The Importance Of Humility And Trusting Your Instincts With Dr. Rebecca Heiss

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 Barkel and his inspiring guest explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change.

Proof. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. I am your host, Adam Markell, and I am full on loving my life. This morning was just sharing with my guest, who I will 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, 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 never been to La Jolla, La Jolla, California, it is an epically beautiful place. We went, had coffee and breakfast, and then we took a walk down to the COVID which is famous for a lot of things. It's a really beautiful spot, but they just have a massive sea lion population in this little part of. Part of the world. And it's. 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. Like nobody's business. And it was just. 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 a wonderful person I'm about to introduce you to. How could you get better than that? As an old buddy of mine would say, this does not suck. And it doesn't. So I want to introduce Rebecca Heiss. 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, 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 pre order. 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. I always in Q.

You nailed it. You nailed it.

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.

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

I once bought a URL. Like I'm in the URL, like sort of addicts club, you know, like 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, Randy, my wife's there and then 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.

Happy dance. I'm like, this is a 25k URL. We're going to 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 community. And they go, no, I think you bought Communionify. It's like there was like an extra N or something in there. So yeah, with a term like iqity, 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, 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. And that is something that I have struggled with my whole life as I'm sure many of Our listeners do, right? That 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 good at surfing, really, like, I'm gonna die, people aren't gonna value me. This, this voice in my head goes off and I. It's a great way to remind myself, yeah, I'm pretty terrible at this. And it's still fun. Yeah.

Yeah, man. I. You know what? It's. There's. There's such an important humility, getting our dose, our healthy dose, like, 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. I mean, there's. Okay, so I'm. This is what I should have said. I'm a nerd, right? That needs to go in my bio. So I, 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, you know, we love her, right? She's amazing. She's an incredible actress. And we see her humanity. She stays very humble because she falls on the red carpet and instead of getting up and trying to brush it off, I'm like, oh, that didn't happen. She's very real about it. She's rolling around and laughing, and we'd like her more for it. So I think that 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 sort of subtle ways. I mean, there's ways that we know when we're driven by fear because we can feel it in our body. I mean, the heart palpitations, the stomach churning, but fear is driving us on a more subtle level. And I know that you're. This is your. 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.

Right.

Which in the back of our heads all the time is saying, you know, 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, like, inoculating yourself by having those doses of my 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 work with people. We work with people on something that they're. They're terrified of, often, which is speaking in public. 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. A lot. A lot of people, it stops them entirely. 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 two 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? What worked for me, what didn't work for me, what could be done differently? But mostly, like, check yourself, check your pulse. Are you still alive? Oh, my God, you didn't die.

Yeah, yeah. But the fear is relevant. Like, it's very real. Because again, for our ancestors, if you got kicked out of the tribe, like, if you did a bad job and you were rejected, you're dead. Like, 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, you know, 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. Right. That doesn't help your performance. So we talk about the sort of 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. Like you're a trust fund baby. Everything is perfect in your world. You know, like you don't have to do anything, but you have that deadline or you have, you know, something that's due on Friday and suddenly you're like, oh, I need to, 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, right. 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, like 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 hurdle. Like anytime we're outside the herd where we are vulnerable in a way that is, as you say, sort of prehistoric. That that's not right. 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 putting you on the spot.

I would say public speaking, but maybe, 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 nine times more likely to get struck by lightning and to die.

People who live in Manhattan. Right, right, exactly.

Like walking around going, where's the snake? Where's the snake?

It's all the lawyers.

Right.

All the bankers. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

We can go there.

We can go there. I know we can.

Yeah. 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 right. We have this conscious higher mind, if you will. But so much of our life takes place in the subconscious brain that 99.9999-9999% of the time we're operating from those instincts, those, those shortcuts that our brain has developed again to keep us alive. But today that simply are irrelevant. So are they rational?

So this is, this is, I'm so glad you brought this back, Rebecca. So this concept of instincts which I want to get into and I want to is, 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, you know, thriving. So that, 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, I don't need to look at that right now. That's, that's a caged tiger. Right. It's not actually going to jump out and kill me.

Right. So is the through line, because this, again, this is sort of that part of my training that, that is constantly looking for that one idea or the spine, let's say. So this, the, the 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. 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 one, two, 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. We're really poorly designed, right? Thousand years.

I'm like, here. I'm a student. I'm being. I'm asking.

Yeah.

Is it a thousand years?

Yeah, probably about a thousand, two thousand, three thousand. 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 pick. 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, could 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, et cetera, 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, is space, especially with modern technology, we're not. We're being bombarded 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.

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 that part of our brain or.

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, I'm glad.

To hear that because it seems like there's a lot of different places that, that are get pointed to. But. 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? Like 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 seven 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. Huh. 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.

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? Like they came over to kill us. So now in the time of COVID we've definitely polarized and said 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, 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. We don't see it up close and personal in these kind of immediate return that we would see if it was, you know, our tribe member next to us who 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.

Yeah. And it's interesting, too, because 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 only trusted my instincts at different points along the way, I could look back and go, oh, I could see how that situation would have 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.

And what we're looking for is real data and recon.

It's a great question.

Relevant today.

Yeah, it's a great question. And the short answer is yes and right. Yes. And our bodies are designed. Right. You should trust your instincts. You're going to feel that little flutter that you need to pay attention to that because your body is designed for understanding and seeing these little things that we're not necessarily fully cognizant of or in touch with our emotion or are physiological responsible enough to say, oh, that's. 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. 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? So a lot of people will say, the easy one is when talk. Talking about biases, Right? Like, well, I'm not. I'm not biased.

I don't.

I don't have any biases. And the test I give people is, okay, cool, 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 assertions 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 communication, as you said, all the information that's flooding us all the time is also manipulative 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. Because what we're doing is. 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. 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 not knowing exactly why you're feeling what you're feeling, but you should just trust your gut kind of thing 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. You know, 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? Right. Maybe I don't know why I'm feeling this, but I probably still need to trust it because there's something 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. That's my best instrument for measuring my instinct in, in the moment is just to check in that way. And we all know that when things are when, when the pace is. 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. 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 of pause, though. 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 turned on, 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, you know, to me, life is increasingly coming at us faster and faster and faster and faster. And so often what we do is we fetch, you know, 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. Like 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, you know, 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 just, 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.

It does. It is such a regulator. And gosh, I love everything you just said. The 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, it is in an ancient text, almost like the Inferno, like Dante's Inferno, where you're talking about what purgatory might be. Purgatory would be that you'd be consigned to a lifetime of filling a bucket or attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

I'm, I'm trying to remember the. It was a Greek mythology, maybe Sisyphus. It is, is something like pushing the rock up all day and at the end of the day rolls back, rolls back down. And 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. Yeah, our brain just thinks it's gonna die all the time.

Right? Everything. Everything net 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 gonna kill me? Or ooh, could I mate with that person? Like, that's it.

Are we continuing this feast or am I the end of the line? Oh, my God.

It's pretty 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, Right? Like, I think a lot of people talk about, you know, 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 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 a 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 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. 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, at the, you know, I'll do a little selfless or selfish self promotion to just sort of.

Yeah.

We got a book coming out in August called Change 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 as you say, to pause, to be able to ask questions 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.

Amazing.

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. And 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. So 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 are swimming along the shore for 20 miles. You are right along the shore. You can always stand up, but it is the idea that you are looking out towards the ocean. You are 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 to the ocean and say, gotta keep swimming.

Right. And you can float, too.

Endless options. Endless floats. 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, um, 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 new book and the Preorder of Instinct. Rebecca Heiss. Did I say that right? Heiss is correct. I didn't even ask you before, so I apologize for not doing that. But RebeccaHeist.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@adammarkel.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. I appreciate it.

Do you love your life?

I love my life.

Totally get that.

It does not suck. It does not suck.

Every day we are blessed to be here regardless of the circumstances is day to love your life. And I say that only because of what you said earlier. Some days are going to be knockdown days for us. We are going to get knocked down some days. And can you still, as you are lying on the ground sort of looking up and gathering yourself and saying, hey, I am 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 two things? But for what we tell ourselves about it and how we feel it?

Not permanent, not pervasive, not personal.

Just as just is. So cool. Thank you so much for being here and everybody have a beautiful rest of your day wherever you are. Just 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@adammarkelle.com podcast for more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com BecomeChange Proof.