76 Highest Potential: Stick it out or change?

Hello and welcome to RxChill Pill for your top-down brain. Resilience is about bouncing back from setbacks by adapting and learning so you can thrive through life's challenges. Your time is precious, so I work to deliver research-backed tools to boost you and your family's resilience. Each of the episodes strive to leave you with an action or meditation prescription that you can apply immediately to your life. I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD, a board-certified physician and mom of two amazing kids. And my purpose is to make the neuroscience of wellness accessible to you and your family's everyday life. Because when I became a mom, I wanted to do everything possible to empower my children with healthy mental and physical habits. This wasn't something that I had growing up, so I had to learn how to create a healthy and happy home life. I'm definitely not aiming for perfection, But I can honestly say that the mind-body skills I learned transformed my family's life. After years of training, I fully transitioned into teaching mind-body medicine, leaving one of the most prestigious private practices in New York City so I could dedicate my time to creating and teaching the science of resilience. My almost decade-long experience teaching high-performing students of all ages have now led me to the creation of my newest courses, Top Down Brain, a STEM-based digital course and planner, Plan to Soar, and Soar Under Pressure for K-12 and beyond. To make these tried and true courses widely accessible, I'm rolling them out with partnering schools, organizations, and online for individuals on mindbodyspace.com. A portion of all proceeds go to those students in need. Today is my monthly chat with my brilliant and amazing friend Fiona Murden. She's a chartered organizational psychologist in London. Fi is the host of her own podcast, Dot to Dot, and is the award-winning author of Defining You and Mirror Thinking.

Hello, Fi, how are you? Thank you so much for being here.

Hi, Juna Bobby MD. It's great to be here, Dr. Bobby.

And today we're going to talk about grit. So I wanted to talk to her about how to figure out when to stick things out and when to call it quits, because I have so many students who excel at so many different things, and some of them have invested a ton of time and effort into a particular topic or sport or music. And it's really difficult sometimes, you know, to know when to call it quits and move on to something else, especially with the past year of the pandemic. It's kind of put some people on hold, especially young kids in high school who have excelled at things, but for anyone really, I mean, even if you're not in one particular thing, how do you know when to shift? You know, and a lot of these young people, I mean, I'm older, so, and I've switched careers, but a lot of these young people feel like they're already railroaded into something, you know, identifies them. Some of these kids have started tennis when they were 5 or cello when they were 3. So it's their entire identity. I, I thought that that would be an interesting topic today, seeing that this is coming up for a lot of kids right now.

And I think you've, you've hit on something that's absolutely critical there. It's identity. And so we, we get that sense of who we are, the personal narrative. So the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the way we construct our memories, our thoughts. And when that's disrupted, it feels like the rug's being pulled from under us. So, I mean, I give a personal example which probably won't resonate with the younger listeners, but when I had my first daughter, I really struggled because I was no longer this career woman. Or was I? Or was I a stay-at-home mum? And what did that mean? And who was I? And so I think it's with anything that you've committed a lot of time to, it becomes woven into how you see yourself. So that is definitely a massive aspect of it.

And do not worry, I talk about my kids all the time to my students, even though they are in high school. I am like, sorry, I loved having kids, and that is why I work with you guys. I tell them about my kids all the time. It is funny that you said that because for me it is the other way around. I had to start, you know, I was a physician and then I became a conscious mom because I was older.— that was just something that I have always wanted to be, a mom. And I think for me, it was more as they became older and switching into, what am I going to do with myself now for the rest? What is my purpose now? I mean, not that you are always a mom to them, but they become a lot more independent. So that is interesting to me that you said that. I had to go and find a whole new career.

Well, I think it is really hard when you are moving out of something that is a vocation like medicine, and that you have also been led to believe that that is what you will do by your family or by school. I mean, for me, you know, I was going to do medicine because school thought I should, because I was good at science. And so I, and so I kept veering off because I was like, well, I love psychology, I really love psychology. And then a physics teacher at school said, oh no, no, no, Fiona, you need to do medicine and psychiatry. So it's this, if you're good at something, you get pushed a certain way.

Yeah.

And so It was, you know, she said psychology won't be challenging enough for you.

But you had enough insight to go into what you loved.

But I didn't, Juna, that's the point. And that's something I think it's useful to share with, with the youngsters that you talk to. Because then I started doing, in the UK we do A-levels, so at 16 to 18 we choose 3 or 4 subjects. And I chose the subjects I needed to do to do medicine because then we have to go straight into our choice. We don't do a major further on in our degree. We choose as soon as we start our degree. So as soon as you're 18, you're deciding what career path you're taking.

Wow.

And, and so I was, I was en route to do medicine and psychiatry, and I got— I woke up one morning and I thought, I don't want to do this. My stepsister was a junior doctor. I could see what she was doing, and I thought, I'm not I'm not 110% committed to this. I'm 90% committed. So then I went and changed what I applied to, and I applied to do psychology. But again, I was taken off track because then I went to work as a management consultant. You know, that, um, go and work in the city. You're at a good university, go and work for a bank, go and work in the city for a management consultancy. So again, I got taken off track. And only then did I come back to psychology after 4 years.

But you also merged those things now.

Well, I did merge them, but that was because I didn't want to waste— I did a business master's after my— it's a postgrad in business after my undergraduate in psychology, and I didn't want to just throw that away. I'd worked in business for 4 years, so then I went and did my MSc, Master of Science, uh, postgrad in occupational psychology, which allowed me to combine those two. But my point is that if you're good at something, which these kids that you work with are, you get pulled and pushed by expectations of the people around you all the time. And you learn what you think— and I've got inverted commas, which obviously people can't see— but you think is what you're meant to do and it's the best thing. And that's what's really hard, because actually what you need to be doing is listening to your inner voice. And I know that sounds a bit woo-woo, but it's not. It's listening to what, what are your intrinsic motivations? What are the things that light you up and drive you because you want to do it? Not because a parent wants you to do it, not because your neighborhood thinks you're going to do really well if you do that, or your school or whatever.

So you have to check in with yourself and understand when you're feeling that sort of curiosity about a topic or subject. Right? In college, I was drawn to social anthropology, psychology, and literature, philosophy. But then I was good at science. So, so then I majored in bio and I ended up going to medical school.

Yeah.

And I don't regret it, obviously. So now I've merged the two things myself. But it was a very long road, I would say. I'm not, you know, I don't regret it, but I'm not sure which road I would take if I could give myself advice. But again, we're talking about identity with these kids. If you start something at 3 or 5 and you're good at something and you've been constantly praised because you're gifted at that thing, and even if you're not naturally gifted, if you start at 3 to 5 and you really keep at it, you're going to be better than most people, right? If you keep at it. And so that's a big part of their identity.

You know, it is, and I think it's hard then to work out, like you said, how to shift lanes, what to leave behind, what to build on, um, and what to start afresh.

So what do you think about the kids in high school now who are looking to go into colleges and they've been maybe doing one thing for a long, long time and possibly the pandemic has made them kind of switch you know, or, you know, have to drop something, for example. What would you say to those kids?

So say, for example, sport. Like, my daughter plays tennis. She's not— she's not been able to play tennis through the pandemic. It's not completely intertwined with her identity, but some of the sports scholars at her school, it really is, and it's hard. But I think it's— some things you can pick back up again, but I think it's also an exploration of what do you really value. So It's thinking about what are the things that make you laugh? What are the things that make you extend that curiosity, not out of a relentless need to finish and get the top grades, but because you want to unwrap something a bit more, get under the surface of it? What are those things? And, and keep an open mind. I think particularly when you're sort of sophomore age, don't close down any options. Doesn't mean doing 20 different things, but it means keep your mind open to different possibilities and different routes through.

Mm-hmm. I mean, you might try 20 different things at some point, right? And then see what sticks.

Mm-hmm.

So when we are talking about kids who have been really invested in something, and let's say somebody is at the top of their sport or at the top of their music, or they're looking to get recruited And, you know, they got to stick it out, right, at this point. So there is a perseverance aspect. I always say to my kids and my students, I mean, there's always that— who wrote that book?

Grit.

No, that's— yes, Grit. Yes, definitely Grit. You need Angela Duckworth's Grit, whose episode will be airing this month, uh, finally. Uh, but Eat, Pray, Love.

Oh, Elizabeth Gilbert.

Yes, Elizabeth Gilbert. Eat, Pray, Love, she always talks about the shit sandwich or poop sandwich. Anyway, so she talks about having to eat that sandwich. But so that's the part where you have to persevere. You have to get through it. You're gonna have to play that mental game. You're gonna have to work on that. It's such a mental aspect, right? Yeah. Right? 'Cause you have that, that you're playing against.

Yep.

Uh, it's like one-on-one. It's very intense. It's, it's like a mental game. Mm-hmm. As well. At that point, you have to, understand that it's gonna— there's gonna be a lot of unpleasantness. Even with music or even with anything else, there's a point where you have to stick through some unpleasantness. I mean, there was plenty of unpleasantness in medical school, which some of it has to change. And I'm not saying that things should, you know, stay the same, but when you're working through something at that level, there is going to be, uh, to even get to that level, you have to get through a lot of unpleasantness.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, um, as a lady who's a wife of someone that my husband works with, who's a concert pianist, and she's, she's from Russia. She plays worldwide usually. She's brilliant. But talking about her upbringing with her, that's all she did was played piano all day, every day. And but I think there's also— it's really difficult when you're young to look at it and think, what are you losing by doing that? And when do you stop? Because I think it's absolutely critical to have grit and learning that determination and learning to get through the tough stuff is essential for life. But then you— there's also having psychological flexibility, adaptability. Exactly. So I think about, um, it's very open. So one of the guests that I've had on my podcast is Kenny Wilson. Who's the chief exec of Doc Martens. You know Doc Martens?

Yes, my daughter loves Doc Martens.

And Kenny is wonderful. Kenny was set up to be a professional footballer, so he was playing football at a really, really high standard in the UK, but he, he didn't get selected for the team he wanted, and he just didn't even touch a football for about 3 years after that. Just switched, did not want to do it, nothing to do with it anymore.

How old was he?

I think he was 17. But you can see his grit. He is now chief executive of a global brand.

Wow.

It is just floated on the London Stock Exchange.

Amazing. That is what I tell these kids. I say, if you are working at a certain level at any of these things, any of these extracurriculars, or even at school, whatever you are doing, if you are excelling and you are putting that kind of effort into something, then you're going to be— you can do anything. You can literally do anything.

The only danger is, um, burnout.

Absolutely.

If you do things so relentlessly that you're not listening to what your body and your mind actually needs.

Which is why we're here, right? You and I.

It is why we're here.

Because we want people to reach their highest potential.

Absolutely.

Without— yeah, and we have so many tools now.

Absolutely. And I think one thing that it always comes back to— so the emotional resilience, the things that I always say, there's the 3 S's. So there's sleep, social support, and self-awareness. And so we hear a lot about the sleep bit, and when you're a student, you don't always get enough sleep, but you can kind of cope when you're a student. But it shouldn't be something, you know, you, you always have that expectation that you're going to get by without too much sleep.

Yes.

The social bit's really important to remember. Our friends matter, our family matters, those relationships matter way more than we often realize to keep us sustained. Because when we get our head down determinedly towards something, we can put those things aside and say, I can't meet you because I'm doing this, or I can't talk to you on the phone. So it's remembering that, but the self-awareness piece, that is the bit that I think not only will help build that emotional resilience, enabling you to fulfill your potential, but also protecting your emotional resilience. So it's got this double, double benefit to it. If, if you can really have a good level of self-awareness, you'll be a far better leader if you want to go into leadership. You will be a far better sport person. So there's all these different aspects that benefit from that. Self-awareness is quite a tricky thing, and it's an ongoing thing. We don't just go, oh, I've done a personality test, this is what I am, and therefore—

so is sleep and social support. It's an ongoing thing.

Absolutely.

Don't just sleep one night and then call it a day.

No, there's actually, there's a book called Rest. I don't know if you've heard of it.

Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by by Alex Soo Jung King Pang. He must be Korean.

Yeah, he's a visiting lecturer, I think, at Stanford, and he does a lot of work within Silicon Valley. But one of the things he says is— and I can't use one of the words because we have a younger audience— sleep is a bit like— I think it's running, dancing, and bleep. We can all do all three of them. But if you practice, you can get a lot better.

And what was the bleep? Is it how many letter word?

3.

Okay. I was guessing that. Yeah.

So it's probably not that naughty, but—

Let's go through those 3 things. That's awesome advice. So with sleep, oftentimes people say, I don't need as much. I can get through without it. I always talk about learning and sleep. And if you're doing some kind of procedural memory, for example, surgery, even music or tennis, any of those procedural muscular activities, that actually procedural memory is solidified during sleep. And also they do recommend that maybe looking at the hardest thing that you're studying right before you fall asleep. So all of these things solidify in sleep, and also sleep is super important for emotional regulation. So my biggest tip to everyone is, when you are having issues sleeping, maybe you're anxious or you just feel like you can't go to sleep and you're not sleeping regularly, the most powerful thing in CBT-I, which is sleep insomnia CBT, which is more powerful than medications, is to wake up almost at the same time every single day, no matter what, right? Within 30 minutes of that same time. Unless, of course, you're like a truck driver. We don't want you to do that. We want you to get sleep. But we're talking about students mostly who are not, Even if you go to bed at like 3:00 AM, then wake up at 7:30, whatever your alarm is. So it's good to start this on vacation because obviously you're not gonna put yourself in danger physically. I said sleep for emotional intelligence and social emotional learning. So what kind of advice should we give them? And what are your thoughts on tips on how to stay connected socially in this time, especially for kids who are on, you know, Snapchat or Instagram?

You will, yes. The thing is with social connection, social and emotional learning is continuous, and the only way we learn it is interacting with other people, and it is a foundation to our mental well-being but also performance. So there's a recent report published by McKinsey that says that the demand for social and emotional skills in the workplace is going to increase as artificial intelligence increases, and the demand for cognitive skills is going to decrease. And so these skills are critical on so many levels.

They're, they're not soft skills because AI is going to take over all the automated sort of, you know, automatic stuff. And we as human beings, at this point anyway, exactly, we're the ones who have that imagination and we can adapt to things. So it's more about adaptability. Right, and being able to adapt to different situations.

And empathy can actually protect against burnout as well. Practical tips: the research shows that scrolling is not great. So scrolling through things, not great. If you're using social media, talking to people on social media— it sounds really obvious, but actually having a conversation, okay, is good. So that actually supports your mental well-being.

Uh, studies support texting?

Yeah, texting, right?

Although Yeah, no, not so good. No, I mean, well, the immediate response thing, that's a lot of pressure.

And I think the other, the other really important thing is to speak. I know it's weird, but speak to people on the phone. And if that sounds too strange for sort of the young people of today, then do FaceTime.

But yeah, no, I think a lot of them do a lot of FaceTime. And actually, I've started picking up FaceTime because my friends my age group don't like to answer FaceTime. So my son FaceTimes me. He almost only exclusively FaceTimes me. He does not call me, like just voice calls. So that he got me on the habit of that, and I realized how important that was to see people's faces.

Now that's what is so important, because even though via a screen obviously is not the best way of doing it, once we see people's facial expressions, we're picking up so many more nuances And that enables our brain to develop because our brain needs to be fed these little social and emotional nuances to be able to develop.

Mm-hmm. And practically speaking, would you— how much would you recommend they need of social interactions?

A meaningful connection at least once a day.

At least once a day, but that could be your family or— right?

But it's not that just sort of like, hmm, hello. It's actually having a conversation.

Okay, so sit down, have a conversation over a meal or something, which is harder for guys when they're, you know, young than it is for girls.

I think girls often find that easier.

At a certain point, yeah, sometimes, let's put it that way. Okay, so the third thing, self-awareness. So what self-awareness exercise can we leave the audience with today? They can go out and do this maybe once a week.

So there are questions that you can ask a good friend. So say 3 questions. 'What makes me really animated? What makes me light up? What really irritates me? And what do I do when I'm really irritated? And can you tell when I'm tired? What does that look like?' Now, they sound like really simple, obvious questions, but the thing is, you could be really surprised what people say. So, my literary agent said to me one day, 'You get so animated when you're talking about teenagers.' And I was like, 'Do I?' And she's like, 'Yes.' And this was that she— we were thinking about writing a book for teenagers following that because I hadn't realized how passionate I was about it. And sometimes, because we have all of our emotions and all of our thoughts, it's difficult to pull out what's what, whereas other people see it, particularly things like tiredness. So if a friend says, oh, when you get tired, you start saying blah blah blah, or you start, you know, you can't find anything, or you won't answer your text messages, or— these are really important signals. And by having that conversation, you can always give your friend the permission to say, will you tell me when you've noticed that I'm getting tired, or I'm getting low? But there's also this thing around, you'll be surprised at what they say you get animated by.

So do you think for teenagers or, or tweens, they could ask their parents this too, right?

Only thing with parents is parents might say what they want to see that child—

what they want you to be animated about. Okay, that's awesome advice. This was such a fun conversation.

It's always fun. I love chatting to you.

Okay, next time we're going to talk about Sleep.

Sleep.

We'll talk about sleep in more detail next time.

Excellent. I look forward to it.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Fi.

Thanks, Juna.

Big virtual hugs.

Big virtual hugs.

Yeah.

That was my monthly chat with Fiona Merton. Her book, Mirror Thinking: How Role Models Make Us Human, is all about how parents, friends, teachers, relatives, even work colleagues are constantly shaping who We are— Fiona uses her experience and insight as a psychologist to empower us to leverage the mirror system to our advantage. You can shape the content of this podcast by letting me know what topics or questions you'd like to have addressed. Just go to mindbodyspace.com/podcast to opt in. When you opt in, you'll get special tips just for our newsletter subscribers. You can also simply email podcast@mindbodyspace.com. At mindbodyspace.com, subject line Podcast Sign Up, and just write yes. If you appreciate the content and want to help, the absolute best thing you can do is to share. Text or email your friends, share on social media a link to your favorite episode. Good old-fashioned talking works too. Please share this podcast with all your friends, family, co-workers, anyone who believes in the scientific method and are curious about natural ways to boost performance, health, mental and physical resilience for themselves or their kids.

Thank you so much.

And until next time, this is Dr. Juna Bobby MD wishing you and your family wellness.