The Dr. Hyman Show - Simple Actions To Transform Your Life And Heal Your Relationship With Yourself

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley, AG1, and Bioptimizers.  Difficult times and experiences happen to all of us. They can often leave us not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy of love, not being able to trust others, and more. And it can be easy to put self-care on the back burner, even when we know we need to face our struggles. Yet, when we make the time to be radically honest with ourselves, sit with our discomforts, and take action to change our state, we open up the door to healing. In today’s episode, I talk with Mel Robbins, Yung Pueblo, and Lewis Howes about how small actions we make every day can be the key to big changes that transform our lives. A New York Times bestselling author and self-publishing phenom, Mel Robbins’ work includes The High 5 Habit, The 5 Second Rule, and the number one-ranking The Mel Robbins Podcast. Her female-led media company produces provocative, life-changing content, with millions of books sold, billions of video views, six bestselling audiobooks, and one of the most viewed TEDx talks in the world. Her work has been translated into 41 languages and has changed the lives of millions of people worldwide. Diego Perez—who is widely known on Instagram and various social media networks by his pen name, Yung Pueblo—is a meditator and New York Times bestselling author. He has an online audience of nearly 3 million people. His writing focuses on the power of self-healing, creating healthy relationships, and the wisdom that comes when we truly work on knowing ourselves. His books include Inward, Clarity & Connection, and his most recent, Lighter, which was an instant New York Times bestseller. Lewis Howes is a New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and industry-leading show host. Lewis is a two-sport All-American athlete, former professional football player, and member of the US men’s national handball team. His show The School of Greatness is one of the top podcasts in the world, with over 500 million downloads. He was recognized by the White House and President Obama as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs in the country under 30. This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley, AG1, and Bioptimizers.  Paleovalley is offering my listeners 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman. Right now, AG1 is offering 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting drinkAG1.com/HYMAN. This month only you can get a FREE bottle of Magnesium Breakthrough. Just go to magbreakthrough.com/hymanfree and enter coupon code hyman10. Full-length episodes of these interviews (and links to all the references mentioned) can be found here: Mel Robbins Yung Pueblo Lewis Howes

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And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. There often comes a point in time when we need to reevaluate our lives and daily practices in order to unlock the power of the mind, eliminate self-sabotaging thoughts, and pursue a meaningful mission in life. You can rewrite the story of your past and propel yourself into a brighter future. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on transforming our lives to feel better and live into our purpose. Dr. Hyman speaks with Mel Robbins about how moving your body is the first step to changing your thoughts, with Young Pueblo about letting go of what doesn't serve,

and with Lewis Howes about moving from powerlessness to a greatness mindset. Let's dive in. Have you ever noticed that you can be super frustrated or feeling really low energy or kind of depressed or anxious, and if you go outside for a walk alone yeah that within 10 minutes you feel different yeah totally it's because you have shifted your physiological state and when you shift or relax your physiological state it relaxes your mind yeah and so i think a lot of us and talk theory talk therapy is a fabulous thing if you can afford to do it. But what happens in talk therapy is you talk through all this stuff and you're in a calm state when you're in therapy, aren't you? So you're utilizing a part of your brain to talk through the issues in your life when you are in a

calm, non-reactive state. And then if you ever noticed, you can talk for an hour with your therapist, but then you get out into your life and you get into the situation with your spouse or your kids or your colleague that you just processed with your therapist. You know that it is related to your trauma from childhood. You know that you're working on not being a yeller. You know you're working on all these patterns. And yet you get into the situation. And you're triggered. And you're triggered. And then all of a sudden you lose control again. And the reason why that happens is because it's not about your thinking first.

It's about the fact that all of the triggers are stored in your nervous system and in your body. And you, in therapy, are using a part of the brain, your prefrontal cortex, which is present when you're calm. But when you get triggered in life, your kids are frustrating you, the traffic is terrible, you're exhausted and you didn't record the fourth podcast in the day, you're now in a different part of the brain and your nervous system is now flipped on. And so that's why you have to attack your mindset from your physiological state. And you've got to use these tools. Now, a second thing that I want to say is this.

I said that you can choose to become who you want to become at any moment. Mm-hmm. I subscribe to the whole body of research around behavioral activation therapy. Okay, what's that? Behavioral activation therapy is act like the person you want to become now. So act into the feeling instead of feel into the acting. Yes. So let's just say that you are somebody who wants to be, I don't know, we'll just use an example. You want to be somebody like part of your bucket list because you've read Young Forever

and you want to be a marathon runner and you're going to get back in shape, right? Instead of thinking about it, instead of like being the you today that's 20 pounds over shape and the last place that you've run is to the car to try to beat the parking meter person. That's the last time you ever took a run.

Yeah. In order to become the new version of yourself, start to act like a marathon runner would today. What do they do? Well, they have tennis shoes. They typically go outside every day. They might have different ways of eating. They probably follow different social media accounts than you do. They probably wake up at a different time.

And so if you start acting like who you want to be today, an interesting thing happens with your mindset. You see, when your brain sees you doing something new, it starts to relate to you as that new person if you this is why mantras often are bullshit because people will want to learn how to love themselves dr hyman and they will stand in front of a mirror affirmations yeah after 40 years of beating them up beating themselves up hate my body body. I hate this. I'm a loser. I'm unlovable. Nobody's ever going to love you.

You failed at this. You failed at that. Now look at the bags under your eyes and one boobs hanging lower and this, that, and the other thing. You've been saying that for decades. You cannot stand in front of that mirror and say the affirmation, I love myself. Because your brain's like, bitch, no, you don't. Did you see how you talked to yourself i don't believe that and so you have to take the actions first before you feel like it

because if you see yourself following dr hyman's protocol and eating in a way that actually activates the healing part of your body your brain looks looks at you and goes, oh, look at you. You actually do care about your health. And your brain starts to change the things it's telling you. It begins with your actions first. And then what about the excuses that we all make? Oh, I can't because of this. I don't have time or I'm too tired or I don't have money.

Whatever the excuses are. Yeah. How do, how do you navigate that? Because I think the idea of acting into the feeling is a brilliant one. And I often tell people that just, just try it and then you don't have to actually, you know, decide you're going to do it. You just have to try it and then see how you feel. Yeah. So here's the thing about feelings. It's interesting.

I think you should ignore your feelings. What? Yeah, I do. We should talk about our feelings, express our feelings. No, you should ignore. When it comes to change, you're going to have to ignore how you feel because you are never going to feel like doing something that is different than what you've always done. Your brain is not wired that way. Your brain is wired for certainty.

Your nervous system is wired that way. Your brain is wired for certainty. Your nervous system is wired for safety. Your entire body is predisposed to keep you in the patterns that you're in because it knows them. Even though it sucks, Dr. Hyman, for you to tell yourself forever that you're unlovable or you're unworthy or you're always going to be with broken people, even though it sucks, it's familiar. And so it doesn't make any sense that you would tell yourself things over and over and over that continue to make you feel broken, but it's familiar. Anytime you try to change a thinking pattern or you try to change a behavior pattern, your own body will shove resistance in your way because your body is biased towards wanting

you to continue to eat what you eat continue to think autopilot Yeah, it's just on autopilot. And so number one expect to never feel like it motivation garbage It's not gonna be there when you need it Expect to not feel like eating what dr. Hyman tells you did to eat expect to not Feel like interrupting the bullshit thoughts that you don't want to take with you in the future. Expect to not feel like it. And so that leaves you with only one thing.

You have to force yourself to do it. There is no other way. This is not easy. If it were, everybody would have six pack abs. Everyone would have a million dollars in the bank. And so your excuses are always going to be there. And when you realize that there's nothing wrong with you, you don't lack the willpower or discipline. That's not the

issue. The issue is you've been waiting to feel like doing it. And you're never going to feel like doing it because this is what you've always done. And so expect the resistance to be there. And you can use the five-second rule. That's why I invented the thing. Tell us about that. What's the five-second rule? So the five-second rule. That's why I invented the thing. Tell us about that. What's the five-second rule? So the five-second rule- You wrote a book about it. I did.

I did. The five-second rule is a brain hack that I created in a moment of desperation because like everybody, I didn't feel like doing the things I needed to do to address the problems in my life. It was 2007. My husband and I were 800 grand in debt. His restaurant business was failing. I had lost my job. Our entire life was what we put on the line to start the restaurant business. We had three kids under the age of 10. We were living in a fancy suburb outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and we were about to lose everything. Checks were bouncing left and right. I was unemployed. Chris had not been paid

in six months. Friends and family had invested in the business. So we couldn't really tell anybody how bad it was. And at 41, Dr. Hyman, I found myself in a situation where I didn't even recognize myself. Like I never thought that this would be what happened to my life. And I faced my issues and our problems by drinking myself into the ground screaming at chris and blaming everything on him and basically sleeping in hitting the snooze button five times the kids were missing the bus like it was and here's the irony the irony is that even when you're in a crisis you know what you should do so there's some part of yourself that knew. Of course. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that you should get your ass out of bed and get a job. Get the kids breakfast.

Yeah, and the drinking isn't helping. And maybe you should tell somebody what's going on. Maybe you should ask for help. Maybe you should get outside and take a walk. Like this isn't PhD material level crap that you need to do. But I couldn't make myself do it. Why? Because I didn't feel like it. And when you start to blow off the little things, like getting up on time, eating healthy, practicing kindness to yourself,

staying connected, asking for help. When you start to get the little things wrong, it just snowballs into everything being wrong. And the good news is the way that you get back on track, and this is also what you believe and what your research and your work demonstrates, is that you get your life back on track, you get your health back on track, you reset your mind and the default ways that you think the exact same way by getting the little things right. Because when you get up when the alarm rings, your brain sees a human being that has the willpower to get up. When you make your bed in the morning, your brain sees a human being that completes things. When you walk into the bathroom and you look in the mirror and you don't criticize yourself, but you give yourself a high five in the mirror, which is something I

call the high five habit. Another book. Yeah. You literally activates neural pathways in your brain around positive encouragement towards self. When you journal, when you meditate, when you move your body, your brain sees a human being that prioritizes themselves. So it's through the actions, the teeny, teeny little actions that snowball into massive transformation. And so I, um, one night it was Tuesday. It was a, no, it was a Monday night in 2008. I mean, it was bad. We were a week away from a bankruptcy proceeding, liens on the house, Chris and I fighting like cats and dogs. And I'm sitting in my living room and I'm like, Mel, you got to pull your shit together. Like tomorrow it's a new year woman.

You got to get up. You got to be nice to Chris. You got to look for a job. You got to get out, get those kids on the bus. You got to do it all. And what happened is I all of a sudden saw a rocket ship launch across the television screen. And I thought, that's it. That's the answer. Like, I literally watched it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is the dumbest story. I was four bourbon Manhattans into the evening. So it was probably the alcohol that made me make the connection.

But I was like, that's it. Tomorrow morning morning when the alarm goes off you're going to launch yourself out of bed so fast just like nasa launches a rocket that you're not going to be in that bed mal when the anxiety and the depression hit because i was having cascading panic attacks like generalized at this point so the next morning the alarm rings and all I did was count backwards, five, four, three, two, one. And I stood up and that one decision changed the trajectory of my life. And what I had discovered by mistake during one of the worst moments of my life is the single most powerful starting ritual, which is what habit researchers and neuroscientists call a technique, metacognition that you can use to interrupt old habit loops stored in the basal ganglia. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 interrupts that

encoded pattern and it draws your focus to the prefrontal cortex, giving you a manual way to switch gears between autopilot, subconscious, trauma patterns, all of it, and activate the part of the brain that helps you change, that helps you learn new behavior, that helps you take control. The five-second rule has now spread- It sounds like the Holy Grail. Oh, it is the Holy Grail. It's now being used in clinical settings with pediatricians. It's profoundly effective with OCD and PTSD. I had an entire inpatient wing, the medical staff in a Philadelphia hospital, come and tell us that of all the things that they can give somebody on discharge after an

inpatient commit, the five-second rule is probably the most effective thing because- So break it down. What is the five-second rule is probably the most effective thing because... So break it down. What is the five-second rule? So the five-second rule is any moment where you know what you should do, but you feel the feeling come up. Hesitation, anxiety, fear, heaviness, trauma, whatever it may be that causes that momentary hesitation. If you don't physically move within five seconds of that moment of hesitation, the subconscious part of your brain takes over. To physically move.

You got to physically move. And so there's this window, this five second window. Psychologists call this the difference between a bias toward thinking versus a bias toward action. And many of us, especially if we're analytical or we're introverted or we struggle with anxiety or ADHD or depression or a whole trauma, we have a bias towards stopping to think and consider what to do versus doing what we need to do. And I'm talking about these windows of time where you're sitting in a meeting at work. You have an idea to share. Yeah. And you don't say it. Correct. And you wonder why you're getting passed over at work. You wonder why you're not getting promoted. It's because you're not visible. And it comes down to these moments.

Same thing at home. There's things you want to say. There's hard conversations to have. Or what about exercise? The hardest part is getting out the door. My mother used to say, the minute I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away. Yes. Yes. Well, you don't even have to lie down because it goes away if you don't move within five seconds. She was an expert at that. Yeah. And so how you use it is in these moments or like addiction, it's profoundly effective with addiction because you feel yourself drawn towards something five four three two one count backwards physically

move away from the thing so just literally just say five four three two one and then like get your body up and go to the other room and here's here's the cool trick you don't do jumping jacks down your head or anything no here's the cool trick counting backwards is an action yeah so it's like a trojan horse because let's face it putting down the alcohol is difficult it feels hard you don't want to you you know like have this neurochemical draw to it when you start counting backwards five four three two one you've actually made a decision not to do it so the counting is like the first domino that falls and then you turn and now you're moving in a different direction. And so the five second rule

became a tool that I use to push myself through the feelings and anxiety and depression and sadness and anger and grief and all the bullshit feelings that are very real that dictate what you do. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. Magnesium has been a constant in my supplement routine for years and that's because magnesium is involved in hundreds and hundreds of enzyme reactions in the body, facilitating all sorts of chemical reactions. You need it for better sleep, for cardiovascular health, joint bone health, healthy blood sugar, and lots more. And the problem is most of us don't get enough magnesium. I love to take magnesium breakthrough before bed. It's been critical for my sleep, my energy levels, and my mood. Pretty much everything. If you've never tried Magnesium Breakthrough,

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Don't miss this opportunity. It's a limited time offer for this month only. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. And you could choose one of two things, either to just go back to bed and not deal with it or wake up and deal with it. Yeah. But we make 30,000 decisions a day and the vast majority of them we make with our subconscious. And if you want to become a different person, you have to make intentional decisions that are aligned with the kind of person that you want to become. If you want to follow all of Dr. Hyman's advice, you have to make different decisions.

And so counting backwards, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, is a tool that you can use to activate the part of the brain that you need to consciously make different decisions. And there's even more involved here because, you know, there's this famous researcher, Dr. Judith Willis out at UCLA. Yeah. And she has studied the impact that the nervous system has on decision making. And what she has discovered is that when your fight or flight sympathetic nervous system is activated, so in situations where you're procrastinating, that's your fight or flight sympathetic nervous system is activated. So in situations where you're procrastinating,

that's a fight or flight nervous system. Interesting. Because procrastination is a freeze. Yeah. Freeze, freeze, right. Yeah. You know, fight or flight. And freeze.

Freeze, right. Yes. And anxiety or nerves or nervousness or depression, if you're in any, or just even worrying and overthinking, your sympathetic nervous system is now flipped on. Your prefrontal cortex, according to the research at UCLA, Dr. Judith Willis, your prefrontal cortex does not function in its full capacity when your alarm state is triggered. No, it can't.

It can't. Yeah. And so- There's often a disconnect between the limbic system, which is a reptile, lizard, stress response, and the frontal plane, which is the adult in the room. And so you see why this person is an adult, but why are they acting like a lizard? Yes. Yes.

And so when you count backwards, 5, 4, three, two, one, the decision to count backwards is a moment of taking control. And the counting itself is what activates the prefrontal cortex so that you make the choice to go walk outside so that you then lower your nervous system stress, and then you could come back to what you need to do. And so it's profoundly effective with addiction, with suicidal ideation, with procrastination, with making more money. Because you're not going to make more money if you're not willing to make the sales calls. You can sit there and think about making them all damn day long. And so it's changed the lives of millions of people. And I love it because it's

free. Anybody at any age can use it. Anybody in any language. Just don't count up. One, two, three, four, five. It doesn't work. You have to count down. You have to because we have been taught to count up since we were little. So the act of counting up already happens in your subconscious. Counting backwards in the beginning, five, four, three, two, one. You have to think about it. Correct. The more you use it, you are encoding a habit of taking action, a habit of courage, a habit of confidence, a habit of betting on yourself. And so it becomes innate. Yeah. I think a lot of your work is about motivation and helping

people with self-love and breaking these patterns and shifting yourself. And we do get stuck. We get stuck in these sort of repetitive patterns of thinking. Yeah. And there's get stuck. We get stuck in these repetitive patterns of thinking. Yeah. And there's a part of our brain that actually is involved with that, that you talked about the particular activating system. Can you talk about how that plays a role in the repetitive nature of our thinking, whether it's good or bad? Yeah. So there's a super cool thing. I can't believe I didn't learn about this sooner. They should teach this in school because it's so cool. So there's this- You mean like how to eat and take your body among other things? Oh yeah. Balance a checkbook, pay your taxes, all that stuff that nobody wants to learn. So there's a super cool thing in your brain called the reticular activating system. I always get the

middle word wrong. Who cares? I call it the RAS. That's right. And this thing is so freaking cool. This is a filter on your brain. I think about it like, think about like, you know, when people wear a hairnet, imagine if you had a, you have a hairnet on your brain, but it is lit up. It is electric. It is alive. And it constantly lights up and changes in real time, depending upon what it thinks is important to you. So, and you can, you can use this sucker to your advantage. So I'm going to give you an example of how you've experienced this. So think about when you've either bought a new car or you've liked a new car and all of a sudden you're like oh that new bronco that new bronco design that thing's pretty cool the second that you latch on to something that

you're interested in what do you see everywhere dr the same car everywhere yeah now here's what's interesting those cars had always been there. It's not like they magically appeared. What happened magically is the RAS, this electronic or this electrical live filter on your brain. Once you got excited about something, it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Dr. Hyman is interested in the Broncos. Shift the filter, block out the Mercedes. Everybody let in the Broncos because he wants to see those. I love the new Ford Broncos. Awesome car. Yeah, it is an awesome car. So that's what you drive? No, I have rented it though and I love it.

So what's fascinating, and look, if you've never had this happen with a car, you've had it happen with a college. Like if you've ever applied to college, you all of a sudden go, wait a minute, does everybody go to USC? Does everybody go to Wittenberg? Why does it, like I thought I discovered this school. And that's your RAS changing in real time. Why? Because it's trying to help you.

It's trying to help you see more of what you want. And so you can do a little exercise. It sounds schmaltzy and cheesy as hell, but I want you to do it today. I want you to tell your brain that you want to find one naturally occurring heart shape somewhere in the world. Wake up or leave this podcast and be like, all right, that's it. I'm not going to go to bed until I see one naturally occurring heart shape. And I swear to God, you will see a cloud. You will see a leaf. You will see a stain on the floor. You will see something on the sidewalk. You will see a spot on somebody's shirt. I just noticed something I'd never seen before. Right there on that lower wood shelf,

there is a dark thing under my YouTube award that looks like a dark heart in the middle of the shelf right there. Why? Because I tell my brain to do this. Now, why on earth would I play this game of looking for hearts every single day? Because I am actively training my mind to change in real time to show me what I want to see. See, the reason why this is important is because unless I give you an experience, Dr. Hyman, where you experience your own brain changing and showing you something, because you'll see right there on the sidewalk, you've been walking past this thing for a year. Yeah. It was there. How do we use that understanding of the RAS to actually

change our behavior, make our lives better? I'll tell you how. Yeah. You have to first try the game because unless you experience it, you won't believe that this is possible. Yeah. Because if you can find hearts, you can actually start telling yourself, it is important to me to start seeing evidence that I'm worthy of love. Oh, that's a good one. It is important to me to start seeing all the people in my life that care about me. It is important to me to start seeing these acts of eating healthy as acts of eating healthy, as acts of being worthy of self-love. Because if you just were to tell yourself, okay, I'm going to love myself now, your brain's like, nope. Why? Because the RAS also works in the negative. Yeah. So one of the reasons why, yes. One of the reasons why

so many of us have such a hard time shaking and breaking the beliefs from our childhood is if you're an adult who believes that you're not worthy of love, that belief is real because of your lived experience. And you now act in congruence with that lived experience. And you pay attention to things and filter the things that confirm that experience. Correct. Why? Because your electronic hairnet on your brain, your RAS, thinks this is important to you. Because you put so much energy into being like, I'm fat, I'm unworthy.

See, that person said that. My boss hates me. I always get everything wrong. Your RAS is like, oh, okay, okay. I'll show you more things you did wrong. If I can get you to start seeing a heart every day for five days in a row, and then- I'm going to do it. Everybody, you should do it.

Do it. You should do it because you're going to be like, shit, this bitch is right. Oh, this is weird. And then if you want to supersize it, if it's a rock or a leaf, pick it up and be like, this sucker right here, this is evidence that my brain can help me. Then get serious about doing the exercise you talked about, writing down the stuff that was true in your childhood. And now write down the stuff you want to believe. And then challenge your RAS, show me that I have friends and start seeing every inbound text from somebody

that is evidence, not that people are using you or they don't. It's so true. It's so true, Mel. We always accumulate evidence to support our existing beliefs and our existing ways of thinking and everything else we kind of ignore. Once a friend said, stop looking for ways to be offended, you know, because you can easily look at everything as, as my mother used to say when I was on honk and I would look around, they go, what makes you think that's for you? You know, like, and, and I think we, we do that so much. We stop constantly looking for evidence to support our beliefs unconsciously. And that reinforces our way of living, our way of being, our actions, our everything.

Yes. And so a couple more things about that. Mindset is critical because right now your mindset was programmed by the adults and the experiences of your childhood. And you are largely trapped in thinking patterns that are probably the patterns that you had when you were between six and 12 years old. For sure. And so you are basically an elementary school or middle schooler living in an adult body. And you have the opportunity to get serious about the person you want to become now.

And so if you were to write down, like take out a piece of paper and write down all the things that you want another person in your life to bring into your life. So the partner that you're with. All of the things that you want her to bring into your life. What are some of those things? Well, actually I did that. I actually wrote down what my partner would be.

I wrote down, I call it the love that I dream into being. What were the criteria and the qualities? And what are they? There's a lot. They have to love themselves. They have to be playful. They have to be willing to kind of come back always to love. I mean, the whole of this thing. Being able to go to the jungle and mountaintop to hang out with anybody, to just be on that magic carpet ride. Yeah. Okay. So you want to know the secret to self-love? Be those things for yourself. Yeah.

Be those things for yourself. And what's going to happen though is you can make that list. It's going to be right there. Stick it somewhere that you see it every day is you will resist doing those things because you don't currently do those things. And that's why you need the five second rule

to punch through the resistance that's gonna be there to help you plow the new neural pathways and the new behavior patterns. And it's through the actions. You see yourself coming back to love. You see yourself climbing the mountain. You see yourself doing all these things. Your entire mind and the default wiring will change

because of the actions that you're taking. We want to allow impermanence to influence our understanding of our own identity. So we should allow ourselves to learn about our past, to see the way our relationship with our parents and whatnot affects the way that we show up in life today and allow these things to inform us. But the moment that our trauma becomes our identity, then it makes for a very rigid healing situation. Because if we're like, oh, this is how I am because of this moment, and I'm always going to be like this, or this is how I constantly see myself, then it's going to slow down your evolution. So in some ways, I think we can do our best to

understand ourselves, but then we also have to let it go because it's like, okay, I'm a changing, growing being. So let me flow with nature and allow myself to develop new interests, new likes, let go of old parts of myself that don't really serve me anymore and start letting my idea of who I am just continue blossoming. And in terms of spiritual bypassing, I think it's tough because the human mind can only process so much information at once. That's the reality of it, is that we can't process everything at once. And I think we get a little confused by the fact that the technological world of today is so fast and information is constantly coming our way. It's we're constantly being inundated and it's exhausting. You know, there's there's, you know, you don't quite realize

how much you take in and how much energy that burns because you're processing all of that. So at one, you know, one of our challenges is to be able to develop our awareness and expand our awareness, but also in a sustainable manner, because there are times where, you know, you're going through a hard time and, you know, staying connected to every single part of everything that's happening in the world, that may not actually serve you. And then other times, you know, you want to be active, you want to be out there, you want to stay very informed, but those may be, you know, one year of your life versus another year of your life. And understanding that we have very different capacities, like, you know, there may be people

out there who can not only, you know, have a beautiful business, but then they're also part of all these different organizations and they're out there actively trying to change the world and they're, you know, doing all these amazing things. And that's fantastic. You're helping all of us. Great. But then there are other people who have experienced so much trauma that all they can do is heal themselves. But that's also beautiful. You're actually serving us by just focusing on healing yourself. Because if you heal yourself and you increase your ability to love yourself well, then that means you're going to be less likely to harm yourself and other people. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. And I

think, I think, um, you know, one of the most helpful sort of frameworks I've ever learned about my own mind is that every, every emotion, every time I'm triggered, every, um, belief I have is, is just my own interpretation of reality that I project, I project my worldview onto the world. And so when I, when I step back and go, okay, this is just like one version of reality. This is not necessarily the truth with a capital T. Then I, then I can get free from believing all these stupid thoughts. You know, my, my friend Daniel Eamon talks about ants, automatic negative thoughts, right? He says, don't believe every stupid thought you have. And I think a lot of us are so embedded with our

thoughts and that's the beauty of meditation is it sort of creates this slowing down so you can kind of watch your arising and your coming and going of thoughts and realize that you're not your thoughts you're not your emotions you're not your beliefs you're not your body you're not any of these things and and so and i i shared this on the podcast before but i almost died about six years ago and i really had you know was in bed for six months and just unable to function and lost 30 pounds and was was in really just this almost vegetative state and i and i was in anything i was in my mind i was in my body i couldn't answer an email i couldn't do anything and i just lay there and i just got to be in the experience of this sort of place which actually was very happy and blissful yeah even despite the fact that my body was in agonizing pain i was i was sort of surrendered into this kind of peacefulness it's hard to

explain but i realized that at that moment i everything changed for me and i i the ideas that i'd had sort of conceptually became more experiential and it was a very powerful moment to kind of start to sort of reorient my life to be more in integrity. And I think sort of the next topic I want to talk about was integrity and honesty. And I think you talk about this concept in your book lighter, radical honesty. Yeah. What's radical honesty and why is it so important to have that? And what does that look like for each of us?

Yeah. Radical honesty is just so critical, so valuable, especially as the first step. And even before I started meditating, I found that, you know, I had no technique, I had no process, I didn't know how to really engage with my emotions. But I knew what the problem was. And the problem was that I had gotten to that rock bottom moment by continuously lying to myself. I did not want to admit to myself that I did not feel good. And when I realized, and I finally admit that I was like, I'm not okay. Like I don't feel good.

I have way too much anxiety, way too much sadness. And that first acceptance of me just being like, okay, this is true. And now I can more so move forward. But I started realizing that I need to repeat that over and over again. Whenever I feel tension, instead of trying to, you know, roll up another joint or just go find some way to just run away from myself, let me just sit with this discomfort. Let me feel whatever's there as opposed to trying to like scrub it away or ignore it in some manner. And radical honesty, it's a term that's been out there for a long time. But the way that I use the term is, is honesty between you and yourself. It's not about you and other people. Like this is just about you and yourself and whatever is coming up inside of you. And I think that being able to

develop that radical honesty, it's a critical part of self-love. And when you are able to, you know, see what's inside of you and accept what's there, whether it's good or bad, then that will actually slowly start building your courage, building your inner strength. And you'll start actually seeing that the sort of tough emotions that you're having, they're actually not as fearful and as dangerous and as scary as you originally thought they were. Because I would run, you know, as if I was being chased by like a, you know, an animal or something like that. And once I started sitting with my anxiety, I was like, yeah, this sucks, but it's not that bad. I'm okay. Like it's, this isn't going to take me out. Yeah. Yeah. That's so, so being radically honest is hard because you have to be honest with yourself.

You have to be honest with how you see yourself and your beliefs and your thoughts and almost take a third party view of yourself because you get so attached to who we are and our identity and our beliefs about ourselves. And it's just so hard to undo that. Right. So, you know, doing this work and, and sort of letting go of these old stories and you know, learning about letting go how do, how do we put that into practice? Like, you know, letting go is really hard. I'm gonna struggle with it. Um, and we often make things harder for ourselves. So what, why, why is letting go so important and how do we have to keep doing this practice of letting go as part of our life? Well, this, um, this really, you know, to what you were saying earlier about you realizing how

you were creating your own narrative of what was happening in front of you. And one thing that I really appreciate that the Buddha and my teacher, S. N. Goenko, talks about is how wisdom is actually you being able to see things from different perspectives. So not just from your own perspective perspective but seeing whatever the truth may be from different angles and being able to see your own angle put yourself in the feet of another person just see the complexity of the situation as opposed to just creating some simplified self-centered story that's just this is not my fault this is somebody else's fault but seeing your own you know what what was what is the role that you played in this situation and how may someone else have seen it i think um that can be so

informing to your ability to let go because that's probably one of the first things we need to let go of is like okay i do have this one perception of what's happening in this moment but there's more there's more to understand and people are seeing this in other ways. But letting go, I think it's the crux of healing. It's quite necessary to be able to even somehow process your emotions and let them go because we don't realize that as soon as we're born, right, we're constantly reacting and every reaction, it creates an imprint on the mind. It molds the subconscious. And this doesn't stop at childhood. And I think that's one of the things that I think a lot of modern therapists kind of really hone in on those like first seven or so

years of life. And they're very formative, but it doesn't stop there. You know, the big events that happen to you later, you know, the heartbreaks, the loss, the, you know, the accident that you were talking about that you went through, these created massive imprints in your mind that are still playing themselves out that are still affecting the way that you act now. But it's you're acting now in relation to what happened before. And the letting go part is letting go of the energy of the past that you're still carrying, that you're still bringing into the present over and over again. And the beautiful part of this modern age that we live in is that there's a lot of ways to let go. You know, like I let go through meditating. Other people let go through the, you know, practices that their therapists may teach them.

There's just a lot of different ways to go about it. And there's no like sort of one to five step, like this is how you let go. But knowing that the letting go often involves, really always involves you coming back to the present moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it's hard because we get, we do get so attached to our worldview and it's, and we think, you know, it's sort of come apart if we, if we actually let go of what happened to us or if we move on or if we don't hold on to things but you know i think we we tend to poison ourselves by this constant holding on to our ways of seeing and whether it's in relationship or to ourselves and i think one of the challenge for people and i noticed this for myself which people may find hard to explain given that I'm successful and, you know, blah, blah, blah is, you know, I realized that I had a certain level of self-worth and self-love,

but I really wasn't fully in it. And, and it sort of undermined my ability to love others, to actually choose the things that were good for me in life, to say yes to what was good and to say no to what didn't resonate with me. And so how do, how do you kind of help guide people towards more self-acceptance, more self-love, more self-worth? Because it's sort of easy to talk about, but it's hard to do. Yeah, it is hard to do. And it's also hard to do in relation to like what society has or like what consumerism has created uh in regards to self-love where it's you know self-love in terms of just kind of pleasing yourself just like buying more things giving us you know just uh the consumerist aspect of it but i think real self-love it is you basically trying actively and continuously to get to know yourself and to do whatever it is

you need to do to heal yourself and free yourself. So that's self-love. It's really an internal dynamic and it is hard. It's not something that's going to be easy, but the reason that we come back to it, the reason that I can come back to it personally is like, I literally can't make a bigger investment. Like it's the best investment that I could make, you know, I could, you know, be out there working and doing all these things, but all of it will just not, whatever I may produce will not be as good. If I don't have a strong ability to accept myself deeply, a strong ability to, um, balance that with self-love and understand that, you know, I should love myself deeply, but there's also things that I can, you know, different directions that I can grow in

that will help me become a better version of myself and just continue showing up into the world in a way that, you know, honors the emotions that I'm feeling, but it's still, you know, showing up in a way that I feel really genuinely good about. If we are not clear in one sentence, what this season's mission is in a meaningful way, I just think we'll have more stress and overwhelm than we need. We're going to face challenges and adversity, but if we don't know exactly where we're heading, we'll never get there. And so step one for me is identifying, are we in a powerless mindset or a greatness mindset? And if we're in a powerless mindset, how do we move there as fast as possible to greatness? And step one is defining a meaningful mission.

Yeah. So. So it's so important. You know, it reminds me of a quote from marion williamson our greatest fear right and most of us don't lean into our light we kind of lean on our darkness because it's comfortable it's familiar we know how to navigate and we kind of afraid of actually the greatness that we can have and your your school of greatness, your podcast about greatness, your, your book, the, the greatness mindset is, is, is, is such a beautiful kind of bookmark in, in a, in a way that points to how we can actually embrace that greatness. She says,

you know, our greatest fear is not, is our, our light and our darkness that most frightens us. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. So I think, you know, and she goes on to say, it's not our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? Yes. Who are you not to be that? You're playing small.

It doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you we're born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us it's not just in some of us it's in everyone yeah i love this and the reason i love what marianne says there is because um the challenge is most people live either a good life or a bad life. But both of those are hard to break through into greatness. Because when you have a good life, when you've got a good family, you've got kids, you've got a good job, you've got things that are good,

you get comfortable and familiar, like you said. It's hard to break through from comfort and familiarity. And people with struggling relationships, call it bad, right? They're still familiar with the bad. And so they stay in the bad. It's really hard. I did that. Right? And so some people will stay decades in a relationship

or decades in a career that is bad and they don't find joy in it, but they stay because it's familiar. And it's not bad enough yet. And most people are- I call it NEP syndrome, not enough pain. Not enough pain, right? Most people-

People don't change because they have NEP syndrome. Most people are not willing to strive for that next step of greatness because it's familiar and comfortable, even if it's good or bad. And that's very few do, but it's hard to say, I want to take a look. I want to go deeper. I want to take a look. I want to go deeper. I want to work on myself. It's just a challenge. But a lot of times it takes some type of extreme pain for us to want to open up and say, I need to make a change. Yeah, it does, unfortunately, but it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. And I think if we all took a moment to

look at ourselves and go, you know, where are the places where we are unhappy, where we don't tell anybody what we actually feel, where we doubt ourselves, where we lack self-love, where we feel insecure, where we're worried about what other people's thoughts are about us and our place in the world. I mean, it's just, it's so easy to be kind of knocked off center of who you are by all these sort of subconscious subtexts of what's going on in our head and our inner dialogue. And you see the real difference in the mindset between someone who's stuck like that and someone who's achieving what they want and are leaning into their greatness. Can you talk about the differences in the mindset?

Yes. There's a whole page I give on 201 of the book where I give this framework between powerless mindset and the greatness mindset. So if you feel like you're not accomplishing exactly what you want or you're not on the path, because my mission is big and I know it's going to take time, but if you're not feeling fulfilled internally, if you don't feel peaceful, if you don't feel in harmony

and alignment with what you're doing, then that means you're more in the powerless mindset versus greatness mindset. And the powerless mindset includes you lacking a meaningful mission. So you're not clear in one sentence, like what is the season of life and what am I doing? Yeah. What's the direction I'm going? Yeah. So you lack that meaningful mission. So I'd ask yourself in one sentence, are you clear on what you're doing for this year or these five years or your season of life? And it doesn't need to be curing cancer or changing the world. Just what is it for you? What is this season for you? It could be an exploratory season. Okay. At least you know

that you're exploring. It could be, I'm trying to graduate from school. Okay. That's your mission right now until the next season. So just being very clear, a powerless mindset is being controlled by fear. When we have a number of fears that hold us back from acting courageously it keeps us feeling powerless and a victim like you talked about so being controlled by fear crippled by self-doubt conceals past pains that this is a part of the mindset i'm good i'm fine life great. This is a part of mindset. There's over 20,000 books on success and mindset. Yeah. Most of them don't talk about the pain of your past.

They don't talk about healing past pain. They talk about here are the seven strategies to be more successful and have a growth mindset. Yes, but I feel like you can't just layer on top of pain. At some point, it's going to topple over. So it conceals past pains, defined by the opinions of others as a powerless mindset, and drifts towards complacency. So we first need to be aware of, am I living in any of these spaces? There's no good or bad, right or wrong here. It's just, let me be aware of it and see, is this supporting me? Is this serving me? And this is serving the people around me. And when we are aware of it, we can start to make a new decision and commitment towards stepping into the greatness mindset. And the greatest mindset includes that you are driven by a meaningful mission, driven by that, not by fear, not by what everyone else is doing but by your mission no olympic gold medalist did it by accident they had a mission no world champion said i'm just going to show up and do this by accident they were clear on their mission and they lived accordingly

they turned fear into confidence i have an example in the book where i talk about creating a fear list i did this in my early 20s i was afraid of a lot of things but i was but i was scared to even into confidence. I have an example in the book where I talk about creating a fear list. I did this in my early 20s. I was afraid of a lot of things, but I was scared to even admit it to other people. You were afraid of telling people you were afraid. Because I was fear of judgment and I didn't want to be looked as weak. Right, right. And by the way, those who don't know what this looks like, he's like six foot five, looks like a brick wall. You wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley. He's a sweet guy. But you turn fear into confidence by making a fear list.

And you write down a list of your fears and you start going all in on them. This is scary. It's uncomfortable. It's hard. I was afraid of a lot of things, but I started going all in on them. And it turned into confidence. It turned into a power of mine because I overcame it. You overcome self-doubt as well. So you figure out what those insecurities are. You don't live in insecurity. This is the greatness mindset. You heal past pains. That's the greatness mindset because you're not driven by pain anymore. You're driven by purpose

and mission and love and abundance and solving problems. That's huge. Not driven by pain, but by purpose. Yes. That's a very big idea because so much of the suffering in this world is because people are unconsciously driven by their fear and their pain and it blocks them from actually getting what they want. Exactly. And the part of it is you can be driven by a purpose to solve problems in the world.

And the problem could be the pain you once experienced. You want to make sure that others don't experience that pain. I can talk about that in a second. But you create a healthy identity. Something you talked about in the first three minutes of this show is if people heard the things we said about ourselves, or if we said these things to other people out loud the way we speak to ourselves at times, they would put you in a hospital. Right.

They would call you crazy. They'd be like, something is really off. And they would medicate you for those conversations. Yeah. They would cancel you online if you said these things. All these things wouldn't work. But we continue to say critical things to ourselves and put ourselves down and degrade ourselves, which is an unhealthy

identity. So we need to create a healthy identity and then they take action with a game plan. This is the greatness mindset versus the powerless mindset. And when we can first be aware of which mindset am I in more frequently? Yeah, no right or wrong, good or bad, no judgment. But how is the powerless mindset working for you? How is concealing these things working for you? How is being crippled by fear and doubt working for you? It might have some benefits, but there's still a lack of something inside of you. So this takes courage to step in a greatness mindset frequently, but that's the decision

we need to make. I think that's true. And I always say disease is often the body's best attempt to deal with a bad set of circumstances. And our kind of distorted thinking is often because we needed to do that in order to deal with a really bad set of circumstances. Protect ourselves in a moment. Yeah, that's right. And then the question is, how do you rewrite that? Because it's one thing to say, don't have self-doubt, love yourself, believe in yourself, have a mission. It's hard to get from here to there.

Very challenging. And so you mentioned a few of the ways you did it through coaching, through journaling, through meditation. There's a lot of practices and I think you go through them in detail on the book. How do you sort of break that cycle? I don't think you can do anything hard on your own. I just think it takes support and listening support and finding whatever modality works for you. I tried a lot of them because I felt like I was really messed up and needed the support. And I continue to have an emotional coach every couple of weeks to support me, to maintain

peace, to prepare for future challenges that might arise so that I'm ready for these things. I'm a big fan of emotional coaching or therapy, but there are a lot of different strategies you can do. But for me, it's having somewhere you can have accountability, you can process it in a safe space, and you can have a game plan for actually taking action to integrate the lessons and healing. Not just reflecting by itself, but taking action to practice the healing uh journey that's what it's about yeah what would instruct me about what you said is that there was a somatic

piece to this yes it was not just in your head body experience yeah it was a full body like full body well you can kind of think your way out you can't think your way out of these things um now it was a it was five months of full body exercises, experiences, catharsis, all these different things. And then a moment when she was speaking to me, my coach, where it finally clicked intellectually in the body. Like it finally, okay, it makes sense. And I feel it at the same time. That's when the ball of pain disintegrated throughout my body. And I was like, something just happened. But it wasn't for me sitting here and just like taking notes

and analyzing my stuff. It was experiencing it. She put me through exercises. She put me through processes. She put me through reflection. She put me through going out into the world and trying things and calling back on it and saying, this is what I experienced and what I learned. and here's the benefit and the problems that came

from it. It was facing the most uncomfortable parts of myself, the most uncomfortable parts of my fears in relationships in the present and acting on it as a peaceful man, even when I was under stress. It was facing these things it was not running away or hiding from these things that it was the hardest thing to do but the more i did it week after week for months that's when things started to unlock yeah it does it takes it's only it takes months or years of really unpacking and doing the work and exploring different modalities and for me it was very very interesting very similar i a, you know, this driving kind of desire to know why I felt this sense of emptiness or lack. Really? After all the New York Times bestsellers, after all the success, after all the credibility,

after all the podcasts, everything. Believe it or not. Yeah. So you still had that. I had this sense of like- Emptiness. Yeah. And it was really more around love. It wasn't so much in success in the world. And it was really this just sense of, of black or emptiness or some hole I need to fill. And I just, it drove me crazy to try to figure out what is driving that. What was the original cause of that? And how do I heal that? And it, it took a long time to unpack it. But I, once I kind of unpacked,

you know, my parents' relationship, my mother's relationship with her parents, because she was a hearing girl in a deaf family like the movie coda and was the parent to them as a dot as a daughter so she she they call it a parentified child and that's traumatic yeah for her and then she did similar thing to me being very depressed and using me as her therapist and that she repeated the pattern yeah so i was taking care of her oh it's probably what got you into medicine yeah and for sure you know there was some definite side effects that were not bad but i think i think it was it was really

it was intellectually something i knew but until i started to actually feel it on my my physical body yes go through this real catharsis and just kind of get it. It was like a big shot in the head and a shot in the body to break that cycle. And like you were saying, it's different for everybody to kind of get there. Sometimes it's doing medicine journeys.

Sometimes it's meditation retreats. Sometimes it's coaching. Sometimes it's all of the sometimes it's meditation retreats, sometimes it's coaching, sometimes it's all the above. But I think one of the things that's really exciting about your book, The Greatness Mindset, is you really help map out how we get into trouble, why this happens, and how to kind of rewrite that. So how does someone who's sort of from the perspective of what you've learned and what you've read about,

how do you reshape their beliefs and their meaning they make and their identity if they're unhappy? Yeah, it's interesting. One of the – I interviewed a brain surgeon and a PhD in neuroscience, Dr. Rahul Jandhal. I'm not sure if you've met him yet. Done over 1,000 brain surgeries, but also a PhD in neuroscience, so studying the mind. The mind and the brain. Yeah. They're not the same. And I said, after a thousand brain

surgeries and all this work of understanding the mind, what's the greatest skill you think human beings need to learn? Yeah. And it's interesting. He said emotional regulation. So he studies the brain and the mind, but the emotions tied to the way we think hold us back. And if we can understand how to navigate the emotions. So the greatest mindset really doesn't work until we start to navigate our heart as well and connect the emotions that we have in our heart to our mind, to our mindset and, and putting them in alignment and harmony. So we can think one way, but if we don't feel in alignment,

it's not going to work. So creating a health. Thinking and feeling and doing all. They need to be in harmony. And if you're constantly in the past, living in a belief or having a story about something in the past, you're going to be disconnected. You're going to be out of harmony and out of alignment somewhere. You're thinking, I'm smart on this. I can do it, but

then I don't feel like I can. So we must create harmony with both thinking and feeling. We must learn to heal the heart first. For me, the greatest mindset is about healing first and then unlocking what you can step into. It's not just thinking I'm great or these things, but healing the wound that causes you to feel out of alignment with your thoughts. One of the things that I... Right, which is what we were just talking about. Yeah, and one of the things I learned about 10 years ago

in one of these kind of workshop experiences that I took allowed me to create a new identity with myself. Before, I had the belief that I took allowed me to create a new identity with myself before I had the belief that I was dumb that I was I was reactive and angry and that's how I was showing up in the world and I was and I felt like I was very I just felt like reactive angry and I didn't feel like I was smart. That was the identity that I continued to say to myself and reinforce. Even though the world didn't see you that way.

Exactly, right? And I created an experience in one of these workshops that allowed me to go through the healing journey. This workshop allowed me to open up about sexual abuse for the first time and create a new healthy identity. And what I did from this workshop was I created a new contract with myself, a new contract around my identity that I wanted to step into. It wasn't where I was at the moment. It wasn't what I would have been living in the past, but it's what I wanted to step into, and it is what I was becoming on a daily basis.

And so instead of being angry and resentful and not forgiving and stupid, which is what I was believing my identity was, I said, I am a loving, passionate, wise man. That's a good one. And I didn't fully, I didn't fully like experience it yet. So there wasn't like evidence proving it internally yet. But I said, I am a loving, passionate, wise man. And I started to live into that on a consistent basis. When I felt like I'm being angry, I'm going to live into this new identity.

And I'm going to start showing up as if and embracing it fully. And now I don't feel like I'm stupid or angry or resentful or these things. It took time, but I started to show up as a loving, passionate, wise man and started to create a new healthy identity. And anytime my thinking would say, ah, there's a lot of smart people in this room. I don't know if you really belong here. Like you didn't do well in school. You think people are going to listen to you? I shifted it and said, yeah, but I'm very wise. I have wisdom in other ways. So I'm going to step into this belief, this identity, which I truly own. I felt like I have great street smarts. I feel like I'm

great in relationship, understanding people, which is a different type of intelligence. Much more important. But before, because I did so poorly in school and always needed tutors until I graduated, I thought I was stupid and people would make fun of me because I couldn't do well in school. So I had this identity was unhealthy. And I started saying, I am loving, I am passionate, I am wise. And I would lean into that identity and it would allow me to make a bigger impact. So you basically kind of change your thoughts. You sort of just, I mean,

the power of positive affirmation I think is real, but you know, you got to heal first. How, yeah. I think you got to heal first. Yeah. You can't just kind of talk yourself into being great.

Cause you won't, you still won't believe it if the feeling is about doubt. If you're doubting the belief, you see, you need to really be on the healing journey, whatever it is that's holding you back. Because if your emotions are still going to be reactive and triggered, if someone's cutting you off

in the street or whatever, or if you feel like someone's abusing you or abandoning you or whatever, or if you're abandoning yourself, then this new identity is not going to work fully. It might help you in some ways, but then it's still not going to feel enough. So we must get to a place of I am enough as I am, and I'm still in a process of growing

and improving. Not saying I'm complacent and I'm not going to work on myself, but I'm enough where I am. I accept everything from my past up until now. I maybe don't like it. I maybe regret certain things, or I wish I didn't do do certain things or I wish certain things didn't happen to me. But if I can't accept it, then it's going to hold me back. So I must learn to accept, to forgive, to take responsibility for things, whatever it is, and own the past so that I can move forward in peace.

It's like to rewrite your belief history. You got to rewrite it. Your belief history. You got to rewrite it. Your belief history. I can't rewrite your history, but you can rewrite the beliefs that you formed out of the experiences you had that led to having maybe at the time an adaptive response to the situation where you're in that might not have been good, but it doesn't serve you now. And we just carry that forward with us in a way that limits us and prevents us from having a great life and one of the one of the things that you know you always hear people say hindsight's 2020 and there are probably instances that happened in your life 10 20 30 40 years ago that weren't fun to experience in the moment but now you can be like gosh if that

didn't happen i wouldn't be where i'm at now right there's probably a number of things you can be like, gosh, if that didn't happen, I wouldn't be where I'm at now, right? There's probably a number of things you can think of. Everything. But maybe they felt like they're these horrible experiences or drawn out challenges or relationships or career. And it's just like, why am I suffering through this? But then now you're like, oh, I know exactly. So the concept I talk about in the book where people feel stuck or they feel like they're just trapped in this feeling is to have future hindsight, is to look out.

Future hindsight. Future hindsight. What's that? So I started thinking of this concept a few years, about four years ago, as I was going through one of those periods of time where I was like, I do not want to be in this experience. I do not want to feel this. I feel like people are questioning me and judging me and they're not understanding me.

I feel like there's unfair things happening to me. And I remember feeling really frustrated about four, four and a half years ago or so about what was happening in my life. And I, I remember talking to a few men who were, you know, probably 20 year, my senior who gave me some wisdom. They're like, listen, this is all going to pass one day. And think of it as a spiritual purging. You're purging relationships that no longer are supportive to you. You're purging your ego.

You're letting go of things that, you know, you're an identity that you don't, that you want everyone to like you. This is a healthy thing and just know it's going to benefit you. And I started saying, and they all said like, you know, is there anything in the past that has been horrible that you're so grateful now today you actually experienced? And I go, yes. So I was like, man, I need future hindsight. I need to see myself five, 10, 20 years from now and know that this is exactly what I needed

for me to do something greater in the future. For me to have more. So whatever your experience, you're going to have every crappy it is right now to reframe it in a way that. Reframe it. As maybe the catalyst for something great. Exactly what you need. And if you said, this is the thing that is exactly going to set me up for my greatness,

then you'd be more excited about it. It's still not like fun to be in pain or to experience like people shaming you or questioning you or whatever it is or a breakup or a divorce. Those things aren't fun and enjoyable. But if you can see the future and say your future self is going to benefit so greatly for the rest of your life because of this moment, you'll look at it differently. You'll give yourself a little bit more grace and peace and you'll see that there's going to be beautiful things in the process. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey,

seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.