other things, right? We kind of get set in our ways. We hear this. It is a lack of curiosity. So curiosity sort of goes from this thing that we had hardwired when we were younger into something that

becomes less and less a part of our everyday life. It's not that it can't, it's lost beyond the age of 25. You're over 25. And are you over 25? I'm 28. Okay. Okay. It's hard to tell. You got a young face and I've never asked you. If I'm being really honest, when I turned 25, every day I told Rebecca, like my neuroplasticity is going down. This is it for me. Podcast is done. I did it so often. It became a terrible joke. But what you're talking about is the upside of it. It has to become a practice. And a podcast is a great way to practice curiosity because you have to ask good questions, which is curiosity. So that's the foundational mental performance skill. It can be cultivated even beyond.

the age of 25, you just have to start getting really curious with certain things about how you operate, how other people operate, ask more questions, ask better questions. That's what relationships are built on. It's not just what makes a good podcast. It's what makes a good relationship. And it can be done. We just have to be a little bit more intentional about it. Great answers to these questions. I'm wondering if you can walk us through you work with some professional athletes what can all of us learn from their journey they're grinding and i often do this with ufc fighters of like i'm not going to go become a ufc fighter but what can i take away from the grit the determination the passion the love of the game

the energy that they put into it what can i pull away from that and learn from what what can we learn from some of the athletes you've worked with well first of all i think the best athletes that i work with they have a certain wiring. I think there's a part of being at the absolute top of elite that is sort of not the teachable part. But on top, that is not enough. Being super gifted, talented, whatever you want to say is not enough. What they also have is a certain gift for just being a beginner and taking a beginner's mindset, that being curious and using that curiosity as a way to drive change, to drive improvement,

progression, and accepting the fact that it doesn't happen overnight, it's sort of like that one percent a day mentality. What can I do today to just move me a little bit closer in the direction of my big goal? So when we set goals, for example, everybody here probably has goals, some big audacious thing that we want to achieve in life for next year. Great. Put it on the map. But what are you going to do today? What thing or set of things can you do today? And athletes are really good at getting a list of things to do. It's going to be something to do with my body today. It's going to be something to do with how I fuel myself. It's going to be something to do with how my mental performance is working. And they just start picking away a little bit

at a time. All of these are skills, which means they can improve over time if you put in the work. And I think there's a commitment there to progress and an understanding that it is not linear. And when they fail, that's okay. This is the growth mindset piece. If I fail, it's okay. I can learn there too. And they understand that failure is a part of the process. And they don't let that deter them. Those are things we can all do. incredible my next question was going to be how can everybody else take this into tomorrow morning do you have any extra thoughts on that get a good night's sleep i i think when i work with every athlete we we spend the first month talking about sleep it really is the greatest

multiplier of anything good that can happen performance feeling good and it's the it's the biggest detractor of what can take away from performance and feeling good. So that's my basic kind of boring advice, but literally that is the thing. And I know from the people that I work with sleep tends to be a pretty significant issue, but do your best to take care of your sleep. That's my practical advice for tomorrow. Fantastic. Chris, I'd like to first thank you for being willing to join us tonight and share such fantastic insights. Can we give a round of applause? for Dr. Bergman. I'm also going to ask if Kylie Bartel can join us again.

Ooh, now the fun part. The fun part. We're going to get both of you and your insights on some questions. So good. Wow. I feel so privileged to have taken that in. That was great. How is everybody feeling right now?

Good? Kylie, I guess I'll start just by asking, is there anything you took away from what Chris just said that stood out to you? You're going to ask me to pick one thing? That seems impossible. I laughed hard at the part about music, how sometimes that desire or that practice of curiosity

tends to dwindle after our mid-20s. But I also took a lot of comfort in that idea of being willing to make mistakes. being willing to risk failure and being able to work through that and see the growth mindset in that. I remember when I was learning a little more about that, how that really opened up my own willingness to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and get comfortable with risk and that that was brave to take risks. And yeah, so I just was like feeling like, oh, felt like I was on track. I was like, yes. What was the band? What's your favorite music?

Oh, it's a wide range. Is it bad that like the boy band B44 comes to mine from like middle school? Like, because everyone else like backstreet boys and insane and I had to pick something slightly different. Yeah. So on the like YTV hit list on, yeah. That's great. So we're going to take some questions from the audience, but I'm going to ask a few more. So if you can start to think in your mind, get into a flow state about the questions that you might have, that would be fun.

through it. Yeah, right? Yeah, that's good. I'm wondering if both of you can share your thoughts on how people can take a next step in their life that's going to make improvements. You mentioned sleep, but I just think about like the willingness to be mindful about where you're at and where you want to go. Like when Rebecca and I were starting out, we, we, okay, it wasn't beautiful, but I put this chalkboard paint up on the wall and I drew a long line and I put a 10 year plan with some of that. And we've knocked off. everything on that list. And in part, it helps that you see that every single day. It was hideous. She couldn't stand the look of a black wall in her home. But it helped a lot in starting to develop that planning process. How do people really go from wherever they're at, whatever struggles they're facing, to really taking that meaningful first step, whether it's starting counseling, whether it's starting to get physically active? What are your thoughts on how people really take that first step? Yeah. Do you have thoughts on that? Yeah, sure. Well, you use that word mindful. that's a good tool one of the really really interesting things that I think is gaining some

popularity and broader acceptance is this idea of a mindfulness practice I was a really late adopter to this by the way I probably like five years ago started taking it seriously it is an incredible meta skill that basically serves every other skill you're trying to get better and it is just this a lot of words a lot of baggage around that term mindfulness. But what it means, I think in its truest sense, is just being more aware. And it starts with you, being more aware of yourself and how your mind works in its most quiet moments. You can practice this. There are meditation practices that literally every elite athlete I now work with swears by. It is incredible what you can get from that. And I think it's not just

true of athletes, it's been probably the most important skill that I've really tried to cultivate in myself in the past, again, five years or so, just paying attention to what your tendencies are, right? You talked about Victor Frankel and that time between stimulus and response being so key, noticing when you're having a reaction and noticing, just noticing. You don't even have to do anything. Just notice it's happening and it kind of loses its power. So that is a really important thing, and it's a skill, again, that you can get better at. Yeah. Yeah, that's great.

I think, too, sometimes for my own mindfulness practices, it's sometimes been hard to stay still, but even being able to mindfulness and movement, like walks in nature or sitting by streams where there's movement, it's been fun to be able to play with different activities of how to hone that in. So that's been a big piece for me, too. So I resonate with that one. And another piece I would add is spending, your initial question, just like, where can people get started about taking this forward? I've watched a lot of people make great shifts by making sure they're closely aligned in spending time with people who are already embodying something of what they want to become more of. So, you know, if you want to be better in your business, make sure you're spending some time with people who are killing it at business.

Or, you know, if you want to be, you know, for me a better horseback rider, like spend time being around people who are better. And even if it's uncomfortable and you feel kind of, you know, self-conscious sucking in front of people, like be willing to put yourself around the greats and just soak up what you can because there's a lot of things both explicitly and implicitly that are happening that you can draw on that impact us and shape how we're acting. So I think, yeah, being really not, I guess, mindful of who you're spending your time with and what you're taking in. So that can be really, really key to. I hate when that happens when I have a question in my head and then you kind of almost answer it. And I still want to ask it because I think it's a good question. Yeah. But I imagine even individuals like Nick Taylor, we have people we aspire to be like.

We have people we look up to. And I feel like the mentorship mentality is maybe lower in our generation. right now, this willingness to look up at someone and go, wow, I aspire to be like them, not in every single facet of who they are, but saying, you do this thing really well. And I admire that and I look up to that and I'd like to learn how to be more like that. Like part of this podcast is looking at my favorite interviewers, looking at the people who kill it, who make me look terrible and being willing to learn and having that humility not to take that personally, to not take their success as an insult on who I am or where I'm at or

or my growth, like, I had to own the fact that the first 10 episodes were going to be rough because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm still learning these things. And so I'm wondering if both of you can share your thoughts on like what it means to look up to somebody and admire the work they're doing and aspire to be more like them. Sure. Do you want me to go first? You want to go first? I have some thoughts on that. Yeah. Well, I think about even in my own journey, like with horses, trying to learn how to do horses better, you know, I kind of had reached a stage where I was, confident with riding them but if they really struggled i didn't know how to help horses through their own struggle and i was like i want to go find like a master's degree in horse training and

i started like observing different trainers and really thinking not only who do i want to be like but also who do the horses like being around most like sometimes you can get things done but at the end of the day it doesn't look like the all parties involved are really enjoying that so just this idea of um i found a mentor and uh his name's josh nickle he specializes in relational horsemanship he's up in northern Alberta and I got a chance to work intensively with him for about a year and just be around him. But man, was it a humbling experience because I sucked. Like, I just, I thought, you know, in high school I had competed in a three-day eventing. I was jumping and having some success with that. And I thought I was good. And then I went in and it was this complete dismantling

of everything I thought I knew and a total change around. But the cool thing about that was that mentorship relationship completely transformed how I work with horses now, and I don't think I could ever go back. I learned some of the most incredible things about myself in that process too and to be guided by a mentor who could allow me to struggle and not rescue me from it and also believe in me that I was going to see it through. I'm still on my journey, but that was a really special example of being willing to get in the arena repeatedly and just not be good. for weeks and then eventually see the progress change. It reminded me I took a lot of comfort in the Teddy Roosevelt quote

about the man in the arena speech, just this idea that the credit doesn't go to the person on the sidelines. The credit goes to the person who's willing to get in there and get dirty and you might have mud and sweat and a bit of blood on your face. But even if you fail, you do so well daring greatly. And that's part of, there's credit there. It's one of my favorite quotes too.

Yeah. The thing that I thought of, when you asked the question on sort of putting yourself around people that you look up to. And it got me thinking a lot about the concept of belief and the importance of belief.

And you mentioned Nick Taylor as an example. But here's a bit of a backstory. I don't know if you follow much of golf. But Nick Taylor lives in Abbotsford, lived half time there. But before Nick Taylor, there was a guy named James Lep. A couple chuckles if you know James.

I know why you're laughing. You know, so James was a few years ahead of Nick, and he got a scholarship down to the States, ended up at the University of Washington, ended up winning the NCAA men's golf championship as this kid from Abbotsford. And he didn't end up, he did play professionally for a while,

but what he did for people like Nick and people like Adam Hadwin, and like these are two people in the top 30, the world from this little pocket town of Abbotsford. And then I got to sort of reap the belief benefits behind that because when they were doing their thing, they were around the golf course all the time when I was coaching the university golf team and they'd come out and play with them. And every once in a while they'd beat them. And they're like, I see that that is possible. And my God, like I can do that. There's no, to me, it's not a coincidence that our team won five

national championships. It was because they believed they could beat anybody. So I do think there's great value. One of my favorite quotes is you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Yeah. Surround yourself with good people and people that you aspire to be. There's value there. It changes you in some pretty interesting ways. There's nothing better than a good interview where you say things like that and I'm inspired. We will now take some questions from the audience. So if you can raise your hand, we have a microphone right here. The key is that you actually hold the microphone up to your mouth and don't let it fall away from your arm as you're asking the question. And it's not for the people here. They might hear you, but it's for the people

on YouTube, all of our thousands of fans sitting online. Yes. You put up your hand while I was asking. Okay. Well, this was originally specifically for Chris around flow states. But I feel like this is also going to be relevant for you as well. And I'm just thinking about this. You talk about a flow state coming from a point of struggle. Like you struggle first and you kind of get over that hump and then you hit the flow. And you were talking about this too with your mentorship with the horses. And we're living in an age now when automation and AI is really prominent. And I feel like there's a threat towards that flow state because of this. I kind of just want to know your thoughts on this.

Like, where does this sort of ease of access for tasks, like being able to complete things quickly and effectively without having to put any conscious thought into it? How do you think that will affect reaching flow state in the future? Well, I'll go first. I'm sure you have thoughts too. but, I mean, look, our attention is under multidimensional assault, and tech is a prime driver there. The interesting thing, does it threaten flow?

It actually induces these microflow states scrolling through your phone. Your attention is fully locked in. It's got all the characteristics. Time goes, oh, shit, I've just wasted another half an hour on Instagram. All the hallmark characteristics of flow show up there. And that's by design. They know that they're hijacking our dopamine system, and we just want more, more, more. There's a great book on this.

It's called The Molecule of More. It's all about dopamine. It just gives, it wants more of whatever gave it dopamine in the first place. The risk, though, is that there is so much reward for such little effort. And I think if you could talk about, you'd probably be much better to talk about this. But the way I think about addiction as an example, it is this, this graphic. gradual, ever-increasing amount of reward you get for less and less effort for something. And there is so much value in getting the reward, this part of the brain, the mid-singular cortex,

it gets bigger when we lean into hard things and how that correlates with so many good measures from academic success to happiness. I just fear that so much of the work around getting reward is missing. And I think at great cost. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that on a lot of fronts. It makes a lot of sense to me why things like AI are so so exciting and seductive right now, especially when you understand the psychology of how the brain is always trying to streamline things.

Right? Like the brain is a massive energy suck. It burns so many calories and it's always trying to be more efficient. Like the idea that once we've got the pattern down, even if it's not super, maybe it's not the, it works okay, but it's not the best. That's where when I'm helping people retrain their coping styles or coping strategies, which can even be in more pathological instances like addiction, like it's hard to rewire things because once the brain's like, it kind of works. It wants to stay with that. But then, so, when it's like, oh, I have this tool that'll do so much for me, you know, and then it can be monetized and you're getting all these different benefits. You can see why it's so seductive. And I couldn't agree more with just being able to get back to how struggle can really deepen a reward and in a way that's probably more meaningful in the long term, right? Something that, you know, sometimes you can evaluate the value of something by how much it costs. So if it's just like super quick and easy, you know, how really valuable that is that in the long term. So especially even with working with kids and youth, I do a fair bit of work with kids and youth. I love getting them

outdoors and off of screens and things like that and getting them to have to struggle through things because it's flexing that skill. And I think if you've felt the success there, you can balance it a little bit. But that mindful engagement with how things are happening is super important. And so that we're using our tools available to us intentionally, as opposed to getting used by them or the people that employ them. Yeah. Any other questions people want to put up their hand? One person, I think we'll have time for two more.

Hello. Question for Dr. Flo. Oh, okay. I'm brand new to Flo as of today. Okay. You were today years old when you heard about Flo? Exactly. So further clarity needed, you talked about frontal lobe suppression, and that movement was a necessary component of that. Does that mean that flow isn't achievable without movement? And are either of you in a state of flow right now?

so first of all yes um it when you get up in like one of the big things that we call flow triggers the things that can push you towards flow risk is a very big one and sitting here in front of a bunch of people with lights in your face is definitely a flow trigger you kind of have to dial in the anxiety piece of it a little bit but yes um so the question around movement um movement flow tends to be an action state but don't it doesn't have to be physical action sort of mental action can bring this on too it's why you know just getting using the bad example of technology certainly that's sure you're using your thumb but it's keeping your mind moving so it sort of has an movement component to it but it's not just physical so moving your body definitely can start to

nudge you in that direction. But anything really that's driving focus, which comes in the form of adrenaline, so this is why this is a really powerful version of that, but also is some reward mechanism. So you get a little dopamine mixed in. It's things that start to bring on this neurochemistry that is associated with flow that tends to set you up for it. Movement's one way, but it's not the only way. May I just quickly add that one of the interesting things that I learned was I was doing EMDR therapy, which is like rapid eye movement therapy. And they have this bar and you watch this light go back and forth. And it felt very bizarre.

And you kind of go through the things that you've been through and you watch this light go back and forth. And then I learned that walking has the same benefit, going for a walk with a friend. And talking about the things you've been through or the challenges of your day or the things that you're dealing with. And going for that walk can A have that element of flow to it. But B, can also be a form of therapy that many people talk about. Kylie, would you mind quickly commenting on that? Yeah, the mechanism they're trying to get at with EMDR, with the lights going back and forth,

is something called bilateral stimulation of the brain, which is just trying to get your brain firing on. So you've got two hemispheres of the brain that's connected by the corpus colossum in the middle. And so what happens when you get it firing, like when you're doing something with your body, that's a left, right, left, right motion. So that's why the light bar goes back and forth,

or sometimes they'll put paddles in your head. hand that buzz left right, left right. You can even sometimes I've heard of people like tap on your knees left right, left right. It has a calming effect and it has a way of kind of bridging parts that might be getting stuck or over aroused or over heightened or overwhelmed. So yeah, the actually interesting, one of the one of the super therapeutic activities is even kayaking because you've got the left right, left right of pushing on the paddles. So it's a some of my best conversations with kids have been in a tandem kayak going around Pender Island. It's had some really cool conversations that way.

So, yeah, just the flow states that come from that are pretty powerful. I have one quick comment on this. I don't know if we have time, but one of the really interesting things about that is when we do move through space, your eyes do kind of move back and forth a little bit. It's just what happens as part of the wiring. And when we move through three-dimensional space, the world is moving past us. And it actually triggers a mechanism side of us that is not related to. to flow state, but it's called optic flow, and it's just the world moving past your eyes.

And it tends to bring heart rate down and bring blood pressure down. And it's one of the reasons why it can be an effective therapy, because it sort of brings down the stress response. It doesn't show up if you're doing it on a treadmill, which is a really interesting thing about like indoor exercise versus outdoors. So yes, being outside has a lot of benefits, but actually moving yourself through space has an additional benefit that being stationary, even on your Peloton, doesn't quite give you.

That's good. Okay, we have time for one more question. I think Corbyn had his hand up. He's looking around confused, but I believe you had your hand up the last time. First of all, thank you so much to all three of you. This was an absolute pleasure to be able to listen to. Kylie, I had a question for you, although maybe others can chime in.

Aaron had asked about, you know, different kinds of therapy. And you had mentioned there's somatic, emotional, cognitive. One thing myself, and I'm sure others struggle with, is how do you find out about what different kinds of therapy is actually available? listening to podcasts, talking with friends, watching Netflix things, whatever. A lot of the times people say, oh, a friend told me about this, and they just stumbled upon it. What advice would you give to somebody who comes to you that says, you know, equine therapy is not for me? How can I figure out what's my pace? Yeah, fantastic.

And also a point to it is it's not free. Yes. It costs money. So how do you do it effectively? So good. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for that question. And it does come up fairly often in the traditional practice part of my private practice

because I do, I love the outdoor stuff, but I do traditional counseling as well. And I'll often even share with people how the best outcomes in therapy come. It's interesting when they make a pie chart about like what's most effective in therapy. The therapeutic alliance in your belief that the person you're sitting with can actually help you is a very large part of the pie. So rapport and relationship are such a huge foundational part that usually when I first meet with clients, I'll say, hey, like, I know this is a first session, you know, we kind of talk through some of the logistics and I kind of give a little bit of information, a bit about confidentiality. And I always say to them, too, you know, if you get to the end of the session and you don't feel like you're a good fit for me, please feel free to let me know. I would, my goal here is for you to get the help you need, even if that means that I might want to or I might need to refer you to someone else. And you can kind of, kind of get a gauge to depending on how things are going in the conversation, but, you know, it's a weird experiment to be able to say, like, I won't be offended at all if you're feeling like you need some supports outside of this. So I actually, I do encourage people to trust their

gut a little bit. Sometimes maybe give it a session or two, two or three, just to kind of get your feet wet into things. And the thing is a different therapist special in different approaches. So what I would recommend for people is most therapists will have a bio on a website or something like that. And if you can familiarize yourself a little bit with just a few of the different terms, that's why I kind of said cognitive, emotional and somatic as kind of camps, but even within those camps, there's a lot of different therapies out there to navigate. But I do, there are some, there's some good matches between certain therapies. So for example, there's a therapy called dialectic behavior therapy that's especially good for emotion dysregulation issues. We're

trying to find logic and emotion and find the wise mind in between, and it's really good for people who have really big emotions. But I know of one friend who was recommended to go to that, but his problem was that his emotions were all flat. He didn't feel anything. So to go to a therapy that's meant for regulating mass of emotions, he's like, this doesn't really land because I just don't feel anything at all. And he actually found a lot of help in healing through some of the psychedelic assisted therapies that help wake stuff up when they feel a little stuck and frozen. So even just to be able, if I can encourage anyone that's contemplating therapy and if you're feeling like it's expensive and maybe you're not getting the traction that you want, it's fully within your prerogative and in your power to say, like, I'm going to either, you know, ask your therapist more questions about how they're trained and where you want to go and be okay to say that, you know, maybe just because that therapist is a great, maybe they are really good at a certain therapy, but it's not the right fit for you. You can get a lot quicker and get a lot farther if there's a good match.

So paying attention to that and letting that take up space is super fair and valuable. Ooh, follow up. Yeah. Is there any websites either of you recommend for starting that process? If they haven't started therapy, seems maybe like an unnecessary way to go to two sessions and not know. Is there like a good website you could recommend that would start you on the process of what therapies exist and how to choose which one might be? aligned with you? That's a good question. I mean, psychology today is a pretty good, they have the inventory of all the therapists, and then they typically have, like, the therapies they're trained in,

and then you can Google that from there, and there's a lot of information out there. I don't have a go-to, but yeah, usually once you get the keywords and you can search those, there's some great resources between YouTube and Google. Final follow-up then. Is there any voices you recommend who are, experts in the field that you could go watch on YouTube because I do find that there's value and you might not be meeting with that person but that's a good starting place and then they'll tell you things about their therapies and then you'll kind of go well that's the one that I want. Is there any recommendations? Yeah. I mean as far as I send a lot of people to there's like a how to ADHD channel and then they have

on YouTube and they have a lot of great information things that are well resourced and then they also do a lot of specific to ADHD but they often talk about anxiety, depression, kind of comorbidities. Attachment nerd is a great resource on Instagram that talks a lot about attachment styles. She's a mom and a therapist, and she's just really, she's real and shares a lot of great information. There's, there's so many out there. Matthias Jay Barker is an Instagram account that talks a lot about family relationships and working through conflict. And Sarah Kubrick, who you had recently, she does a ton of work with trauma and existential purpose and things like that. So again, it's kind of like,

Thankfully, with the internet, even with what you're doing here, you're making information more accessible to people at a level that's free so they can get a taste before they put down the money to go see someone and you get a sense of what might be a good fit and what's out there. And I'm so thankful, even though technology and all the AI things out there can have their limitations or some of their detrimental effects, I do think that when the tools are used well and can share information, quality information like what we've heard tonight and make that accessible to so many people. I just love those ways of how these tools are utilized. What a beautiful way to wrap this up. Thank you both. Can we get a huge round of applause for both of them? Yeah. So I'm going to ask you both to step out and follow our photographer.

You are all staying here, so simmer down. I'm going to ask you both to wait out here with the balloon arch, and I'm hoping when we're wrapped up in here, people can come grab some photos. Feel free to take off the headsets if you prefer. But take a breath, relax. You killed it.

I mean, I'm really the main event, right? I wanted to briefly thank you all for coming this evening. I'm so grateful. It's such an honor to have a packed house filled with people who are interested, engaged, laughing, having a great night.

And, Tim, can we wrap the live and say goodbye to those people who may have been watching online? It's got to be like an end live button, right? It's done. How is everybody feeling? How is the night out of ten? Good, good. Okay, I have to be honest, and I'm going to. to force you all to be a part of this.

Tim, I'm going to ask you to come out here because I couldn't have started this series of the podcast. I couldn't have interviewed half the names that I've had on without your support. And so we're good on the recording. The live is over. I need you to come out here and I need to show my appreciation

for you and I need to make you uncomfortable. He loves being in the background. He loves hiding in there. But I have to ask you to come out here. You're the man. I'm going to make you open it right now in front of everybody. Aaron, I know this is your second live show you've done here,

and I have to tell you, I forgot to hit record. Perfect. Well, you all had a good time, right? So I want you to open this in front of everybody. I know that you put in so much work, and this is a person who never looks for appreciation, who's probably having a stroke inside right now, having to do this in front of everybody.

But he does so much work. for the community behind the scenes and he never seeks appreciation he's always willing to take a call show someone the space he created the space because he wanted to connect with community and so he's a person i really admire and i just i can't thank you enough for everything that you do for the community and you do it back there and you don't look for recognition and so i got you this out of appreciation for everything that you do it's an eagle feather Thank you all for coming. There's more food right there.

There's more chips. There's calendars that I co-made with our photographer, Alex Hart. They're free, so please take them. I want to share them with you. He took every single photo in there. There's more food. There's more snacks. There's more opportunities for mingling.

So please, I hope you all had a great night. We'll be doing this again in June. So please come back out and show your support. Thank you all. You're free.