EP 135: Top 10 Traits of Highly Resilient People | Andrea Pennington

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. This is your host, Leith Mall. And today I'm sharing with you a conversation that I had with Dias Wondrea, formerly known as Dr. Andrea Peck. She is a holistic physician, an integrative physician, an acupuncturist, a trauma expert. She's the author of many best selling books including the top 10 traits of highly Resilient People and also someone who's trained in psychedelic assisted therapy and deeply involved in the plant medicine movement and the whole psychedelic renaissance. So we had a lot to talk about. We focused on her book and talking about the actual attributes that that are common to highly resilient people. But we wander here and there based on the depth of her experience. So please give this one a listen. She's.

An integrated physician originally from the US who now lives in France and now known as Deus wonder. Welcome Dr. Pennington.

Thank you for having me. Slate. It's an honor.

It's a great pleasure. My name is Fleet Mall and I'll be your host for today's session. I'm just really excited about this conversation and I want to tell you a little bit about Dr. Pennington and her work. Dr. Andrea Pennington is an integrated physician, acupuncturist, meditation teacher, international best selling author, TEDx speaker who has provided holistic health education for over 20 years as founder of Innate Vitality. Did I get that right? Innate Vitality. She combines her extensive medical expertise in training and trauma recovery with her experience in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture to help people build resilience, reclaim vitality and thrive despite the inevitable trauma and drama life brings. As a sought after media personality, Dr. Andrea has shared her empowering insights on holistic healing and resilience on the Oprah Winfrey show, the Dr. Oz Show, ITV this Morning, CNN, the Today Show, LuxTV, Thrive Global and Huffson Post, and as a news anchor for the Discovery Health Channel, she proudly shares insights on conscious relationships with Our Love, a spiritual based conscious connection platform developed by Rythmia which helps people find spiritually aligned social connection. Dr. Andrea facilitates a variety of workshops around the world which promote holistic healing, resilience, trauma recovery and SEL Love using trauma informed positive psychology, the attunement, meditation, Yoga, breath work, brainwave training with EEG, neurofeedback, and sacred plant medicine ceremonies with qualified shamans. Dr. Andrea's latest book, the Real Self Love Handbook, includes her proven five step framework, the Cornerstone Process, which she has taught around the world to guide people on a journey of conscious evolution. This framework provides a process for self guided or group led recovery from developmental trauma and adverse childhood experiences, building resilience and integrating insights gleaned from sacred ceremonies. Psychotherapy and self help work as a form of narrative therapy. Dr. Andrea created stories with Stories with Soul.

It's a life writing workshop.

Another one of your workshops. Right. And you also have a recent book out, something 10 resilient. Could you say that title again?

Yes, the top 10 traits of highly resilient people.

Top 10 traits of highly Resilient People. And that's really a great focus for our conversation today. So, Dr. Pennington, we've all been through an incredibly challenging last year, 12, 14 months with the COVID 19 pandemic and the lockdowns. And have you been in France that whole time?

I have, with the exception of one month in Denmark. Yeah, I've been here for the whole thing.

Yeah. And so, you know, it's affected all of us, all around the world and of course, sadly, it has affected many in much worse ways. And there are some of us that have the privilege to be kind of in lockdown and almost like a retreat quality, but nonetheless, we've all been living with the fear and the traumatic distress of this and we've just seen our world change so radically. And along with that, the world hasn't slowed down in terms of the war and conflict and political polarization and everything else going on. And plus we have the looming or really already present climate emergency that's creating a lot of climatic disruption around the world and something that could get a lot more serious before it gets better. So at any rate, I'm just curious to begin with, how's this year been for you personally and have there been surprises for you in terms of how things have unfolded or what you've learned in the process?

Well, for me, like many other spiritual teachers and self help leaders, at the beginning of the pandemic I just went into service mode. There are a lot of other physicians that haven't been working how I have. I've been mobile. I've been living in France for 10 years and I transitioned into a new way of healing and helping people with a lot of online programs. So in the very beginning I was really helping a lot of healthcare providers learn how to create online businesses to sustain themselves for the General public, I was really stepping up, leading guided meditations, helping people understand, just as you pointed out, that we're at risk of going into post traumatic stress disorder as a result of this pandemic. But there are things that we can take for ourselves, things that we can do for our children, so that this actually could provide a springboard for post traumatic growth. So I went into service, hosting events and leading workshops. On the personal side, I did use it as a retreat. I used it as a moment to really reflect on what I've been doing for the last few years. Because, as I mentioned, I've been living in France now for 10 years and raising a teenage daughter. And it just gave me a moment to really reflect and think about, is this how I want to be living and how I want to be working? And that has informed several of the new programs that I'm releasing this year.

That's wonderful. And I think it's been a common theme among many of our presenters on the summit that we have enjoyed the privilege, many of us, to kind of take this almost as a retreat time. And for many of us, myself included, been doing a lot of online work for a long time, so it was relatively easy just to shift completely online. And fortunately, that's worked out in some amazing ways. I think we've all discovered that we can communicate and connect and provide, you know, really beneficial programming online in ways that we may not even have thought possible previously. But it has been a privilege to stay in one place and be in kind of retreat mode for myself for the last 14 months with my wife, Sophie. And I really feel a lot of gratitude that I have the wherewithal to do that. I'm glad you do, too.

Before we get into talking about, today's theme has a lot to do with healing trauma, which is one of your special areas of focus, and how to create resilient relationships. Before we go into that, I wonder if you could say something about what resilience means to you. To begin with, even at an individual level, what is resilience?

Well, from my perspective, with a background in Chinese medicine and as an integrative physician, I look at resilience as the innate capacity that we are born with to return to a baseline of health and vitality. That means whether you've experienced an accident, an illness, an injury, surgery, or some other loss or trauma, you have an innate capacity to come back to a baseline. That is what resilience is. There are many things that can threaten our resilience.

Being able to weather the storm means we have to have resources on board. Even though we're born with this innate capacity, some of us haven't really flexed our resilience muscles or use those skills. Right now we need to build them, or we have been building them over the last year. But that's what resilience is. For me, it's the ability to return to a baseline state of hopefully, good health wherever you were before.

And the body knows how to do it naturally.

Would you also feel that resilience includes not only the ability to recover, return to a baseline, but actually to realize what might be called post traumatic growth or to grow with our challenges?

Some people are talking about not only bouncing back, but bouncing forward. Ideas like that.

Yeah, absolutely. That's the next step. So, for example, if we start at baseline and there's some sort of stress or pressure on us, some people will just wither away. They won't have the resilience. And those are the people that end up with chronic illness or ptsd. Some people, after stress or adversity will return to their baseline. That's resilience. And others of us will actually use it to spring forward in that post traumatic growth, as you pointed out. And there are only a few extra characteristics that we need to be mindful of to move us in that direction. One of them is a sense of agency, and that is feeling that I have control over something. Now, with the pandemic, there are plenty of things we cannot control. And with government and social systems, the list is endless. But if we really want to set ourselves up for post traumatic growth, we start to really look at what can I control? Usually that's only us. We can control our attitude and our response to these situations. We can look at what has happened in these times of adversity to recognize our strengths and to learn the lessons from where we might have messed up. And we use that as fuel to move forward.

Well, I think you're referencing something like the growth mindset, which I know is part of your work. And I'd like to explore that more in just a moment. Before going there, though, I'd like to explore resilience just a little more. And you've recently published a book, the Top 10 Traits of Highly resilient People, as we mentioned before. And can we look at resilience? You mentioned it as kind of a latent capacity or an innate capacity.

And that we have more or less access to. We all have it, but we seem we have more or less access to it. As you said, maybe we've done the work to Kind of flex our resilience muscles. Right. So we have that access.

I'm wondering if we can also look at it. You know, I would imagine we can look at it as a state, being in a state of resilience and, and then if we can look at it also as a trait. And the reason I'm asking that whether we see it as an innate capacity or, or, or whatever, a resource that we can draw on, is this something we can increase? Can we increase our default level of, or our trait resilience, if you will, through some kind of training and development?

Yeah. My experience professionally over the last 20 years is yes.

There are two pieces to it. Yes, to be in a resilient state means that you have some level of vitality.

Which can mean the absence of illness. And the way that we can more reliably return to that state state is to develop the traits. And so in the book we cover these top 10 traits of resilience. Starting off with things like insight, which is about self awareness, emotional intelligence, we can look at the trait of flexibility and adaptability. We know that when people are too rigid and when they only see one way to get things done, when the world changes around them, they end up breaking down. So learning to be more flexible and adaptable is a trait that can make us more resilient. There are other things like tolerance and compassion, which a lot of people have been experiencing a flexing of their compassion muscles because so many people are suffering because they can't get to loved ones, because we're witnessing all of these heinous crimes on social media and seeing people of color killed before our very eyes. So people are learning to develop compassion. There are other ones like confidence and self efficacy, positive relationships. Now it seems like kind of a strange thing to call a trait, but as you already know, to maintain healthy relationships you have to bring a certain mindset to that and it is something that we can train. So when you add up these 10 traits of resilience and you can be flexing them in various ways all through the day to do your training, if you will, you can get yourself into more of a resilient state. And if you did happen to have an illness that was provoked through stress and adversity, like for example, we know that stress related conditions like the autoimmune challenges, allergies, asthma, arthritis, any of the gut associated problems, we can improve those through all of these resilience traits because we're calming down the storm within the body, giving ourselves a greater sense of agency, which again changes the way the body and the brain respond.

I love that you ask that question because it is very. If we really get into the technicality and the semantics, it is a collection of traits and it is also a state.

Well, thank you. I just find it not only fascinating, but I think really helpful to deepen our understanding of exactly what it is so we can learn how to exercise our self agency and optimize our health and resilience and so forth. I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the things we're up against because, I mean, we are up against an ever more challenging world that we're living in with things like the pandemic and climate change disruptions and divisive politics. And you know, in some ways I'm pretty much an optimist by nature. And I actually do feel we. There's been a continual evolution of human progress and there are many wonderful things happening in the world, but we still have a lot of problems and a lot of challenges, as we know. And maybe because of the population and the way things accelerate, it's all kind of in our face. So there's a lot of stress and a lot of challenge. And it's the same time, in many ways we've been kind of enculturated to not feel right, to not be willing to suffer pain, to just pop a pill as soon as you feel any discomfort at all, or to just suck it up and toughen it up. Right. So either of those.

And then there's some other cultural trends that I think almost encourage a kind of fragility and a kind of victim mindset and which can get conflated with compassion. Right. Because it's not about, you know, we don't want to communicate, everybody just needs to toughen up. But becoming fragile isn't the answer either. Right. So.

There'S a lot of confusing messages out there in the world, I think, for people. And I love what you're saying about finding some way into agency now when people haven't exercised a lot of agency in their life or the challenges of their life have kind of put them back on their heels and maybe they haven't even been encouraged to exercise a lot of self agency. How do we step into that and start finding where can I exercise my own autonomy, my own self agency and embracing what I need to do to take care of myself and be my best self in the world?

That's a great question, Fleet. For me, that one starts off with increasing the resilience trait of self awareness, insight. So before we try to set boundaries and tell the whole world, I'm going to take this stand. We have to do it with ourselves and for ourselves. So one of the things that you mentioned is growing up in a culture, and that includes the family culture of don't talk, don't talk about what's troubling you, squash your emotions, don't speak up. That toughen up or suck it up mentality. Well, the first step, before we can exert agency in the outside world, we have to exert that agency with ourselves. And so a lot of the work that I do is about helping people come out of denial, to actually put a label to what they are feeling in the now and what they experienced in the past. Because it is true that we have these great survival skills that we just will suck it up. You know, we are told by our parents or by the media or others, you know, just keep moving, you know, keep moving towards that goal. And yet that oftentimes leaves our authentic self and our own needs either put by the wayside or locked away in the shadow. And so part of recognizing our sense of agency is to reclaim that for ourselves by getting in touch with our emotions. Like, what do I really feel? And one of the things that we talk about with developmental trauma and people that grew up in dysfunctional homes is that if there was a culture that you're not allowed to talk about the family, or comparing us to that family over there that was really abusive, you might actually feel like, oh, maybe my childhood wasn't all that bad, or it wasn't as bad as. And that's detrimental because you will grow up thinking that you're resilient because yeah, I had a bad childhood, but I made it through. And instead what you've really done is you've taken on more than you really should or, or needed to. And so people are kind of confusing this idea of resilience as sucking it up and enduring adversity that eventually ends up hurting the organism. So we know that people that push through that have that mentality, they are at a higher risk for developing burnout and many other stress related conditions. And so in some circles there's even a badge of honor like, oh, you know, I experienced burnout as if it was a good thing. And so we have to kind of re educate ourselves to recognize what I went through was traumatic and in some cases downright abusive, and it shouldn't have been that way. And yes, while I have been strong, I've been being strong for too long. And that's what Burnout is a sign of. And as we start to recognize that, then we can reclaim a sense of agency by saying those things shouldn't have happened, they did. I'm not going to continue to blame the past, but now I'm going to take the strengths that I've accumulated along the way and set better boundaries and better goals for myself. So that's one part of how I see this agency coming on board for us as individuals.

Well, that's so powerful. And I think this also points in a direction. I know you have a tremendous focus in your work on self love and self compassion. So talking about requires a certain bravery, right? A certain kind of courage and, and a certain kind of strength. But it's not, again, it's not that toughen it up, suck it up kind of strength. It's actually opening to what we feel and really giving ourselves a lot of self love and compassion. Not for the purpose of becoming fragile, but for the purpose of claiming that self agency. So I wonder if you could talk about that, that interface between kind of self agency, self responsibility and at the same time self compassion, self love.

We absolutely do need self compassion and self love to recover from trauma and to really move forward with authentic power. There's this lovely Buddhist quote that becoming self compassionate does not make you big headed, it makes you big hearted. So a lot of people think, oh no, maybe self compassion is going to make me weak or maybe it's going to make me think that I'm better than other people. But actually what we're doing is we're really reconnecting with the heart.

And that is, it's huge. So.

Self compassion for me is about recognizing the suffering that I may have endured in the past or in the present and recognizing that I'm not alone in this. Everyone as a human being will experience some sort of loss, illness, aging or death. We will all make mistakes. We're not robots. So as soon as I can recognize that we have this common humanity, as we all say, then it opens the door for me to say, yeah, it's okay that I messed up and it's okay that I'm dealing with some really tough emotions and decisions. And at the same time I can say to myself, I sincerely wish you a peaceful journey through this process.

It's a critical thing because a lot of people in the popular press think of self love as just a spa day and manicures and bubble bats. But it's more about really getting down to who you are on a soul level so that you can look beyond the activities in the world, the things that you've done or not accomplished, and really seeing who am I as a spiritual being and what is my true contribution to this life. And when we can start to do that and strip away the rest, we're left with something really beautiful and really powerful.

And it wouldn't hurt to have a spa day every day if we have the ability for that. But I like, you know, I think what you're saying is so important. And we could also think of it as even if simplify for ourselves as, you know, just increasing our kindness towards ourselves or even just friendliness. Like many of us have such a critical relationship with ourselves, a self critical relationship and stuff. We just absorbed it from the culture. Right. And you know, there's all kinds of negativity bias in a culture. It's good. We're kind of biologically set up for all this. We're biologically set up to do all the wonderful things you're talking about, but we're also kind of biologically set up for fear and survival and negativity. Right? And so we've absorbed this and we tend to have a super critical relationship with ourselves. So part of what you're talking about, just shifting that, like if I'm not going to be my own best friend, who will be?

Yeah, right, exactly. But we also have to recognize that self talk. And it's true what you're saying. It's like the culture sets us up for it. The original culture, which is the family culture, is what starts it off. So for many of us, we have internalized a critical harsh parent. In my case, it followed me around with all these different voices judging and criticizing exactly all of the shoulds and why did you do that? So part of that insight is to start recognizing what is my self talk and where did it come from? Is it the shoulds of the media? In my case, I also had this sort of shoulding put on me from the American Medical Association. Here I was this revolutionary, integrative doctor doing Chinese medicine and trauma work that was very different than everyone else at the time. So we have to look at what are the shoulds, what are these automatic thoughts and self talk and start to challenge them and ask, is it true? It may have been true in your family, it may have been true that you needed to follow those shoulds in order to not get whipped or abused at home. But now in this present moment, are those statements that you hear rattling around in your head, are they true? And if not, we've got to challenge them. Because positive self talk is one of the top 10 traits of highly resilient people. So if you want to build a stress resistant personality, you look at the negative stuff and you flip it to positive. And you may have to continue to reaffirm it and find evidence that the positive is true. But it's hugely important and should not be overlooked.

I'd like to talk a little more about trauma and the impact of trauma, but I do want to reference your book, Real Self Love Handbook, A proven five step process to liberate your authentic self, build resilience and live an epic life. So I mean, that just sounds like great territory and I really encourage people to explore that because I think any kind of self help, self transformation work, self healing work begins with just gradually shifting that relationship we have with ourselves to be kinder, more compassionate. And from that place we can do the work. Otherwise our efforts to improve ourselves can be just more shoulding and kind of beating up on ourselves. And I think that's one reason why so many people run the other way from their New Year's resolutions every year is because we know we're setting ourselves up for self shaming because we haven't created that basic positive environment in which to hold our efforts to continue to grow into our best selves. So could you talk a little bit about trauma, what trauma is? Many of us have aversive childhood experiences. There's historical trauma and generational trauma and single incident trauma as adults and so forth. But could you talk a little bit about the nature of trauma and the relationship between trauma healing and resilience in terms of supporting stepping into our lives?

Yeah, absolutely. The way I see trauma is it is the body and the brain's response to some event.

So running a marathon for one person might be traumatic, but if you're an experienced runner, it might be the most exhilarating experience of your life. Yeah, there's a little trauma to the body per se, but usually when we're talking about psychological trauma, we are often delineating big T trauma as in.

Capital T versus little T. So typically when we're thinking of trauma, we're thinking of, as you mentioned, single incident trauma. You've been a victim of some traumatic event. Abuse, neglect is a traumatic experience, sexual violence. But we also recognize that living with discrimination, all of the isms, so sexism, racism, colorism, recognizing that homophobia, living in any sort of culture of discrimination creates a stress on this human organism. And depending on whether or not we can buffer that stress, typically that's through a parent Or a caregiver, a supportive environment play, things that allow us to discharge that stress. If not, it can be considered a trauma. And that trauma is based on how we respond to it. Now, of course, as you are very well aware, anything that we experience before the age of 18, when we have this incredible brain growth going on, specifically from birth to age 3, and then again in adolescence up to even well into our 20s, when we've got this explosion of brain development, if we experience some of those traumas, they will impact the development of the brain. A couple of key areas that I focus on in my work is if you've experienced some sort of developmental trauma and did not have that positive buffering, for example, you may have noticed that your stress response system is tweaked such that you are hypervigilant that you startle easily, that the littlest little criticism or change in the environment can totally throw you into that fight or flight or freeze syndrome. Whereas for some people, if they've experienced some of these adverse childhood experiences or traumas, and they did have positive buffering, they might be fine. And in particular, what I'm talking about is the compassion circuitry of the brain. So this goes back to the research around children who were neglected or left to cry in orphanages and caring homes. So for example, if something terrible happened, like the loss of a parent, or a suicide of a parent, or physical abuse, or living with an addicted parent, if we have a compassionate caregiver who is able to show us how to regulate our nervous system, how to still feel safe even though there's scary stuff happening in the environment, then those brain circuits that are learning about self soothing and compassion, they'll still form. But if we don't have that, if we have an emotionally distant parent or another abusive parent, or even mean siblings who then are picking on us, then we know that those compassion circuits and that that part of the brain does not develop as well. And so the reason that's important is because you and I just talked a lot about compassion. And I've had clients tell me, like, I don't, I don't even get the concept, like, what does that mean? Mean? And it's because those parts of the brain were never fully formed and developed. Instead, the brain had to shift towards, you know, the threat response system. So these are, these are the issues that I am, you know, keen to talk about on a daily basis. Because based on neuroplasticity, based on the fact that we still have a brain, as long as you still have a brain and a Spinal cord, you can see, still start to develop some of these circuits. It's going to take practice and it's going to take repetition, but we can develop resilience in those areas.

Well, that's a very hopeful message. And I know for many. And part of what you're talking about when you talk about that buffering and the compassion circuitry, even at maybe a most basic level, it's whatever level of positive attachment and bonding we get in early childhood. And we know that a lot of the struggles human beings have as adults. One pointer anyway, is the degree of healthy bonding and attachment they got in early childhood. It really does can affect us throughout our life. And for, for people who have deficits in that area and they know that there's, you know, we have that kind of almost trapdoor that when we get triggered, it's like we're going right down the rabbit hole. And it's just like, you know, there's just no bottom down there. Right. And I know you work with a lot of people in this way. So how do people begin to build almost reparent themselves or something, or rebuild those assets that they just didn't get, tragically didn't get in their childhood?

Perfect question. You're awesome. It is about reparenting. So we can do that on our own. We can do that in support groups like 12 Step Communities and Fellowships can be great, and you can do that with a coach or a therapist. But ultimately, what you've described is exactly it. It's re parenting. It's replacing that inner critic that beats you down and judges you and installing more of a cheerleader and a loving inner parent. Because what we can do over time is to give ourselves what we did not get back then. And that's really important. So for me, for example, I found myself. I had been on my kind of empowerment journey and then I found myself with a child. And this is at age 35. I found myself sounding like my mother. And I had made a vow. I will not be like my mother when I have a child.

Many of us have had that experience. We see that we're channeling our parents voice right to our own kid. And we said, I'll never do that.

Exactly. And it's because of what you described. It's this trapdoor. I got triggered. And what went down is the pathway of least resistance. I became snappy, I became irritable. And I happen to have a daughter who is very sensitive. And I had to learn how to get myself in check. And one of the challenges was through going to therapy, I realized, oh, I'm getting triggered because I'm having to give to my daughter what I never received myself. That inner child that wanted that unconditional love and that care and that swaddling and cuddling. That's what I had to do. And this what I didn't receive. And so part of the reparenting means we contact that inner child, that wounded part of us that is still carrying those memories. I mean, it's real and giving ourselves that. So becoming your own loving parent, doing things just for me, that showed my inner child that, yes, you're worthy of also having this unconditional love and acceptance. And the good news about that is when we engage in these re parenting behaviors, we can start strengthening new neural pathways. So rather than being so reactive and going down these pathways that have been built up over decades, we can start strengthening new ones. It takes a lot of repetition, it takes a lot of mindfulness to be aware of when you're getting triggered so that you can at least stop long enough to take a breath and choose consciously rather than letting those unconscious patterns take over.

You know, as you mentioned before.

We'Re all exposed to a lot of stress and traumatic stress now. And whether we know it or not, you know, all of us have had that fear that we could become ill with. COVID 19.

At my age, I envisioned early on I could end up on a ventilator in an ICU unit somewhere. It's not exactly how I would choose to end my life. Separated from my loved ones and really feeling so much pain around seeing how many people are dying with their loved ones not having the presence of their loved ones, and then for their loved ones not having any means of closure or connection and, and just so much pain and suffering around this. So we've all been living with this and we've been coping with it however we cope, consciously or unconsciously. But we are exposed to a lot of this and we could all be experiencing PTSD symptomology in one way or another. And so it seems like really important for all of us to be really taking good care of ourselves in the ways you've been describing and at the same time.

What'S going on in the world. We could see this as a very leveraged challenge. Arundhati Roy talked about the pandemic is a portal we could step into the next, through, through to the next level of consciousness that we're called to at this point. We have many indigenous elders we're hearing from on the final day of our summit here. And many of them are talking about the pandemic, not to make light of the terrible suffering and loss, tragic loss, but that it has come as kind of a teacher to awaken us. And so.

I think life is not necessarily going to get any easier anytime soon. So I wonder if you could talk about how we can work towards becoming more resilient and the impact on that path of embracing a growth mindset versus that fixed mindset. I wonder if you could just talk about that distinction a little bit.

Well, first, I would echo what these wisdom keepers will be sharing on the final day. I have seen in the last year people step onto this path of awakening that I never would have expected. Like, the pressure that we're all facing on a global scale. It has opened some sort of portal. Like, we literally are hearing people say very enlightened things that were like, now you're getting on the bandwagon. So it is an opportunity for us to level up spiritually. And I also echo what you said that even if, you know, we talked about here in France, it looks like in June they'll be lifting travel restrictions and allowing foreigners to come in. And there's getting vaccine, passports and all of that. So, yes, shops are opening again here. Restaurants will be opening again next week. People are thinking like, okay, now we're going to get back to normal. But the reality is we're not going back normal to normal, nor should we, because there are many ways that our lives before were very toxic. And if we really look at all of the systems that have been impacted by this pandemic, the financial, the social, the food, local shops, personal family, finance, it is going to take years for us to, quote, unquote, recover and to find our new normal. So that idea that you're bringing up about a growth, growth mindset is essential. So at the top of this interview, I said there are some key distinctions that we need, some key psychological factors that we need. That sense of agency is one of them. The other one is a growth mindset to recognize that even though you've lost some things and you brought up the ptsd, we're all going through. Like, I've had many friends admit that, yeah, they were binging on, you know, ice cream and Netflix just to get through some of their anxiety, we can also recognize that we can grow, we can evolve. And even though things are really tough right now, if we focus on building these resilience traits, if we focus on what is good in us, we can bounce forward in post traumatic growth. And another key trait in the top 10 traits of resilience is meaning in life having a sense of purpose. We're what the Japanese call ikigai. And that's another thing that I think this pandemic has done for so many of us. I personally have been one of those people like you described. My mother, who has Alzheimer's, is in the United States and I live in France. And in August, she suffered a stroke and was put in the icu. And I spoke with the physician, and he said, don't even bother trying to get on a plane. We won't let you in the hospital because of the pandemic. They're like, it'll be a two week quarantine, and by then she'll either be dead or she'll be discharged. So can you imagine what I sitting here going through the emotions of shock and fear and then guilt that I'm so far away, and.

It drove me to really, really think about my mother and family and what am I doing with my life? You know, I said to you that on a personal level, I've used this 14 months to really think about what is my purpose in life. And I'll just end this with this one concept. You know, my mother came from British Guyana, and she went to nursing school in England and then immigrated to the United states in the 60s and then became a physician. And I saw my mother.

Grow through various stages in her career and deal with racism and sexism. And she was a feisty, feisty little firecracker, only five foot two. But a few years ago.

She told me as she was watching my TED Talk, she said, you know what? I can tell you're doing the master's work. And she said, you know me ready. I'm ready to see my sister and my mom. And if I were to cock up my toes and meet my maker, I believe he will say, job well done. And that just hit me because I was feeling so sorry for my mother that she had moved around the world and been so feisty and been such an amazing physician, that here she was, with her physical body deteriorating, her mind deteriorating, and in that little moment of clarity, she felt like she had done God's work. And it left me recognizing that I made the right decision in moving to France and changing the way I practice. And then with her stroke, you know, eight months ago, it really got me thinking, like, am I really living the meaningful life that I want to? And I think that is part of the awakening that this pandemic is bringing us all. It's a moment to really say, what am I doing? Like, I've had clients who are grateful that they lost their job, that they were saved from burnout because of this pandemic. So it is a glorious opportunity for those of us who are willing to step up our game, to really do this deep work of healing and self recognition so that we can live a life of purpose and meaning.

Wow, that's an incredibly inspiring message. And you're clearly continuing.

Your mother's work and journey. I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about relationships in particular. Relationships, or human relationships can be the greatest source of joy in our lives.

And resilience itself is not just an individual situation, one of our sources, we have the internal sources of resilience, but part of our sources of resilience is being connected with us others, our social networks and our relationships, and being part of a web of caring human relationships. And at the same time, our relationships can be a tremendous source of pain and suffering. I mean, many, often the trauma we experience, we experience in relationships with other human beings. So, you know, it just, it seems like.

The courage that it takes to not give up on relationship in our lives because it really, in some ways, it is the ultimate source of resilience and joy and fulfillment. Life happens through relationship and at the same time, it's where many of us have experienced the most suffering.

Yes, that is true. And it is for me and my work. I started off as a pediatrician before I moved back into adult medicine and got specialty training in age management and hormone optimization. And what I've shared with you has all been informed by the research on trauma, developmental trauma, adverse childhood experiences. And last year we published a book, Manifesting Love, with a collection of authors talking about not just how they manifested a love relationship, but the self development process they had to go through in order to actually be ready for a healthy and loving relationship. And I know you have plenty of speakers talking about relationships, so I'll just share my little piece of the pie. And that is, you're absolutely right. We are often wounded in relationships. Unfortunately, we often find ourselves repeatedly going into abusive and painful relationships. For the most part, that is because of the original attachment wounds that we experienced as children. That initial relationship that we have with our caregivers sets the stage for how we will relate in all of our relationships, not just the romantic relationships. And so for a lot of, again, for a lot of my work, I still have people do like an inventory of their relationships just to have that insight and awareness, to see are there patterns? Oh, now I recognize I do keep being attracted to these narcissists, or I keep attracting these emotionally distant or absent people. And when we can spot the patterns, the next question is, where did it begin?

And generally, when we go back and we look at those formative years, we can identify what our relationship was to our primary caregivers, male and female, because that imprinting is what gives us this sort of blueprint for what we're going to search for. And of course, that search for your perfect partner is not conscious until you make it conscious. In other words, it's not that I'm consciously saying, okay, my parents got divorced when we were three, I really missed my dad. I'm going to try to recreate that exact same experience because maybe now I'll finally get the love and attention. We're not saying that consciously, but on an unconscious level, that's what many of us have done. I found myself always being attracted to men who were emotionally and physically distant. And it took hindsight to say, oh, if I really strip things away, that's very much like what happened with my father, because he moved, we moved to Colorado, he stayed in Nevada, and so on. So when it comes to relationships, we have to kind of look at those original attachment wounds or imprints and heal them, debug the system so that we are literally reprogramming our mind to seek out healthy attachment relationships. And for many of us, a self help book is not enough. You need a wise therapist to do that with or in a self help group setting. But I find that it's critical because even outside of romantic relationships, we'll find people sabotaging things at work. They have these interpersonal conflicts that again, are traced back to their developmental traumas.

And as you pointed out, we need positive relationships. There's great work in the research circles that show that positive relationship in childhood are one of the buffering aspects. In fact, they're considered positive childhood experiences that counterbalance the adverse childhood experiences. But also as adults, people who have positive relationships and learn how to be in relationship in healthy ways have a longer lifespan. So it's worth investigating and not putting off to just being a nice to have, you know, because I have a lot of clients who say that like, oh, at this age, you know, I might as well give up. I'm already set in my ways. Everyone I meet is set in their ways. But it could actually impact your longevity and your sense of fulfillment in life.

Absolutely. That's one of the clearest correlations. Healthy relationship and longevity. It's absolutely, absolutely Clear.

You pointed something I think is just so important, and you referenced that based on early childhood experiences of wounding and just all kinds of different situational impacts. In our early childhood, we do have these kind of internal blueprints or scripts, and really one of the most leveraged ways to see change in our life, to see positive change, because we can work on the surface to keep trying to get ourselves to do this or change that or do that, but we're kind of struggling against this unconscious blueprint we're not aware of. And we have blueprints for relationship. We have blueprints for our career, for our financial life, for every aspect. It's the conditioning that got programmed in. And if we can get the help we need, the support we need to discover some of those and then question their veracity or just realize they're essentially narratives and we can create a new narrative and create a new blueprint. That's one of the most powerful ways to really leverage change in our lives. So we're really glad you pointed that. It's also connected. What you said before about the self talk and recognizing the negative self talk and these internalized stories we've taken in and then really questioning the veracity, are these true? Even if they were true at one time, do they serve me now? I think that kind of internal self awareness work is so important for all of us.

Yeah, absolutely, it is. And in fact, that's what, in your introduction, reading my bio. The Stories with Soul workshop is where I help people go the deepest with that narrative, that personal narrative. It's drawing off of the wonderful work of Dan McAdams, James Pennebocker with narrative therapy. But basically what we're doing is expressive writing in a supportive group format. And you can literally get in there and rewire your brain through doing these journaling prompts, and I add in guided meditation, because it helps us get into the brainwave state where we have access to the subconscious mind. But you absolutely have the power to change your narrative, to change the story. And that's another aspect of agency. It's being willing to look at yourself, but then pick up that pen and rewrite your story. Get rid of the victim mentality and embrace the hero in you. And that's what we all have the power to do.

Well, that's what's been so empowering, the discoveries in neuroscience over the last three decades. I mean, human beings have been figuring this out for millennia, but we didn't really understand the science behind it directly and scientifically. In the west, at least, we assumed that by the time you're adult, the brain you got is the brain you got, and if anything, it's going to diminish in its capacity over the lifespan. And, and two, three decades ago we began to realize that's not true. And you mentioned neuroplasticity before we can rewire our brain and it's not as fluid as it was maybe when we were children, but it is completely changeable and we can grow and thrive in even being centenarians if we're so fortunate to live that long. Right? Yeah. There's really no limitation at this point and we understand the science behind that. So, you know, these are incredibly challenging times we're going through. And you know.

I think this is a time when we have no choice but to transform individually and societally and systemically, because especially what we're facing with climate change, global warming, and we're going to need resilience to come together and do that. So whether it's just dealing with the personal challenges we have in our individual lives, whether it's coming together locally in our communities to meet challenges, and it's doing whatever we need to do somehow to societally tackle these really daunting challenges we're facing, I'm wondering just what might be your kind of final message here. What do you think is, I mean, it's going to be different for everyone, but what might be some of the more leveraged places to put our energy so that we can contribute to our own well being and to our collective well being?

Well, I am a big believer in each and every one of us having a profound impact on the world. And I say you can even start small. So when you do this work for yourself, it means that you're going to be more caring and compassionate with your immediate surroundings. And that impact on your family, on your children, on the people close to you will have a ripple effect. And a lot of people want to do big, big things. But if we start with ourselves and become the best human that you can be, you will turn on that empathy and compassion and then you'll start to couple it with action. So whether that's just consciously choosing to go zero waste at home or to walk instead of taking the car, those little things will add up over time. And it's not, maybe you're not going to make a huge impression on the ozone layer, but the vibration that you're putting out and the influence that you have on other people, it matters. So even though we think that we're so small and we don't matter. I truly believe that we do because there's always someone watching us. Our children, their friends, other people. So if we become responsible for ourselves and for our ecosystem closest to us and become the best that we can be, we can have a more global impact. And of course, for those people who feel called as healers, as teachers, as leaders, then we know that they are already doing the good work. But each of us, we have a role to play. And as I always say, you are truly a gift to the world. There's no one who could take your place. So share your presence with passion.

Beautiful. And we really have no. We have no idea how far that ripple effect can go of even the smallest actions. Right. We're all in this interdependent web of interconnectedness and every and self compassion is really no different than compassion for everyone because by being compassionate and kind to ourselves, we're actually self stewarding ourselves and participating in the world in which we're gonna. It's. It's the most compassionate thing we can do for the world as well.

Yes, absolutely.

Well, thank you so much, Dr. Pennington. This has really been a joy and I appreciate your work so much. And you just seem to be a powerhouse of bringing really powerful information and healing modalities into the world. And so I really encourage everyone in our audience to check out your work and check out your wonderful books and so forth. And I wish you all the best on your own journey as we kind of begin to emerge into whatever's next for us here, which I think is kind of fascinating, really. I mean, there's a lot of pain and suffering, and I think we need to really hold ourselves in each other with a lot of tenderness. But it's kind of exciting. We're in a new world and to see what's actually going to emerge.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Fleet. I appreciate the opportunity to share in this summit and I wish you as well continued success and vitality.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

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