Overcoming Fears By Rewiring Your Brain To Work For You With Dr. Rebecca Heiss – Replay

Fear of failure can hinder you from achieving great things in life. People that accept their mistakes and know how to practice the art of humility are bound to succeed and live better lives. This is one of the reasons why our guest believes that humility is important. Stress physiologist and keynote speaker, Dr. Rebecca Heiss, knows how to rewire our brains to work for us again. Traits like humility come from our brain and how we perceive things with our mindset. And our perspectives come from our ancestors, including the different human instincts that we possess. So listen to learn how to fear less and make room for more amazing things. In our conversation today, we discuss the importance of humility and the prat effect. People who are more humble and own their mistakes are liked more and seen with higher leadership potential. We talk about how our ancestors' way of thinking I'm going to die, I'm going to get kicked out of the tribe, can actually be harmful to us in the modern world. We spoke about the truth of being rational and also her new book, Instinct. We talked about how to trust our instincts and also the importance of pausing and being self-reflective. So sit back and enjoy this replay episode of my conversation with Dr. Rebecca Heiss. Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders Leaders across the globe have taken, and all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Adam Markel. Markel, and I am full-on loving my life this morning. Was just sharing with my guest, who I'll introduce to you guys in just a second, that I got to start my day having breakfast with our youngest daughter who goes to UCSD. And of course, like so many other students these days, she is off campus. And so having a virtual experience, but at full tuition, full prices, of course, you know. But the cool part about her being off campus is that off campus for her is La Jolla. And if you've ever been to La Jolla, La Jolla, California. It is an epically beautiful place. We went and had coffee and breakfast, and then we took a walk down to Cove, which is famous for a lot of things. It's a really beautiful spot, but they're— they just have a massive sea lion population in this little part of the world. And it's just so rad to see these sea lions at play. I mean, literally like children at play. They squawk, they fight, they crawl all over each other, and then they surf in the waves. Of course, They're looking to not get eaten by a great white that's out there as well. And they're just— and they smell like nobody's business. It was just a beautiful way to begin the day. And then to go from that and to say goodbye to our little Eden as she goes off and does her thing. And then I get to come back here and sit in the seat and engage in a conversation with the wonderful person I'm about to introduce you to. You know what? How could you get better than that? As an old buddy of mine would say, This does not suck, and it doesn't. So, uh, I want to introduce Rebecca Hice. And first of all, I'll just say this about her: she is an evolutionary biologist. We'll unpack what that means in just a second, but I have a feeling there's, uh, you know, the seals and the sea lions are no strangers to her. So she specializes in stress. Rebecca knows fear. She's dedicated her life to understanding why we behave in the bizarre, unproductive, and potentially damaging ways We do. I don't know about potentially. She has a new book that's coming out actually in April. It's available for preorder. It's called Instinct. I absolutely love, love, love that title. I love one-word titles for books anyway. And she's the founder and CEO of IQITY, the hottest new assessment tool for conducting continuous 360-degree reviews of yourself and your team. So, well, Rebecca, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for being with us.

Oh, thank you so much. And what a wonderful introduction. I, I so appreciate that. And I'm so glad actually that you stumbled over IQITY. Because, you know, in my head it makes so much sense. And this is a classic self-awareness thing, right? It's perfect. iQIYI, I'm cueing you in. Perfect. And then I get it on paper and somebody else looks at it and they're like, liquidity, is liquidity— you know, it works. So thank you for that opportunity.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. I once bought a URL. Like, I'm in the URL, like, sort of addicts club, you know, like an— I'm not like GoDaddy Anonymous.

Yeah, I'm with you. I think

there's a lot of us out there. I bought this URL some years ago that I thought was the coolest thing in the world, and I was there at the— Randy, my wife's there, and then my My son-in-law is there, and everybody was so excited. I go, "I just got Communify, communify.com." Are you kidding me? It's

yeah, I'd be thrilled.

The happy dance. I'm like, "This is a 25k URL. We're gonna build this out. It's amazing." And then we looked at it like I don't know a couple of days later, and somebody like I don't know one of our kids goes, "Dad, what did you buy?" I go, "Communify." And they go, "No, I think you bought Communinify." It's like. There was like an extra N or something in there. And so with a term like acuity, you just got to make sure you kind of double-check the spelling. And, you know, but yeah, Rebecca, this is a very impressive bio. What's one thing that's not a part of that introduction that you would love for people to know about you?

Oh, that's a great question. I like to surf. And part of the reason that I like to surf is I'm actually terrible at it. And it helps me Remember that failing is not a bad thing. That is something that I have struggled with my whole life, as I'm sure many of our listeners do, right? This idea of failing being this deep-seated fear of, oh my gosh, if I don't show my worth, if I don't show my value, if I'm not going to— starving? Really? I'm going to die? People aren't going to value me? This voice in my head goes off and it's a great way to remind myself Yeah, I'm pretty terrible at this and it's still fun. Yeah,

man. You know what? There's such an important humility, getting our dose, our healthy dose, almost like vitamin D from the sun. I'm asking you, do you think there's a healthy dose of humility that helps us?

Yeah, sure. This is what I should have said. I'm a nerd. That needs to go in my bio. Anytime there's an opportunity to find out, like, that's an interesting question, I go and I turn to the science. I'm like, I bet there's a solution to this. So yes, it turns out there's something called the Pratt effect, which literally says that the people that make mistakes, that are more humble about it, that own their mistakes, we like them more, we trust them more, and we see them with higher leadership potential. So I call it the Jennifer Lawrence effect because we love her, right? She's amazing. She's an incredible actress, and we see her humanity. Yeah. She stays very humble because she falls on the red carpet, and instead of getting up and trying to brush it off and like, oh, that didn't happen, She's very real about it. She's rolling around and laughing, and we like her more for it. I think that dose of humility is not only helpful, but actually really, really important for us all.

Do you think it builds our— I don't want to say immunity, but the idea somehow that we are driven by fear in really subtle ways? There's ways that we know when we're driven by fear because we can feel it in our body. Heart palpitations, the stomach churning, but fear is driving us on a more subtle level. And I know that this is your bag, so I want to ask you, is that a true statement? And what does that actually look like?

It's such a true statement. And you started to go down that road. I got really excited. I was like, oh my gosh, we're talking about stress inoculation already, which is literally the thing, right? It's the doses of humility that we get that allow us to say, oh man, I was really stressed out because I had to prove myself today and I failed epically. Oh, And I didn't die, which our brain in the back of our heads all the time is saying, you're going to get kicked out of the tribe. They're going to reject you. You're a failure. You're nothing. And all of these things that actually those stories did help our ancestors to survive because you can't fail, you die in the ancestral environment. But today, those stories aren't actually helpful. In fact, most of them are fairly harmful. And so the idea of inoculating yourself by having those doses of— by failing and saying, oh, Didn't die today by seeking discomfort, right? And say, "Huh, you know that person rejected me and I'm still here to tell the tale." Oh my God!

Yeah. Or as my daughter Eden would say, "Oh my God!"

Oh,

oh my God! I am still alive.

All right.

We we

I mean right.

We work with people. We work with people on something that they're they're terrified of. Often, which is speaking in public. And I know you're a keynote speaker, so you've gotten over your— or you are okay with, have the humility to step out and deal with your fear. Yeah. A lot of people, it stops them entirely. And, and so in particular, we work with folks that want to get on a TED stage, which really brings up quite a bit of fear of 2 things. One is that they don't have anything worthwhile saying, like, what's my whole message? Is that even Like worth anybody's time. And then the whole idea of what it would look like to stand up there and deliver it, you know, is terrifying. And as we work people through those early stages, often what we'll say is what you just said, that when they deliver their talk, even to a small audience, like the audience that we curate for them, they go, okay, great. So now what's the feedback? You know, what worked for me? What didn't work for me? What could be done differently? But mostly, are you like, check yourself, check your pulse. Are you still alive? Oh my God, you didn't die.

Yeah. Yeah, but the fear is relevant. It's very real because again, for our ancestors, if you got kicked out of the tribe, if you did a bad job and you were rejected, you're dead. You don't survive without your community, without your people. So that fear, I just want to acknowledge for people, that's real and it is important. A little bit of stress, if you didn't care at all, you stepped on stage and you're like, I'm going to blow it, whatever, that's not good either. That doesn't help your performance. So we talk about this inverse U-shape or the normal curve shape of stress and performance. That if you have no stress, you're not going to perform very well. You're a trust fund baby, everything is perfect in your world, you don't have to do anything, but you have that deadline or you have something that's due on Friday and suddenly you're like, oh, I need to get my butt in gear and do this thing. Now your performance increases. The problem is most people slip down the other side of that curve, and they start to have this stress response and it actually inhibits their ability to get the work done that they want to get done or get on stage and have a great performance. And so much of that exists right here. It's just the story that our brain is telling.

Yeah. That part of us that says we have to be a part of the herd. Anytime we're outside the herd, we are vulnerable in a way that is, as you say, sort of prehistoric. And so I guess the question is, how much does rationality play into this, into our decisions about should fear stop me or should fear actually inspire me?

Yeah. So I mean, when people ask me about being rational, I have to say, well, are any of us actually rational? Like, do you know what the number one fear is? Just put me on the spot.

I would say public speaking, but maybe it's something other than that. I'm guessing

it's snakes.

It's snakes.

Snakes, right? Like, that is, that is so irrational. That is mind-boggling. Like, in its irrationality, you know, you are literally 9 times more likely to get struck by lightning than to die.

Who live in Manhattan, right? Their fear, right?

Right.

It's all the lawyers.

Right. I

should have said all the bankers. I'm sorry. I'm

sorry. We can go there, actually.

We can go there. I know we can.

Yeah. It is really funny because we all think that we are cognizant, conscious thinking beings. And I'd say we have the capacity to be. We have this conscious higher mind, if you will. But so much of our life takes place in the subconscious brain. That 99.9999999% of the time we're operating from those instincts, those shortcuts that our brain has developed, again, to keep us alive, but today that simply are irrelevant. Are

they rational? I'm so glad you brought this back, Rebecca. This concept of instincts, which I want to get into, and I want to— are these instincts based on rational? Are they rational or are they irrational? What's your position?

I think they're rational, but not for the modern environment. So they were rational for our ancestors. When you look at the fears that we actually have, it's forward-eye-facing predators, right? It's snakes and tigers and bears and sharks and people. Oh my gosh. And we died of those things over 70% of the time back in the ancestral times. Now, unfortunately, our brains haven't evolved to keep pace with technology and populations and all the ways that the environment has changed. And so despite the fact that most of us are living in a much more safe, much more abundant environment than any of our ancestors ever would, our brains are still going, could be a snake, could be a tiger, could be a bear. And they're responding to keep us alive, like survival, rather than thriving. So that ping that comes in from our email or from our— we're going, oh, it could be a tiger, it might be a snake, it could be that thing that I have to pay attention to. And no, it's not. It's okay. We're operating so much of the time on this massive influx of stress that we haven't consciously taken the time to say, I don't need to look at that right now. That's a caged tiger. It's not actually going to jump out and kill me.

Right. So is the through line, because again, this is sort of that part of my training that is constantly looking for that one idea or the spine, let's say. So what is the through line for the book Instinct? Is there one sort of solid idea that you're building and making the case and the argument for throughout the book?

Yeah, it's our brains aren't built for this world.

Wow.

They're not built for this world. Now, we have the opportunity to tweak them, right? To recognize, to bring the subconscious to consciousness and say, huh, I have a choice. I can operate from these subconscious processes, or I can retrain my brain for the world that it's actually living in.

So is it fair to say that the evolution of the brain hasn't actually caught up with Let's call it the technological world that we live in. Is that—

Very fair. Yeah, very fair. I mean, if you think about the last 200 years, you know, 200 years of technology, well, that's 1, 2 if you're generous, generations of human brains. You know how many generations it takes to have a single potential evolutionary breakthrough in something like a brain or a back or a knee or, I mean, all the things that fail us? We're really poorly designed, right?

1,000 years? I'm like, here, I'm a student. I'm being— I'm asking.

Yeah.

Is it 1,000 years?

Yeah, probably about 1,000, 2,000, 3,000-ish. It depends. There's so many factors there, right? It depends on mutation rate and, you know, how big the selective force is. And the reality is, as humans, we've removed ourselves from natural selection, right? We're not getting weeded out because we can't— I like to pick on people with eyeglasses. My partner wears eyeglasses and I pick on them all the time. Yeah, see? And I think like, you'd be dead. Like, you don't—

Can't see, can't see that predator. You're done. You're toast.

But not anymore, right? So we've actually weeded ourselves out of this idea of being naturally selected against or for. And so the only thing that actually drives evolution today is massive events like viruses, you know, which, which aren't exactly changing our brains for technology or productivity or any of the things that we really want them to change our brains for.

What about— because you use the word cognizant and conscious— is it possible that our brains are, from a consciousness standpoint, or an ability to tune into consciousness or be more aware, awake, cognizant, etc., that that's the evolution that's taking place now that's different than an evolutionary development that would have kept sort of had us no longer I don't know, crawling on the ground or hunting from the trees or things like that?

You know, I'd like to say yes, but I'm not sure that I can. Now listen, as humans, we have like— we've evolved that capacity. We have that capacity. It sits right here, right? It's the gift of human evolution that we have this huge frontal lobe where we can make those conscious choices. The problem is, especially with modern technology, we're not. We're being bombarded with with input. So the number that I've seen repeated is 400 billion bits of information every single second. We can only consciously process about 2,000 bits per second. So

that's the delta there is a shit ton.

It is an absolute shit ton that is just going immediately back to that subconscious, like instinct-driven subconscious survival mode.

And we're talking about midbrain when you say that instinct is that this is medulla, this is Yeah.

So, I mean, if you talk to neurologists, they're very careful not to say, look, this part of the brain does this and that part of the brain does that, because there's no real absolute separation. But yeah, the older part of the brain.

I'm glad to hear that because it seems like there's a lot of different places that get pointed to. But we're saying overall that this is sort of, as you say, the ancestral programming is still so— that those grooves are so deep in us to this day. That they do what? How does this affect the average person living in the time of COVID right now?

Where do I begin?

I know it's a big question.

We can start with— I mean, there's 7 instincts that I cover in the book, right? Everything from survival, which is that very basic, I have to survive, and time becomes the biggest pressure. And I'm so nervous all the time that I'm being flooded with cortisol and I'm not activating my conscious mind to think logically about Is it actually dangerous for me to do this? Well, what information do I have? Right. The second— well, sex is probably not relevant in this exact instance when you're asking me about COVID but variety, our instinct to seek variety. So we want a variety of information sources. We want a variety of people coming in and telling us, but only certain people, only the people that we belong with, which is our fourth instinct, right? Belonging. I have to stay in the herd. I trust. Yeah. And then the other, the fear of the other people who disagree with me, who don't look like me. Well, They were real threats, right? They came over to kill us. So now in the time of COVID we've definitely polarized and said, well, those people, we don't trust them because they're in this tribe and I belong over here. So now you've had this increased tribalism. Our instincts undermine everything that we're doing, all the things that we're thinking about or not thinking about. And I think in particular, when we're talking about a virus, something we can't see, something that's not tangible, something that we're talking about in In a way that's like, well, there's how many hundreds of thousands of people have died of this? Okay, well, it's now a statistic. We don't see it up close and personal in the kind of immediate return that we would see if it was, you know, our tribe member next to us was attacked by a lion, right? That's a very real tangible thing that I can say, oh, lions, they're dangerous. So COVID is hard, you know, living and adjusting with viruses, wrapping our brains around that. It's a struggle.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. The best piece of advice that I attribute to my dad through my young, young years was to say, trust your instincts. So he said that to me a long time ago. I've passed that on to our kids. I've always really, not always believed it, but sort of into my 30s, I started realizing what good advice that actually was. And if I'd only trusted my instincts at different points along the way, I could look back and go, oh, I could see how that situation would've gone differently. So my question to you, and this is not an easy one either, is Are you saying that we can't trust our instincts because our instincts are really kind of wrapped up in a whole series of things that are firing? You know, all those neurons that are firing are pre— you know, they're sort of ancestral in nature. And what we're looking for is real data and recon.

Yeah, it's a great question.

Relevant today. Yeah.

It's a great question. And the short answer is yes and, right? Yes and. It's— our bodies are designed, right, to You should trust your instincts. You're going to feel that little flutter that you need to pay attention to that because your body's designed for understanding and seeing these subtle things that we're not necessarily fully cognizant of or in touch with our emotion or physiological responsible enough to say, oh, that's what's happening. I need to do this. So much of that is beneath the surface of our conscious minds. And yeah, you do need to pay attention to that. And you also need to pay attention to why you're having that response. So is it relevant still in today's society? A lot of people will say, the easy one is when talking about biases, right? Like, well, I'm not biased. I don't have any biases. And the test I give people is, okay, cool. All right, I want you to picture a housekeeper. And did you picture a woman? Was she Hispanic? Right? Or picture a felon or picture a CEO. And again, that doesn't make us bad people, right? But there are associations, there's links that our brain creates to process all the information that's coming at us rapidly. So we quickly create associations and that's fine. There's nothing inherently bad about that. And if some of the associations we have are, you know, my people good, those people bad, then we're going to have these internal responses, this instinct to say, oh, I don't think I should trust that person, or, oh, I don't think— I think I'll go with that instead of this. Or so, depending upon the context, yeah, trust your instinct and question it.

Yeah, interesting. And then we won't even get into the part of all of that, that communication, as you said, all the, the information that's flooding us all the time is also manipulative.

Oh, yeah.

To the extent that people that understand how we are wired, so to speak, will also be able to determine from an instinct level how somebody is going to respond to certain kinds of information put in front of them.

Yeah.

Because what we're doing is looking at the other as other, for example, right? These tribes. Then in a political context or in the context of something like a virus, It's— we're basically seeing people squirting lighter fluid on our instinct to see others as other.

So true. It's so true. And, you know, I want to kind of return to— unless you want to go down that path, and I'm happy to go down that path— but I want to return to something else you said too about, you know, not knowing exactly why you're feeling what you're feeling, but you should just trust your gut kind of thing. You know, often I'm obviously a scientist and I trust science, and I have to go back to my original training, which is as an ornithologist. So I'm a bird nerd. And one of the best things that I learned in studying birds is that they see direction. So they actually see north and south. They see that as different colors, essentially, and they can see infrared. So they have all of these senses that you and I have no bearing of. And so, so often I think to myself, well, what am I missing? It's just not something that my body can measure because I'm human. What would a bird sense? Maybe I don't know why I'm feeling this, but I probably still need to trust it because there's That I haven't been able to measure yet, that's still valid.

Yeah. So being really present with how it is you're feeling is, to me anyway, that's my best instrument for measuring my instinct in the moment, is just to check in that way. And we all know that when things are— when the pace is fast or other things are sort of heightening the moment, it's difficult to just sort of take a breath and really check in.

Yeah.

But that's a discipline, and that's a higher-level skill in terms of everything from being a parent to being a leader of a company or leading your own life at a bare minimum. And I guess I could pause there. It's more of a statement than it is anything else.

It's a great place to pause though. That's— we, we talked right from the start about pausing and how valuable that is.

Yeah. Let's go to that because I think that might have actually been before we started recording. So that's really great. So yeah, tell me, what does the concept of pausing mean or do in the context of your work?

Yeah. So I'm a big fan of the pause because to me, life is increasingly coming at us faster and faster and faster and faster. And so often what we do is we fetch water with buckets that have holes in it, right? Instead of pausing long enough to say, huh, what seems to be the problem here? And often the issue is we're watching others get ahead, right? I'm putting that in air quotes for those of you that are listening, just get ahead of us because they're still filling this imaginary pool with their buckets that are leaking all over the place. But if we can take long enough time to pause, to actually slow down, to say, huh, and be self-reflective and going, what seems to be the problem here? Then we can start to patch our own buckets, to realize, huh, maybe running as fast as I can, as hard as I can, isn't actually the most productive thing I can be doing. In fact, if I slow down and I take in some, I don't know, what's that in the air? Oh, freshly baked bread. How lovely. And I start recording all of this in my head, Time actually expands. Our relative sense of time increases. So the pause is huge for so many reasons, even just snapping us out of that stressed-out mode of busy, staying locked into that vicious cycle of being busy all the time and saying, I don't have time to figure out what I value. I got to get this done. That single breath actually signals to the rest of our body, because you can't control your heart rate, you can't control the hormones that are being pumped through your body. The only thing you have control over is That single pause, and that helps regulate everything else.

Visual I got from that of somebody filling up that leaking bucket is so powerful because a lot of people are exhausted. Exhaustion is sort of an epidemic. I think in part it's because people are leaking their energy in so many ways. That bucket can be a metaphor for so many things. They're constantly rushing to fill it with money. You know, everybody's after the money and filling the bucket with the money. But meanwhile, they've got all these holes in the bucket, right? They don't manage their money well. They do any number of other things to sabotage themselves financially. And then they wonder why both they are— I don't love the word broke. Let's say they're just not where they want to be financially and they're exhausted, which ultimately can feel like helpless and feel like hopeless at a certain point when you're that tired and you're just Recognizing that you're like that rat on the wheel, you're just running and running and running, but you're not getting anywhere. That to me is that visual of filling up, rushing to fill up a bucket that has holes in it. I can't remember the reference, but it is in an ancient text, almost like the Inferno, like Dante's Inferno, where you're talking about what purgatory might be.

Yeah.

That's what purgatory would be, that you'd be consigned to a lifetime of filling a bucket We're attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

I'm trying to remember the— it was Greek mythology, maybe Sisyphus. It is.

It's

something like pushing the rock

up

all day, and at the end of the day, it rolls back.

Rolls back down.

How exhausting, how defeating. And what story do you end up telling yourself? I'm a failure. I can't get anywhere. And then your brain believes the story you tell it because, well, we really like to be right. And that's another instinct is self-deceit. So our brains will actually fool us into believing things that aren't true so long as we can be right.

Well, right is survival, right? Right is life. Wrong is death. You're wrong, you die. That's, you know, like—

You've got it. It's really, you know, it's not brain science. I tell people this all the time. This is really simple.

It involves the brain, but it's not actually brain science. It's brain chemistry.

Yeah, our brain just thinks it's gonna die all the time.

It just thinks, right, everything nets out to that's gonna kill me.

I tell people life, truly, all behaviors in life, you know, whether you're out going to buy your new Lamborghini, or you're buying cosmetics, or all of life boils down to sex and survival. It's either, is that person going to kill me? Or, ooh, could I mate with that person? Like, that's it.

We continue this piece, or am I the end of the line? Oh my gosh.

It's really sad, but we're pretty big creatures.

Rebecca, I have one last question for you, which I ask every guest, and that is to define resilience. What does it look like to you?

Putting the gloves back on. I mean, resilience is being knocked down and staying down. That pause is really important. I think a lot of people talk about, you get knocked down, you get back up. But I think what gets missed in resilience is the time spent just laid flat out on your back and processing and thinking about Okay, this is what happened. This is how I've failed. This is what I've learned from that failure, because it's easy to just latch onto the failure or pop back up and do the same thing again. Literally, as the bucket drips out.

The Rocky model.

The Rocky model. Yeah, just pop back up. Resilience is having the time and the wherewithal and the consciousness to stay down for a bit and then get back up differently.

That is the most aligned answer to that question for me. For our— what we do in our work, and we speak on that topic a lot and do a lot of research, that is literally the answer that is most in alignment with what we believe about that topic. Because so many people do think it's bouncing back. We say bouncing forward, but the concept of bouncing forward involves what you just said, taking that pause. In fact, I'll do a little selfless or selfish self-promotion to just sort of say— That's right. Yeah, we got a book coming out in August called Change Proof: Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience. That book is all about what you've just been sharing with us, that how do you become change-proof, immune, in other words, or inoculated from the virus of fear, and ultimately for what purpose? And so you've just given us, I think, one of the best definitions of what it looks like to be resilient, to take the hit and not immediately bounce up to take another one, but to, as you say, to pause, to be able to ask questions. Right. And then choose to take another, maybe similar path, but it could be something entirely different because of what you've learned. So that pause, ask, choose is the model that we're going to share in that book. And you just—

I'm so excited for this book. It sounds amazing.

It sounds amazing. Well, you just articulated such an important part of that. Thank you.

Mo, my pleasure. Honestly, I had the pleasure of talking with a Navy SEAL yesterday, just yesterday, In what you were just describing, I was thinking about what he said. So I got to give a shout out to Jonathan Kleck. I think I got that right. Jonathan Kleck, Navy SEAL, he's talking about resilience and he's talking about the idea that if you ask somebody to just go out and swim 20 miles, how many of you can just go swim 20 miles? And you look around, nobody's raising their hand. But if you say, hey, if I just drive you out to the middle of the ocean, drop you 20 miles out and say, shore's there, how many of you do it? He says, resilience, the idea of inoculating yourself against fear is recognizing that you're swimming along the shore, For 20 miles. You're right along the shore. You can always stand up, but it's the idea that you're looking out towards the ocean. You're always looking and saying, I got ocean, I got to keep swimming. I got to keep going. I love that analogy so much because it really is that choice of saying, well, what are my options here? What are my options? I can look that way and I can stand up. I can always stand up. I can always pivot. I can always adjust, or I can look at the ocean and say, Gotta keep swimming,

right? And you can float too.

Endless options.

Right. Recharge your battery for the next— yeah. And it's funny too, because the Navy SEALs have a mantra, because I've had a couple of Navy SEALs on this show too, which is cool. And I don't know Jonathan, but it's this idea of embracing the suck.

That's right. That's

their

thing. Yeah. Bite the lemon. Don't sugarcoat it. Just bite it.

Rebecca, what a blast to have you on the show. And in our show notes, of course, you guys will be able to find more about the The new book and the preorder of Instinct, Rebecca Heiss. Did I say that right? Heiss is correct?

You did. Adam, you got it. Very good.

Didn't even ask you before, so I apologize for not doing that. But rebeccahice.com and more information about the new book is available in the show notes. If you know somebody that would love this episode, please refer them to it, share it, leave a comment for us at adamarkel.com/podcast. And that can be a comment for me or for Rebecca. We'll get that question to her as well. But it has been a blast. Thank you so much for being a guest on the show today.

Thank you. And thanks for the great work that you're doing.

Appreciate it. Do you love your life?

I love my

life. Totally get that.

It does not suck. It does not suck.

No. Every day we are blessed to be here, regardless of the circumstances, is a day to love your life. And I say that only because of what, you know, what you said earlier. Some days are going to be knockdown days for us. We're going to get knocked down some days. And can you still, as you're lying on the ground, you're sort of looking up and gathering yourself and saying, hey, I'm just going to take Rebecca's advice here and pause. Just chill out on the canvas for a minute. Can that be an I love my life moment just as easily as one of those moments where, I don't know, you're doing the happy dance, the victory dance in the ring? What's really the difference between those 2 things but for what we tell ourselves about it and how we feel it?

Not permanent, not pervasive, not personal.

Right.

Just is.

Just is. Yeah. So cool. Thank you so much for being here. And everybody have a beautiful rest of your day wherever you are. We hope you love your life.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. /becomechangeprueb.