The Ultimate Cheatsheet to Outsmart Your Brain

There's this story, and I tell this to my clients all the time, and their response is always the same. So let me look at your faces to see what your response is. There was this guy that was looking for the key outside in the front yard of his house. It's daytime. He doesn't have electricity, like, no power in his house, and he's looking for the key everywhere. Outside in the front yard. And. And he's everywhere. The neighbors are passing by, and one neighbor stops and tells him, buddy, what are you looking for? And he's like, oh, I can't find my key. I'm looking for it everywhere. It's nowhere to be found. And he's like, okay, I'll help you. So they both start looking for the key everywhere. And then suddenly the neighbor asks, hey, just try to think. When was the last time you saw the key? Like, where were you at? He's like, oh, I remember perfectly. I was inside the house the last time I saw the key. I was inside the house in the kitchen. And the neighbor's like, why are you looking for the key outside? And he's like, because there's light out here and it's too dark inside. So every time I say that, you guys flat Africa, I have no idea what you're thinking. Every time I say that, people look at me like, what? Why is the guy looking for the key outside when the key is inside and he knows it? It's exactly what we do. We look for the key to joy, to happiness, to feeling fulfilled, to success outside. Because that's where the light is. That's where the pleasures are. That's where it's easier. That's where it's enticing outside. We look for it in relationships. We want people to meet our needs and make us feel good about ourselves and to think, fill our voids. We look for it in things. Oh, I'm going to buy this car. Because when I buy this car, I'm going to feel cool and I'm going to feel good about myself and I'm going to feel like, oh, my gosh, I had the money to buy this, so I'm successful. We look for it in life events, experiences and trips. And that's why no matter how much we look for it, we don't find the key to our joy and our happiness. And there's always something else that we want because the key is inside the house. The key of happiness is within you. You don't need a man, you don't need a woman. You don't need kids. You don't need anything to be able to supply yourself with that joy. And I could do a whole bunch of workshops, a workshop series on the different ways of finding the key to happiness. But today we're going to focus on our brain. And our talk today is outsmart your brain. Because we think that the human brain is really smart, because it is amazing all the things that we've created and that we've brought to this world. But the human mind was not wired to make us happy. In fact, it's wired to keep us from happiness. Because in order to feel joy, to feel happiness, to overcome pain and struggles, you have to feel the pain and the struggles. And the mind says, no pain. That's how the mind protects us. That's how the mind is, like, super smart and keeps us safe and alive by protecting us from pain. And that is true for the body. Whenever we touch something like a thorn or something hot, our immediate reaction is to pull a pullback. I don't want that. It's too painful. And that's the way of the body keeping us safe because it wants the brain keeping us safe because it wants to ensure survival. Now, the thing is that when it comes to the psyche, the mind cannot keep us safe by pushing away from the pain. Because what happens is, let's say somebody says something that hurts you or makes you feel like you're not good enough or. Or that you're not worth it. As soon as that comment comes in, you put your walls up. You're like, no, no, no, I don't want more of this. You're protecting yourself. You're pushing back from the pain. But what we don't realize is that the pain already came in. We already felt not good enough. We already felt hurt. We already felt that the other person wasn't appreciating us. So the pain is inside already. We're protecting ourselves from the possibility of anybody hurting us again. But when the heart hardens for one, it hardens for all. So when you protect yourself from the evil, you're protecting yourself from the blessings as well. So you have all these walls up, and you have the pain inside with you, and you're trapped in your own walls we call defenses in psychology. You're trapped in your own walls with the pain. So. So then what happens is you obsess with it. You continue thinking about it, it continues to hurt. The emotions continue. Nobody's hurting you anymore. You're hurting yourself because you continue to relive what you already have inside. In between those Walls. And that's just an idea as to how we create our own pain. And the only way of overcoming pain. Record this in your mind is by feeling it. We cannot push back on pain. We don't realize that what we're putting in our subconscious minds, we ourselves, because we never react to what people do to us, we react to what we tell ourselves about what people did. That's what's going to make us feel a certain way. Feelings are overrated. We give them too much power. Our feelings are not. They don't exist on their own. We create them. Which is why to me, I work a lot with couples and to me it's. I just don't know how to, how to emphasize enough to my couples. Like, you fell out of love, no problem. Fall back in love. That's a feeling, right? Like, okay, you're not in love anymore. You're not feeling. I know, but the feelings are not there anymore. So that's it, it's over. No, bring the feelings back because you are the one that's killing those feelings. You're the one turning yourself on and off with your partner. You are the one feeling depressed and anxious. It's not the rest of the world. The keys are not outside. The keys are within. So the subconscious mind has two really cool things. Number one, it believes whatever you tell. It doesn't know how to differentiate reality from fantasy. And number two, it does what you tell it, no questions asked. So the brain is limited. And if we were to think about the 35,000 decisions that we make every day, we would die because our brains would explode. Literally. There's research that shows what's going on inside the brain. And if you're thinking about a lot of things your brain wants to explain, which is why you feel drained after a long day of work, or you, you've had an emotional conversation with your spouse and you're like, I can't anymore. There's a lot of activity in the brain and it's about to explode. So what the brain does to not explode is it creates automatic. It automates things. It's too hard to say that word. My English is not very good looking, guys. So then it automates things, and those are called habits. It creates ways that then become very familiar and you can do without thinking. So much so that there's research that shows that people that have had their basal ganglia, which is where the habits are in, where they reside, people that have had issues with that or have got into an accident and it's no longer working Properly, they can still do things that they don't remember or they have no idea that they're happening because it's a habit. So it happens not because we're thinking about it, but rather because we've been doing it so much now. The problem with that is that when we automate things, when we create habits, they become so ingrained and so normal and so matter of fact that we think that that's how it is. It's part of my personality that I'm an introvert or an extrovert. It's part of part of my personality that I'm a morning person or a night person. It's, listen, I'm just not like that. I'm not touchy feely, like my husband wants me to be all over him, but I'm not like that. Well, all those things are habits that you have created to feel more comfortable to deal with or cope with the situations that you have experienced in life. And they've worked for you in the past, which is why they stuck. And you stay with them, which is why they. It created a habit. But we don't realize that life changes, needs change, people around us change. So I couldn't be carinhoza with my mom because my mom was abusive. Or if I showed some sort of vulnerability to my dad, then he would hit me, or he would tell me get over it and man up. But I can open up to my husband and I can't be vulnerable with my wife because they're different people. But we continue to exercise the same habits, even in different circumstances, and we don't question them. So part of this exercise is to be able to question and explore what it is that you have continually done your entire life that you may not be realizing is impacting your ability to be happy or the way you're living your life unfulfilled. Another thing it does is it creates. It sticks to what's familiar. So you create habits and you stick to those. But then you also create paradigms. Paradigms are belief systems that are so ingrained on you that they feel like facts. So, for example, you know, the woman is the one that should be cooking because imagine I'm going to work and I'm doing all these things. That's a paradigm. Oh, but you're the one that's supposed to call me. I don't need to call you. You should call me. That's a paradigm. Oh, but he should tell me what he wants. It's not mind reading day. That's a paradigm. He thinks in his paradigm, you should know because you've been with him for 30 years. So we all have different ideas as to how life should be. And we don't realize that those are beliefs and they can be changed. They're habits. Paradigms are habits. They're belief systems that we have continually repeated and that have worked for us at some point and we've continued to do. And then it acts with judgment and makes good decisions. So in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that's in charge of the higher functions, the one that allows us to make decisions and make judgment of things, that's where our morals are in. That part of the brain allows us to do things that animals can't do. But the problem is that that part of the brain is guided by our habits, our unconscious, and everything else that we've spoken about that we realize is not perfect. So we see how the system is wired to keep us safe. But there are some problems and glitch in the technology there because we are not aware of our habits. And we think that everything is a personality trait. And I can't change it. I've always been this way. So what? You could be different now. Oh, but nobody in my house went to school, like, college. So, like, who am I or who am I to, like, do this? Like, who's going to buy this? Who's going to come here, talk to me? My husband would pay me to shut up, and you guys are here to listen to me. It's amazing. I could very well think, like, who's gonna show up. But I believe that I was coming here whether you were coming or not. I was gonna be here. So you have to change your paradigms and you have to think higher, and you have to visualize and imagine what it can be. Because when you get if you can imagine, and my daughter's doing some T shirts and she's doing, like, fun, like, messages, and she wrote, if you can imagine it, you can do it. If you can imagine it, you can do it.