Start With A Win - Fuel Yourself With Joy with Amanda Gore Part 1

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

What’s the point of achieving your goals if you’re miserable doing so? With decades of experience helping organizations build dynamic teams centered around authentic communication, Amanda’s personal mission is to remind young, over-achieving entrepreneurs to stop and breathe. Building a business can be overwhelming at times. With burnout rates skyrocketing for both C-Suite and entry-level employees, mental health in the workplace has become a priority for sustainability. According to Amanda, pursuing joy is a lost art that has the potential to counteract feelings of fear and insecurity that stifle productivity.Everyone’s perception is built from stories we’ve created around our life experiences, especially those from early childhood. Negative experiences can create narratives that disrupt our capacity for joy without us even realizing it. Amanda refers to these unconscious beliefs as malware because they essentially infect the computer of our minds. She challenges listeners to first become aware of those stories and then be willing to do the work to rewrite them. By choosing a different reality for ourselves, we can navigate triggering situations with more ease. The best tool for reprogramming our minds is pausing to take a breath. Observe beauty in nature. Slow down so that consciousness can catch up. In a culture that has traditionally valued face-paced productivity, Amanda leads the way with a more peaceful approach. Joy is the new high performance fuel. The best part is, it’s free!  Main TopicsJoy is the new high-performance fuel (02:17)Relaxation leads to higher levels of efficiency (06:25)The stories we tell ourselves influence our behavior (08:47)Stressful situations trigger unconscious beliefs and narratives usually unrelated to the current scenario (12:00)Rewriting the stories with a slower pace of life (14:45)  Episode Linkshttps://amandagore.comConnect with Amanda:https://www.facebook.com/thejoyproject.amandagore/https://twitter.com/amandagore_joyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/amandalgore/https://www.youtube.com/user/amandagoretvConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/Listen, rate, and subscribe!Apple PodcastsSpotifyGoogle Podcasts

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. Coming to you from Brand Viva Media Headquarters, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. Producer Mark, how you doing, buddy? Hey. That was some wicked dancing you got going on there. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, hey, if you only listen to this podcast, you can hover to YouTube. You are missing out.

And watch the condensed version of this. Yeah, you know, I like to get the blood flowing. It kind of gets you ready to have a good conversation and be engaged. We've been dancing for years on this show. We have. I sure... Engineer James can put a whole compilation of our ridiculous dancing. It brings a lot of joy to my life, though. Yeah. You can't really be dancing and frowning at the same time. That's awesome. There you go the same time. That's awesome. There you go. All right, that's a new quote here.

Exactly. Well, hey, I'm excited to introduce our guest today on Start With A Win. We have Amanda Gore on the show, and she is one of America and Australia's most popular professional speakers. She is an expert on communications, leadership, and group dynamics. Her goal is to help people reduce stress, improve communication, build personal and professional relationships, as well as develop teams of collaborative and trusting colleagues. Amanda, welcome to Start With a Win. Welcome, Amanda. You guys, a very impressive dancing, I must say.

Oh, well, thank you. And it's so nice to see you again. And you, Adam. It's lovely. Yes. I love the Remax team and an extension of it here in some ways. There you go. And Remax is a sponsor of our show. Oh, lovely.

Perfect. Works out great. But yeah, I've seen you speak, and you're fabulous on stage. Oh, thank you. You captivate the audience, and you really bring everybody up a few levels during the process. So I want to get into what you talk about and why that is effective in business and personal life. So let's just get right in. Joy. I mean, we use the word joy. Dancing brings joy to me. And you talk about joy being the new high- That's unusual.

Oh. Yeah, sorry. Crazy, huh? But joy is the new high-performance fuel. Can you tell us more about that philosophy? Well, yes, because we don't talk about joy at all, pretty much, at work. We talk a lot about mental health issues. Right.

We talk about how depressed people are at work and how miserable they are and how hard it is to find people to work for you and all of those things. And, you know, Okay. Like I don't wake up in the morning going, how can I offend people today? But I've just arrived back from Australia and that's the other thing to live here. So my Aussie-isms are very strong right now. So having said that, most entrepreneurs, generalizing, are people who are very driven and on task and they've got a mission and a purpose. And those things are great. When you don't stop and rest along the way and find the joy in the moments, then you

actually lose that sense of joy and you might get to where you've been striving to get to, but you'll be miserable. And then what's the point? And just yesterday I had a call with a woman who reached out to me and just wanted to have a chat to see how I had gotten to where I am, I suppose. I'm old, that's how. We were talking, she was 34 and she was talking about everything she could do and she was setting up this business and she was coaching and she was training and she was wanted to speak. And by the time we'd finished, I said to her, it sounds to me like you're very driven. You get bored very easily. And the reason I'm

saying this is because I think it ties into a lot of entrepreneurs. And by the time we'd finished and I had given her permission, so she gave herself permission to just take a big breath and to recognize she didn't have to strive and push really hard all the time, that she could kind of ease it out a little and take a breath here and there and find the joy in being present in this moment and just stopping. And I know it sounds corny, but we don't do it. And it's true. Just stop and smell a rose or look outside and watch the snow in your case or sit in the sun in my case and do those little things. And you should have heard the sigh of relief that went through her whole body.

Wow. And from those small moments, like lots of people think joy is, and everything was fabulous. But you know, joy is really, in my mind, a tremendous sense of peace and that things are okay in the world. And because from that place of peace and equilibrium, you can look out and experience joy in the nature. And because from that place of peace and equilibrium, you can look out and experience joy in the nature that's around you or the people that are around you or what's happening

around you. Right. So I want to unpack that a little bit more because, I mean, it sounds to me like she was getting really tense and really worked up with, you know, when you start, yeah, you start looking at all of these things piling up in front of you. And it, first of all, it just, it takes away any relaxation that you have. And we can't function when we're all wound up like a spring and tense and overwhelmed and things of that nature. You mentioned mental health. I mean, you know, that's, some people call that anxiety. And they're looking for a way to just get rid of the noise and the voices in their head that are attacking them.

You've got so, it's like you're standing there and 20 people are telling you what to do because you're thinking of 20 things at once. Yeah. So you mentioned getting her to take that sigh of relief and then she finds some clarity. Why does that happen when we take a step back and we relax the things that are important surface instead of all of the things coming at us? Why are we able to do that, do you think? You know, that's a great question because I'm not so sure. It's all about giving yourself permission and understanding what's at the root of what's driving you. And for me, it always comes back to the stories that we tell ourselves

between zero to seven. So I've been studying with a man, I studied with a man called Michael Grinder for 35 years, who's taught me an enormous amount about nonverbal communication. He's probably the world's leading nonverbal communication expert. And David Martin, Dr. David Martin, I've been working with in the last seven years. And through my work with him, I'm 68 now. So through my work with, and I only tell you that because I've done the most profound work on myself in the last eight years, really. And probably the root, excuse me, the discoveries I've made about myself, which apply, I believe to almost everyone, is that we are driven

by stories that we tell ourselves. And those stories we told ourselves when we were between zero to seven. So epigenetics teaches us that between zero to seven, a child's brain is basically hypnotized in a same pattern, theta pattern, as hypnotized adults. And so the experiences happen around a child. Certain things happen. And when you're a toddler, you haven't got any sense of perspective. You have no capacity to understand what somebody else, your parents are feeling or somebody else is feeling or thinking. So when, when mummy yells at you because mummy hasn't slept for five days because you haven't, a toddler doesn't go, oh,

mummy, I know you're exhausted because I haven't slept for a week and nor have you. I know you're not really yelling at me that you love me. You're just tired. No, that doesn't happen. A toddler doesn't do that. A toddler goes, mummy doesn't love me. I'm not worth loving. I'm not good enough. I'm, oh no, I made my mummy unhappy. And that story gets embedded. And then, and it's like, I like to liken it to concentric circles, Adam, so that in the center of the circles is you, the essence of you, this astonishing, beautiful, brand new, state-of-the-art computer, this astonishing being of light that you are. Then zero to seven happens around that essence of you. Right.

In that zero to seven, malware comes in. This is how I'd describe it. Uh-oh. And the malware are the fears, and there's three of them, that we've told ourselves. Now, I got the trifecta. Some of you may not have any. Some of you have one or two, but they are. I'm not worth loving and I'm not good enough. I took it to the next level. I told myself I was worthless. That was always helpful during my life, but it didn't drive me on to be the best at everything I could do, or I strove to be the

best at everything I did. The second core fear is, and of course that led me pretty close to burnout, the second core fear is that I'm unsafe in some way. And if you permanently feel unsafe, one of the biggest ways we learn to feel safe is to control everything and everyone around us. As my second husband pointed out to me that I was a little controlling, and I, of course, had the psychology degree, and I was the one who had had all the training, so I magnanimously looked at him and said, ah, I know what you're doing.

You're projecting. It took about a year until I realized there was just a bit of truth in what he said. Yeah, I had that work out. Yeah. Bugger it. And then the third core fear is separation. I don't belong. I don't fit in.

So these three fears come in and surround the essence of you with malware, if you like. And then every other circle expanding out from those two central circles, every aspect of your life, every relationship, everything is run on that malware. And you know what it's like in a computer. You get a brand new computer, malware gets into it. You don't know originally that the malware is in there. It's only as the malware sort of creeps out and gets, I call them little puss balls, you know, they make little puss balls everywhere. And after a while, the computer doesn't work quite the same, but it becomes more and more and more obvious. Well, that's exactly what happens to us in life. And for many people, those stories play out in the way we treat ourselves and our relationships, which is an extremely long way to come back to the question you asked me, Adam, which was it's those stories that are driving us in our head.

Okay. That keep us going, that are like the 20 different people talking to you. We tell ourselves three things, and do those become the topic of those stories? Because it seems like those three things, I'm not good enough, I'm not safe, and I don't belong, is where we continue to go back when we have this tension in our lives. Is that kind of the root for all of these? Well, it's the root. We don't go back there. The thing is that because the reason I use the computer as the metaphor is because that malware is operating constantly in the background, constantly. And so everything is built on that. So let's say you're an entrepreneur and you've got a big meeting coming up and this is like a crucial meeting. Well, automatically it's a reflex, as David Martin has taught me,

these are reflexes. We don't even know they're operating in the background and there can be the tiniest trigger in the environment that really has nothing to do with the original circumstance, but it triggers like a reflex, instantly a behavior. And all of you, if you stop for 30 seconds, you will find out that, or you'll remember some experience you've had that really was like a nothing experience, but you reacted to it in a very strong way. Right. Well, that's the reflex kicking in. And I quote David quite a lot because these are his phrases, so I like to acknowledge him. He says that one of the most important things to do

is to slow down to the speed of consciousness. And when you slow down to the speed of consciousness, which is being present in this very moment, then you can start to be aware of what you're telling yourself that's triggering the reflex that's causing the behavior. And you can start to catch yourself doing these things. so it is a real exercise in awareness and consciousness um because i didn't know i was telling myself these things because it's so deeply embedded it's the malware it's hidden until it pointed out i mean i knew i didn't think i was worth loving i had no clue i told myself i was worthless and also i added i was responsible for my mother's happiness for a number of reasons. But these are, if you can slow down to that speed of consciousness,

where you are aware of who's telling you the story, that would be you. And sometimes it's your mother's voice, but you were the one that took on the story. Sometimes it's your father's voice. Sometimes it's a relative's voice. Sometimes it's a relative's voice. Sometimes it's a teacher's voice that you hear, but it's really your story. You took on the story. So the responsibility is with us to change our stories. Okay. So to that extent, we've got that and that rests on us to change the stories. How do we introduce joy into this in order to, you know, kind of, I guess, inoculate ourselves from these situations or how does that, you know, how do we introduce it and what is the impact that that has on these situations that we're in. Well, I would say that the joy...

You get one or the other, right? Well, fear for me is the opposite of joy. So fear is the joy killer. And joy is there giving you life force, making life worth living, helping you appreciate the smallest moment or the biggest moment. And I think, too, the definition of joy is really critical. Like I said earlier,

it's that sense of peace, that sense of, ah, everything's okay. You know, it doesn't have to be this monumental, hysterical moment like your wedding day, you know, the moment you say, I do, or the moment a child is born. They're extraordinarily joyful moments for most people. So it doesn't always have to be that level. So I think sometimes people look for too much. Joy really comes in those small moments, and in particular when you learn to accept yourself. And you can start to see the fears, call them as unreal as they are, because everybody is worth loving. You are good enough.

It doesn't mean that you can't grow, develop, be more. We are safe, generally speaking, unless you're in a dark alleyway, you know, and there's you hear a knife coming out of a sheaf. Most of us are safe most of the time. And we're never separate. If you look at quantum physics, we're never separate. You and I, Adam and Mike, are all connected in the field, and we can never disconnect from that field.

So we're never really separate, Adam, never. And we just perceive it as we don't belong. And it's kind of an existential thing too, because when we come to earth and we're born, we separate in many ways in our interpretation from our spiritual nature. And I'm not a space cadet, but we are mental, physical, spiritual, emotional beings. So we need to look at all of those aspects and they all tie into joy. And so that essence of who you really are, and if your listeners could take this away, see me and hear me saying you are an astonishing being of light, astonishing, capable of amazing things. And stop for a moment, slow down to the speed of

consciousness and just pick up all the voices you just heard when I said that. Did you hear it? No, you're not. You're worthless. No, you're not. You're not worth much. No, you suck. Whatever it is, just pay attention because the truth is rip away the malware, which takes a while, by the way, to clear up. You know, it's an ongoing process, but it becomes easier and easier. You rip away the malware and you are left with the extraordinary beauty and astonishing nature of who you really are. And that's what happened to that young woman yesterday I was speaking to, because she had a glimpse during our conversation of who she really was. And it was like she went, oh, because she finally could see herself for who she really was.

And you're all capable of that. All right, we're going to pause the conversation right there. This has just been amazing. It's been gold. But we've reached the end of our episode. So make sure that you subscribe. So you get notified next week when part two comes out. We'll see you next time.