The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show – Happy Not Perfect: Upgrade Your Mind, Challenge Your Thoughts, and Free Yourself from Anxiety by Poppy Jamie

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Happy Not Perfect: Upgrade Your Mind, Challenge Your Thoughts, and Free Yourself from Anxiety by Poppy Jamie A clear path to overcoming uncertainty, perfectionism, and fears of rejection so you can finally find peace with the past and create a happier, healthier future “Poppy’s powerful approach will help you take control of your thoughts so they don’t control you.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Even before the pandemic brought on a crushing wave of stress, anxiety, isolation, life change, and financial struggle, there was already a growing mental health crisis. Due to a culture that encourages perfection, hustle, and fictional life/work balance, many are burning out. Behind her Instagram-projected image of “happy wellness founder,” Poppy Jamie was also struggling mightily with perfectionism and life purpose. She began working with mental health experts and researchers to find practical tools to overcome her inner critic and rewire her mind. She discovered that it is possible to create new neural pathways in your brain to break patterns of avoidance, challenge fears of not being good enough, and turn failure around by stretching the mind with new, healthier thought habits. The old wiring (and habits) that you’ve been stuck with can be written-over. You can actually upgrade your headspace to make curiosity, vulnerability, compassion, and emotional flexibility your default settings. In the emphatic and trusted voice of Bridget Jones meets neuroscience, Poppy shares her Flexy Thoughts approach for changing how you react to emotional triggers and think of yourself while improving your mental and physical health, relationships, and vision of the future. Our emotional resilience may continue to be tested, but the new perspectives and strategies in Happy Not Perfect will help us bring confidence, adaptability, and acceptance to whatever comes next.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Thechrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Get them involved in the show. Tell them to hit that subscribe button. Ask them, say, have you subscribed to the Chris Voss Show? He does these funny things and has these brilliant, interesting people on his show. It's the best show podcast on the Internet.

Just no one's heard of it yet or something like that. Somebody's heard of it because whatever. Anyway, go to YouTube.com for Chrisfoss. Hit the bell notification button. Also go to goodreads.com forward slash chrisfoss. You can see everything we're reading and reviewing over there. You can go to all the major groups we have on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places, even the TikTok. And you can see the different book authors we have, the videos and some of the different things we're doing. Definitely want to check out all those channels to keep abreast of what's going on. Today, as always, we have an amazing author with an amazing book that she is releasing.

This is coming out June 8th, 2021, so you're going to want to take and pre-order this baby so you can be the first one on your blog and your book club to take and read it and be able to say, I won, I read it first, and of course master some of the really great tips that she has in here. Her name is Poppy Jamie. She's written the book, Happy, Not Perfect, Upgrade Your Mind, Challenge Your Thoughts,

and Free Yourself from Anxiety. That sounds like all sorts of good stuff that I'd want to take and do. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com. And their Micro-iDSD Signature is a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now.

I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. She is one of Forbes 30 Under 30.

She's a British entrepreneur and TV presenter. She's the founder of the mental well-being app, Happy Not Perfect. Co-founder of the accessories line, Pop and Suki, host of the Not Perfect podcast and author of the new book. In 2016, Poppy launched the first talk show on Snapchat, Pillow Talk with Poppy. And the following year, she set up her two enterprises with dedicated focus on creating accessible tools to help the stress and anxiety

levels of young people. Poppy is the youngest board member on the UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Award of Advisors. I'm trying to read today, I guess. A point of light award holder given last year by the former Prime Minister of England for her work in mental health. Poppy is also a global goals advocate for the United Nations. In the Not Perfect podcast, Poppy interviews world experts, thought leaders, and change agents to share tools, wisdom, and advice to living a happier, not perfect life. Welcome to the show, Poppy. How are you? Thank you so much for having me, Chris.

I'm well. Thank you. How are you? I am good, but it seems like I might need to have my neuropsychiatric brain checked on this spacey diet with a bone broth diet. So not everything's working out there. So welcome to the show. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. People can find me at Poppy Jamie on Instagram or

Twitter and always love to hear from any of you guys. And of course you can find Happy Not Perfect on any major book retailer or actually anywhere where you buy your books. There you go. And what motivated you to write this book? I wanted to write this book to really help people in moments of uncertainty and to start making better decisions because we live lives mostly on autopilot mode. Research has proven that 98% of our thoughts today were the same as yesterday. And we end up experiencing the same stresses, having the same day over and over again, and wondering why this is always happening to us. And Einstein got it so right. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing, expecting a different result. And if you're anything like me, I just had this moment

where I was like, why am I just constantly feeling so anxious? Or why am I just getting myself into the same problems? Why am I making the same mistakes? And this is when I guess my focus on the mind really came to be because I had actually a complete health breakdown because my anxiety became too much. And it forced me to start looking into my mind and not just, as I say in my book, I had to have a full brain cleaning exercise. And it's not just the cleaning where you kind of stuff toys in the cupboard and hope they don't pop out. It was an actual kind of spring cleaning where you have to open up the cupboard and go, what on earth do I have in here? What beliefs am I holding in here? And are they serving me? And the book is all about learning to be a flexible

thinker because when you can think with flexibility, no challenge is too great. You have the resilience and the tools to bend in any direction and in any shape to get through anything that comes your way. That's pretty interesting. Do you find that a lot of people that are in your age group that I imagine is a large part of your audience, they're suffering from anxiety and what's going on and probably some of the coronavirus, what we've experienced the last year and a half. Absolutely.

I think modern day culture is so toxic for our mental health. Wherever you look, whether it's online, suddenly perfect has become normal. We don't see imperfection anywhere and just only in our own lives and so we are living an illusion thinking that everybody has their life together everybody's killing it everybody's winning and this this hustle culture that's do more more be better is is really the enemy of joy and self-acceptance and also forgiving ourselves for making mistakes, which is just so deeply human. And I think for young people, if you look at what the younger

age group in high school, they are being told that they're going to be a failure if they don't get the best grades. You then go to early twenties age group. If they don't, you know, have an amazing job or suddenly creating a billion dollar company, they're also failures. And suddenly their self-esteem is being challenged. And then each age group has its own challenges and its own kind of set of like cultural kind of aims that most of us miss. And then suddenly you have the majority of people going, where did I go wrong? When actually no one's gone wrong. we just have followed our individual paths that are not perfect because the nature of human beings is that it's unpredictable and we're always gonna it's gonna be messy does instagram play into that and different websites

that like you say everyone presents themselves as my life successful here i am and uh sometimes they fake the whole background does that make it hard on people and increase their anxiety and issues with mental health oh my gosh people lie the entire time so as you read out i sat up two companies and i used to always follow the news on other startups and who's raising and what's going on. And then you suddenly realize that press stories are usually lying. And you hear about these exits that actually were really concealing, like quite a bad exit, actually. And this is the thing, the press is mostly an illusion, and we can't believe the hype machine that everyone has become so good at being for themselves. And look, that's no shade

on anybody else. We always have to put our best foot forward and everyone's trying to do their best. But I think we also need to be self-compassionate and have that moment of realness with ourself to know everybody else is struggling just as much as me. And in the book, I talk about this thing called duck syndrome, which I well i was a major participant of and duck syndrome explains someone who on the surface is trying to glide across the glide across the water looking like they've got life all together everything's going well job family relationship good. And actually underneath the water, they are paddling for dear fucking life. Sorry, can I swear in this podcast?

And we've become the exhausted by projecting our own illusion that we have everything together. If only where we were just a bit more honest to be like, you know what? Things really haven't been so good this week. We would allow everyone just to take a deep breath and be like, oh my God, me too. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of this started, we saw in social media around Foursquare. People would always check into, I don't know if you remember Foursquare, the Foursquare app,

but people would check in and be mayors of how many times you check into the local fine restaurant or whatever. But we used to joke about how no one ever checks in at the methadone clinic. No one ever checks in at AA. No one ever checks in at the pawn shop. No one checks in at divorce court. It's always like Lachey restaurant and Dubai and people are always checking in someplace nice. They're never checking in. I just got bailed out of jail tonight. And so there's this positioning like you talk about with PR notices. I just, someone sent me a PR notice the other day. And one of the reasons they were putting out this PR notice across the PR newswire was

they have two ripoff reports on their internet search and their Better Business Bureau news is, or reviews are through the toilet. And so they're creating these fake, fluffy PR newswire stuff to try and bury those reports. And I'm just like, oh, my God, everything is about positioning. And my life is great. And that's not healthy for anybody, really, I think. No. And look, I understand why we all do it.

All of us have tribal instincts. All of us are asking three questions the entire time. Am I safe? Am I enough? Am I safe? Am I enough? Am I loved? And we believe that by checking into, we might believe, I know some people don't, but we might believe that checking into nice places makes us feel enough that people are going to look upon us with better thoughts or think we're better if we are outwardly living a more glamorous life, which is, it's when we really think about it,

it's so untrue. This is the irony of perfect. We all think from a bit more perfect, I'm going to be more liked. And actually, like perfection makes people dislike you. Everyone's like, oh God, not them again. Like at that fancy restaurant, people love someone who just goes, you know what, I'm just getting a kebab in the local kebab shop because actually I'm being honest about what I love to do on a Monday night. Whatever your fun things to do. Or actually, I just want to play a game of cards and drink a cup of mint tea. I know it might not be the most glamorous thing, but actually it makes me happy. I would think, God, how cool is that person? They can just be so free and honest with what they authentically want. And so, look, as I said, this social pressure to feel like we've got to

perform, to be something more than actually our wonderful, truer self is more than enough in any scenario. Yeah. I've known people that are life coaches that are homeless. They're just schlepping couches. I've known people that are relationship, dating coaches that can't get a second date. And there seems to be this whole thing with people who are like, branding, I must position my branding. Otherwise people won't buy my services or I need people to buy my services. And there's just this faux fake it till you make it sometimes things. One thing I discovered a long time ago was the power of being authentic. And it still doesn't get me as much likes as that girl who always sits by the pool somewhere in Dubai or wherever she is in the world.

And maybe I'll never get as many likes as her. But learning to be authentic is... I don't look good in a bikini too. So that's the other problem. But I learned a long time being authentic, talking about my pain, talking about my struggles. Today I was talking on Facebook and I posted about how, hey, the last three days I've really been struggling with switching to a bone broth for lunch diet. Been really spacey and just trying to get through it. And I get support from my community that goes, hey, you can do it, Chris, and all that sort of stuff. But authenticity, I've talked about challenges I've had where my dog kids have passed and I've shared some of that pain on the thing. And actually it really helps other people too.

I've had a lot of people that said, wow, watching you talk about the pain you went through helped me with my, I didn't realize I got closure with my parents or I didn't, death, my dog death or whatever it is. And a lot of times what I found is being authentic really helps other people resolve their issues. Watching each other go through the challenge that we do of life because we're're human, really helps other people. What do you think about that? Absolutely. I think when we can meet someone in the circle of truth, we give them permission to be truthful with themselves as well. And there's this beautiful writer I love called Anne Lamott, and she writes about how she is desperate for that dinner party guest that person that sits next to her at dinner and is just honest because the conversation that arises from honesty is so like nutritious like you leave a conversation an honest conversation, feeling so full, really having connected fully with that

other human being. And I think we all hate small talk. There's no one who says, I love small talk. And that's when, you know, socialising can get tiring when we're pretending to be a certain person. And that's why sometimes if you've got to go to a work party, for example, and everyone's just pretending to be their best self, it can feel a little bit exhausting but when we're really honest with what's going on and we don't flippantly answer a question like how are you and and we say yeah fine we're fine I'm fine we don't actually answer that question but when we actually pause to say yeah I'm good I was as you just said only three days ago on facebook you were you know talking a bit more honestly about how you're feeling i think it just opens up so much more yeah

like ways to connect with each other yeah and and more honesty and less of a chasing perfection life the fomo aspect of social media is off the. I don't know if you want to talk about it, the fear of missing out. And the people that have FOMO, I'll talk to one of my buddies that are married, and they're like, my wife is killing me because she saw your photos of you traveling to XYZ, and now she wants to travel, or you're doing this event, you're going to this event, and I really wanted to go to that event. Oh my God, I have FOMO. And so people have these desires of where they feel imperfect, like you talk about in the title

of your book, or they feel like they're just not complete, which is really not healthy. Comparison is the thief of all joy, as the ancient Greeks said. And it's so true. As soon as we compare our life, we will always see our inadequacy. We'll always see where things aren't matching up. And if you think about it, we would never go back to prehistoric caveman times. We knew what maybe 20 people are doing, 30 people max. This is a very new phenomena for us to be connected to this many people and to know this much about other people's lives arguably we do not need to know so much because you you've had a great holiday you then return you see your friends instagram photographs suddenly your holiday looks wasn't adequate you're like oh no we didn't get good weather and oh god our hotel wasn't as nice or i didn't go to

ibiza we didn't go to ibiza. We didn't go to Ibiza. And suddenly we think our holiday, even though we loved it, suddenly is downgraded because we have looked upon someone else's photograph, which probably took them 300 takes to get that sunset. And they didn't also tell us in the Instagram post that they fought with their partner for the entire time. And this is why Instagram it is it's it's just such a like an illusion that we all buy into because it only shows us at one point not point not not one percent of a split second and it doesn't show us the entire picture and in 2016 I gave a TED talk called Addicted to Likes. And it was 2016, we were quite new on these platforms. And I began to observe how addictive those likes had become. They were quantifiable moments of us having that kind of external validation that feels so good.

It sparks our happiness hormone, it sparks our dopamine, it makes us crave to want more likes. And really, what was this doing to us? And because who are we craving likes from? Like a bunch of people, we don't really care what they think of us, but Instagram makes us care what they think of us. And so I think comparison is something that we should talk about more because it's a human condition. We will always compare because it helps us to sometimes

understand what we want. For example, we have a cup of coffee and we're like, was that better than yesterday's or was that worse? Actually, yesterday's was better because I actually prefer my coffee a bit hotter. Now that is useful comparison. It is giving information about what we like and dislike. Unhelpful comparison is comparing to an illusion that isn't real. And that's often what social media encourages us to do. I think I heard a comedian or somebody say that when our society is dug up by some archaeologists hundreds of years, a thousand years from now, and they're like, what was this society doing? They're going to look at all of our Instagrams and everything and be like,

these people were perpetually smiling 100% of the time. They were clearly really happy. And no one, like I joke, no one posts pictures of you coming out of the jail bail bond office. No one posts pictures of, hey, I just got out of jail. Hey, I just came out of the methadone clinic. Hey, I just came out of my rehab center. And yeah, I'm just here under the Vidoc and hanging out with my friends. No one ever posts those sort of stuff usually. And so you basically get into a lot of some of the things that you were experiencing, what millennials are experiencing, Gen Zers are experiencing. And you talk about being determined to overcome your mean girl

inner critic. Tell us a little bit about that. That's so funny. Yeah. So we all have an inner critic. Some people call it the ego voice. I like to call it my bitchy inner critic. And so I named my bitchy inner critic because I think it's really important to name the voice that is screaming insults at you on a day to day basis. And because it reminds you yourself that you are not this voice. And if you've ever read The Untethered, it's a really, it's a brilliant book about that kind of ego voice and the fact that if we can observe the voice, we are not the voice. So I call my bitchy inner critic regina called after the main girl the mean girls because she's vicious and the thing is with our inner critic is that it knows our deepest darkest fears and then it torments us with them day in day out

and so just by understanding that we then have greater I get greater power to disarm this voice inside. And I always like to talk about babies because when we see a baby is without fear, a baby comes into this world full of love, no self-consciousness. A baby doesn't say, oh, don't look at me. I'm dancing. I'm embarrassed. A baby just dances. And a baby doesn't say I'm having a bad day or I'm feeling anxious a baby is just is just there to love and so we learn our fears we learn our prejudices and we and we learn this kind of inner critical voice that is telling us things that we are terrified of not being enough not being worthy that not being good, our work should have been better, that person doesn't like us, that person's going to cheat on us, all of those fears that our inner critic tells us.

And so the flex method in the book gives you four steps to be able to turn down the volume of this voice and turn up the volume on self-compassion and on living life according to our values and what we want our future to be like. And in order for us to do brave and courageous things, we need to have a way to reduce the fear that keeps us trapped. This is why in the book I focus upon that because we are our own worst enemy. The greatest battle we face is the battle within the mind. And so we need to know who our opponent is to be able to disarm them. Yeah. In fact, I found with the diet I've been on, we talked about pre-show, most of 90% of my battles in my mind, just dealing with the mental aspects of, okay,

where I'm at. Okay. It's okay. Realizing that you're not going to lose like 25 pounds in a day. You've got to just go, okay, just a little bit, baby steps, eat the elephant one bite at a time, but also take care of your mental health. And that's really important. And so you give people a lot of different ways where they can stretch their mind with new, healthier thought habits and what they can focus on to maybe get some better uses of the brain and get better performance out of it. Is that correct? Absolutely. And something that I really like to focus on is this idea of thought health, because currently in culture, we understand physical health and how to look after that. And we're beginning to understand mental health, but our thoughts have a great impact on all aspects of our health. And if we are living a life on

toxic thoughts, on deeply fearful, critical thoughts, like telling, like beating ourselves up the whole time, telling us that we can't do things or setting huge expectations. And then if we don't meet them, calling ourself a failure, then that is highly toxic. It's stressful. It increases the cortisol production that then leads to inflammation inflammation lowers our immune system like disrupts our digestion and so when we actually look at the thoughts that we are entertaining in our mind we're able to say okay which ones are going to be healthier and so one part of the step i taught i'll go through the steps because it's really helpful sure so the

first step of the flex method to becoming a more flexible thinker is connection. And that is taking a moment to actually connect and accept anything that we are feeling. And we have not been encouraged to embrace uncomfortable emotions. If we're feeling happy, that's great. And if we're feeling anything other than happy, we try to numb ourselves so we don't feel it. And so that's why we can become addicted to anything really, because it's a behavior outside of ourself in attempt to lessen the internal pain. And I talk about in the book that I became addicted to work, which is a strange addiction to talk about because you're thinking to yourself, God, how can you become addicted to work? And it's because whenever I feel stressed, my kind of way

to reduce that stress and that uncomfortable feeling was, well, I'll just work harder. I'll just work harder. But in all honesty, it just took me to burnout and chronic exhaustion. Often when we talk about addictions, oh, that means alcohol, that means drugs, but addictions can, like minor addictions, daily addictions can appear throughout our day and in different things. And so when we connect to ourselves, we actually teach ourselves to become able to accept how we feel. And Dr. Joan Rosenberg is an amazing psychologist that wrote a book called 90 Seconds to a Life You Love. And she talks how research has proven our emotions only last for 90 seconds. So if we get into the habit of being able to experience our emotions for just 90 seconds, we're able to

process them and stop living in this reactive state where we just, we jump to conclusions, we assume, we like get angry quickly, we react and make bad bad decisions say things we don't mean if we could just connect with our uncomfortable emotions we're actually able to then tap into our wise brain because when we react our emotional side of a brain our brain is in control and when our emotional side of our brain is in control we can expect trouble and bad consequences. So a great tip to be able to connect with how you feel is a diffusion technique, which I found in acceptance commitment therapy. And it's just a very simple sentence. Today, my mind feels, and you insert how you're feeling. And why that's so powerful, the word today, you remind yourself, emotions are temporary.

My mind, you are not your emotions. Sometimes we over-labelize ourselves. Like, I'm just an angry person. I'm just an anxious person. I'm just a stressed person. No, nobody is any one person. You experience anger or you experience anxiety or you experience impatience. Like, we ourselves are, like, are like full of love wonderful free human beings

and then we these emotions pass through us and you then label your emotion because research proves when we actually verbalize or label or journal how we feel we start to activate that computer side of the brain and in return the emotional side starts to relax and so the so a negative emotions impact starts to decrease and so that is step one connection step two curiosity curiosity is one of the greatest superpowers all of us have access to and that is the ability to question what we're feeling and thinking and the thoughts that are going through our mind rather than believing them. Thoughts are not facts. As we know, that bitchy, inner critic, ego voice, whatever you want to call it, is spitting lies, like emceeing negative things most of the time because we have an 80% negative bias. And we also have a

confirmation bias. And what confirmation bias is, our brain likes to confirm whatever it thinks is true. And as Peter Crone says, being right and wrong is a poor, being right is a poor man's self-worth. When you're that person that has to be right, really, you are revealing a very low self-esteem. You're revealing a very low bout of confidence. When people stand there and say, this is my opinion, you've got to believe it, otherwise you're wrong. It just shows such a stiff way of living life because you're unable to hold your opinion, also listen to another and see if you have a blind spot. And as we know, every human being has a blind spot. There are always things that we are not considering because when you drive a car,

you have to look twice, look twice left in order to ensure that you are not missing a blind spot and a car is not there trying to overtake you. And so curiosity allows you to break through blind spots by asking questions like, interesting, tell me more, not jumping to conclusions of what you think, not filling in the blanks with your assumptions. And your assumptions are usually just past fears playing out in the present. But curiosity allows you to say, is this true? How do I know this is true? Is this 100% sure this is true? How is this thought making me feel? Who would I be without this thought? And we start to break through old patterns that are colouring

our present. The past is often the architect of our present, but doesn't need to predict our future and curiosity disarms our automatic negative thoughts that we all have. And then the next two steps are choice and commitment. And choice, and I'll just touch upon choice, you always have to choose a different way to think because otherwise we will fall back into autopilot mode. We will fall back into our default settings, which is have an 80% negative bias, will be overly critical, overly negative. We will let our fears dictate our life. We have to actively choose to question our thoughts and live life like compassionately with optimism and like stepping into love for ourselves and others, because we won't if we're left to autopilot mode.

Yeah. These are brilliant, man. This is stuff people really need to do. Years ago, I think a couple of years ago, I read Eckhart Tolle's, what was it? It Escapes Me, Learning About the Self. And my brain was beating the crap out of itself. Like you mentioned the mean girl. My brain was just whipping me and so crazy. It was so negative and so mean. And I just felt at the end of my wits at the time. And I was like, just wow. And I like how you talk about different ways that it means that you get people to change these aspects and to really address them. I like how you take emotion and you separate yourself from it so that you can look at it and you can make it an object that you can control as opposed to this is who I am. I'm angry. You can be like, no, you this, we have a, you have an emotion kind of box and you have control over this box and what you decide to do with this box and how it applies to you. I really love that being objective with it. Absolutely. We all have a choice in how we

respond to life when we are not taking that pause and we're reacting from past patterns, because that's how the brain works. It's a pattern matching machine. It walks into an environment and says, have I been here before? Have I seen this before? And if so, what data can I collect from that memory and how do I react right now? But it's such a faulty way of living life because the past is really inaccurate. The human brain cannot remember, scientifically proven, cannot remember the past accurately. And that's why I think I call them MI5 because I'm British,

but you can call it CIA. This is why CIA agents always know if someone's lying, if they can repeat, recount a story perfectly twice. Because if you're trying to recount the past, you will do it slightly differently the second time. Because when we're trying to recount the past, like you will do it slightly differently the second time. Because when we're trying to search our past memory banks, the brain never remembers the past in total accuracy. It remembers the gist and then we fill in the blanks. And so I write in the book, there's a chapter called Flex the Past. And it talks about how these war veterans were doing a tour and the stories they gave on the first night were completely unrecognizable to the stories

they were giving on the last night. If I was a war vet, I wouldn't have it all straight either, that's for sure. And that's, again, it's like, I have a huge respect, gosh, we're so lucky for them, but it's just an example of research that proves that we can't rely on our past memories. We've got to take conscious decisions in the present of how we want to create the future. Because relying on the past will only lead us back into past patterns that are usually slightly unhealthy or not useful for us. That's really interesting, people with the CIA or MI5. Isn't it MI6 or is that the Bond thing? Oh, maybe it's MI6. Oh, is it MI5? I figured you were in Britain. I don't know. I don't know. There could be an MI5. Maybe that's

the secret one or something. They're both secret, but I know my friend, my friend lives in London somewhere and he's just across the bridge from MI6. And I'm like, do you really want to be that close to that building? You never know what could go on there or something. I don't know. It's funny. But I think the James Bond movie is coming out later this month. Is that a sponsor or something? Are we plugging that? But no. But I love what you talk about. That's really interesting. People repeat the most perfect stories. I do remember my friends who were pathological liars. I had two of them that were narcissistic, pathological liars, and they would practice their lies. I've been going through process because I've been writing my book and trying to remember all my stories. And unfortunately,

I've waited way too long. I wish I would have put them down sooner because I'm like, so what was it? Did this one go? And I was telling somebody a story the other day about one of my stories and I got partway through and I'm like, there was some sort of subject and I went, wait, hang on. Oh no, hold on. I got the numbers mixed up. Okay. Now I remember what they are. And I'm just like, as I've been telling my stories more and more, I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot about that part and that part. And yeah, it was interesting. Anything more you want to impart to us about your book and stuff,ourage people to buy it before we go out. the research and make it really easy to understand and it and the flex method really has totally changed my life if it can if anybody is in those moments where you're feeling uncertain you're

going through change then hopefully flexible thinking will help you develop your own self-trust because the one thing I don't think we get taught about enough is to develop trust within us we're all like birds. And I think sometimes we forget that even if the twig breaks, we still got wings. We can fly to another twig. We're going to be okay. And I think the reason why anxiety is so high is because we've lost this trust. We think that other people know us better than us.

We think that other people have got the answers. There's this kind of like guru culture. It's, oh no, let's wait for somebody else to give me advice. When actually you know you best and the book is really helping you and hopefully showing you that how to tap into your inner wisdom how to tap into your guidance because it's amazing we're all our we're all the best advisors to our friends but when it comes to ourself we're like oh hold on what was that again and we just need to slightly flex it we need to slightly flex it and then we have unlimited pools of wisdom so be your own guru that's really the

message of the book i really like that be your own guru i spend a lot of time for a while running around working on fixing the world and then i one day i was like yeah maybe i should fix me because i seem to have some issues there There's that. So give us your plugs, Poppy, before we go out or people can find you and look you up on the internet, know more about you and order your book. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Chris. I'm at Poppy Jamie on Instagram and Twitter and online, just www.poppyjamie.com. And you can buy Happy Not Perfect on any book website or where you buy your books. And as I said, always love hearing from anyone.

So if anything resonated, please do get in contact. There you guys go. Check out the book. You can pre-order right now, June 8th, 2021. It's going to be out. Happy Not Perfect. Upgrade your mind, challenge your thoughts, and free yourself from anxiety. Poppy, it's been wonderful to have you on the show and brilliant to enlighten us with so much great stuff.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. Thank you very much. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, see everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Also go to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,

all those different things. There's a million groups all throughout there. You can check them out as well. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time.