TrueLife - Duncan So - Expanding Neuroplasticity

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Duncan SoIntroducing Duncan So, the Burnout Interventionist—a beacon of hope in a world where burnout threatens to dim our inner fire. With a deep understanding of the human experience, Duncan helps individuals and teams navigate the challenges of burnout, guiding them toward healing and renewed vitality.In a society where burnout knows no boundaries, Duncan believes in the universal need for compassion and support. As we confront the silent pandemic of burnout, Duncan's mission is clear: to empower individuals to reclaim their sense of purpose, resilience, and well-being.With a proven track record of guiding thousands toward recovery, Duncan is committed to fostering healthier, more sustainable workplaces where employees can thrive. Join him on a journey of self-discovery and transformation—where resilience, meaning, and fulfillment await.http://linkedin.com/in/duncansowww.transcendthehustle.comhttps://schedule.burnoutrecoveryaccelerator.com/strategy-session One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearers through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. Hope the sun is shining. Hope the birds are singing the wind. Is that your back?

I got Dunkin' So with me. today, the burnout interventionalist, a beacon of hope in a world where burnout threatens to dim our inner fire with a deep understanding of the human experience. Duncan helps individuals and teams navigate the challenges of burnout, guiding them toward healing and renewed vitality in a society where burnout knows no boundaries. Duncan believes in the universal need for compassion and support as we confront the silent pandemic of burnout. Duncan's mission is clear to empower individuals, to reclaim their sense of purpose, resilience, and well-being. With a proven track record of guiding thousands

toward recovery, Duncan is committed to fostering healthier, more sustainable workplaces where employees can thrive. Duncan, thank you for being here today, my friend. How are you? Oh, George, thank you for having me. And what an illustrative introduction. That's so, I can listen to that to sleep, long me to both inspiration, excitement, and right to bed. What a powerful intro. Thank you for having me. I had a pleasure is all mine. I'm excited to talk to you. I think that when I think about burnout, okay, I have so many thoughts on it, and there's so much going around. Maybe it's the demographics of the people that are living today, or maybe it's a spot in my life,

or maybe it's just the changing workforce, the world we live in. But I wanted to give you an opportunity. Like, how do you define burnout? And I thought we'd just jump into this bad boy head on. How do you define burnout, man? Maybe I'll give you three definitions. So one of them will be mine, and one of them will be more the more stricter version of it. So the World Health Organization defines burn, quote,

to manage chronic stress in the workplace, and, you know, having gone through it, not just as interventionalist, but going through it myself personally, it's probably not as updated as it should be. I mean, this was just before the pandemic when that came out, and we realized a few things that came from that one.

One, it's not all workplace-related, you know, having been in the lockdown for so many people realizing that chronic stress can stem from many places. And we went through this whole work-like blur that happened during that time and opened up a lot of stuff for so many people. And so we realized that wasn't really true. And the second piece was an interesting one. This is more of both my belief and both my experience. When you define it as mismanage chronic stress, there's two parts of it. So one where it's correct, it's chronic stress, meaning is it's different than acute stress or in the moment stress.

Now, the challenge with that definition is we don't really want to manage. and or mismanage chronic stress, meaning is if it presupposes that chronic stress is something we should have in our life. The reality is far from the truth for that because if chronic stress becomes our reality, in my definition, that is just the definition of suffering. Like, why would we want to intentionally suffer? And so I think the more, more accurate, you know, definition going through that would be managing acute stress or managing stressors and eliminating the chronic, the chronic. in the chronic stress is probably the better approach when it comes to definition to going into like a solutioning process. Now, the second definition is probably more useful for most of us because burnout unlike many other what I call mental health conditions that you might break out in the DSM, burnout is a metaphor. Like if it's not a three-syllable word that has roots in Latin or something like that, it's actually a metaphor.

And we all speak in metaphor. So in a way, we all will gravitate towards what burnout means for each individual person. And metaphorically speaking, that is like the burning out means the flame inside is being extinguished and why there is such a powerful relationship to burnout as a path. We can go into the big picture consciousness stuff too as well, the social stuff. I'm after this. And there is a relationship to why and how burnout is really important for us in 2024 or really since the 2000s and how technology and how we work and all these different things play a big role

in the expansion of ourselves as human beings. So there is a really powerful component there as well. My definition that I strictly use doing my clinical work is when you spend more energy than you can replenish, the keyword is as a habit, meaning is from a neurolinguistic programming and we'll go into that as well, from an NLP lens, we all look at patterns or programming, things that run on the inside. And the challenge, just like financial management, is this is mental and emotional energy management. And so most of us today sort of have life control us versus the other way around.

And whether you're an entrepreneur, you're working mom, whoever it is, when we lose control and begin to expend so much of this energy and we can't replenish naturally, meaning is we have to like will power it through, you know, our unconscious mind, our habits, our patterns will eat us alive. And that's the point. not a good or a bad way is just the point of those habits is to make her life simpler. And if it's not in a healthy way, then it will drive us to mental and emotional bankruptcy in this case, which most of us will label as burnout as well. So that's what I use in my work to help to address all those, and intervene with all those different patterns and move people towards total well-being. It's really well said.

And it's interesting to me, it seems to me with those definitions, that I think you'd even go, you could even simplify it more on some level. And maybe this happens with, with a lot of things is that there's a, there's an individual burnout and then there is a sort of group burnout. And when I look at the world of employment today, especially like multinational corporations or,

you know, anything that's unfortunately really profit driven, instead of driven by meaningful action, what you see in my, my opinion is the, the burnout comes from the lies that are told on the, inside. And the inside is like, hey, we want everybody to be fine. We want them to work, but really you want profit. And when those two things come together, you can have people on the bottom that feel like

they're building something. But if you have people at the top that don't just see them as a number, like that snuffs out the flame of the candle. It just puts like a wet rag right at the top and production just goes down to the ground. That causes burnout. Not only for the people on the bottom, they're trying to build something and build this flame and burn together, right? The tiger, tiger, are burning bright. You know, we want to see this thing burning. But if you have guys atop like, yeah, service doesn't really matter that much or, you know, just cut that corner because profit matters.

That seems to me to be the group burnout and the group dynamics that we're seeing on a social scale right now, as we have these two forces coming together. And then on an individual level, the entrepreneur seems to be a different type of burnout. I would say that the burnout for the individual is more like the first stage of a rocket burning through its fuel and then igniting the second stage. I think it's necessary for the individual. What you take on that, man? Yeah, so there's a connection to that.

So, I mean, back to good old philosophy or as above, so below type thing. And so you can imagine, let's go back to something not too far or long ago, right? 20 years ago, we went through industrialization. We went through institutionalized things, top down. And that was what we called the grind, right? And even in our institutions like religion and so forth, kind of the same thing, right? Lots of dogma, lots of these processes. And so came a consciousness shift collectively.

And capitalism plays a big role in this as well, is we moved away from sort of that we nature of we need a policy in this world, that value system and moved into a more individualistic type of thinking. And so, you know, in the, I would say the 2000s into the mid-2000s, we have a huge rise of like freedom, flexibility. I want to be in control of my own destiny. I don't want to wait like 30 years to get. my gold watch in retirement. I can go out, do some work now and get my gold watch today.

Now, that was a healthy balance. At that point, the shift of that was how do we break the status quo because the status quo is stifling innovation and stifling our ability for growth. Now, the pendulum swings both ways. So there was, you know, in the 2000s was really cool, especially in California. The VC world popped up and all these things that were very different than today's private equity and all those different approaches. And one really powerful mechanism came into existence, and that was the Internet, right? So for those, you know, I was sort of like before the Internet

and after the Internet as well. And so when we became so hyper-connected and it creates so much noise, it took the lessons that happened through, I want things now, instant gratification, meritocracy, agile approaches, just flattened organizations and all those different things. There was a sweet spot at one point. Don't get me wrong, when we didn't burn out,

we can still use words like work-life balance. And then today where technology is going a mile a minute, AI is going a mile a minute, and it's like, you know, humans can't really keep up. Creates an interesting opportunity or a window for many of us because there is a next step for this. There is an evolutionary process to this as well. is what I found in myself included

is this was a lesson of, yes, there is definitely an empowering feeling of being in control of your own life. But we lose the relationship between being this, meaning is the people that go into burnout and come out of burnout, the biggest thing, whether they're high achievers or on the path of achievement

and are failing over and over and over again because of the noise we're experiencing today is what's the point of achieving all these things? I feel empty on the inside, right? So that is kind of a nightmare. You can imagine, you know, 30, 40 years ago, there was a little bit of time to figure out who you were and sort of evolved that way.

You know, in sort of our modern time, we have so much distraction that shuts down that connection. And so when people go through burnout, I mean, there's obviously the symptomology of the anxiety, the fatigue and all those different things. But one important piece that has come out of this and was very loud. coming out of the pandemic with hashtag great resignation

and this year is a great negotiation, whatever you want to use in China that have this whole like let's rot policy. It's a global phenomenon is we're realizing there must be something deeper. How can we live a life or how can we contribute our time in a more meaningful and fulfilling way? And I'm not saying that, you know, people, generations behind us never had this.

Of course, it had this, but from a collective perspective, we're getting so much tension more than ever before and so much connection more than before that we're able to really begin to have those dialogues and conversations in a very meaningful way. And what I've done and what I continue to do from a systemic lens is not just support the individual. My philosophy is sort of, you know,

it's not a top-down approach, it's not a bottom-up approach. It's an inside-out approach. And so as we recover, properly recover from burnout, not just cope with it, we begin to learn so many things in one of the lessons. I thought I find very clear, specifically with burnout and productivity and achievements and goals, is we move away from this cycle of,

I want to have things and to have things, they've got to do things. When I do things, I have things, and it goes into this sort of accelerated Joneses, you know, like follow the Joneses type mentality. And for the first time collectively and cross-generationally as well, because we have the largest multi-cohorts of generations squished together in our lifetime things to modern medicine, I guess I'll call it that way.

And we're moving towards human beingness, right? So in the 2000s, we call it what authenticity? Today and a lot of our institutions, we call it, how do you bring your whole self to work is probably one of the, at least aspirationally speaking is what we're talking about. And where the conflicts lie is, so many of us are bringing not our whole self to work. We don't know what means is we bring all of our parts and all of these parts are wounded and hurt and stressed out. And then that creates so much problems that we see today.

But going through this, obviously, is then you move into sort of what interconnection is like and how do you bring in meaning and purpose and fulfillment and values and relationships and all those lessons that open up once we go through a challenge like burnout that we see today. And that was really well said. I admire the way in which you're able to communicate that. It reminds me of, I forgot who wrote this. There's a book, and I'll try to put it in the show notes, but it spoke about the human condition going from being and then slipping into having.

And then from having, slipping into the illusion of having, and then slipping into the idea that you can only have it, the appearance of it. the appearance of it. You know what I mean? Like we've slipped from being human beings to having. Like used to be this thing. Now you have this thing. Now you have the illusion of having this thing.

It's like, yeah, I have this house. I live here in this beautiful place. And then, okay, well, now I have a house. Now I have a mortgage. You know, but you'll never pay it up. You just slip back. And so when you talked about moving back into being, I think it speaks volumes of the way in which the relationship between burnout

and altered states of consciousness flow. Like maybe you could speak to that a little bit. Yeah, so that's one of the key lessons that comes out of it because the having or the, I call the labor intensive side, right? And again, this was an institutionalized belief system in the early days, right? So you can imagine the rise of Henry Ford and the industrialization and scientific management. And even today, right, today we talk so heavily on like, you know, decision, data informed

decision making and all those different things. They're all great. I mean, I'm not just my background as an LP as a clinician in the space. I'm an engineer. I'm also an engineer. My background's in that space. So I have a very deep, strong appreciation for the use of applied sciences, just so much of our work. Now, at the same time is, well, that can create a lot of tools that can help us to amplify, grow, and accelerate. We depolarize somewhere along the lines where we lost a connection to ourselves. And so we went full extreme onto the outside world, right? The only thing that's real is what I can touch and feel, right?

And by the way, like anything on the inside is an illusion, suppress that, right? Like, that's not even real. Like, it's completely fake. It's metaphysical, right? And what I found unique today is, you know, coming out of burnout, we begin to reshift or renormalize into or repolarize or polarized properly back into, like, okay, the beingness nature or the, consciousness nature of ourselves isn't an external world thing is, you know, we express, we project,

we interpret our world outside of us and the real control is actually on the inside. And that's why, whether it's like the Jones's problem or I need more to have more stuff and then go into like a sort of a perpetual death grip, right? It gets tighter and tighter and tighter. It's we learn this process of letting go. So a big one through burnout is learning how to let go. And we begin to embrace these concepts of like flow, which then leads into a whole school of peak performance as well. And we also move into a concept of less is more. And, you know, there was a whole movement and still is, it's still growing of like essentialism or minimalism, maybe a little bit extreme, but definitely figuring out like there is a relationship between standard of living and quality

of life. And today we've leaned too strongly on standard of living and our quality of life has is plummeted. And, you know, the World Economic Forum, you know, whether you agree with their philosophies or not, but at a very simple level, they, you know, they sort of called out this year that, you know, we have these extremes of we can't even meet their basic needs. So many of us because of economic challenges. And the other far extreme is we can't, there's so many geopolitical problems and big systemic issues that we want to control that we can, and it makes us so nervous. So 2024 sort of anxiety is around sort of those huge dichotomies and how to navigate those as we go through this, you know, the storm, right?

It's interesting. You know, as someone like yourself who has a background in NLP and probably has a wonderful love of language, be it symbolism, body language, or regular language, what do you, do you see this move towards nouns becoming verbs as a process of evolution and the way we're seeing the world? You know, when you start looking at Duncan, you know, is Duncan a person, place or a thing? Or is Duncan a process? You know, I'm starting to see this evolution of people seeing nouns as verbs as a process. I love it. I think there's a real magic in there.

I'm curious to get your thoughts on that. Yeah, it's Ying and Yang, right? So, I mean, language is pretty universal because one of the things that I appreciate about NLP isn't just about the use of language because language is, like whether I speak Chinese or English or whatever it is, we follow syntax, we follow grammar, we follow structure, we follow those things. And in the ancient days, I mean, let's go back to ancient practice. Language was magic.

Right? If we talked about like, yeah, language is magic, right? It's magic is an expression of consciousness. It's spells. So we use that today as well. And nouns are important. It's sort of the Yang approach. Yang is important because it freezes things.

They're objects we can touch and feel them and so forth. Process verbs and stuff are movements, right? And so we need both. Like at the end of the day, we need both, right? And how, and the beauty of, and why I enjoy NLP as a process, not just in my career, but in life. is it helps to really formalize or at least give a framework around sort of how consciousness and energy expresses itself and how we use things like nouns, for example, to create containers, right?

Their containers are useful and then we can use verbs and processes and descriptives to fill that out. That's the story and the narrative, the movement. We need both. At the end of the day, we need both. We need the nouns. We need the things to focus on the, you know, the willpower, the masculine, masculine, the electric part of things, right? And then we need the process, the flow, the movement to fill in the feminine side of things, right? The expression, the emotion, the story, the motivation, right? And you need that to achieve your goals and you need goals to exist.

Otherwise, it'll just be a whirlpool that circles in on each other all the time, right? So it's a beautiful symbiosis, right? So once we understand that, and this is the perfect time, especially going out of burnout, is generally you begin to reconnect to all of these very natural human abilities that we have that may seem supernatural or not. They're actually been there. And by connecting to it and realizing from a practical sense, we can do so much more with so little, right? With so little and live with a lot more grace and happiness and joy.

Burnell can be a game changer for so many people, even though that process can be a nightmare for so many people, right? Yeah. Yeah, is it, do you think it's fractal? Do you think that like the individuals are going through burnout at the same time our society is going through burnout and they're just like, you know, they are just part of it. Is that, do you see it that way? That's the lessons, right? So the lessons is we moved away from institutional structure, even though we focus into it, a very me-centric I want things now. And collectively, we're learning how to let go.

So the lesson is letting go. And a lot of the challenge when it comes to building and wanting and having is control, right? Because we want to control everything and we lose relationship. Even technology is a form of control, right? I've been writing algorithms and logic diagrams and maps to program things. And, you know, if you even look at modern day, like AI, for example, we moved away from being rules-based, then we're moving towards, like, fluid-based looking at just how things operate and having AI stitch that together consciously. Right. So, you know, that is also an expression of us.

We're going through the exact same thing. Brunel just has a deeper relationship to a lot of mental, emotional health challenges. And that's why I guess it's a lot more personal, less philosophical or spiritual for people. It's very personal for people, but there's a health relationship to it. Yeah, it's interesting. The idea of relationships and the language we use on a daily basis to describe our relationships, Oftentimes, it seems to me, in my experience, that going through burnout fundamentally changes your relationship with everything around you.

Because in some ways, it's almost like you were rewiring your brain to have a different relationship with the world. And that's where I got into the idea of neuroplasticity. It seems to me, and as someone who's an NLP practitioner, in some ways, that's what's happening, right? We're changing the way our brain, we're changing their relationship with the way we see the world, which is kind of like neuroplasticity. Is that fair to say?

I think that's true and the opposite that makes burnout a challenge is we're not neuroplastic enough. We're too rigid. When we're too rigid in our ways, even though we want stuff, but we're always like, you know, this is our goal. This is we must do. We must have produce go, go, go, go, go, go. And we lose the ability to connect with the deeper problems, right? And sometimes, you know, from more of a clinical lens,

and sometimes we feel that what we want to have and we just keep doing and falling these, cycles really just it's about satisfying thing. It's really simple, like an unfulfilled need that's really simple. And I love this one because some of us come in and goes, Duncan, what's the secret to happiness? Right. So we go into questions. And I'm like, well, from an NLP lens, right?

Happiness is instant, right? If I just went and if I said, George, think of a time in your past where you were ecstatic. You were super happy. And you can relive that memory and smile goes up your bottom. Like, congratulations, you're happy. Right? Like, you don't need drugs. You don't need all.

these different things, it's so easy to go into happiness. And the real question for so many people is not about happiness, about these states is how do I not live in misery? Like, how do I move into the flow states of fulfillment and purpose and meaning? And what might sound like philosophy and those concepts, but really is human. Like I call those very technical skills, right? Like how, unfortunately, we never were born to be like, this is the technical manual to how to be a human being. yes, we live in free will, so we get to choose, whether our happiness or demise, that's our choice. At the end of the day, where the illusion really kicks in

is when we externalize things so much that we no longer remember the connection we have to create our own world, and then we feel the world controls us, right? It's all about control, right, in this aspect. And then everything circles around that. And when we let go, right, when we let go, the illusion drops, And then we realize so many unique, not just other new frameworks and new techniques and tools and ways of being and living and doing and having that are so much more fulfilling that doesn't require to be a philosopher. We can apply science.

We can apply things like neuroplasticity where it's about learning, right? If we're growing, we feel alive. So our natural state is to be very neuroplastic, right? And we lost that. We lost that along the way of industrializing things. too much. Yeah. I don't know if we lost it or it was conditioned out of us. Conditioned out of it. That is accurate. That isn't an accurate representation of it. Yeah. In some level, I'm excited because I see the world of the public school system of Pavlovian dogs being

changed on some level. And it's coming from the ground up. And that's where all change comes from, right? Change comes from the bottom up. People up top can try to make change happen. But it's much better when it's organic and we see this happening from the ground up. You brought up this idea of control. And I'm curious, what do you, is someone, what do you think is a relationship between control and uncertainty? They're intimately tied. And so our fear of uncertainty is control.

Like our process of managing uncertainty is control. I mean, certainty and uncertainty, by the way, they're yin and yang of each other. Meaning is you need uncertainty, or sometimes you can call it. like freshness, right? We need we need uniqueness, right? We need novelty in that way because it helps spice things up and it helps us grow. It helps us grow as well, right? And expand. But we need stability as well, or a nervous system just deregulates. And then we go into fight or fight,

that's not very useful as well. And so the right balance of control and the right balance of expansion is needed. And sort of why like, you know, it's like your destiny is where it's very playful and valuable. But it's, you know, your values and your belief systems, you done right helps you to set the guard rails, right, to help you really follow that, follow your path for those, especially coming under burnout, usually, what they're asking for or not just purpose and fulfillment, but they ask those real deep existential questions, like, who am I, what is my purpose? And when you have a deeper understanding, having a relationship with yourself, you begin to realize, and, you know, in my generation,

we have this whole yolo period, right? You only live once. And, you know, you hear these stories in my younger times as a millennia, as sort of the late stage millennial is, it was like, oh, go on travels, go on these experiences, travel the world, blah, everything is so transient. And that was great, don't get me wrong. And then they came back and they're like,

then what? And I still feel empty and underfill in the inside, right? And today we might use words like spiritual bypassing or something like, right? Or personal growth bypassing or something. And it's really down to the same questions. Like once you get clarity around that deeper relationship with yourself, And again, there are tools and techniques for this.

It's so easy to really YOLO because the opposite of YOLO is, how do I go on my deathbed, leave this world with no regrets. Some people say, how do I leave every day better than the next? And those comes down to your blueprint, which is structure that is called your values, right? So yes, we can change your values in extreme ways like near death experiences. We've seen those happen. And by work as well, we use NLP to shift those. But naturally, for those who want to have a stronger sense of identity and who they are and what they're meant to do,

we have that borne into us. So that's our blueprint. Where it's really important, back to conditioning, is sometimes we may be overconditioned with beliefs and values that aren't really aligned to who we are. And that's when we get today we call it imposter syndrome or feeling that, you know, either we're not worthy or we don't deserve it or not love or not this, I'm not enough and all those different things. And those are all really great, like, contrast to help you. Okay, what does enough mean to you?

What is worthiness? What is love? Or these deeper things that's subjective in nature, but very unique to tying back to that blueprint. And when you do, everything opens up and then, you know, that's where flow happens. That's where grace happens, right? So flow is important. We use us peak performance. But grace from a very, from a very like, in why I say the word spirit, but from a metaphysical lens.

And I know both of us, like in the world of even psychedelics and consciousness expansion and so forth, is you have something that's so metaphysical and we go through this body to make it physical, right, going through a mental body or emotional body or a physical body and building things, has to be clear, right? So once that is clear, things flow, there is a grace there. Things are blocked. Well, guess what? You're not just at late stage.

You're going to get physical problems, obviously. But even in the medium, early stages, you get all this, like, status. and noise and confusion and all these other emotions, which aren't bad. It's just we don't understand what those emotions mean. And then we suppress it to the next day and we go really into deep level problems like burnout, late stage burnout especially. It's really well said. Sometimes when I talk to people that are in the midst of like a late stage crisis,

you know, and believe you me, tons of people on my family. and myself and all probably if we're being honest someone in our family or ourselves have gone through this stage of burnout or the time of crisis and if you haven't well get ready because it's probably coming your way so what's interesting though and what i like to tell people and myself is congratulations like right when you're down in the dumps and like everything is horrible and the world is falling down around you and you're calling your friend like you can't fucking believe you're sherry die why me the best thing you can do is that congratulations because i feel like you are at the crossroads of gaining understanding.

For the first time in your life, you can't control things, and that's a positive thing. Or maybe it's not the first time. Hopefully it's not the first time, but that is a real opportunity to do some learning. When everything around you was crashing, it's probably a sign that you're on the point of a breakthrough.

Is that good, like, what do you think about that? Like, it's helped me in the past. I'm just curious to get your thoughts on that. That is by design, like in my experience anyways, right? So beliefs aside, that's my experience, right? meaning is what I found is, so, you know, crisis is obviously don't get too many of those, right? So whether it's a burnout crisis or a divorce or whatever those, we're seeing a lot more of those today. But these crises teach us lessons.

And I know sometimes we hear this concept of it's in the silver lining, like look at the silver lining. But, you know, I want to reframe that. I want to be like, it's not about looking at the silver lining is let's look at, let's expand the lining, right? Because that lining stores the lessons that you need to learn. and I feel so many of us today, unfortunately conditioned or not, is we aren't very wise, right? So we don't integrate.

We have so much information, right, to the point where we have fake news, right? And we have so much information that we, it's hard for us to discern. And as we discern, it's even more difficult for us to integrate that into wisdom. And so why understanding consciousness and going into a lot of these metaphysical concepts and principles,

really yield a lot of tools and a lot of techniques and frameworks that really help to, for many of us going through this, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a changemaker or a leader or achiever going through these type of crises, or even worse at times what makes a burnout crisis a crisis isn't the deregulation, is I'm burning out, you're holding your business together, your venture together, your job together, and suddenly your partner leaves you or your aging parents goes into an illness or your child goes into illness or you go into illness or whatever it is. And there is just no capacity to navigate that.

And so that's a huge crisis situation. And you have to really not just sift sort of prioritize, but you have to regulate extremely quickly. And what makes, you know, what I chose in terms of my work anyways, I never decided to enter into burnout. It just happened that I fell into burnout. I left that. Went into systems change.

So reinventing food banks, building schools in Africa. I've been doing a lot of those really fun things and just came full circle because I realized that there was a deep need for so many people as my mission is to empower the way we work, live and grow. And a big part of it, my season of this career, my contribution in the next five to seven years is to really figure out this burnout piece

and create a platform or a channel for our own growth and evolution and what you said, your breakthroughs, right? So a lot of our work is how do we, how do we find and discover and use a more structured process to experience those breakthroughs and then find meaning through those breakthroughs to move your life in the direction that you need to go, right? To be you, really. It's Time to Be You was one of my models I used, you know, like 10 years ago.

That was in my early days of going through burnout. It's fascinating. On a grander scale, the idea of patterns, like it's really difficult. I think it, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it takes at least two people to notice a pattern. Like, I can look at my life and see a pattern, but if I have someone there that's looking at it, now it's confirmed. You know what I mean by that? It seems like very helpful. And I'm curious in your process.

Is that, and it seems also that it, when you're with someone and you realize a pattern and they can use, they can they can see that pattern with you and confirm that pattern on some level that speaks to the idea of connectedness and patterns and making change is that something like it seems like you're really good at that like i could imagine sitting down with you and talking to you what's the secret sauce are you helping people understand that pattern is it necessary for that like it's all connected right so that's the that's the perfect description of the entire professional therapy At the end of the day is, especially, you know, I want to just burn out, just general, like, reflection and growth is, again, we've lost the relationship with ourselves.

And so, so ideally is, you know, that's why we have practices like meditation and mindfulness and so forth, is that allows you to, what you would do the same thing with another person to do with yourself. Now, with another person is useful, especially if they're, you know, they're not how to be trained, but they're more, like, empathic or they have that natural tendency is they can reflect it back to you. Now, the challenges of interpersonal relationships is sometimes they project their baggage onto you and then it becomes like a cluster storm, right? We don't want that as well, but a lot, and I've learned this especially in romantic relationships, even in my capacity, I know I have the answer and I see it as well. I see them sort of moving to self-sabotage.

That doesn't really create change, right? Sometimes I even create resistance. And it's just the ability, and then I teach us to managers as well, especially around empathic leadership. and so forth, is if you know how to hold space properly, if you know how to ask questions properly, just like you're doing as a podcast host, you ask those questions properly, it's so funny that people will be like, now that I hear myself talking, right,

and then they'll go into their own solution and they'll be like, George, what do you think? And you just repeat what they said, like, we're an amazing idea, and then they're gone doing their thing. That's a good day for a therapist is what they're looking for, right? And for a lot of people, that's enough. especially and it's a global issue,

but more specifically in the United States because your general surgeon just sort of put up on the top of the list is loneliness, right? Our technology has created a filter towards real human to human interaction. And we live in, we, especially Generation Z, they grew up in a very virtualized type and a very fast-paced virtualized,

almost a hallucination of a world. And so, yeah, so there are challenges of like, How do you get the feedback to listen to yourselves when you, and when your life is so determined on all of the, all of the devices around you, right? And so we have to also be very cognizant of that because that is an entire, that's a generation, by the way, type of conditioning, right? So they too are going through similar lessons, but in a very different way.

Wow. It's, it blows my mind to think of. I know we're kind of coming up on time here. I got a few more minutes, but I have one more question that I heard that I wanted to get your opinion on and it is the difference between a symbol and a sign. And from what I have read, that a sign is something we see that points to an action, but a symbol is something that not only points to an action, but participates in it. Like the yin and yang you were talking about. It, like participates in the actual change and you can see it in there versus like a stoplight. So we'll break the linguistics of that. So let's go into traditional sense. Symbolism.

Okay. Symbols are very useful because symbols hold an energy or a definition or a resource of some kind, right? And so when we see a logo, for example, or we see what we attribute to say a Lincoln or something of that with Matthew McCona, he's sultry voice, right? Those symbols evoke. We want to evoke something, right? It can evoke beliefs. It can evoke emotions. And all of those things can lead to certain behaviors and directions of where we want to go in life.

Right. So very practical from that land. Symbols and symbols used throughout time, just like how we, as simple as language, is very important. Signs are intuitive, meaning is even from a cognition perspective, is, you know, and Carl Young called like synchronicity, right? It's something about similar antipity or these different things, is when you have a clarity of what you want in life. And so this is sort of like it falls into the law of attraction schools as well and that type of stuff.

It's really all the same thing is if you have clarity, so that that's where a breakthrough happens, is when you have true clarity, your nervous system wires yourself to begin to sense, whether it's through your five senses or through a heightened five senses in the more intuitive realms, right, where those signs come in and leads you to do actions and behaviors towards that of what you want to create.

And sometimes we can even use the words like, oh my God, the universe is conspiring, and so forth and call that law of attraction. But what it really is in its most simplest form is cognitively and neurologically is you want to clear up all the stuff that we don't want. So if you're walking through life, like, for example, in relationships, so what do you want in a relationship? And you're like, I don't want a person that cheats on me.

I don't want this. I don't want this. I don't want this. And then you're saying, okay, what do you want? And then you're staring into blank space. Like, no one's ever asked me that before. So from that lens, I call the gas and the brake problem, right? It's too many of us live our life, our foot on the brake, and we continue stepping on the brake.

And then we use all these biohacking, new level resources to put our foot on the gas, looking at the rear view mirror and this our vehicle, like this vehicle is breaking down really hard. And so we want to get our foot off the break. We want to look forward and then have the tools to, to, and these tools being flow and emotions and states and all these different things, we want to put the gas on in a way that helps us move towards what we want to create in our lives. That's it.

It's actually kind of really simple, but the process could be, can get pretty in depth. But for so many people, it's just really, like, once you have, once you're looking forward and not at the rear of your mirror and you're consciously putting your foot on the gas without your foot on the brake, well, guess what? the signs appear, right? And then those signs materialized into something that's more what your vision is, is what we call achievement, right, in a new way. And so the difference is moving forward is how do you achieve the things that give you

a sense of growth and fulfillment and passion and love and joy and all those things that make beingness fun, right? Otherwise, you're just for the sake of doing things, put on your foot on different and there's driving in circles and looking at the wrong things. And so we don't want to do that. That just can get pretty miserable pretty quickly. And isn't it interesting? When you have one foot on the brake and you mash the gas, you do a burnout.

Yeah. Or not everything. It fires or breaks everything, right? Doug and you're so awesome. This is like the time, we're on our time and this is way too fast. I felt like we just started talking. So you've got to come back and we've got to do something longer. I got to block off like a couple hours because I think we could just fairly even

scratch the surface. But I know you got some cool stuff coming up and I wanted to give you a moment to tell people like what you got coming up or people can find you and what you're excited about. Yeah, so really exciting this year. We're launching our retreats in Mexico. So we'll be in Port of Oriarta will be in Cabos, Las Cabos doing this work. We're introducing psychedelics into our work as well. So we'll go into another discussion on that, but how five MEOD, how expansion and consciousness really not just accelerates recovery, but really propels us towards purpose and meaning and falling on to our, you know, moving away from just having a career, but into calling and contribution.

And so that is something that is very strong this year and elevating and helping workplaces to move towards a direction for all of their employees, all their people, as well as individuals, entrepreneurs as well. So, you know, obviously burnout is my jam. So if you're exhibiting any of those, do feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. And I'm happy to have a conversation there. game changer with NLP, psychedelics, and integration. We didn't even, we just didn't even touch on that.

I'm so upset, but we'll do another one. Ladies and gentlemen, go check out Duncan. His links will be in the show notes down there. This individual, I think, is one of the most incredible people when it comes to the ideas and on the cutting edge of psychedelics and NLP and integration and not only getting better, but finding ways to optimize yourself as well as healing past trauma. So go check him out. That's all we got for today.

Hang on briefly afterwards, Duncan. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have a beautiful day. Aloha.