Unlonely with Dr. Jody Carrington - Closer Together: Sophie Grégoire Trudeau

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Sophie Grégoire Trudeau is a mental health advocate, public speaker, and mentor. Over the past twenty years, she has been an ambassador and champion for youth self-esteem, gender equality, emotional literacy, and physical activity. Sophie has received UN recognition awards for her humanitarian work and was named the first National Volunteer for the Canadian Mental Health Association in 2022. She also serves as Youth Leadership Global Ambassador for Plan International Canada. A mother of three, Sophie is a certified yoga instructor and an adventurous outdoor sportswoman.In this episode Dr. Jody and Sophie chat all about connection, how people are hard to hate close up, mental health and human behaviour. This episode covers a lot of deep topics and will keep you wanting to learn more.Follow SophieInstagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. At the beginning of every episode, there will always be time for an acknowledgement. You know, the more we do this, people ask, why do you have to do the acknowledgement and every episode? I got to tell you, I've never been more grateful for being able to raise my babies on a land where so much sacrifice was made. And I think what's really critical in this process is that the ask is just that we don't forget. So the importance of saying these words at the beginning of every episode will always be of utmost importance to me

and this team. So everything that we created here today for you happened on Treaty 7 land, which is now known as the center part of the province of Alberta. It is home of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which is made up of the Siksika, the Kainai, the Pekinni, the Tatina First Nation, the Stony Nakota First Nation, and the Métis Nation Region 3. Our job, our job as humans, is to simply acknowledge each other. That's how we do better, be better, and stay connected to the good. friends welcome back welcome in my fellow humans uh I am so grateful that you are going to sink in with us again this week into the Everyone Comes From Somewhere podcast. I have to tell you, I didn't sleep very well last night because I have never, I've never been as excited to have a conversation about a human that I thought I knew a lot about. And then I read her book and I have to tell you, uh, I'm excited today. I really want you to drop your shoulders as you settle into this conversation, because we're going to talk about some hard things. We're going to talk about mental health and people's perceptions of us and

how people are hard to hate close up and what it means to have a regulated system. It is a privilege to be emotionally regulated. And it is going to be the most important thing that we teach our children, I think in the next generations to come. And I could not think of somebody who is more well-versed in this space has put it all together in a beautiful book that she's just launched. So listen, Sophie Gregor Trudeau, I want to, I mean, it needs no introduction, but I'm going to tell you a little bit about her, okay? A mental health advocate, a public speaker, and a phenomenal mentor. Over the past 20 years, she has been an ambassador and champion for youth self-esteem, gender equality, emotional literacy, and physical activity. She has received UN recognition awards for her humanitarian work and was named the first national volunteer for the

Canadian Mental Health Association in 2022. She also serves as Youth Leadership Global Ambassador for Plan International Canada. She's a Mama 3. She's a certified yoga instructor and an adventurous outdoor sportswoman. I sat at a table with her. We spoke at the same event a few weeks ago. And I just need to tell you this for, from all the sincerity in the bottom of my soul, I was blown away. And when people say that to me, when they say, you know, I was blown away, you were way better than I thought you were. I'm always like, fucking thanks. That was the bar low. But I, I think that so many people have a perception of so many things. And I love this idea that people are

hard to hate close up because when I moved in to your space, all I wanted was to talk more. All I wanted to was to know more and to think about how you became so brilliant in this space. So what I want to know first is for us around here, the difference between empathy and judgment often lies in the capacity to know where somebody comes from. So context is the prerequisite for empathy. So, Miss Sophie Gregor, where do you come from? It's Sophie G in the house. Sophie G is in the house. Humans buckle up.

Wow. I need to take a deep breath in and out after hearing this. Because I come from a place where I know what you've said to be true, but I don't live from that space. I don't believe that that everything you just described is me. I, I don't believe that everything you just described is me. I believe that I'm a loving human being, that I have a space here in this world that is a privilege. I believe that we all belong to each other. We just forget.

We really do get confused, numbed, and we forget. So if we were to take away all of these accomplishments and titles or whatever you want to call them, who's left? Who is left? Same thing for you, Jodi. Same thing for anybody listening. The core of what's left is something that is so pure, so unfettered, so unattached, and so real. And it's a place that is accessible, that we can go back to often, but that we just have not been taught to befriend. And that is pure compassion, self-compassion and empathy. And the context is humanhood. We just divide and we conquer and we get confused and we try to navigate through the fog of life and we forget that we all belong to the same context of what it means to be human. So when you talk like that, I understand and it's graceful and it's kind and thank you for this introduction. What I do take in the most

is how you said you connected with me and that it's difficult to hate a person when they're close by. I could not agree more with you. Those are probably some of the wisest words ever because it reminds us of our shared humanity so on my life path I think in a nutshell what I try to do is to remind myself of my common humanity to everybody else and with my voice and my practice I try to teach it and inspire others to feel, to sense the same way. People are suffering. People are

tired. People are depleted. People are struggling in the relationship, struggling to raise their kids. And we're finding so many injustices in our world that at some point the brain can't take this anymore. The body can't take it. And if we ignore all those little stresses, because it becomes our normal, we actually become sick mentally and physically. Amen. And here's what I believe. And I know this is true with your work because it resonated so much with me. I have assassinated over a thousand people in this country and not one time have I met

a bad human. Every human being has the capacity for good. So many of us have lost access to it these days. And I wonder, you know, so many of the experts, you had over 20 interviews of some of my biggest heroes in this beautiful book. And what do you think is getting in the way from us accessing that beautiful soul, that compassion that is in all of us. I mean, even your horrific, you know, when I say to people, they're like, yeah, you haven't met my ex-wife or you haven't met my, you know, third cousin twice removed or the person that abused me or the things like this.

And this is where we land in the places of trauma and, you know, our stories. So tell me what gets in the way of us, especially these days, accessing that good? We get in the way of us. It is only us who can get in the way of us. Not our fault. We haven't been taught to push ourself out of our own way. We haven't been taught to sit with pain without feeling threatened by the difference of somebody else. And the most unhappy human beings are the one who cannot trust another. So think about this for a second. It gives me, look, I have chills right now because, because think about the state of the world. When you have, you know, and in my book Closer Together, I talk about this. When you have every single human being has a nervous system.

We're all built the same way. We have a nervous system. Thank you for showing them. That's so good. And we all have a sympathetic branch and a parasympathetic branch. And to make this very, very simple, one is for your alert mode. You don't want to cross the street and get hit by a car. So your amygdala in your brain, like a little bell is ringing,

saying stop. And then the other part of your nervous system is the parasympathetic, which really wants you to relax more, rest and digest the food that you eat and come into, come home to yourself without feeling that you're threatened. So the problem with our lives today and a big neuro, you know, neuro imperative biological nutshell is that too many of us are stuck in our alert mode constantly, chronically. So what happens when we're stuck there? This is really fascinating. If I was stuck in my alert mode now, if I was like super stressed and there's no saber tooth tiger wanted to kill me, but my mind is so chronically stressed that I always think that there was a stress in the room. Okay. And most like they're saying that almost 50% of the

population is stuck in their sympathetic nervous system. The statistics are not, uh, are not, you know, on top of the, of themselves yet, but just around that around that um and if i was looking at you jody and we were like right now i'm looking at you on the screen if i was in my alert mode and i was stressed out i could interpret your neutral face right now you have kind of a neutral face right you're not aggressive you're not you're not you're not being shy you're not scared. I could interpret them as aggressive. Because you're ready. Just because I'm because you're heightened that I'm I'm ready to defend myself because I think there's a threat to me. The three things people are more scared of humans, death, people and their minds. So you're asking me what's in the way of us and the lack of education on how

to regulate ourselves. I love that. And you know what I'm often amazed at in my work is this idea that who causes us most significant pain in this world is humans. What is required for healing is that same entity. That's it. And so it becomes a really interesting journey for those of us who have the capacity to lean into people who have the privilege to lean into people, because I think it is a calling now bigger than ever before. If you are listening to this, your capacity, I've never had this much hope in the world, despite the fact that we speak a lot about, you know, the places that we're at, the way to get back home is as simply complex as this. When you're acknowledged, you rise. I have to be emotionally regulated to give that to another human being. And what do you think about that? You know, in this place of, I love this, you know,

sitting with us because we're the most important work we worry about. Let's fix this guy. If my partner wasn't like this, if my kids would just smarten up and it's not that it's our fault, it is, it is our solution. When we get to understand this connection between the heart and the head, what do you think about that? There's a little, there's some different components to this is a fabulous question. So first of all, we have to choose, you were talking about heroes, right? We're not choosing our heroes wisely. We're choosing strangers on Instagram who keep taking pictures of themselves and, you know, who we don't know and who gives us a negative impact on our self-esteem because we compare to dehumanized, deformed, disfigured. But it looks great. It looks according to our beauty standards, but it is so pervasive and it is so in denial of

our true nature that we keep living in this resisting mode. When we live in this resistant mode, we can't create because we're fighting against something. So when we come into the world with the two most inherent needs of attachment, how you were taken care of from zero to three for your emotional and physical survival, how that person touched you, looked at you, danced with you, played with you, and kind of validated your reality and your sense of reality. And that created what we call epistemic trust, but just like a trustful relationship to, you know, the adult who took care of you and the world. Now, when that attachment of childhood attachment is either secure, insecure, or disorganized in cases of abuse, you start with a tone and with a synteny and with a

dance in your wired brain that follows you through the course of your whole life. So if that was unsafe, and by the way, what is safety? Let's talk about safety. Safety is not just the presence, the absence of threat. So it's not just the fact that there's no saber-toothed tiger that's going to want to kill me now. It's the presence of connection. So as you said, Joan, connection, connection, connection, whether it's picking up on, you know, in a hundred milliseconds on facial cues, expressions from humans to humans, what did the pandemic do? Took that away, took our feeling of security and trust away from us, in a way. And so safety is key. Now, you could be living in a mansion with cars and diamonds, or I don't know what you dream for in life, whatever that is, or in a tent.

If your feeling of security is threatened, if you're feeling insecure, it doesn't matter if you have money or no money, if you have a title or no title, you are in alert mode and you feel threatened and you have difficulty feeling compassion and empathy. You have difficulty connecting with other humans. You might interpret other humans' facial expressions differently in a negative way. So if you think about the worst of the worst, like wars and genocides and whatever you can think of that's taking place actually on the planet right now, or abuse in a household, or bullying online, or not feeling safe with your own family, that feeling of security trumps everything else. On the Abraham Maslow's pyramid, as you've said,

and I've heard you say that, if you have a roof over your head, fine. You have food on the table, fine. They're actually basic needs that you need to have met. But if security and safety are not there emotionally and physically, it's game over. All cards are off the table. So when you talk about how is it that we can better regulate ourselves, I think safety and security is number one. Now, how do we reconstruct that ourselves instead of waiting for governments or companies or because they have to come in too, for sure. But what happens in our own households and how we talk to ourselves and how we treat ourselves when no one's watching. No one's watching you right now. How do you treat yourself? What's your inner conversation?

Are you, you freaking idiot? You can't do anything right. Are you comparing yourself to other people? Are you threatened by the difference of others or are you a more compassionate patient? It's going to be okay, baby love. You're reparenting yourself at every step. You failed. It's okay. You're going to get back up. But here's the problem. We're on a screen right now, which is great because it does facilitate so many, so many more connections. But because we're constantly, and Jonathan Haidt in his book, Anxious Generations, talk about this, talks about this because we've been on screen so much. There you go. That's it. That and I. Yeah. Yeah.

And because we have cut human connections, because we spend so much more time on screens in front of computers, not moving, and doing less and less exercise in nature, which is absolutely inherently important for our mental wealth and mental wealth and mental health. What's happening is that from about six, well, you should never give an iPad or a screen to a kid under six years old, that's for sure. But between six and 10, you know, this is a period

in our lives that is called experience expectant. The brain is nourished by experience through our whole lives. But especially during that period, what's really important is that the kids are taking low loss, low risks, low costs, right? So you fall off your bike, you get back on, you're fine. You climb a tree, your parents knock, oh my God, are you going to be okay? No, let the kid be independent. Let the kid try and test its physical or her, his, theirs, physical, psychological limits, because that's how you actually know who you are and how you're becoming. So when we limit that period of time, what we're doing is that we're not allowing for the brain to wire strongly enough with resilience in its own neural pathways so that when we

reach the teenage years and adult years, what happens? It's high risk, high cost. Train wasn't brain, sorry. The brain wasn't educated. We can't deal with it. Criticism, too much. Failing, too much. Can't take it. We're living in a world where technology is bringing us to the moon, but we're taking our lives away at. Oh my God. And I say this all the time. You can't tell somebody how to regulate emotion. You have to show them. And if we are in a world where we're the first generation of parents that I don't think we talk a lot about, this is the first, we're the first generation of parents where our kids have had this much access to us, where we have had social media, where we are emotionally dysregulated. And so we can't tell

our babies how to do what we have to show them. And we, I think are not, the kids are not the problem. I can, I've assessed and treated lots of babies and they're not the issue. If the big people aren't okay, the little people don't stand a chance. And the idea is when we invest in, this is the problem. It's this marginalized population. It is this person. It is the kids. You can give the kids all the, I can see your kid in therapy to other fucking 65. If I send them home to a war zone, it is a waste of time. This is a systemic issue that becomes really important. And to that point, Sophie, I think about so much in your book, uh, closer together, which again, I read, but I rarely do. I read things front to back these days. I skim, I get the points. Do I,

do I like this? Do I write the notes? Yeah. You should see. I mean, I went every, every plane I've been on, I'm reading, I'm writing. I'm, I'm so amazed at the interviews. And part of the thing I thought about is your babies were in such a critical period when they were so exposed to what this means, this personal life. And you write about it in your book. You know, I think about when I see the fuck Trudeau signs now, I think about that so differently because people are hard to hit close up. What was that like for your children? What was that like for, how do you keep yourself regulated when you're constantly inundated? And we can talk about marginalized people's doing this their whole career their whole life but i was so struck

because i think we put politicians people in positions of authority and power in a place where we forget that they're human too oh there's many angles to this answer first of all uh i'm happy that i'm evolving uh professionally in a world where I get educated continuously because I'm a curious student of life about human behavior. I understand in those instances, for example, that it's not as personal as one might think. When people feel fearful and insecure, it is very easy for them, and it is their go-to, to blame, to find the parent to blame or the adult in charge, i.e. a prime minister, for example, to explain their insecurity. Now, it would be utopic and ignorant and uneducated to think that one person or one government can solve everybody's problems. It doesn't work that way. And I've seen it from all angles to know that, first of all, there are freaking good people at the helm right

now. And I really hope we don't take that for granted. That's it. I said it. And there are forces out there that might want to take that away. And our freedoms are at risk and our rights are at risk. So we have to be very discerning here. The other thing is, because I was doing that work of understanding human behavior, and because you said what happens at home when I treat kids who are dysregulated and sad and have repressed sadness and anger, well, when my kids did come back home, they had love. Not perfect. We're human beings, right? We're human beings. But man, even through the restructuring, even through difficult times, even if your family's being the target of daily constant accusations based on, you know, half truth, if not lies,

it is very difficult for children to be able to process that. Unless inside the home, there is a discernment, a perspective, and parents who are doing the work of understanding why this is happening and how to take perspective from it, how to grow from it to become better humans as well. Criticism, constructive criticism, I'm always open to it. Sometimes I have difficulty taking it in because I have this tendency to want to be perfect, which stems from shame from a long, long time ago. But I know that. And now I pick it up.

I'm like, oh, there we go. You're not accepting what they're saying because what, Sophie G? And then I'll just hold myself. It's okay, love. It's okay. Nobody's telling you you're not a good person. You're a great person. But here's where you can learn. So I think that because the kids and I and Justin have, you know, awkward, not fun conversations on truth, then we deconstruct the pain and we're willing to dig and look into it and it hurts. But you know

what? Emotions and human emotions are not dangerous. Panic is. Human emotions are a gift. But again, do we educate ourselves to know how to process them, navigate them and befriend them? Because that's the gift of life. On your deathbed, on your deathbed, when you're done, on your last breath, what will it be? What you accomplished? That you love. That I love enough.

For me, that's it. And the chaos is necessary to learn the calm. And what I hear you saying is that we all want everybody to be happy, I think. You know, we talked about this when we to be happy. I think, you know, we, we talked about this when we were speaking on the stage with, you know, Dr. Mate, I love your conversations with Gabor, because it's like, we, none of us are happy all the time. And when we give our kids a script for everything, right. You know, when I, when somebody brings, you know, they're, they're concerned about their child and they come to me and they say, can you see this kid? You know,

my, I'm really concerned about him. He's cutting, he's sad, he's whatever. And I say, okay, yeah, but I'd like to see you too. And they say, what do you, do you think I'm the problem? And I usually like say, no, of course not. You're the solution. You just went like this. No, no, you're the solution. And I think it's so interesting in this place that right now, sometimes in our own households, we feel completely and utterly dysregulated. We tend to do worse with our own children because that is where we end up. I'm so good with other people. I say this all the time. So if I wrote kids these days, a national bestseller, best fucking parenting book I've ever read. I wrote that bitch when I was regulated. If you watch me with my own personal children, you wouldn't buy the book because when we are regulated, we're amazing. And so I often speak to educators, teachers,

police officers. And I say, do you know, we Ram Dass said this, we are all just here walking each other home. Takes my breath away every time. And so all we need in this world, if I could simplify it to this, you know what, and I've read this over and over again in closer together, we just need to invest in the walkers, you and me doing the regulation. When I have a teacher that knows how holy her work is, when I have a police officer that understands how important her work is to sit with somebody who's emotionally dysregulated in this multiple layers of trauma and can say, tell me more. Come on in. It's OK.

At the same time of keeping you safe and not taking no shit. Like, I mean, I think it's those two things that have to always happen. This isn't about just fucking loving everybody, because we also have to say no, because that's where I think safety, you know know that's where we know the most of all of these people that you interviewed there's so many in here so many beautiful people i listen if you haven't read the book yet mark critch ariana huffington gabby bernstein like how do you even find these lists plunk how did you how i mean i know how but as i was reading the book i was was like, holy fuck. She did not. Yes, she did.

And then I checked. You know what I did? We didn't know each other when you wrote this, so likely I would have been in the footnotes. But I checked. I was like, please be Jodi Carrington. Please be Jodi Carrington. Please be. No Jodi Carrington.

It's fine. You know what? I'm going to have to write another one to have you in love. Yeah. Yeah. Let's write one together. Done. Done.

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Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Who really resonated with you the most in all of those interviews? Because I know you were probably only just took such excerpts of the wisdom. Tell me the physical feeling, the presence, the energy that you sort of felt with some of these amazing souls who just have so much to give to the world who, who just so you know, it took me a lot of courage to reach out to people. I hated it because yes, because I've never been just because I have, I know a lot of people who have a public profile, right? I don't believe in fame and celebrity. I think that's a wind

of illusion. And if you believe in that, you're completely disconnected from yourself. But I do admire some people out there who are trying to change the world and who inspire me on my path. But I don't want to bother them because I know that everybody wants a piece of them. So I was like, I can't call them. I can't call her. What is she's going to think? I'm like a suck up. No way. And then I'm like, Sophie, you are doing similar work as they are. And you will reach out and tell them their truth. And then I'm like, Sophie, you are doing similar work as they are and you will reach out and tell them their truth. And you know what? The response was beautiful. Did we have a couple of no's here and there because it didn't happen? Yes, of course. And that's fine. But I would tell you that all these people are peacemakers. The scientists that I interviewed

are peacemakers. They want to understand the brain so we can better regulate ourselves. People like Liz Plank, like Mark Critch, like David Livingstone Smith, who's an expert on dehumanization and who interviews people who have committed atrocities and who sits in front of them and realizes through his research that hate stems from a deep need for connection that was never nourished. So think about all these people who manifest their anger and try to blame one person. And although there are leaders out there and perpetrators and criminals, actually, but nobody's born a criminal. You become a criminal that are committing atrocities when you sit down with them to understand the damage their brains have been to been through the lack of emotional leadership within themselves. They are absolutely dysregulated.

You just see it in another light. It doesn't mean that it excuses you. Yeah, you don't condone the behavior. That's not ever, everybody, you know, I think that's where we get stuck sometimes. You condone the behavior. No, no, no, my friend. But you can't address what you don't acknowledge.

It's this idea of understanding why. You wrote this so beautifully in your book as well. You're like, you know, we can ask this question all the time. You know, and Bruce Perry says this too. You know, not what is wrong with you, but what happened to you? No bad part. Oh my God. Can, can we talk about Schwartz's work? No, no bad parts. We were raised with shame and guilt from day one, whether our parents shamed us or made us feel guilty or not. It's in our culture. It's in our

religions. It's fear-based. I'm doing a generalization here. There are some organizations that do not teach fear or shame or guilt, but it's really ingrained and it's also ingrained in the patriarchy and in femininity and how we define those two words. So I want to talk about CPR. And it's not what you think. It's not to reanimate. It's not mouth to mouth. Okay, Jodi? That's where I was going. Okay, good. Got it. What is it? CPR. It's too early. It's too early for you. You have copyright. So CPR, Dr. John Gray, who is a couple specialist, who is an angel with wings, who works out from California, calls CPR the catch, pause and release. He's in the relationships. Now we're talking about romantic love, which we put on a pedestal and it's making us sick because we can never kind of reach that pedestal in real life. Just the most important relationships in our lives with our kids, with our teachers,

with the people that we work closely to, the people that we live with that trigger us the easiest because they're the ones who are the most important in our lives, right? It's normal. We trigger each other and we shouldn't be afraid to trigger each other because the big emotions come up and then we learn from the big emotions. Okay. So CPR, catch, pause, release. Can you in your own life today, for example, or when you'll be listening to this, can you catch a moment where, I don't know, I'll take one example. You're getting angry. You feel fire coming up in your throat or your belly is getting agitated or you see your mind is getting really like cluttered and everything is stuck in there. Maybe that's what it feels like. Maybe it's something else. Fine. Can you catch it? Can you go, oh my, I'm getting angry right now. I can feel it here in

my body. Then pause. CPR. Catch. Pause. Can you pause? can you take five deep breaths through your nose and exhale it out from your mouth because I know you can read five emails in that pause can you pause for five long deep breaths and notice the power that you have instantly on your nervous system it's going to come down just with those five breaths. The fire might not be all gone. That's fine. You're human, but it will calm down. And then repair. Did I say release? It's repair. Catch, pause, repair. How do you repair the little ruptures in yourself and in your life at every moment. Do not wait. Do not say, I'll deal with this later. I have a call to make. No. Why did I get angry? Can I calm myself down?

And can I express my anger with non-angry words like telling somebody else to F off or, you know, accusing somebody? can I calm down just a little bit? Whether you're with your child and you, I just turned around because I asked my little one to go brush his teeth 15 times and he still hasn't done it. And although like, what is it, banana in your ear? Do I have to scream it? Right? I'm a parent. I make mistakes and I know the station or is it, okay, wait a second. You're really, you're resisting right now, brushing your teeth. And it's really irritating me because I asked you 15 times to do it. Love. Is there something that we, is there a compromise

that we can make, you know, and the number of times I've taken the face cloth instead, you know, I, so I think you're, this is so true. And I speak a lot about repair. One of the most important things you will ever do is apologize to your children. And I think what's critical about this, you know, the Gottmans have been doing this work for 45 years in, in, in the marital space. And they say the greatest predictor between couples that make it and couples that don't isn't how much you fight or how much sex you have or how much money you have is actually your capacity to repair. That is the number one predictor. And it is interesting because it requires emotional regulation,

which is so tricky. Yeah. Because you can't give that away if you haven't received it. If nobody has never looked you in the eyes and said, baby boy, look at me. I am so sorry. We don't have the capacity to give that away. It doesn't mean we don't feel it. It doesn't mean we don't have that capacity. It means nobody has shown us to do that. The obligation, obligation, responsibility. I often get stuck in this space of women, because guess who has a better emotional language, statistically speaking, those of us with vaginas, those who identify with a feminine energy. Is it the responsibility of women? Is it, how do we in this era of empowering finally women, we are really needing to teach also

the role of men, those who identify with a masculine. I mean, I have two sons and a daughter. The idea of having an emotional language at the table will be so critically important for us women because we're better at it. I think the future is female at the head of every leadership organization because we need an emotional language. Okay. How do we navigate this world with all of those responsibilities? We're still stuck as, you know, the primary caregivers with this gift we've always had that we now, the world needs now more than ever. How do we manage this as women? When you talk to a little child,

to soothe him, her, them, how do you talk to that child? Tell me, Jodi, how do you talk to the child? What happens? With my eyes, with proximity. And when I... Talk to me about the child? What happens? With my eyes. With proximity. And when I... Talk to me about the rhythm. What about the rhythm? It's slow and it's engaging.

Okay, there we go. So you're present. Okay. We live in a society where we don't think we're worthy of rest. Slowing down is evil or almost. This is dangerous. It's dangerous. It's dangerous. Yes. Because the message in our head is it's lazy. I mean, your father was so busy. I, you know, the idea of you in this book is so beautiful because it's like, we come, we're one generation away from this idea that if you slow down, you're lazy. The hustle culture is upon us. And the 40 hour work week is asinine because

we never shut it off. Our clients, our patients, our children, our parents have never had this much access to us. And then rewriting of the story around rest. I heard you in an interview, Sophie, this is probably the most important piece you've, well, you've said many things. They said, what is your one trick? I can't remember who asked you this. And you said, be silent. So tell me more about that because why is rest so critically important in this noisy world? So again, many angles to this answer, because we have dysregulated our systems from a stress perspective, from a sleep perspective, and from a light and food perspective. The way we nourish our bodies doesn't allow us to rest properly because we have

too much sugar, too much junk food. When we eat too much sugar and junk food, for example, we don't have the same level of energy. When we don't have the same level of energy, we don't really want to exercise. When we don't exercise and move, we don't sleep well. So that wheel of our mental health, that fabric of our lives is impaired at every kind of, you know, place on the wheel. So it's all bumpy and we're all over the place and we don't know how to get back up. It's not our fault. We haven't been taught. We're trying, we're trying hard. So if we don't think we're worthy of rest, and if we don't slow down, and I'm going to come to why women are so important here. And if we don't slow down, and if we don't slow down, and I'm going to come to why women are so important here,

and if we don't slow down, and if we don't take the time to be with people, including ourselves, it means that we're not being present. What is stress? Stress is a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment. Ooh, say that again.

That's what stress is in the bubble. Stress is a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment. Beautiful. As mothers, as women, plates are overflowing. All the emotional load of every single person in our family, trying to perform at work, trying to perform at the house not enough help how do we rest how do we even show our kids that we take the time to close our eyes and to be without movement it's another thing we're fucking up we can't

even rest well right because people are like just an, are you fucking kidding me? When, at what point do you think? And so you're like, I'm, I can't even rest good. I believe, I believe, and this is, this is fascinating, but I, and I see because I, I, I educate myself on this topic and I'm seeing people from all across the world with a lot of financial means and a lot of potential uniting. So we can better understand how to change micro habits in our lives. Micro habits. We all stand in line for our coffee in the morning. Don't tell me we can't have a micro habit of, you know, repairing our brain for five minutes.

It's all coming, by the way. It's already there. It's just that we have to make it more accessible to more people and not expensive exactly right it can't it can't cost more than an eight dollar cup of coffee kind of thing so because women are not being allowed so for maternity leave in canada like it's right six months to a year depending on what you choose and now we have paternal leave which is incredible and if you look at other parts of the world, just the United States, there's no serious paternal leave. I don't think there's anything. So how can we restructure the most important personal bubbles of our lives in our household if we don't even give the appropriate time for people to build families without having to struggle to be with

that family, to be in connection to that family, and to allow ourselves to actually learn from each other. So there's two types of curiosities that Dr. Judson Brewer in my book we talk about, and I'll tell you why it's important. So there's deprivation curiosity, which is like our ancestors, when there was something moving in the bush, they would go and look in case there was like, I don't know, a snake or something that could attack their family. Okay, we put that away. So then there's interest curiosity and Dr. Justin Rue, for example, is allowing people to quit smoking, smoking without any patches or anything by allowing them to be curious of when they're actually smoking a cigarette. Slowing it down.

So slowing it down. That's key. key slowing down is key to everything you talk about i talk about all the allies that are out there out there talking about if we don't slow down to do this work that's not it's it's not going to take shape and it won't become a micro habit so we have to become curious and we have to apologize to ourselves first for not showing up for ourselves. When I suffered from eating disorders and for years I was, you know, making myself binge and purge because I was trying to numb my thirst and need for emotional connection that I wasn't getting, people can find all the drugs that they want. Sex, music, TV, traveling, relationships, distraction, lust, whatever it is. We're all one trauma away from each other

and we're all one addiction away from each other. So in micro doses, we're not talking about psychedelics. So if we're able to apologize to ourselves, because there is a difference between an apology and a repair. Okay. So this is important because an apology is just, I'm sorry more accepting, not only of what happened, but of how you can move forward with yourself or with somebody else. I think that we're constantly judging each other and ourselves that we're just never good enough. It's never enough. It's never enough.

Whether it's the objects that we accumulate that don't not even bring us happiness because we're on this hedonistic treadmill that just creates emptiness inside ourselves. And at the end of the, of your life, will it be the cars that you accumulated or will it be the love that you showed and how you contributed to the world? It doesn't mean that we're not allowed to like beautiful things. I love beautiful things. I try to not attach to them and I try to not accumulate them too much. And I think that this whole work for women, unfortunately you are right. And it's not, it's not unfortunately, but you'll understand what I mean. You are right that unfortunately women have already begun the work of emotional attunement because we are biological mothers or because we mother,

you don't have to be a biological mother because our whole system is very much regulated by oxytocin and serotonin in our femininity, in our lives. And it's much more, and you know, those are relaxing hormones and the dopamine and the testosterone are very much more. And you know, those are relaxing hormones and the dopamine and the testosterone are very much linked. So the estrogen and the calming hormones are linked together. They work together and the dopamine and testosterone in men also are linked and work together. So they're not exclusive, but because they really work well together, it means that the dopamine highs that we get through, you know, performance and achievement. And this is not to say that women aren't achieving or performing quite the opposite.

But we do have a chemically induced and produced body that allows us for more attunement. Now, does this mean that men are not capable of being attuned? Absolutely not. It depends on how they were raised. So yes, unfortunately, we have to continue as women to educate and to emulate, to show how to do it to the men around us. Yes, we're going to have to be patient. And yes, we're going to have to love them even more, because that is where the true work is. And I'll always remember on International Women's Day a couple of years ago, I had said, oh, you know, in order to create more equality in our world, we have to hold on to the men in our lives that are our allies. We won't be able to create more

equality for women if we don't hold hands with them. And holding hands is metaphorical or whatever. And oh my God, did I slam. It's not the time to talk about that. I'm like, yes, it is. And today, you know, when I think about that, it's what everybody's talking about really, is that we have to, you know, feminism has to include everybody in order to create more equality for everybody. It's not our responsibility to fix. And I think this is the very clear distinction that I want now more than ever for women, those who identify as women, to understand that we can't tell anybody how to do what

we have to show them. And so we deserve long overdue, in fact, require a seat at the table, a voice in the hockey dressing room, a conversation when I can say to somebody, let's slow down for a second. Come here. Tell me more. Right. When we look at fortune 500 companies, less than 10% are led by women. Those most successful organizations moving forward right now, I promise you this because I do a lot of work in this burnout leadership space. And I always say this, please understand that if you have somebody who can withstand emotion, who has the capacity to name it, then you will tame it. And people will want to be a part of your organization, your system, your leadership. And if you want to short wire that the idea is

find people who have an emotional language. And statistically you want to short wire that, the idea is find people who have an emotional language. And statistically speaking in this moment, women have much deeper emotional languages than what we even still to this day, give our boys. We say this in this moment, boys, don't cry. You're skating like a girl. And it's in our bones because historically we've been in this place where we believe that to be true. We've come from places where we needed brute strength and infrastructure and all of those kinds of things that we're one generation away from that. And the idea now isn't to curse what came before us. It is to envelop what is necessary to reconnect to this world because we're losing the most beautiful reasons about why we're here, right? The soul.

What do you think about that? Well, you just said it. You said we're one generation away from that, except for that generation who can change it. And as Terry Real says in the book, in Closer Together, is that it takes one person from one generation to break a cycle that will benefit all other generations to come. And that is like, although, you know, trauma can spread like wildfire, so does positivity, healing, and consciousness. And when you talk about being happy, I have a problem, I think, with happiness, although I think sometimes I was born happy. I don't know what it is, but I'm a morning person. And when I wake up, even during bad days, I'm like, woohoo, what's next, right?

I'm here to be happy. We've been brainwashed that we were here to be happy. We came here to be conscious, to be discerning of our own behavior. We are a thinking species, a sensing species who can discern and take perspective from our own actions. That's the gift of a lifetime, but it's also the curse of a lifetime for the ones who don't. So I think that from a generational perspective, and it says, you know, in indigenous communities, I think they believe that it takes four generations to heal one trauma, you know, an intergenerational trauma. And we understand, and we're seeing now in our own country of what was caused and the harm that was caused to them and how long it's going to take to be able to heal that relationship. But I think that because it takes one person to be able to change the cycle in one household, what if it happened'll be fine, that human emotions are not dangerous, that they can rise and they have everything within themselves to understand them better

and become greater individuals as they grow up, because that's what it means to be mature. This is what emotional leadership is. What's emotional leadership? I keep putting those two words together, because I think they belong together and it's part of the maturity process of what it means to become an adult emotional leadership take in a breath when you're out of breath when you're anxious and you feel overwhelmed by life yes choosing to listen instead of talking and finding a solution personality which I want to do all the time because right that's all right Generally speaking, just ask me.

Exactly. Wanting to save people or whatever that is. If you want to save people, go read a book on narcissism. Can I, and I, and I'll wrap this up because I know I'm so grateful for your time. What I love the most about some of the work that you do is, is to this point, when we speak about, you know, if you're, wherever you're listening to this, our words in this moment, you are the most important person in the world. I am the most important person in my family system in this moment. Soph is the most important person and not because nobody else matters, but if we're not okay,

the people we lead and we love don't stand a chance. And one of the things you've said in terms of being in this place in your life, Sophie, as you're stepping into this next chapter, navigating co-parenting relationship with your children, you've said, and, and Gabor, I think taught us this, but you tell me where this came from. I chose authenticity over attachment. And because I, I love that phrase so much, it speaks to the point that we cannot do this holy work. We cannot break or heal generations. We cannot use our privilege in a way

if we don't put ourselves first. And it doesn't mean at the expense of other people. It means for the people we love the most. Choosing authenticity over attachment. Can you tell me what that means to you? That makes me cry. It's hard work. It means that you have to be brave.

It means you have to trust that if you do leap and you do make a decision that makes you uncomfortable, but somewhere deep inside of you, you know that it's the right thing to do and you go for it. That's choosing authenticity over attachment. This being said, we live in a society where marriage is success and divorce is failure. We are unfortunately giving an emotional heritage and a relational legacy that is dramatic, that is immature, and that is unevolved to our kids. Because life happens in between. And when you have tasted love, whatever form that takes, on your tongue, in your hands, in your eyesight, in presence, in friendship.

When you have tasted love, let go right away from the obsession we have with its longevity. Cherish what you have tasted because that is the sacred gifts of life. But we attach to it because we're so afraid that we're going to be rejected and left alone. Because when the tribe goes away, you're dying. It's death. It is not. It is not. We have to start raising our children and showing them as parents, as partners, as lovers, romantic or not, that what has been lived in love has the potential and the life and the opportunity to be celebrated. And the beauty that that is left in a relationship. The beauty of what it means to be connected, whether it changes or not, is sacred. And we have the duty to protect that through time. Through time.

That longevity is important. Yeah, is critical. And it starts with us. It starts with us. It does, but we need patience and we need to slow the, slow down. Exactly. Oh my goodness. Okay. Tell me, um, where do people find you? What is, what is next for Sophie G? What, um, as we promote this book, what's, what's next on the horizon for you? Many things. I have many projects in mind. I'm training my brain to deal

with uncertainty, which I don't like at all. It's so difficult. And, you know, like I have speaking engagements. I, you know, I have a, I'm represented by agents here in Canada, in the United States. So I'll be trying to meet as many people as possible to share this message and to empower people to know how to intervene in their own hearts and minds. And, you know, I've also, I have big projects I want, I want, but I feel like they're not only mine. Like later, we can talk you and I because I feel like I want to get people into this so that we can actually join forces to create machines, whether it's through AI or, you know, connection through humans that will change our micro habits every day. So we can actually fundamentally and efficiently deal with the frequent crisis that we're facing. I mean, and we're just means to that piece. And I think that, you know, when we create podcasts or you get the opportunity to speak on a stage, what you're building is community because nobody was ever meant to do this alone. And when we. Exactly.

Right. And when we pull people into that. So I am so excited to see what you're going to do with this. I think you're just getting started. I am so honored to just I can't wait to sit in the front row and watch you navigate and change this world because I think it's a gift and you're using it beautifully. So I thank you. Thank you for giving me your time for joining us here today. Uh, I, I know that everything where people can find you the book, all of those things are just going to be in the show notes. And yeah, so sophie.wanchudo.com, which is my website, close it together, which is the book. You can order it on Amazon. It will be delivered at your doorstep. You can go on my website to order it.

And I just want to say we didn't talk about play, but you are a fun, funny, hilarious, playful being. And I want you to know that I acknowledge that because when a mammal is sick, they start playing. They stop playing. It's the same with humans. When we stop playing, it's because something's off. Same for children.

And when we play, the brain feels safe. So whatever you do on your journey, continue to play. Continue to laugh. Because that's how we connect. And it doesn't have to be all serious and boring. We're creatures of fun. So come on. joy. And you know what I love the most? Joy is the most vulnerable emotion on the planet. When I sit with people and I say, tell me what emotion you're feeling when you're at your most vulnerable. And they say shame and fear and sadness.

Do you know what the most vulnerable is? Joy. When you're belly laughing with your babies, when you're dancing in your kitchen and I, in your presence, Sophie, people feel that. And so you just keep spreading the joy. I cannot wait to watch what you do in this world. And for the rest of you, thank you for being here with us today. I hope you're inspired to be with your people, to drop those shoulders and to change the world with us, because I'll tell you, this is the place to be because we're just buckle up world. We're coming. We love you. What? The Everyone Comes From Somewhere podcast is produced by the incredibly talented and handsome team at Snack Labs.

Mr. Brian Seaver, Mr. Taylor McGilvery, and the infamous Jeremy Saunders. The soundtracks that you hear at the beginning of every episode were created by Donovan Morgan. Our executive producer is Marty Piller. Our PR big shooters are Des Veneau and Barry Cohen. Our agent, my manager, Jeff Lowness from the Talent Bureau. And emotional support, of course, is provided by, relatively speaking, our children. For the record, I am a registered clinical psychologist in Alberta, Canada. The content

created and produced in this show is not intended as specific therapeutic advice. The intention of this podcast is to provide information, resources, education, and maybe even a little bit of hope. I'm going to go. Dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton.

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