Teaching The Value Of Brain Health At Work With Scott Warrick

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 to another episode of the Change Proof Podcast. I'm so happy to be your host, Adam Markel, and happy to be sitting in the seat today to introduce my conversation with Scott Warwick. Scott is a 3-time bestselling author, a national professional speaker, practicing employment lawyer, and a human resource professional with 40 years of hands-on experience and background in helping organizations to get where they want to be going. Which includes coaching, training managers and employees in his own unique, practical, and as you will see, entertaining style. Sit back and enjoy my conversation today with Scott Warwick. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the 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. Go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. All right, Scott. So, you're used to hearing your bio. I know you're a keynote speaker in addition to being an attorney and an author and all that. So, you get introduced here and there from time to time. My question to you is, what's one thing that is not a part of your standard bio or introduction that you would love for people to know about you?

that I was brain damaged, severe post-traumatic stress disorder. And so honestly, and I discovered it because my oldest son was born with Asperger's autism. At the time, at the turn of the century, we were told that that's just the way he is. That's the way he's wired. There's nothing you can do about it. And so make a long story short, I did a lot of my own research, discovered that was 100%, 180 degrees wrong. I'll tell you what I learned saved my life, as probably my son as well. And so it's completely taken over my practice of law and it's completely taken over my practice as a human resource consultant and all of my programs. And it's because everything you do involves your brain. I think everything bad that happens to you can be good. And that's just what I'm trying to do with this.

Yes. And there's an element of how we define resilience in our work in the world and our research and things of that sort. We are often confronted with different versions or different definitions even of what resilience is. And I think there's an element of resiliency in what you just said. I also just want to point out at the outset, you and I are, we are brothers of a sort and in more ways than just one. We have both been attorneys. You are still an attorney. I practiced for a few dozen years and my specialty as an attorney at the time was employment law. I did some real estate work as well. I did some bankruptcy work earlier on in my career, but it was the employment work that I did, primarily plaintiff's employment work, that really had me the most passionate, I would say, during my career, during that period of time in those disputes, which were often really tenaciously battled. I did a lot of litigation there, and these were cases that were not purely commercial In nature, commercial litigation, when employees and employers have disputes, those disputes tend to be ugly. Now, before we started recording our show today, you and I, you said something to me that I found fascinating. I really want to get back into that, which dovetails hopefully with what I just said. And that is, you said in every employee-employer dispute, there is some element of brain damage.

Yes, brain damage.

I'll toss that right back to you, Scott. Tell us what you mean by that.

Yeah. And understand where I get this from is I was severely, severely, severely brain damaged. Okay? I mean, massive post-traumatic stress disorder. And what makes my story a little different is that I am just, and it's probably some of my OCD that I had at the time, I did not believe what my psychiatrists were telling me. And so I started looking into the world of neuroscience. And one thing that I discovered through all of my research, and I mean, Literally a few thousand hours across the last 20-some years. I have a storage facility that is chock-full of my research. Okay, so no, I'm not a neurologist, but I have been able to completely 100% cure my OCD. Now, part of my research is to show what is the human brain supposed to look like in a nuclear SPECT scan. Now, these aren't MRIs. MRIs are X-rays on steroids, so they look at the structure. Okay, so, you know, anybody that watched football, they'll see that every football team will have someone get an MRI, oftentimes on their head, on their brain. That will look for tears and bleeds and things like this. It's structural. An MRI looks the same on a live person as a dead one. There's no difference. This is looking— a nuclear SPECT scan is looking at live human tissue. So, we can watch you think. And my brain was a mess, looked exactly like I just got back from the war. Okay. So, what's a normal brain look like? Well, it's getting good blood flow. It has hotspots to keep it moving, like the back of your brain here. You want this, your cerebellum, as hot as you can get it. Those are your automatic functions, your coordination, things like that. But the rest you want cool. And understand, I have to teach this to people who have no background in the law, no background in neurology, but if you understand how a car engine works, you understand how the human brain works. So you want it to run cool. You want the spark plugs to fire, but you want the rest to be cool. If it's running hot, you could be born with a brain that is inflamed and burning too hot, 15%, 20% hotter, or like most of us, like me, We damage it with our thoughts. Okay, so here's how most of us— and understand, 80 to 70% of everyone you know who has prescription drug coverage is on psychiatric medications. Now, I will never bash psychiatric medications, but do you ever wonder why somebody has a really good psychiatrist and they're getting the person on the right medications and they're working? Psychiatric medications don't cure. Anything. They calm the symptoms. It's like putting water on a fire. But people keep treating their brains like soccer balls. And the number one thing is the way we treat each other. You see, if your car won't start, that will release massive amounts of adrenaline and cortisol. That's fight or flight. And we've got the same brain that Fred Flintstone had thousands of years ago. But if another human being attacks you, You and I both know that that human being might kill us. We release 3 times the cortisol and adrenaline, 3 times. So guess what? 20% of that goes to your brain. You will damage your brain in a very short period of time. It's actually the first organ to go. If you ever have an upset stomach because of stress, your brain's already damaged. If you start to get hives, your brain's already damaged because 20% went to 2% of your brain. So I looked at my scans, and when I started coaching people, I discovered that a normal, healthy brain is Betty White. Betty White. I mean, great sense of humor. She was not hypersensitive. And let me tell you, hypersensitivity has been a diagnosable mental disorder for 20 years. It's not normal to be upset over everything that happens to you. Right. Or somebody who goes from 0 to 60 with their temper all the time. Those are hotspots. That's brain disorder. Every mental disorder is really brain damage. And I'll tell you, over the years, I'll have people, I'll talk to them about their diet, their exercise. See, all the things that we do to take care of our brain is within our grasp. So you want to drink half your weight in ounces in water every day. Okay. These are 32 ounces each, and I got 4 of them. Fill them up every day. And guess what? You drink all that water because you're flushing your brain. Diet, exercise, the people you hang around.

I love the analogy of the car. I think a lot of people don't exactly know how a car functions and operates, but we all get the idea that A car's supposed to run at a temperature that is not hot because if it runs over hot, we've seen what overheating in a car looks like. It's,

you

know, you're on the side of the road, it's 104 degrees outside and your radiator's steaming and you're waiting for AAA to show up. Lubrication is the thing that often is an issue in a car. If you ever let your oil get so low that it's not there, you know, you can seize your engine. People get those sort of pro ideas. Yeah. And certainly when it comes to that idea of the overheat and the radiator, the solution to that is antifreeze, it's coolant. So what I want to ask you is 2 things. First of all, I want to know what that lubrication or what that coolant for the brain is. I think you were just about to get into that anyway. So if the goal is to keep our brains cool, my question to you is, what kinds of things can people do to do that? You already said hydration, so drinking enough water throughout the day. What are some other things that hydrate or cool or lubricate the brain?

Yeah. And we talk about resilience, we talk about your brain, your body, your mental health. Those are all the same things. Your body is nothing but a transport system for your brain. You could lose your legs. Your body is still going to operate your brain. Okay? It's the most important thing you got. So 25% of everything you eat goes there. 20% of everything that's in your blood will go there to 2% of your body weight, your brain. So, if you want to talk about lubrication, what do we want to do to keep our brain healthy? Well, if I'm getting bullied at work, and understand this is one of our biggest things, we spend more time at work than anyplace else, 75 to 80%, maybe a low of 70%, depending on what study you look at, of all Americans say they are absolutely miserable at work, hate their job. Most people get a sick feeling in their gut just over the thought of going into that hellhole. That is killing you. It's 40% worse than smoking. Literally, chronic ongoing distress will kill you. 80% of all of our trips to the doctor's offices are from chronic ongoing distress. Okay? So having said that, I want to get good chemicals in my body. Stress management means I'm going to try to get the distress chemicals, which cortisol and adrenaline, And I'm going to try to replace them with eustress chemicals, E-U stress. What are those? Dopamine, the motivation drug, serotonin that combats depression, oxytocin, which is the happiness drug, telomerase, which actually is released in your body and surrounds your DNA and helps them from aging. You get younger, ergo Betty White. What did I do to repair my brain? Again, back to the water, change my diet entirely. Okay. It's best for everybody just to go ahead and eat like as if they were diabetic. Okay. Low carb, high protein. Okay. You want unsaturated fats, not saturated fats. So these people who go on a no-fat diet are killing themselves. I want unsaturated fat. My brain is largely fat. What else? I want to hang around good people. The studies on this are amazing. Our veterans who go and help other veterans at VA hospitals or clinics recover much faster from their PTSD. And it makes sense. What they're doing is it makes them feel good. What's it mean when you feel good? It's like when you get a massage. I try to get a massage every month. COVID threw a monkey wrench into that, but now we're getting past that. Think about this. I'm so relaxed. I just got this great massage. Okay? You're pulling out. And let's say you're pulling out of the parking lot and someone who did not get a massage cuts you off and almost hits your front end. Okay, now think about this. You're in a great mood. How do we react? Eh, he missed me. No big deal. Okay? Because you've got your mood in order. And what is that? Eustress chemicals. So if we stop thinking about mood and all this, let's think about chemicals. Hanging around good people, going to concerts, going and spending time with our friends, taking a walk, hobbies, those are all therapies. Meditation is a huge deal. And I stole everything that I know about meditation from the Navy SEALs. And I will tell you, when these guys can overcome— guys can overcome the fear of drowning, that's superhuman. And meditation helps you do that. So actually on my website, I give all kinds of free videos and it's in the book, all this stuff about how do you rebuild the brain. You gotta know what's damaging it. And mostly it's the people you're hanging around. And then what do you do to heal it? And if you call that lubrication, perfect.

Beautiful. So at the beginning you said that you experienced brain damage and it was a result of PTSD. Would you give us some sense of what that was about? What's the story? There. I'm always searching for the first domino in a situation. And so it sounds to me like that was your first domino.

Oh yeah. And I'll tell you, this is one of those things that I've learned. Mine actually goes all the way back to my childhood. Okay. Bullying and everything like this. And I will tell you, kids, and I mean anybody under the age of 25 is particularly susceptible to bullying because you ever notice babies when they're born, they can't walk. They then start to crawl. They then start to hobble a little bit, walk like drunks. Okay? Then they learn how to run. Well, what's happening is you've got all these bare wires all throughout your brain when you're born. They're just raw, just like raw wires in your walls. But you get something called the myelin sheath, and that is that fatty protective tissue. Once that gets covered, that neuron becomes 10 to 100 times more efficient. Doesn't scatter. Ergo, the term scatterbrain. Well, it moves up your brain and all the way over here, your frontal lobes, your logical brain doesn't fully form until you're 25, 26-year-old for a female, 27, 28-year-old for a guy. Okay. So a little kid like me, 4, 5, 6 years old, flooding with all this adrenaline and cortisol, just like Fred Flintstone, burning my brain. That was the beginning. Because kids are most susceptible to brain damage as children because they don't have that myelin sheath on there. Now we still get it as we get older.

Was that the result of bullying? So just to understand what we're talking about here, so you were 5 or 6 years old and beat up, and that's the damage we're talking about.

Absolutely. And I mean bullied. And here's one of the problems. I mean, literally getting beat up. When you're bullied and beaten up or threatened with beat— being beaten up. The danger is your gut keeps churning and you're releasing all that adrenaline and cortisol. 20% is going to go to your brain. You're always waiting for that next shoe to drop. That's why if somebody is— their gut is turning Sunday night thinking about going into that horrible workplace the next day, they need to think, I'm smoking 1.5 cigarettes. That's how bad that is for them. That is the absolute worst thing you can do for your body, chronic ongoing distress. So, oh yeah, mine goes back and then I made the mistake of going, becoming a lawyer. We had more lawyers kill themselves last year than ever before on record.

Yep.

Yeah.

It's one of those things people don't realize is that when it comes to suicidal ideation and substance abuse and ethical issues, lawyers rank among the top 2 or 3. Doctors are very high on the list as well. It is something to take note of. So you said you made the mistake of becoming a lawyer. In sort of a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. And by the way, I didn't close the loop on that. Not only you and I share that as a profession, but we also share the same barber.

Yeah, we do. We must be related in DNA somewhere because this is not a fashion choice, by the way.

So it is for me. Oh,

it is? Okay. No, I'm afraid not. My mother's side.

Yeah, I chose to be bald. I just— hair is overrated. So let me ask you something. You work in the employment law space. Has that been where your practice started? Did you evolve into that? Tell us a little bit about your choice of that area of practice.

Yeah, I mean, my whole career has been very unconventional in that I went into human resources, problem solving and things like this, communication. I mean, my undergrad was actually in communication. How do you address and resolve conflict? Organizational communication. I actually worked with a consultant at Procter& Gamble for a while. Fascinating organization that's very big into open communication. Wonderful place. And everything in the late '80s became so legalistic. Now, when I started in human resources, just to give you an idea, in lots of parts of the country, sexual harassment was legal. It was not illegal yet. There was no ADA. There was no FMLA. There were no I-9 forms. There was no COBRA. There was nothing. I mean, just basically Title VII and some pregnancy and age law out there. So I thought, well, if I'm going to know human resources, I've got to go back to law school. So in 1992, and I paid for all my degrees myself, I worked at Owens Corning Fiberglass to pay for my undergraduate degree. I was a glassblower union guy. I was a steel worker at an aluminum factory to pay for graduate school. And I worked all day as an HR guy and then went to law school at night. Destroyed my health, pretty much lived on Arby's 5-for-1 roast beef burgers. Okay. You can really steer with your knees pretty good when you're eating. It's amazing. Okay? When I graduated in 1996, I got an offer from a big law firm and it's like, that's the Mecca. It's like, oh, I never thought. That was a really good move to learn what you should never do. Oh my God. The partners I worked for, in my opinion, were not human. Oh my gosh. I was thrown into the middle of stuff. The disgusting things that I saw were absolute— I mean, it is like watching 10 wolves fight over the littlest lamb in the lot. I mean, I learned an awful lot about how the practice of law actually works in these big firms. And when I do get to speak to young law students or something like this, my advice is always the same. Go to work for a small or mid-sized firm because they will actually take the time to teach you things. I'll tell you, a lot of the things I saw at other big firms and things like this, if the public knew, these folks would not just be disbarred, they'd go to jail. Okay. So, but litigation, when I say lawyers, I mean litigators. Oh my God. I saw some of the most horrendous stuff. The attacks that you get on the phone from counsel. I've never lost a case. I am a nerd. Okay. One of the books I wrote is on employment law. And it is up to about 800 pages. And you know, it's not in print, it's digital. It's a hernia carrying this thing. Okay, so that's what I do, Legal Update every year. And I just finishing up stuff. And I'll look at all these cases. And I'll put them in there. So that 800-page book will grow by another 50 pages by 2024. But the stuff that I've seen with litigators, and a lot of litigators, I will tell you, the Alcoholism. You talk about lubrication, this is perfect. It is amazing to me. In Ohio, we've got something called OLAP, Ohio Legal Assistance Program. Well, that sounds good. Sounds like we're going to help lawyers. It's for all the alcoholics and drug addicts. And what's happening, this is just like with our soldiers, the brain's on fire. How did they burn their brain? They burned their brain by all this flooding, attack, attack, attack, attack. And so you're flooding your brain with all this cortisol and adrenaline. It's gasoline. And your brain actually feels like soft room temperature butter. It's extremely fragile, very fragile. It's the most fragile organ in your body, more than your skin. And you'd burn it to a crisp. Ergo, when I'm drinking Jack Daniel's, or if I'm snorting cocaine, that calms your brain down. It works. But you can't stay drunk or high all the time. Okay, so you see, we send people to— this drives me crazy. We send people to substance abuse or drug rehabilitation. And I went to go visit a friend of mine who was in drug rehab, and they had breakfast for him. And I'm like, oh, I can't believe this. They had pancakes, syrup, bacon. Why don't you just give them a .45? That is— you're dosing them up. It would've been better to give them a Snickers. At least a Snickers has peanuts in it. That is— you shouldn't be eating that crap. It's going to damage your brain. So you see what we do? Yeah. We get people off the drugs. We don't help the person with the mental disorder. So they get out. So I wonder why they relapse. Duh. Okay. So yeah, it's all part and parcel. So I've taken all these terrible experiences. And I'll tell you, I work with employers so that they don't get sued. And I'll tell you, an employer in 27 years who follows what I tell them to do, follows my processes, for coaching and warning and dealing with people. I've never had one sued. None of my clients ever have gotten sued.

You brought up that your PTSD, or, or let's say the earliest trauma in your life was bullying by other kids, right? Do you see bullying at work? How big an issue today is the equivalent of bullying? I know it's an extreme word, but I think it's appropriate. Where do you see bullying at work?

Okay, let me go to a very credible source, the EEOC. EEOC is buried. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for all the folks out there. So if you have some protected class issue, you can go to your state civil rights commission, or you can go to the national EEOC. They're 50,000 to 60,000 cases behind. Think about this and how easy it is. I can get my phone right here. I don't even have to go anywhere. I can go to the bathroom. And sit there and file a civil rights charge against my employer. Okay, it'll be 10, 11 months before they even get to you. Okay, so EEOC, I— and you will not hear me give a big hand to the federal government very often. Okay, I'm just a product of the '60s and the Vietnam War and all this stuff. But I will tell you right now, the EEOC on this harassment task force hit a home run. It was marvelous. And they said, we got to stop using lawyers for training because they bore the bejeebies out of you. And all they want to do is talk about remedy. We need to talk about prevention, like tolerance, like conflict resolution, all of these types of things. And what they said in there, the astonishing statistics, they said, how many women in today's workforce are actively watching Seeing sexual harassment or being sexually harassed? 94%. I'm like, whoa. Okay. I mean, that goes on and on. How many people have felt that they have been discriminated against because of their race? It's up in the 70s and 80s percent. Age? Up in the 60s percent. Okay. Sex? Probably one of the top ones. Okay. And then you go and look at Gallup poll, Gallup poll, Harris poll. They're all saying the same things between 70 to 75, maybe 80% of everybody feels like they're being bullied on a daily basis. Ergo, look at the harassment claims that are going to the EEOC and civil rights. So it is a major epidemic. And my message, well, I think I mentioned, I love doing this. Okay? And I'll tell you, when people hear my message, I know 30%, and think about this when you're at the grocery, 30% of everybody there has active post-traumatic stress disorder just like I did. They will kill you. You do not poke the bear. Have you noticed? Think of our national society. In 2018, we had 0.9 mass shootings in American workplaces every day. That's terrible. Today, we're 2. I mean, Maine was 1. Today— oh, I think I might have said workplace shootings. I just mean mass shootings. Our mental health was at critical mass in the first quarter of 2020, according to the American Psychological Association. Most of that is from our job because we spend so much time there. Most people hate their jobs, and that's according to everybody. And then we got COVID, and so we isolated. Now picture yourself, your isolation. You're not getting those eustress chemicals. You are isolated, and now you're going to worry about finances. It pushed us over the edge. Our mental health is a disaster. Here's my message, and this is why I go all over the country to safety conferences, It's really funny when I go to a safety conference, because I'm not there to talk about your fingers and toes. I'm not there to talk about your legs. I'm not there to talk about your life. Last year, Ohio had like 171 fatalities on the job. That's terrible. That's terrible. We had over 1,500 suicides of people of working age. And forget mental health, think brain. I've been to so many mental health conferences where nobody talks about this is what you're doing to destroy your brain. Here's what you need to do to fix it. And I promise you, here's my high. Every single time I do my session, I will save somebody's life. And I hear about it. Actually, it kind of does cause a bit of an issue because when I'm done, I'll get dozens of phone calls and emails for the next several weeks about people asking about the brain scans and asking about their lifestyle and things like this. And I say, hey, you can buy the book, or if you really want to do it quick, go to my website and listen to the free resources. I give this stuff away because this stuff saves lives now.

God, I see in the background, and not everybody is looking at this on YouTube, many people are just listening to it, but Healing the Human Brain, that is the title. Did I get that title correct? Yes. Yep.

Yeah.

Will you tell us in the last couple of minutes that we've got here a little bit about that book? Obviously, I think we have a sense of what inspired you to write it, but what's in that book that you may not have shared with us already?

Well, the main thing is I start— I thought about this. It took me 20 years to write it. 20 years. Okay. Because I will tell you, I had to be the guinea pig. My son was the guinea pig, and I had to make sure what I was saying was researched by— and I'm an attorney. So, I'll never say anything that I have not researched and I can't enter into evidence. It's about hope. If you have hope and get into my philosophy here, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, it's been picked by many groups as one of the top 10 books ever written. And Viktor Frankl is a psychologist who survived Dachau. How'd you do it? And he said, I always had the belief that there was meaning, that there was a reason I was going through. So, you see, when you have meaning, That gives you hope. And what that actually does is release eustress chemicals into your body, which he didn't know at the time, but he felt it. If you have hope, then you can survive just about anything, including Nazi concentration camps. And so I will hear from a lot of people, well, I'm going to try this. My husband's suicidal. I'm suicidal. What did you do? I said, right now, you can start doing this right now today. Start by drinking half your weight in ounces in water every day. Start by taking your multivitamin packets every day. That will start you on the right road. And then add something else later. I coach a lot of people, and I'll tell you, if someone comes to me to be coached, they are— I'm the only thing in between them and the door. They're about to get fired. They're all brain damaged. You're not going to have behavioral problems if you have a healthy brain. And I can relate. I had a damaged brain. My clients who stick with it all get better. They all get better because they drink their water, they start to sleep better. And a lot of them, hey, I'm getting bullied like this. It's very common that I will be coaching a problem child and my report back to the company is, well, you better do something about these supervisors because this is what's going on. It's taking control of your life. And I've heard people say, well, I can't quit my job. Do you want Alzheimer's? I will tell you, we just discovered in the last few years, massive amounts of cortisol in your body causes Alzheimer's cells to grow. You don't want that. If somebody smokes cigarettes for 40 years and then they got lung cancer, they shouldn't be surprised. We are now discovering that about Alzheimer's. Do you want to live on psychiatric medications for the rest of your life? Do you want to get Alzheimer's? No job is worth that. You got to find a place whose values match yours. So the book is all about hope. Michael, my son, was born with Asperger's autism. The kid that they said would probably never go to college graduated from Ohio State with honors, went to Roosevelt University. Picture this, a kid with autism. I drove In our van up to Chicago, let him out in the middle of the business district by the Buckingham, you know, Married... with Children fountain, okay? And left him there. He thrived, never looked back. Here's a kid that maneuvered all throughout Chicago, graduated with a 3.91 grade point average, and now wants to go on and get his doctorate. He was born that way. I developed it. So let's get back to resilience. You choose to be who you are. Don't you even tell me, oh, this is just the way. No, you choose to be that way. Because I tell you right now, if I hadn't learned this stuff, oh, I'd have killed myself by now. Because I used to think it was normal to sit around and think, hey, I think I'll try this this week. And you can always kill yourself next week.

So I've got one final question for you, Scott, and it dovetails, I think, quite well with what you just shared. And that is to ask you, in terms of your own resiliency, what's the one thing that you do on a ritual basis, whether it's daily or it's in some other frequency? But what's the one thing you would say, if you could just do this one thing, it has helped to create more resilience mentally, emotionally, physically, maybe even spiritually for you than almost anything else that you have tried or anything else that you have done? What is that?

I think one of the biggest things for everybody Is I love what I do. I love what I do. I don't get sick about coming into work because what am I going to do at work? I'm going to help somebody with their contracts so they can get a better job. I'm going to help somebody with one of my programs. I'm working on 4 different programs right now for 4 different clients in 4 different states. And guess what? I'm going to go in and I'm going to spend a whole day with these people. I'm going to teach them how to communicate. I'm going to teach them how to build a safe environment and how to heal their brain. I love doing that stuff. Probably 80% of my practice is— 75, 80% of my practice is actually training people how to live better lives. And that means tolerance. I'm not going to pick on you because you're Black, because you're white, because you disagreed with me. I'm going to teach tolerance. I'm going to teach brain health and how do we communicate so that we can live better lives. These are all life skills. And I I love it. Absolutely.

Indeed. My wife talks about life skills. She was a teacher for 18 years and still with our kids or with so many different contexts, that idea of learning life skills. You can learn life skills at any age, by the way. So this is not just about teaching a 10-year-old. This is about teaching ourselves something new at any age. And as you said, and I couldn't agree more, Scott, we are in charge of our destinies. And I know a lot of people are You may think that there's somebody else or something else that's in charge of how you feel and also what your life experience is. And I'll just say that from my standpoint, the greatest freedom we have is the freedom to think. Nobody can ever take that from us. There's nobody that's responsible for that for us, can't abdicate that responsibility. And ultimately it is the key to anything that we would call happiness or fulfillment It's just what you said, honestly, Scott. We have that ultimate freedom and that should give hope to anybody, especially somebody that doesn't find themselves that happy in this moment or has considered suicide, which many people have, or is experiencing intense anxiety or depression or anger and the feeling of just sort of being helpless in many situations. I think the best that we can hope for is honestly just in this moment, Recognize that the one thing we have ultimate control over is how we experience this moment. So you can experience from any of those sort of disempowered states. You can also just in the moment take a breath and feel gratitude even in the midst of an effed up situation or a lot of things that maybe you don't like or don't approve of or wish were different. But in this moment, we can simply choose to be grateful. In this moment, we could choose to feel hopeful in this moment. We can choose to change. Everything can happen for us in this moment if we simply decide that that's where we want to direct our focus and our attention and our thoughts. So Scott, it's been a pleasure to hear your philosophy today. I love the fact that your resilience ritual is to do work that you love, to do work that's fulfilling and meaningful. Very much appreciate your reference to Viktor Frankl and his work in the world, his meaning therapy work. Again, if you haven't read that book, if you haven't looked at it, I recommend that to our audience as well. Terrific. Scott, again, thanks so much for being on the show today. For our audience out there, we'd love it as always for you to provide your feedback, and you can do that by going to adamarkel.com/podcast. You will get more information where you can leave a comment or a question there. And of course, in the show notes, you'll find out more information about Scott, his work, his books, places that he is planning to be in terms of his speaking, ways that you can hire him to come and speak to your organization. purchase his book, all that good stuff as well. For the moment, I just want to wish everybody a beautiful and a blessed rest of your day, your evening, or wherever it is that this message has found you. So thank you again and ciao. Well, I so enjoyed that conversation with Scott Warwick. He's a unique guy. I mean, you could just tell his way of expressing himself is very animated and intense, born out of a lot of trauma and early childhood stress that he called PTSD. And I'm recalling his referring to his being bullied as a child, physically bullied, and obviously mentally and emotionally bullied at the same time, as being traumatic, as being something that created PTSD in him, and that he ultimately had to find his way out of. And now what's unique about Scott is that, as opposed to, I think, in many cases, people who have been bullied living in some respect in a way that is less, perhaps less than they're capable of, Still dealing with that trauma many years later. Many people find themselves in those situations. Many people have also become, in some respects, the aggressors in their lives because of that early disempowerment and wanting to take control and wanting to assert themselves, perhaps as a way to make up for that. You know, it's every variety on the spectrum of how it is that people have dealt with bullying. I think lots of people have been bullied. There hasn't been enough conversation about it, of course. Probably more of us would really find that we have those things in common. I know I was bullied as a child as well, and perhaps maybe less intensely than Scott had, but perhaps not. I know that for me, I'm still processing some of those events through the lens of hurt. I found myself at various stages of my life being a justice warrior like Scott. I became a lawyer, be able to defend people, to defend the underdog. to take on the bullies. And that was mostly my work as a lawyer for a couple of dozen years in that arena. But I also found that I, I was harboring a lot of anger and, and frankly, that I was easily angered. What I understand now is that much of that flows out of my having been hurt at a very impressionable time in my life when I was very young. And that feeling of hurt and not knowing how to process that, but making meaning of it as we do when we're 5 years old or 7 or 8 or 10 years old. And some of that meaning might have been that I'm not wanted or I'm not good enough or I'm not worthy or, or any of those kinds of things that kind of hurt. And what do you do about it? Well, you defend yourself. As a child, there's not much you can do to defend other than to avoid. But as you get older, you, you develop these more mechanistic ways to mentally and emotionally and even physically defend yourself, whether that's to become the kind of person that can't be bullied anymore. Physically speaking, whether that's to become someone who is immune on the mental side, that, and even on the emotional side, perhaps immune to those kind of attacks because you've developed that hard outer shell, perhaps that deal with those emotions, you suppress them, repress them, et cetera. Just not a place you want to go and, and all that kind of thing. I've had to revisit those things later in life because I found that they were coming up, but they were coming up in ways that I wouldn't have expected. And everything was drawing me back into that inquiry, drawing me back to the conversation with myself about what it was like to be a 5-year-old kid and being told, hey, you know, you're not a part of this little group. You're not wanted here, or whatever those other messages were at the time. And to come back and revisit it and look at it through this lens of hurt as a way to then go back and say, what was I feeling? And how do I feel today that is a reflection perhaps of some of those things that I felt then and was not then equipped to resolve, to deal with, to integrate, if you will. And so speaking to Scott today brought those things up for me. He talked a lot about brain health, brain hygiene, and inflammation and how our brains run hot. We could see that all around us in the world that we're living in right now, that people are very much inflamed, to use Scott's word, inflamed. And the idea here is to cool down, to literally cool our brains. And there's ways that we can cool our brains. And he provides some of those ideas about what he does today to lubricate, to cool down his brain using water, hydration, and other techniques. He talks about the difference between distress and eustress. And, and ultimately, distress is caused by these, that fight or flight chemicals that are produced, adrenaline, cortisol, et cetera, when we are in that fight or flight mode. And when we're doing that, we're actually damaging our brains. It's one thing to be in that mode when you're truly being chased and when you're threatened and when there's something that you do need to defend. But so much of our time these days is ruminating on things that are not actually life-threatening to us. In doing so, we're actually causing our brains to be inflamed. And that inflammation, if you will, is deteriorating the experience of living that we have at this moment, which is really all we've got. But it's also interfering with longevity. It's getting in the way of healthy brain activity as we get older. So the chance of Alzheimer's or other things are exacerbated and perhaps even brought on earlier by this perpetual inflammation of our brain. And ultimately, we have things that we can do to be conscious about that, consciously aware, make changes, and not have to just accept those things as something that we are powerless over. Similar to the way a person who's being bullied, whether they're bullied as a child or, or as we talked about today, bullied by their employer or bullied by a manager or bullied in any of those other contexts, that we are, in fact, quite a bit more powerful than we think. We have a lot more power and even control over those kinds of things than maybe we believe. So I enjoyed my conversation today with Scott. He is an interesting and a very— has an interesting perspective. He's not a run-of-the-mill speaker, author, or someone who's in the law profession to this day because he's still practicing there advising HR professionals and corporations in a way that I think is quite unique. So I've enjoyed it. I hope you've enjoyed this episode as well. And if you know somebody that would really benefit from listening to some of what we discussed today, please share that episode, share this episode with that person or those people. Also, we'd love to hear from you. So if you wanna leave a comment, you can go to adamarkel.com/podcast and leave your comment there. And we'd love for you to find out a little bit more about how you are doing stress management-wise. And the simplest way to do that is to go to rankmyresilience.com or resiliencerank.com. And in 3 minutes, you can get an assessment of your level of mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual wellbeing and resilience. Feel free to do that. It is 3 minutes. It's entirely free. It's our gift to you. I just say thank you again for supporting our podcast, for saying good things about it, for sharing it with others. We appreciate you being a part of this community. So thank you so very much.

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