Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Julia DiGangi on How to Harness the Energy in Your Brain EP 422

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on Passionstruck. I think the question that we need to ask ourselves is at the foundation, it's do I feel safe? There is absolutely not a shred of doubt in the scientific evidence that the brain needs a certain degree of safety to feel free, to feel connected, to feel well. So I think you start and say, does my life feel good to me? Really basic. Well, in some ways, yes, in some ways, no, okay, what are those ways? Well, I feel lonely. I think it begins, first of all, with an awareness. And one of the things about trauma and the biology is when we feel really bad, the nervous system is so intelligent. It says, okay, let's not feel so bad. Let's avoid. So let's avoid either through alcohol,

Starting point is 00:00:40 let's avoid through overworking, let's avoid through focusing on other people's problems so we don't have to look at our own. Let's avoid. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice

Starting point is 00:01:00 for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists,

Starting point is 00:01:24 military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become Passionstruck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 422 of Passionstruck. Consistently ranked as the number one alternative health podcast. A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, be better, and make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're not aware, throughout 2024, we are conducting a weekly challenge to help inspire you to become Passionstruck. We release a new challenge every week in our newsletter, which goes out to over 30,000 people in our community.

Starting point is 00:01:58 Just go to Passionstruck.com to sign up. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it earlier this week, I had a fantastic interview with Cass Sunstein, the nation's most cited legal scholar, a prolific author, Harvard Law professor, who is renowned for his co-authorship of the groundbreaking book Nudge, alongside Nobel Prize

Starting point is 00:02:34 winning economist Richard Thaler. We explore his new masterpiece, Look Again, the power of noticing what was always there, which offers an enlightening journey into the concept of habituation, which is our psychological tendency to get used to our surroundings and how it shapes our thoughts, actions, and ultimately our lives. And if you liked that previous episode with Cass or Today's, we would so appreciate you giving it a five star rating and review. They go such a long way in strengthening the passion struck community where we can help more people to create an intentional life.

Starting point is 00:03:01 And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback. Today's episode ventures into the very essence of what fuels us. Our brain's extraordinary energy. Imagine tapping into a power source within that propels you to unprecedented success, deeper fulfillment, and more meaningful connections in every facet of life. It's all about the neuroelectrical energy sparking through our brain, the powerful currents that sculpt your identity, ambitions, and interactions. Forget the notion that your emotional vigor is at the mercy of the world around you. Today, we're tearing that myth down with insights

Starting point is 00:03:33 from our distinguished guest, neuro-psychologist Dr. Julia DeGangy. With her groundbreaking eight codes, Dr. DeGangy is here to show us how to seize control of this vibrant energy, transforming it into a wellspring of empowerment, resilience, and connection. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely honored and thrilled to have Dr. Julia Degange on PassionStruck. Welcome Julia. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Starting point is 00:04:09 So something you probably don't know about me is I'm a combat veteran and I understand that you did your residency at the VA, something I've become very familiar with. Can you tell me what stood out for you from that experience of seeing so many veterans who've experienced trauma and adversity? That's a really big question. So yeah, I've worked with trauma and adversity and stress and anxiety in so many capacities. I think my experience at the VA, so I've done some work at the VA out in Boston, I've done some work at the VA out in Chicago.

Starting point is 00:04:39 So lots of work with combat veterans has been so profound. The way I sort of want to answer this is when we are in extreme stress in our life, when we feel like we've experienced really deep loss or we're traumatized, I think there's always this sense of confusion and hopelessness. Like our lives are in such disarray, we don't know how to put it back together. And I think two things really have stuck with me. I think it's the body of the work that I do is that number one, healing is absolutely possible. I don't say this is kind of pie in the sky. I don't say this is philosophical. I say this

Starting point is 00:05:15 as a neuropsychologist who's published extensively in the scientific literature and has walked with people as they've transformed their lives in ways that if they told you, I'm just going to give up on my life. You wouldn't even blame them. So I've watched people make profound transformation. And the second thing, and this is really why I wrote Energy Rising, is to get to healing because of how the brain works. we almost always have to do the counterintuitive. So healing is possible, but it seems so far out of reach a lot of times because the very thing we need to do often doesn't occur to us

Starting point is 00:05:54 or seems like the exact opposite of what we should do. And I'm happy to give some stories to really clarify this if that's helpful. Yeah, why don't we do that? Sure. So I have treated a lot of PTSD, both in civilians and I have treated PTSD in combat veterans, as you mentioned. Well, I'll actually tell a story, okay? I'll call this guy Bill, and I tell the story and energy rising as well. So Bill comes to see me, and this is a very important piece of the story. He's been back from his deployment for many years. Okay. So I say, well, what's been going on? And he basically says, Well, I've been

Starting point is 00:06:32 avoiding my life. I've been avoiding restaurants and public spaces. I avoid movie theaters. I trauma happened in the context of a convoy. So I don't drive. I avoid people. I, you know, one of the symptoms of PTSD convoy so I don't drive. I avoid people. I, you know, one of the symptoms of PTSD is irritability and frustration and irritability and anger. So I avoid people. He had gotten fired from a couple of jobs and most painfully, he was pretty estranged from his family. Little kids are very hard on even healthy nervous system. The noises they make, the constant demands, the, so there was a lot of sort of issues in the family. And so his wife and his kids had left.

Starting point is 00:07:06 He comes to me many years later and says, so I've tried all of this avoidance to try to get myself to calm down. The driving felt scary, the people felt frustrating. So if I could just keep avoiding them, I thought I could solve my problem, but it's not working at all. Oddly, the exact opposite, it seems to be happening.

Starting point is 00:07:24 The more I avoid, the worse I feel. So part of the reason I'm so willing to do conversations like these, I feel very honored to be a guest on your show is because I am on fire for educating people about how the brain works and how we achieved resilience, whether we're talking about massive trauma or we're talking about ordinary stress in our life. And that's a very important piece

Starting point is 00:07:44 that I want people to get when I tell this story is this is going to be an extreme story. But if it works out the most extreme forms of human suffering, of course, there's pieces for us to take away regardless of where we are in our journey. So I say to him, first of all, I want to normalize all the avoidance. I think that's a very unsupply the brain's trying to be very intelligent. Don't touch that. Don't look at that. Don't go there. Let's protect you a very, the brain's trying to be very intelligent. Don't touch

Starting point is 00:08:05 that, don't look at that, don't go there, let's protect you. Okay, so it's very normal. Second, there's no shame in this. Okay, it's the neurobiology is trying to move to protect you. But the third thing is this, and this is where the counterintuitive comes in. All that stuff you've been doing is not working. And so we now need to do the opposite. So we're not just gonna try to avoid people, places and things. We're actually gonna talk specifically about your trauma. We're gonna talk about it in detail and we're gonna talk about it over and over. And he's like, what are you talking about?

Starting point is 00:08:37 Like I just told you I'm trying to do the opposite of this. Fortunately, and this is where I think scientific evidence can be so healing, there's a massive amount of scientific evidence that supports the treatment that I'm describing. And I say, obviously the decision is yours, we can do this together. So he's very brave and says, I'm going to give it a shot. So we're not processing kind of trauma more orlessly, we're actually speaking about one

Starting point is 00:09:00 very specific instance, and we're going over it and over it. Now remember, this man has been back for many years. About week 12 he comes into my office and we had recorded him talking about the trauma he'd gone home and listened to it. He holds his phone up in front of my face and says I can't listen to this thing one more time. So I'm like sit down tell me what's going on. And he says doc every time I listen to this recording, I fall asleep. It is dull as shit. So every time I tell that story, it's so meaningful to me. And I've done this with me many people at this point in time, because the thing that had previously traumatized him so much,

Starting point is 00:09:38 he had shrunk his entire life to try to avoid the feelings in his own nervous system, is now entire life to try to avoid the feelings in his own nervous system is now so inoculated. It's so diffused. The energy is gone that it's so boring. It lulls him to sleep. If transformation can happen at that level, transformation can happen to us all. But the thing is, number one, I have to be committed to my healing. Okay. I think a lot of us are.

Starting point is 00:10:04 But the other piece that a lot of us miss is because the brain is, number one, I have to be committed to my healing. Okay, I think a lot of us are. But the other piece that a lot of us miss is because the brain is a pattern detector, it tends to do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again, even though you have tons of evidence, it's not working. And so a lot of times we have to do the counterintuitive. First thing I'm gonna say is prolonged exposure therapy really sucks.

Starting point is 00:10:24 It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. And I think what's even harder is when you're asked to pick one trauma experience, I was always asked, pick the most traumatic experience. I'm like, how am I supposed to do that? Because I have had sexual trauma, I've had physical assault trauma, I've had multiple combat trauma,

Starting point is 00:10:44 and like how do you pick one was so difficult for me? But I was doing what this gentleman you described was doing. I had gotten out and was on the surface what someone would see as a normal functioning human. And in fact, I was an extremely high achiever, the youngest vice president and a fortune 50 company, youngest person to make partner in a big four consulting firm, CIO and a Fortune 50 company, youngest person to make partner in a big four consulting firm, CIO of a Fortune 50 company before I was 40, but inside I was disguising and putting a mask on.

Starting point is 00:11:15 All the pain. Who I truly was, who I truly were. And I was showing up as someone completely different to everyone around me. And I remember eventually going through a NeuroPsych review and I came out of it expecting these profound conclusions because I was having memory issues. I'd forget where I put my keys. I'd forget what I would say to my kids. I'd forget things at work. It had gotten really bad. I felt emotionally numb. All this stuff. And at the end of it she goes, you just

Starting point is 00:11:42 have severe depression. And I have to tell you, I was so pissed off coming out of that, that it really launched me into a period of first I went through denial, but then I went through really some my own personal soul searching. And this was on the outside. And it eventually led me to the VA. Because I said, if I'm not getting the help I need out there, then I got to just put myself in the epicenter and get it from people who understand what veterans have gone through. And so by doing that and then going through cognitive behavioral therapy or long exposure

Starting point is 00:12:16 therapy, MDR, you name it. I mean, it took a long time, but I wouldn't be here talking to you today and talking about the things that I've went through had it not been for that. And a big reason that I do this show is because I'm trying to help people not do the foolish things I did, which was wait so long to take action because my life could have been so much better. And I would have been in a better place in my relationships, my mental health, my my relationships, my mental health, my physical health, my relationship health, spiritual health, everything. So I just wanted to bring that all up.

Starting point is 00:12:52 Well, I think what you're saying and the fact that you're willing to model yourself like this is so profound. I have so many things to say in response to what you said. When I did my internship at the VA, so you do an internship before you get your PhD in psychology, one of the things that I realized is because exactly what you said is true. So one of the things we know about trauma is most people actually don't experience, and this is a scientific finding, don't just experience a trauma. They experience this trauma, that trauma, that trauma, and then this becomes all the more complex when we had childhood trauma. So you're thinking about the brain, the entire infrastructure of the brain is just being built at an astounding rate. So what does that mean? Then if I had lots of childhood

Starting point is 00:13:34 trauma and the very people who I'm supposed to be able to trust to take care of me are dangerous. So you're absolutely right. It's like we can talk about trauma, like it's this kind of neat thing, but it almost never is. But what I do find is that, and this is again another very counterintuitive idea, but I think when people get it, it's so healing, okay? And these are the reasons that I wrote energy rising. We tend to pay a lot of attention to our situations. So the thing that you said to me on Tuesday,

Starting point is 00:14:03 the thing that happened to me in 1987, the thing she did the other day, the thing they said on social media, it's like situation after situation after situation. But the problem with that is that, no matter how much you focus on your situations, it's never gonna get resolved until you focus on the very energy that's giving rise to your situation.

Starting point is 00:14:22 And by the way, when I say energy, I'm not talking metaphorically or metaphysically, emotions are quite literally a neurologic energy. I am a neuropsychologist extensively published in the Neuroscientific Literature. So these are these neural zing zing zing zap zap zaps that create sensation in our body that then drive behavior. So we think, okay, if I could fix the situation, I could fix the feeling. And also, by the way, there would be no situation

Starting point is 00:14:51 until I had a feeling. In other words, if you said something and I had no emotion, I wasn't offended by it or I didn't think it was funny, it would just zoom past me. My brain would literally not encode it, okay? So I think a lot of times people are like, oh my God, there's been so many complex situations in my life. I don't know what to do about it. But actually, when we make it simpler, it gets a lot clearer. And I believe that clarity is the foundation of all power.

Starting point is 00:15:15 So when I start to say across all these situations, I'm really only feeling two or three things. So imagine the bad situations in my life. I'm feeling anxious about it and I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling angry about it and I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling embarrassed about it and I'm feeling anxious about it. Like it's not, you could have an infinite number of situations but they're all kind of mapping on to these really core emotional experiences. And in energy rising, I distill the emotional experiences down so simply to two things, emotional pain and emotional power.

Starting point is 00:15:49 By emotional pain, any feeling, I don't care if you call it rage or irritation or frustration or inadequacy or shame or embarrassment or awkwardness or upset, any negative feeling in your body is emotional pain. And I totally understand that this exists on a spectrum. Okay, there's mild irritation all the way up to rage. And then on the other side of that, there is emotional power, confidence, resilience, connection, self-assuredness. In other words, my inherent sense of my own goodness. So do you see how already if I start to think, wait a second,

Starting point is 00:16:23 I don't have to necessarily figure out how to fix x, y, z a million numbers long. I could just figure out how to work with my nervous system and solve for this one feeling that would invariably transfer across situations. The whole premise of energy rising is really this, the horrible feelings that we all feel in our body. Despair, disappointment, fear, anxiety, they are not here to torment us. They are actually calling us into our next level of power. When I know what to do about my feelings of inadequacy, I'm truly unstoppable. When I diffuse the power of shame over my life, I am truly unstoppable. A lot of us are coming to it backwards. We're not being counter-intuitive

Starting point is 00:17:05 enough. In other words, we try to say like to your point, if I become the youngest partner in the firm, if I become the CIO, if I make the most money, in other words, if I do enough out there, I'll save myself from these feelings in here. This is not how the nervous system works. Some days it tickles me and some days it drives me crazy. We pay more attention to the intelligent operation of chat GPT in our cell phone than we pay to the intelligent operation of the most glorious machinery on the planet, which is our own brain and nervous system.

Starting point is 00:17:38 But you gotta learn, just like you wouldn't try to drive your car and make it cut your lawn, or use a blender to vacuum your family room. We're trying to live our lives asking the brain to do things that the brain just isn't designed to do. It's not how you get to where you're trying to go. And so when you realize this, there's a sense of clarity. There's a sense of, oh my god, I can do this. In other words, it's manageable. The whole thing about stress and trauma and people miss this a lot, I would argue that the core feature of it is overwhelming confusion.

Starting point is 00:18:14 These people were I can't understand how these people could do this to me. I don't understand how God did this. I don't there's always it's not traumatic if it makes sense. Okay? Stress is also always about confusion. If I knew how to get X, Y, and Z done before five o'clock tomorrow night, but it's the sense of I'm overwhelmed, the world is demanding more for me than I have to give and I don't know how to solve that problem. So we have to, when we talk about recovery and resilience, we don't talk enough about the brain's relationship with confusion. And I think another term people use all the time is uncertainty. These are neurologically synonyms.

Starting point is 00:18:51 There's no difference. And when I hear what you're talking about and I think about what I went through, the thing that always comes to top of mind to me is worthiness. I didn't feel worthy of love. I didn't feel worthy of love. I didn't feel worthy of affection. I didn't feel worthy of success even. The stuck points that had accumulated and the mental barriers I had put up resulted in self-doubt. And as you said, shame and imposter syndrome and so many other things. And it wasn't until I started to work through those and experience self-love that I was able to start letting other people in and start releasing the pain. I was, before we got on, I mentioned, you talked to a friend of mine, Dr. Stephanie. And in that interview, I heard you

Starting point is 00:19:45 talk about this in terms of the concept of pain and power as two sides of an energetic coin, I think you said. Can you elaborate on how this relates to the transformation of pain rather than its eradication? So first of all, I thought it was really powerful how you said it was only when you came to know your own worthiness that you could really tolerate other people seeing you as worthy. So we have to first have the emotional capacity in our own nervous systems. People cannot give other people experiences inside of their nervous system. This is actually a great myth that causes so much pain and dysfunction relationships. Okay. So when I say every single thing you want in this lifetime

Starting point is 00:20:28 is on the other side of the feelings, you keep refusing to feel, I think this is the truth of our neurobiology. So for example, let's go back to the story about the veteran. The feeling, he was trying to run from the feelings. And again, this is very natural. The brain understands pain.

Starting point is 00:20:45 If you kind of think of the brain as this very complex computer machine, it has all this coding in it. The brain kind of is like, pain is on some level a zero one at this very reflexive and primitive level. Does it hurt? Yes? Okay, avoid it.

Starting point is 00:20:58 It's very simple. If that worked, we should do it all the time. For example, if I put my hand on a hot stove, I'm immediately gonna yank it back. time. So for example, if I put my hand on a hot stove, I'm immediately gonna yank it back. Great. So freaking adaptive. The problem is we try to run that same coding in our relational lives.

Starting point is 00:21:15 For example, you said to me something that I didn't like one time, I'm never gonna talk to you again. I tried to sell something and nobody bought it in the first five minutes. And that was, I felt embarrassment in my body I'm never doing it again. I'm shuttering the business. We have arguments with people and we cut them out of our lives forever So what at my point here is like cuz we don't know how to intelligently hold

Starting point is 00:21:36 Sensation in our nervous system because we don't get a lot of cultural education around it We just try to pretend like it's the hand on the hot stove and avoid avoid avoid But the problem is and there are a couple key points of energy rising, this is one of them, is that if we could perfectly avoid pain, we should do this. We should. I am at my core a pragmatist, but when I look around and I've done a lot of international work, I've been doing this work, depending on how you want to look at it for 20 years or 40 years. I come from a family with a fair bit of trauma. My father's a psychologist, so I really kind of grew up on psychology and emotional intelligence and trauma. I've never met a single person who said life didn't hurt, not even close. So trying to construct a life where I say, there is no pain is like you telling me, hey Julia, I'm looking to buy a house in the zip code

Starting point is 00:22:31 where there is no gravity. I just need this one house to not have any gravity. It's like, that sounds like it would take a tremendous amount of effort and be totally fruitless. So when we start to realize pain is an inalienable aspect of what it means to be human, just like aging is just like gravity is just like weather is just like time is like it just is. I start to say okay, let me really think an emotionally intelligent way and all emotional into there's tons of information out there about emotional intelligence let me simplify it all it means is am I thinking intelligently about emotion? So I say in a world that promises pain, what is the pain that empowers me the most?

Starting point is 00:23:12 And then let me choose that in honor of my evolution, in honor of my healing, in honor of my expansion. So let's go back to the veteran. So he was saying, I am gonna try to avoid all this pain, but in the avoidance of the pain, he didn't save himself from pain. That's a really important piece. He was an agony. And I think you're saying that you have experiences that mirror this. So if I say, Okay, listen, this is an I think

Starting point is 00:23:37 it sounds like you intimately know these treatments. I think anytime we go to therapy to work on the parts of our life that hurts, when we touch the parts of our life that hurts, they hurt. Okay? There's no, it's not like it's magic. When I start to say, okay, I'm going to face my demons. I'm going to face some of the things I did wrong. I'm going to face the way people hurt me. That is of course painful, but the result is healing.

Starting point is 00:24:01 To be healed is to be powerful. When I talk about power, I'm not talking about command and control. I dominate. I'm talking about my own experience of my own worthiness and my ability to then therefore experience life fully. If I want more self-confidence, people say emotions are so confusing. They're not actually that confusing. They're quite mathematical. There's like a physics to emotion. If I want more self-confidence, I must come into a new relationship with the energy of doubt. That's gonna be a little bit painful, but in that pain,

Starting point is 00:24:31 I become more powerful because I become more self-confident. Lots of people say they want peace and then they try to externally control every single thing around them, which just makes them absolutely feel terrible. So if I want more peace, I have to come into a new relationship

Starting point is 00:24:45 with the energy of uncertainty. As I start to habituate my system to the energy of uncertainty, that's going to rattle me. When I master that, when my system habituates to that, I get more powerful. I want more connection with people. Well, then I have to be willing to say sometimes people are going to reject me. We're all saying, can I have the relationship where I promise,, the for reals, no one's ever going to hurt my feelings. This does not exist. And so then we protect ourselves from not getting hurt. But in the process of that, we seal ourselves off from relationships and are perpetually hurt. We're unfulfilled, we're lonely, we're unconnected. So when we really start to understand how we can take emotional pain and convert it to emotional power, our lives truly transform. We settle down. We were able to trust the

Starting point is 00:25:32 intelligence of life, trust the intelligence of ourselves, and trust the intelligence of others. Julie, I want to get on and back to your book. But I think before we do that, there's an important question I want to ask you. So we've just discussed some pretty heavy stuff. And there might be someone who's listening here who's stuck in this horror show that I found myself in. And they're doing what I did, avoiding everything. I avoided even going back to the Naval Academy because of the trauma, avoided going to the VFW or American Legion, avoided going to crowded spaces, avoided going to loud spaces. It's not the way you want to live your life. How for a listener, can they better understand how trauma is showing up for them today and their everyday thought patterns and interactions so they can recognize it. So I think the question that we need to ask ourselves is at the foundation,

Starting point is 00:26:29 it's do I feel safe? There is absolutely not a shred of doubt in the scientific evidence that the brain needs safety, a certain degree of safety, to feel free, to feel connected, to feel well. So I think you start and say, does my life feel good to me? Really basic? Well, in some ways, yes, in some ways, okay, what are those ways? Well, I feel lonely. So I think it begins, first of all, with an awareness. And one of the things about trauma and the biology is when we feel really bad, the nervous system is so intelligent, it says, okay, let's not feel so bad. Let's avoid. So let's avoid either through alcohol,

Starting point is 00:27:06 let's avoid through overworking, let's avoid through focusing on other people's problems so we don't have to look at our own. Let's avoid. So you gotta numbness is actually an adaptation to pain, right? Like if I'm in agony, wouldn't it be better if my skin went numb?

Starting point is 00:27:23 Okay, so there's like, you got to think about this as an evolution. First of all, let me get a sense of how I'm feeling. Okay, I don't know how I'm feeling. No problem. Even normalizing that. Great. So let me get some help around. There's, I think, tremendous resources all the way up to one-on-one professional support. I mean, there's an enormous continuum of care. And I think that's, you know, people talk about all the perils of social media. But I think this is one of the beautiful things about it. It's like, there are really good groups online, there's podcasts like yours, there's brilliant books, okay. And then it's do I feel like I have the requisite safety and support

Starting point is 00:28:00 to start feeling feelings that I've historically told myself I can't feel. This really is the most, I think, reductionistic way to say this. And I think a lot of times people will say, I can't feel those feelings because I'm going to die. The feelings are going to be so bad that I'm going to die. And we all on some level understand this bad feelings are called bad feelings because they feel bad. But I think you're living evidence of like you have got to get this stuff out of the nervous system. I want to explain why I call energy rising because I think this answers your question. So the biology is designed to get rid of trash, to get rid of waste. If I eat food, I pass it.

Starting point is 00:28:47 If I take an oxygen, I emit carbon dioxide as waste. Every 27 days, my skin cells just go away. If there's a foreign invader in my immune system, gets it out of the body. In my experience, there's something singular about emotional waste. We have a feeling that we don't like inside of our own body, shame, fear, and adequacy. And what happens is the feeling starts to rise. This energetic sensation rises through the body. And instead of just letting it pass, we shove it down.

Starting point is 00:29:22 We shove it down. We shove it down. We shove it down through our avoidance. We shove it down. We shove it down. We shove it down. We shove it down through our avoidance. We shove it down through our overachievement. We shove it down through our numbing. We shove it down through our distraction. And so what then happens is like a bad feeling, shove it down, a bad feeling, shove it down,

Starting point is 00:29:36 a bad feeling, shove it down, a bad feeling. You do that five or 10 times. You do that a hundred times. You do that a thousand times, no problem. The biology is resilient. But when you do that 100 times, you do that 1,000 times, no problem. The biology is resilient. But when you do that for a lifetime, you become emotionally constipated. You are filled, you are clogged with emotional junk.

Starting point is 00:29:55 And so then somebody cuts you off at a stop sign or somebody gets your drink order wrong at Starbucks and you're pissed off seven ways till Sunday. When we want to respond, we have the ability to respond, the responsibility, the ability to respond intelligently to our lives, but we've got to clean up the machinery. So I think when we understand that there's a lot of toxic stuff inside and in the removal of the toxic stuff, that's deep work. But when I go back to this idea of picking a more powerful pain, it's do I really

Starting point is 00:30:25 have an option to not process my stuff? Let me think about that. If I didn't process my stuff, what would that mean for me? If I don't process my stuff, what does my future look like? Also, I don't think all things need to be processed. I think this is what's beautiful about individual empowerment is you get to say, you know what, this thing has been hanging around for 20 years. The likelihood of it dissipating like magic in 2024, probably not going to happen. What are the things I need to do? And I think the other piece is when people get good information, good care, good treatment. Again, I think the continuum of care matters, wherever you are, is on people need more care than others, totally normal. But when you get the right help for the right problem,

Starting point is 00:31:12 the transformation happens very quickly. The relief, the relief, I'll say it like that. So I'm just gonna add my personal thoughts on this. I remember I was a senior executive at Lowe's, I was killing it. I was told I was in the top quadrant of people who they thought someday could become the CEO. And I remember going to this meeting

Starting point is 00:31:33 with a lady from Forne Ferry, who was an organizational psychologist, and they had just done this evaluation on all of us who were in that highly promotable box. And she said, John, you have had this just blistering career of so many things that you've achieved. But then she brought in Marshall Goldsmith, what got you here isn't gonna get you where you wanna go.

Starting point is 00:31:57 And I look back upon that and she was so damn right, but in ways that she probably didn't even realize because I was arsoning the very things that and she was so damn right, but in ways that she probably didn't even realize because I was arsoning the very things in life that I wanted because this pain kept me from being able to display emotional intelligence in a way that at that level I needed to and it was really. Can you give an example? I'm just curious to wrap my head around it a little bit more.

Starting point is 00:32:27 So I would just say I put up all these walls around myself to protect myself from harm. And one of the things that I didn't want to expose was vulnerability. And I think if you want true connections with someone, especially as you're getting more senior in your career, or if you want a deep relationship, then you have to be vulnerable in communicating your emotions and your feelings to someone else. And I was blocking all that because I was worried that the pain of letting people in and seeing the true of me would be too much. And so I just let it out. I just blocked it. And by blocking it, I prohibited

Starting point is 00:33:07 all these good things to come about because I wasn't going as deep into relationship building as I should have in an authentic way, if that makes sense. It does. And she was saying that kind of wall to get you to your next level of leadership, it wasn't going gonna work anymore. Is that right? Well, she was saying that I had gotten this far based on intelligence, intellect, drive, hard work, resilience, and that would only get me so far.

Starting point is 00:33:38 But in this next chapter, if I truly wanted to become a CEO, if I truly wanted to get in the C level, yes, those things mattered. But what mattered more was the personal relationships and how you collaborated, how you interfaced, how people viewed you. And most importantly, how they trusted you. And if you're someone who's not showing your authentic self, then how is anyone going to trust someone? So this interview, as sometimes they do, has gone completely different than I pre-plan it to go. But I'm going to tie it back into your book. In your book, you have these eight different codes that you discuss. these eight different codes that you discuss.

Starting point is 00:34:25 They're eight neurogenetic codes. And the first one is something I think that touches upon what we were just talking about, which is how do you expand your emotional power by focusing on emotions as a form of energy. So if you talk about that scenario with the veteran, some of the things that we've been talking about with me, how can a listener harness their own emotional energy to better navigate challenges and difficult emotions? Yeah. So first of all, I love saying this, that one of the things I'm really proud of about

Starting point is 00:34:56 energy rising is there's tons of exercises like practical, I think this is one of its strengths. So there's lots, but I'll give you one. So one of the things is when we think about getting stronger, we're never confused about this on the physical health side. And this is great news. So for example, if I wanna get stronger, I know that I have got to walk

Starting point is 00:35:17 if I'm sitting all the time, or if I walk a lot, then I gotta run, or let's go to the gym, okay? So I go to the gym and I can only lift five pounds. And today I wanna lift 10 pounds. Well, I am never like I am confused about how to get stronger. So I go to the gym. And when I try to lift more weight, my muscles quite literally shake my physiology shakes, I sweat, my hands might tremble, my legs might quiver like my body is shaking. So in energy rising, I give this my hands might tremble, my legs might quiver, like my body is shaking.

Starting point is 00:35:46 So in energy rising, I give this example that I call hold your emotional shake. Now one of the things is that no one is ever confused. I just sat on the couch for 10 hours eating hot Cheetos and binging Netflix. Why am I not stronger? People are like, I know precisely why I'm not stronger, right? I might have not wanted to go and that might be, I know how to get physically stronger. Well, the analog, because you're really asking me is,

Starting point is 00:36:11 how do we develop emotional power? Is we have to meet more emotional resistance, just like we have to meet more cardiovascular or muscular resistance to get physically stronger. But here's where, and the analog is so strong, okay? The body is the body and the habituation of muscles works a lot like the habituation of the brain. So I say, all right, I'm gonna like, let's say public speaking, I want to express myself more. Okay, that's kind of like how I would get stronger. And I say, I'm going to come

Starting point is 00:36:40 on this podcast. So I booked the podcast and then ahead of time I'm like, I don't, I don't, I don't, this isn't, the anxiety starts to shake my system. I'm like, I don't know, I might sound stupid, I might run out of things to talk about. So I'm quite literally shaking. Now, until we have powerful conversations like you and I are having, a lot of times when we have those sensations in our body, until we understand how to interpret with the cues that the computer is giving out to us, i.e. our brain, we say, oh my God, this is really dangerous abort mission. And so I cancel the interview.

Starting point is 00:37:17 And then I have to compound that because I can't really trust myself. I say I'm going to do things and I don't follow through and you can just see the implosion. So I have to say, wait a second, if the way bodies get stronger is to meet the physical resistance, I can then meet my emotional shaking and say, this is actually great news. And here's the thing on the physical health side. A lot of us who do work out, whether it's we go for walks or we run or we know our muscles shake, it doesn't feel good. We don't love the sensation of really working out, but even then there's something satisfying about it. It's like the reason I keep going to the gym is because like when my muscles shake as much as it burns and hurts and blah blah blah, the shaking is the clearest evidence that I'm getting stronger

Starting point is 00:38:02 right before my own eyes. So what if I can hold that intelligence and say this is how biologies work? So let me go on this podcast and shake. Literally, not even metaphorically. My voice might shake a little bit. My hands are sweating. I might be trembling. No problem.

Starting point is 00:38:23 To change the emotional system, just like changing the physical system, you need two things, the right combination of intensity and frequency. So I might say going on your podcast would be like, let's say like going to give a live standup comedy routine. That would be a 10. That would make me like face melt off.

Starting point is 00:38:44 That would be a 10. That would make me like face melt off. That would be way too stressful. Coming on your podcast would be like a seven. That is the right combination of an intensity because 10 is too much. 123 is not enough. We're looking for the Goldilocks just if I could only lift five pounds in the gym, I'm not going to go try to lift 75 and rip my arm off. I'm also not gonna go try to lift 75 and rip my arm off. I'm also not gonna try to lift four or six. So I really start to think, what are the ways I speak up for myself?

Starting point is 00:39:13 And what's really cool about this is because you're meeting sensation in your body, we're not talking about situation, I could say, well, like another way I could do this would be to do a Facebook live, like to get on Facebook, or to start a blog. It doesn't even have to be like me verbal in real time. Maybe me starting a blog is like six. Maybe me. So there's all these ways if I'm saying what are the ways that I can express myself more if that's my goal. How would I make this hierarchy really easy, tons of examples from

Starting point is 00:39:41 my own life and calibrate things. What's a one? What's a five? What's an eight? What's a nine? What's a 10? And then do it. So I think that's very attainable. And I think too, understanding that the emotional system is going to transform the way the physical

Starting point is 00:39:55 system transforms, I think that's helpful for people too. Thank you for sharing that, Julianne. I wanted to touch on one of the other codes and that's code two, building your power pattern. And I really like this aspect because I have my own book coming out and I talk about the mindset shifts that we need to make if we want to change the life that we need to become a, I call it a perspective harnesser. And what I'm really talking about in this chapter is cognitive reframing or cognitive restructuring, because oftentimes we see things like adversity or trauma. But, and it could be as we're going into holiday seasons, something like going over to a relatives house that brings out anxiety for you. But the way I have learned to think about these things is that trying times, whatever they are, and they're like a rubber band that you can expand and then move back.

Starting point is 00:41:03 Can you talk about maybe building your power pattern through what I just brought up and how does someone implement a power pattern to reshape their mindset? Absolutely. So the idea of a power pattern is so vital because the brain is in fact a pattern detection machine. It's moving us in patterns.

Starting point is 00:41:24 And to be direct with you, it's moving us really in emotional patterns. So for a pattern detection machine would go Apple, fill in the blank, what comes next? Well, Apple. But the way the human system is moving through space and time is we're really moving based on these emotional patterns. So let me give you something so I hope we all have patterns that are, some of us feel like whenever we go to a party, we're going to meet someone interested, you know, and so every time we go to a party,

Starting point is 00:41:50 so I hope we have positive patterns, but I'm going to talk about some of the more painful patterns. So we have a pattern that sounds like this and people should choose their own. I'm just going to give a few examples. I can never get what I want. I can never get what I want. I can never get what I want. I can never get what I want. I can never get what I want. I can never get what I want.

Starting point is 00:42:08 Now there's a new situation. I've changed jobs. I've changed relationships. I'm about to build a business, whatever. And I promise the brain will recreate the pattern. This is why New Year's resolutions, change management and organization, changing relationships doesn't change how we feel

Starting point is 00:42:27 because the thing that's making us feel how we feel is actually our feelings. So if we keep looking at situation to change feeling, it's not gonna happen. Okay, so I'm still in a situation where I've had this pattern where I can't get what I want, things never work out for me, things never work out for me, things never work out for me, or here's one, people just don't understand me. Things never work out for me. Things never work out for me. Things never work out for me.

Starting point is 00:42:45 Or here's one, people just don't understand me. People just don't understand me. People just don't understand me, okay? So let's say I'm someone who is, I wanna be an entrepreneur. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs. I do a lot of leadership coaching in this space. These people are wildly creative.

Starting point is 00:43:04 Well, the more creative we are oftentimes, people don't get it. That's in a way what it kind of means to be creative. Like if I say, here's a coffee cup, and then I just recreate the coffee cup, that's not really that creative. It's like, I just mimic the exact same thing. So a lot of times when we are creative,

Starting point is 00:43:22 we get a lot of no's because people are like, I don't really get that. I don't really get that. In my own experience, talking about emotion in this way, especially like I did a lot of international humanitarian aid, a lot of international development, I was really interested in this psychology of international conflict. And a lot of people were like, that's interesting, but it give me a break. It's never gonna, it's not gonna be the thing. So I got a lot of knows. So if you say every time I get a no, or I can only take three knows, and then I'm going to give up all my power, I'm going to give up my ownership of my own life, I'm going to give up ownership of my own vision, that's very dangerous, very crushing, I think to the human spirit.

Starting point is 00:44:05 So how can I come up with, if people, I had to come up with a way to interpret my reality in a way that empowers me. So instead of saying people don't all understand me, what if we could say as entrepreneurs, for example, I am ahead of my time, And then it gives everyone permission. So if you don't understand me, I don't have to get so offended. We don't have to ruin the relationship. I don't have to quit my dreams.

Starting point is 00:44:33 I just get to say, well, actually, let's say our pattern is I am a pioneer. If I truly am a pioneer, oh, everyone else hasn't been on these roads before. It's my job to explore and clear and come back and explain. And I forgive them for not understanding places they've never been to. So it's the exact same situational outcome.

Starting point is 00:44:58 Me being creative, other people not getting it. Me being a pioneer, other people not getting it. Me being entrepreneur, other people not getting it. And then how do we handle that dissonance in a way that really allows us to work in these pattern efficient ways? Thank you for sharing that, Julia. And we don't have time to go through the other codes, but I'll just give the audience a taste of just a couple. Code three is about harnessing your emotional energetics. Code four is about mastering uncertainty. Code five involves rewiring one source code. Code six gets into quiet commanding. Code eight is build a relationship from the future. And

Starting point is 00:45:34 I skipped one. Code seven is unleash your magnetism. And I wanted to conclude the episode like this. You are part of NASA. They've selected you as an astronaut. And I thought, yeah, I was like, no, I think we got our say. I'm not part of NASA. I get it. It's hypothetical. Hypothetical. And they have selected you to be a neuroscientist on the mission to Mars. And when you get there, you're the first group of people who land on it, and the powers it be say that you can lay an edict for the future of humanity on the planet. What would you set that edict to be if it was through leading with emotional power?

Starting point is 00:46:16 Oh my God, I already know. I was like, oh, this one's gonna stop me. This one does not stop me. I have 100% of clear on this. It would be this, to come into a new relationship with the feelings you keep refusing to feel. Because here's the truth of humanity. It is not that our problems get too hard.

Starting point is 00:46:36 It is that our feelings get too big. Our lives break down, our businesses break down, our relationships break down, our homes break down. At the point of the feelings we keep refusing to feel. It's too frustrating. I'm too excluded. It's too aggravating. It's too anxiety provoking. It's too rejecting. Until we can learn how to more intelligently hold those feelings in a nervous system that frankly is designed to hold a lot of energy. The future of humanity won't change. And I believe that if we can understand this

Starting point is 00:47:10 conversation about emotional power, emotional intelligence, so much can change on the planet. Well, what a powerful answer that was and a great one. If someone wants to learn more about you, discover the different practices that you do, where's the best place for them to go? I am on social media. So I would love to connect either at Dr. Julia Degangy on LinkedIn, Dr. Julia Degangy on Instagram, or you can come to my website, Dr. That's drjuliadegangy.com. And I'd love to connect. Well, Dr. Julia Degangy, it was so nice to have you on today's show and quite an honor and a different discussion that I thought we would have. But I thank a good one for the listeners. So thank you so much.

Starting point is 00:47:54 Thank you too. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Julie DeGangy and I wanted to thank Dr. DeGangy, Lissa Fortnato, and Harvard Press for the honor and privilege of having her appear on today's show. Links to all things Julie will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. Videos are on YouTube, both at our main channel, John R. Miles, and on our Clips channel at Passionstruck Clips.

Starting point is 00:48:19 Please check them both out and subscribe. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. You can find me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles, and you can sign up for our newsletter, which now goes out to over 30,000 people in our community, called Live Intentionally. You can sign up at passionstruck.com

Starting point is 00:48:40 and every week throughout the year, we are doing a weekly challenge that will help you gain more courage, take more steps, and lead you throughout the year we are doing a weekly challenge that will help you gain more courage, take more steps, and lead you on the journey to becoming passion struck. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck podcast interview that I did with Dan Harris from global conflict zones to an unexpected on-air panic attack. Former ABC news anchor Dan Harris embarked on a transformative journey, Discover how meditation turned his life around, leading to the best-selling book,

Starting point is 00:49:07 10% Happier, his podcast and meditation app. I picked this concept up from the Dalai Lama, who I've had the great privilege to interview a few times. He has this idea of wise selfishness, which I really like because I don't love admitting this, but it's true, and wired, I find, to be selfish. And that is one of the biggest flaws that I've worked on inside of myself. And I just naturally go in that direction. I don't think this is totally uncommon, but it's a part of my mind

Starting point is 00:49:35 that I've wrestled with a little bit. And the Dalai Lama's argument is that we're all selfish, but there's a way to do it correctly. There's a wise or enlightened self-interest. And I think what you're describing fits that bill, because if you can focus on what you're doing that's valuable to other people, in my experience, it makes you less anxious and it improves the quality of your work. And we'll likely, I'm not guaranteeing this, but it's certainly what I've experienced personally, make you more successful. Remember that we rise by lifting others, so share this show with those that you love and

Starting point is 00:50:10 care about. And if you found today's episode useful, then definitely share it with someone who could use the advice that we gave in today's program. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear so you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and become Ash and Stroud.

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Julia DiGangi on How to Harness the Energy in Your Brain EP 422

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