EP 164: Designing Your Destiny | Marisa Peer

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, Fleet Moll. And in today's episode I'm having a conversation with the legendary Marisa Peer, an amazing hypnotherapist from the UK who's brought transformation to so many people's lives. And she really understands how to begin to shift the landscape of our inner psychology to really quiet that inner critic and developing a much more positive relationship with ourselves. And it's a very direct approach. She really invites all of us to take what I call radical responsibility for really reshaping our own personal psychology and mindset and heartset and so forth in order to really actualize our lives and our greatest potential. So Marisa Peer is really a force and you're really going to enjoy this episode. I'm really excited to be here today with Marisa Peer from uk. How are you, Marisa?

I'm very good, thank you for asking.

Well, it's wonderful to have you be part of this summit and your work is renowned around the world and it's an honor to meet you. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio to familiarize anyone who's not familiar with your background with your work and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Perfect.

World renowned therapist and bestselling author Marissa Peer is one of the most recognized names in the well being industry and and was recently awarded the Mental and Emotional help provider of 2022 by UK Health Radio. Over her 30 year career, she has helped thousands of clients reframe their issues and turn their lives around thanks to her unique approach, Rapid transformational therapy or RTT. Given its potential, Marissa took the decision in 2017 to establish the RTT School and has helped train over 13,000 therapists globally. In 2021 she created the Five Day Challenge, a free resource aimed at 6 to 11 year olds to help them build self confidence and resilience. Developed in conjunction with teachers, the Challenge has been accessed by thousands of schools globally and has been recognized within the education industry as a powerful well being tool. Last year saw the publication of her sixth bestselling book, Tell Yourself a Better Lie and she also launched Dietless Life, Marissa's unique weight management program. Not only is it designed to help people lose weight and keep it off for a lifetime, but also to maintain A healthy relationship with food. And that's something almost all of us long for and struggle with at different times in our lives.

Okay.

So, Marissa, this summit focuses on various approaches to rewiring the brain or reshaping our neural architecture to heal traumas, to heal attachment issues, as well as to just optimize our brain. Health for life, performance for well being, for happiness, for longevity, and so forth. So with your work, I'm just wondering how that sort of for you fits into that. I mean, it's a bit of an analogy. It's maybe an oversimplification of the brain a little bit to say rewiring the brain, but it's still. It's a valid analogy as well. And I'm wondering how that fits in with your work. I mean, you were doing this work before some of the more recent advances in brain science and getting fabulous results. But I'm wondering how this, you know, our current knowledge about neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, epigenetics, and all that relates with your work or informs your work or.

Yeah, well, you know, rewiring is a word people love. I say that you're going to come in and we're going to teach you how to rewire yourself. What does that even mean? Well, it means you're like, nobody is born unable to leave food. No baby says, oh, my God, I ate too many cookies. I feel so bad, or I'm so greedy. But a lot of our wiring, the very thing that we don't want to do is what nature, like nature, has wired us to be so scared of hunger because even 500 years ago, it killed you. More than disease, more than war. And so there's the wiring that goes against you when you're hungry. The brain is so scared of hunger, you'll eat anything. So that's an interesting concept that you're wired to fear hunger. You're wired to remember where sugar is and go back for more. You know, years ago, if you found honey that was so exciting, you'd eat it until it was gone. You wouldn't go, it's a bit fattening. I just have a bit. And so a lot of our wiring. To eat food when it's in our line of vision was what kept us alive. So the things nature's done wired you to be scared of hunger, remember where sugar is, go back and eat food when it's in your line of vision is really interesting. And again, you can't fight one, but you can write. You can say, oh, yes, I am hungry, and I Am feeling weird and I'm about to eat all these cookies, but actually I've got an hour's train ride home. When I get home, there's wonderful food. I don't need to eat the cookies. So you can work with your wiring. You know, human beings are wired to be so terrified of rejection. Why is that? Because it also killed you. Being banished, being cast out, being marooned. Survival was a numbers game. And even though we think we're so modern and so evolved, we're really not. We are wired to be scared of rejection. We're wired to be scared of not having enough to eat. We're wired to be scared of people not liking us because those things kept us alive. And all these years later, the truth is you could live on your own with six cats, never see a soul and make you to 102. So the things that we're wired to be scared of, it's our wiring that hurts us. When you can understand it. Oh, right. I feel like it's the end of the world because 500 years ago it would have been. But actually that didn't work out. But I can have another relay. I can live on my own. I can have a great life with cats, dogs, pets. So we have to start dialoguing back. Our wiring is fixed, but we can work around it and say, but this really isn't. It's a bit like, you know, when you go to the top of a building and look down, your stomach drops, your mind goes, get away from the edge, you fall because the wiring says, hey, you're going to fall, you're going to die. I'm going to make your stomach plummet. So you step back. Even then there's plague. Wound her that thick. And I think one of the good things is understand your wiring. Oh, ok. My mind isn't trying to make me fat. It isn't trying to make me cling on to this person who's not right for me. It's all about surviving when that was actually statistically not an easy thing to do.

So we do have this very much fear and survival based wiring and that's not going to go away. And it's there for a reason. It's there to keep us alive. And we wouldn't be here as a species if, if there wasn't that wiring. And it does seem we can. As you're saying, it's helpful to understand that and maybe reframe that and work with it. And at the same time it seems like we can create additional wiring or other wiring in the brain that other neural networks in the brain that could counterbalance some of that and maybe support. Because otherwise it's hard just to think of it. And psychol. I can be prepared to always have the right thoughts when that fear and survival based wiring kicks in, but that's hard to do. So it seems like we can imprint some momentum of some positive alternatives or other ways of thinking.

I mean, just saying this, this expression, I have phenomenal coping skills, I have extraordinary coping skills, bring it on is so different. Oh my God, I can't cope. So when you're saying I can't cope, and I've had many clients whose parents were so sensitive they couldn't cope with noise or light or even the sound of a packet of potato chips being open. So they never went to the cinema or the swimming pool or the movies because the parents were this. I can't cope with sound. I said, but that's your parent. You got to say, I can cope with anything. Noise, light, sound, heat, cold. We're actually incredibly resilient. I think humans have this belief that we're fragile, very delicate creatures damaged for life by life's misfortunes. And that actually isn't true. We're actually incredibly strong, we're incredibly resilient and we're great survivors. Look what our ancestors went through. And if you do the opposite. So saying I'm fragile, I'm strong, I'm a strong person, I'm a strong woman, I'm a strong man, I'm strong, I'm brave, I'm capable. You know, imagine going into surgery, which I did, I was in. I'm strong, I'm strong, I'm brave, I'm brave. I've got the bounce back factor rather than, oh my God, what if I die in the operating theater? Because we do have a choice with all this worrying. We have a choice. We can talk ourselves into something or out of something. And our words are really shaping our reality just as much as our wiring. But the great news is that when you change your words, you change your attitude. If you don't like your reality, look at your language patterns and start to change it. Because that's what neuroplasty means. As you think thoughts, the brain will reshape itself to the thoughts you're thinking.

Well, that's an incredibly refreshing message because I think there are a lot of cultural trends today that are kind of encouraging people to see themselves as fragile and forever damaged instead of, instead of really recognizing the incredible results you have.

I know I have an agony column. You know, advice column. Somebody wrote to me and said, hey, I'm at work and this boy doesn't like me, and it's damaging my mental health. It's like, no, darling, that's not true. A boy doesn't like you. That's part of life. You'll find another one who does. And if he doesn't like you, he's not right. That isn't damaging your mental health even a tiny bit. Except it is when you keep saying it is. You're just learning to deal with rejection, and not everyone's going to like you. But we now have this word, mental health. I'm not being promoted. It's damaging my mental health. Somebody was rude to me. It's damaged my mental health. And we're making this generation feel so fragile. It's wonderful to recognize that we're not all the same. But I do think we're making people feel unnecessarily fragile when really we want to feel that we're stoic and strong and it's okay. And, you know, it's a bit like, if you look at Covid, half the world says, oh, I'm loving Covid. I'm at home with my kids. There's no kidding the other hospital. I absolutely hate it. I might as well be in jail. I'm a prisoner. And it wasn't even Covid. It's what Covid meant to you. Because it's not events that affect you. It's how you feel about the event, which you're free to change. It's what the event means to you, which, again, you can change. So even in a bad situation, when I got run over, it's like, well, actually, it's quite cool. I've got all this time off, I'm lying in bed. I have to do anything. Everyone is being so kind to me. So you can always. You can reframe anything if you want to. And if you can learn to reframe everything and make it better, you know, we could. The only thing we can control are our thoughts. We can't control the weather or traffic or people. We've got Covid. We've got Perma crisis. But the one thing you can control is your thoughts. And when you control your thoughts and make them positive, life is very different. And we have to learn to do that, always take charge of our thinking. Now, most of us fear change because what if it's changed for the worse? But often it could be changed. People say to me, don't you mind getting older? I'm like, well, it's better than the alternative. Of course I don't mind. It's an honor to get older. Some people never have that joy of getting older. And so it's really important to keep reframing. I'm old, I'm single, I don't have children.

Whatever. But, you know, always look for. Is there anything good about that? Because if you look hard enough, you can find something good about everything, including getting older. Because it's a luxury we don't all get to experience.

Absolutely. So you're talking a lot about. What I hear you talking a lot about is mindset and also the power of narrative. That impact.

Oh, yeah.

That drives mindset. And narrative is such a powerful force. And a lot of our narratives were developed early in childhood where we were making up stories to make sense of the world. They are the best stories we could come up with at the time. But carrying them through into adulthood and having them drive our lives in adulthood doesn't necessarily make sense. So your latest book, Tell Yourself a Better Lie, would seem to point to the possibility of the. That narratives are just that. And if we have a narrative that's really not working for us in life, we could. We could create a different narrative that would work better for us.

Yeah. You know, our greatest pain is never from the lies. You know, imagine your partner saying, I don't love you anymore. You're boring. Or your dad's saying, well, actually, you're a mistake, and we really were trying to have a son, and we had a fourth girl, or vice versa. And these lies don't hurt us as much as the lies we tell ourselves. Our greatest pain really comes from these lies. I'm an idiot. I've got rocks for brain. Everything I touch falls apart. I'm just not very good at people. I don't like confrontation. This new one, I feel social anxiety. I'm like, actually, you really don't just be antisocial. And there's nothing wrong with that. That can be a good thing. I don't really want to be with people tonight. I'm going to stay home and watch my TV or just have a nice bath. But antisocial has become social anxiety. You know, we keep giving people these tremendous labels. When you label yourself, you limit yourself, even a good label, like, I'm the good one or the caring one or the kind one or the dependable one. And so the narrative is all about, you know, if you don't like it, why not change it? You know, just because your parents had this belief, like one of my clients told me this story that his father said, stand on the table and you jump and I'll catch when he jumped. He would really say, that's a lesson. Never trust anyone. Don't even trust your own shadow. You can't trust anyone. But that was the father's story. And what I see with many clients is they make someone else the story, their own story. You can't trust people. The world isn't safe. People will rip you off if they get a chance. And there might be some truth in that, but that's another person's story. You have to make your own story. I mean, my parents story was very different to my story because it's quite exciting to go, hey, I can edit and upgrade and change my entire life. I should have been a girl, I should have been a boy, I should have been an account. I should have been an athlete. You can just be yourself. You have a blank slate and you can edit and rewrite anything you like by reframing something. Oh, you know, it's like my grandmother used to say, men don't like successful women. Don't be too smart, you'll never find a husband. But if you look at someone like Michelle Obama, that's clearly no longer the truth. Or, you know, so many things that we hear. You've got more chance of being abducted by an alien than finding love over 30. Your fertility falls off a cliff when you're 32. Your school days are the best days of your life. Marriage is hard work. I mean that. I find that that's the strangest expression. I find it very hard, much harder being single. You wake up with the flu, you got to go out and get your own. You've got to get dressed and go out and get your own prescription. And you're married. I'll get it. I'll make you some soup, get you some paracetamol. Let me get you a nice blanket. But being single is so much harder than having a partner who does things for you. And you've always got someone to share stuff with. So I think a lot of the narrative, as you say, it's just been passed down. Marriage is such hard work. Your school days were the best days of your life. It's all downhill from now on. Life is over when you're 45. Nobody likes women over 40. I remember when I was about 17, I remember seeing a paper about Bridget Bardo who was 34, and it said, she's finished, finished at 34. But now you haven't even started at 34. So I find what really helped me and my patients is to every time you have a belief, challenge it. Who told me that? What did they know? Where did that come from? Is that relevant to me? Even if it was true for them, it doesn't have to be true for me. You know, I remember when I was at school that long ago, there was a girl in our class who got pregnant. It was like, oh, my God, it was such a horror. The shame of being a single parent. I'm a single parent. I mean, I'm happily married now. But there was no shame when I had a baby. It was a choice. Now some people choose to be a single parent. It used to be cast out for that. So we have to keep looking back at all these beliefs and saying, why am I believing something that doesn't serve me?

Absolutely. You know, it seems like one of the most limiting of these kind of beliefs. You know, none of us come through childhood unscathed. And we inherit the stories of our parents, which come from earlier generations, maybe made more sense to them, but don't necessarily make sense in our time or serve us. And we've all, especially in, you know, well, ever more so with each successive generation, the influence of media and that basic message that you're not enough. You know, I mean, the whole consumer society is built on a message, you're not enough. But if you buy this product, if you have the right clothes, the right car, the right. Just the right. That maybe you'd be lovable, maybe enough. So, you know, from an early childhood, we're all absorbing these messages that were not enough. And so I'm wondering about, in your work, if you feel it's not only we can rewire the brains to. They have a more default way of feeling like, I am enough. I am okay.

But.

But also that there is some depth of our being that we can touch into where that's an experiential reality, that we have innate unconditional wholeness and goodness and okayness. That. That. That is a fundamental lie. This idea that we're not enough or we're broken or we need fixing or we're missing something that seems to be one of the most damaging lies or one of the most fundamental lies.

Yeah. See all my bracelets? They all say the same thing. Each one says, I'm enough. But I have it all over my house. I have it on mirrors, I have it on chalkboards. I write it everywhere to remind me that I'. Because the common denominator of most of our issues is I'm not enough. I'm not enough. So I drink too much, eat too much, shop too much, you know, need too many likes. Because if you don't think you're enough, you'll need more of something. But then the truth is that's not even true. Where did you get that from? Who told you? No, babies don't look at me. I've got any teeth, I've got any hair. I've got these triple thighs and a big fat tummy and I don't know. And I don't quite look right. Babies are certain they're enough. So we know that we, we're not born with that belief. Because of course, when you're in the womb, it's like being on Holly in the Four Seasons. You have 24 hour room service, it's always 75 degrees. There's always someone there. So our belief we're not enough has to be something we acquire as we progress through life. And we can pick it up very, very early on. But if we weren't born with it and we acquired it, then we can also let it go by again. Where do you get that belief from? Well, the media told me that and they tell me every day I gotta look like this. I've got to have fat hair and thin thighs, but I've got fat thighs and thin hair, therefore I'm not enough. So you've got to challenge that and defy, I think magazines and television maybe, I mean, I. There was some studies actually you. When television was piped into Turkish villages, they found a high percentage of women within three years got eating disorders when they never had them before. And exactly. In Fiji, cable TV was piped in. Things like Beverly Hills, Night Friends and the same thing. Very quickly girls began to get eating disorders because they started to compare themselves and you know, we really have to start saying to our girls, don't do that. I've noticed now something quite good is happening. We have like, my daughter will talk about body shaming and we've got this thing now where you don't body shame. And the mannequins in shop windows are much chunkier and bigger. And we're stopping having this model of skeletal women and saying, well, that's good. You know, we have to take the next generation and show them that it's not what you look like, it's who you are inside. But it's a big struggle when the media is telling you every day what matters is what you look like.

Absolutely. And yeah, and I think there's more pressure on this than ever. Before, with, with young people growing up. And.

We also can because of these lies that we, we just kind of absorb and these beliefs and so forth. Do we absorb. We can often be our own worst critic. I mean, and our internal environment can often be not so friendly. We're involved in self shaming and self criticism. And I wonder if you could talk about the importance of changing that internal landscape because it makes complete common sense that we should be our own best friend. We should really. We're our closest companion. So if we're not going to be our best friend, who will be?

We got to talk to ourselves where we speak to our own best friend. We sometimes need to have a look at the day in the life when we wake up and go, oh, look at me, I look awful. Oh, I didn't get anything healthy for breakfast. Oh, I haven't left enough time. I'm going to mess up this presentation. If you spoke to your friend like that, they wouldn't be your friend for very long at all. So you have to speak to yourself the way you speak to your best friend. And the five day challenge you were talking about earlier was actually about giving children a cheerleader, is about making each child in the class design a cheerleader. Imagine it was in their head. And of course, a cheerleader only even on a bad day, they keep cheering you. You tried, you did your best. You could do better next time. And what was so lovely, when I watched the footage of these children with these awards, they'd say things like, he, he makes me feel better. He believes in me. And to them it was so real. This cheerleader was real. It was really in their head, clapping and waving and saying, you're okay, you're good. You, you've got your own talent. In fact, you know, I was working with a little kid recently with depression. He was saying to me, no, I'm. I'm not good at math, I'm not good at art. And I said, what? You said I'm good at it. I said, but that's your gift, darling. You're only supposed to be good at one thing. Imagine if everybody was good at everything. We'd never go to a restaurant. We'd never get someone to do our garden. We'd never go shopping. Oh, I can make my own clothes, I can cook my own food, I can design my own house. I can do everything myself. And life would be so unfair. And your gift is it. And that's all you need. You see, schools do this thing that I don't agree with. They make you Study every subject. And some kids are never going to be good at art or maths or English. And then they make you feel bad. In Finland, you only go to the lessons that you like. You self choose your lessons. So kids who love it or in it, kids who love art or in art, and it's working out very well that they're actually being educated in a subject they're probably going to go into as a career. So, you know, it's. It's. I think the whole school system has a lot to do with this comparison because they try to make you do every subject and you can't be good at everything. In fact, I was giving a talk on depression. This guy in the audience said, excuse me, can I ask you a question? I said, of course. He said, how can I make my kid good at everything? I said, are you? What good? He said, no. I said, well, that's your answer. If you're not good at every subject, why would you expect your kid to be? Isn't that rather hypocritical and very damaging? Be elated. What he's good at doesn't have to be good at anything else. So I think, you know, we know that comparison is a thief of joy. But magazines, the media, but also the school system make you compare yourself. That person's thinner than me, richer than me, got more than me. That kid at school is better than me. You know, I took my daughter into the class when she was 5, and as I walked her in, because in England, it's not like the yellow bus. You take your kid to school, you walk them into the classroom. There is no yellow bus. Just me, Mommy. Look at that girl. She can write her name in a box. And I can't write my name in a box like she said her name is. And she showed me Amy on the wall. Amy's name was in a box, and Sam had put his name in a box. And there it was on the wall. But it's like, but your name is Phaedra. The P goes up, the H goes up, the D goes up. It's a long name. It's not supposed to go in a box. And she had a friend called Diamantopoulos. He's like, wow, imagine trying to get that name into a box. But Sam and Amy got infinite praise because they got their name very neatly in a box. It was put on the wall. And I wonder about these teachers when they do that. Look at Sam and Amy got their name in a box. What does that mean for Arabella or Clementine? Who can't get their name in a box because it's long. And it was that whole thing that was just so obvious to me that you're rewarding not effort, but just achievement. And you should reward effort, not achievement because some kids work really hard and don't get any praise and others naturally do stuff and get all the praise. And I think the whole school system is so backwards in making us compare. And many kids don't thrive. They feel like failures.

Yeah, that whole comparative thing is so structured into our society. And I remember growing up in the 1950s in middle class mid America. And you know, even the TV shows at that time, they looked like ordinary people. Most of the TV shows, the sitcoms were about working class people and middle class people. And you knew there are wealthy people that lived in some mansion over there, but it wasn't in your face right then. At some point the media became all about wealth and status and prestige. I remember them with the first show I think maybe was the Lives of the Rich and Famous. Right. But then it just went from there. Now we have the world of influencers. And everybody, every little kid growing up has this image in their mind of super wealth and super luxury and super status and super significance in that way. And how could they not be comparing themselves to that and setting themselves up for. We're really struggling.

Yeah, yeah, they know is they want to be a fireman. They go, I want to be a celebrity. I want to say, I'm going to be a. They were silly. A celebrity. I want to be an influencer. You know, the days of wanting to be a fireman or a nurse, we don't reward that anymore. We, we reward going on television and being really mouthy and getting a great following for being obnoxious and rude and critical. You know, I work in television a lot and I realized very quickly that all they want is to be entertained. And I say, hey, could you make this person cry? Could you make this person angry? Like, well, therapists don't really do that. One says to me, could you sit in a bikini and do therapy in a Jacuzzi? I said, no therapist would ever get in a bikini and do therapy in a Jacuzzi. With their client. It's just unheard of. Yeah, but it would look good. I said, but for who? Wouldn't look good for me. I'd look like an idiot. But that is the problem with television. It's gone so far into shocking and entertaining and it is no longer nurturing. And as you say, all the shows about, you know, we used to have a show called on the Buses about bus drivers. It was a great show, but that wouldn't interest anybody anymore because we make our kids and the same thing, these shows of lives of the rich and famous. You think, oh, my life's not like that, so I'm a failure. So we are actually damaging the next generation with magazines, with people look perfect and everyone is taking pictures of their bodies and their food and their houses and trying to create. It's like what I call being overexposed to fake images of perfection on a regular basis. And all they ever do is make you feel inadequate. Everyone's having a better life than you, but they're really not because it's not real.

So I know in your work, Marissa, that you really, I mean you, I get the sense you really like to cut to the chase and give people very user friendly practical ways to make really immediate shifts in their lives. And you've developed this method called RTT or Rapid Transformational Therapy. So I know you've kind of been alluding to some of the principles of it already, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what Rapid Transformational Therapy really looks like. Both how you train clinic to offer it. But I would imagine people read your books and they can use some of the principles almost as a form of self therapy.

Yeah, in one of my books we have a chapter called RTT for me and it says these are the things you can do at home. Of course you can go and see a therapist, but for simple things, you can actually do this yourself. So RTT works and it's very specific. And people come in and say things like, I can't stop drinking, I can't stop pulling out my eyelashes. I blush when people look at me. I am no good with the tent, with attention, you can't find love. And we also have the premise that, listen, you were not born like that. This must have come from somewhere. And I never say what's wrong with you, always say, well, what happened to you? And then people begin to tell you their story and their story is always so interesting. And as the story unravels, you begin to see that things happen. When we're a child and we make sense what happened with a life, with a life purpose, with a life of a child. I've been on the planet for five years and I've decided I'm unlovable. I've been on the planet for seven years and I've decided I'm stupid or I'm worthless. We have something called learned helplessness. So imagine you're seven and your mum's crying because you've got any money or your dad's just hit her and you're standing there helpless and you think, I've got to fix this, but I can't do it. I got to stop my dad hitting my mum, screaming at my mum, drinking too much and the child can't do it. So they have this thing about I must, but I can't. And they immediately become helpless and they go through life with this belief I can't fix anything, I can't make things better, I'm not good at stuff. And unfortunately they carry that along. Forty years later, you know, you imagine a kid at school being made to finish some congealed fish on the plate or being laughed at because they can't pronounce a word. And 50 years later they still can't leave food, they still can't speak to. My stepfather went to school and he was left handed and he was hit on his hand with a ruler every day till he wrote with the other hand. And he could never sign a check in public because he had this tremendous sense of shame. And if you looked over his shoulder, he just couldn't do any writing at all. That was a lingering imprint of being hit on a regular basis at school just because he couldn't write with the other hand and I had to hypnotize him and take him back and they go, well, look, you know, that happened, that was terrible, but that's not you anymore. So one of the things we do is when we find the scenes which are easy to find, we have the client, then state isn't me and they have to explain, almost justify why that's no longer them. And that in itself is so simple yet so powerful. That's not me, that can't be me, won't be me, isn't me. So it's a bit like, first you're a bit like a detective, but new detective hat and you investigate what happened, how did that affect you? And then you almost become more like a dentist. You start extracting all that negative stuff and then you become like a coder and you code in a better belief. So it's doing it all together. Some therapists are very good at working out what happened to you. Some are very good at giving you new beliefs. If you do it together, find out what happened, extract it, code in something new. Doing it all together is immensely powerful because the client doesn't listen to you saying, well, you do this because of that and the client works out. Yeah, of course, I do this because of that. But they. You do it with them, not for them, which makes it much better for the client. Then you give them a recording, exciting, the imagination. But the biggest thing is just saying, look, you know, any kid of your age would have felt the way you felt, but you're not that kid. You know, I was watching. It wasn't a great movie. I was watching Blonde about Marilyn Monroe's life. And of course, as you watch it, as a therapist, you think, wow, by five, that poor woman felt worthless, helpless, hopeless, inadequate. And the problem is that because the mind wants to go back to what it already knows, it's the most vexing thing. The mind wants to go back to what's familiar, what's known, what's comfortable. We. We always have this reset of going back. So when you, you know, I've worked on many shows, people losing weight, and they have a trainer and a chef and machines, but the minute the filming is open, they order pizza, an ice cream, because it's familiar. It's the same reason why 70% of lottery winners are absolutely bankrupt in three years. Because if what's familiar is getting a paycheck and spending it all because you only get enough to cover the bills, then when you get the lottery, investing isn't familiar. Spending is familiar. So they'll just spend it. And that's the most vexing thing that our primitive brain wants to go back to what it already knows. But the good news is you just have to make better stuff known, and then it will go back to that. Hmm.

So I know you have a background in therapy, and. And I know there's even some forms of addiction treatment now where they actually talk about memory replacement. Of course, our memories are limited interpretations of past events anyway, and they are stories, in a sense. And however factual or not so factual they may be from time to time. But I. I know you work at that level. I wonder if you could talk about kind of relationship with the conscious mind, the unconscious mind, which might be just as kind of a substrate of the conscious mind, but then the ability to use things like visualization and creating mental images and pictures and so forth to kind of reprogram at that maybe somewhat unconscious level in a way that'll actually cause us to start having different thoughts and feelings that are going to be more supportive for our life.

Because you're absolutely correct, the subconscious mind is running the show. The subconscious is like a powerful Ferrari, and the conscious is the driver who's had no experience ever of Riding a Ferrari. So can't really get the best out of it. And, you know, with everything, it's like if I had a syringe in my hand and held up a needle. Now, it's not the needle. It's what the needle means to you. If you're having a sleeve full of tattoos, you'd be very excited about that needle. If you're in immense pain, you'll welcome that needle. If you're having beauty treatment, you'll be excited about the needle. But if you don't like needles, you say, well, I can't look at the needle. I don't like needles. I got a phobia about needles. And I can't even go to the dentist because I hate needles. But it's not the needle. It's what the needle means to you. It's the pictures you make in your head. If I had a lump of meat in my hand, if you're a vegan or a Hindu, that would be so offensive to you. But if you're a bodybuilder, it'd be the best thing ever. Because it's not the thing. It's the pictures we make in our head about the thing and the words we say to ourselves. And the very good news there is that if the way you feel about everything is down to the pictures you make and the words you form, then the good news is you can change those words, you can change those pictures, which in itself changes your life. So addicts, I find, never feel they're enough. Addicts always feel inadequate. No one says, hey, my life's so amazing. I think I'd drink myself into a stupor here. My life's so amazing, I think I go and troll somebody. So all our limiting behaviors come from limiting beliefs. And if you can take out the limiting beliefs, it ends the limiting behavior. We put I'm enough into, I think, 1600 schools last year, and they all said the same thing. Bullying has just disappeared in this school. Children aren't being bullied, and we don't have bullies because they all do this thing every day. Got a little plaque on their desk, and they'll say, I'm enough. And they create a little bit of artwork. You have to say it, state it, affirm it. And they all feel so much better. They feel better. They're academically doing better. But I loved that the fact that bullying was diminishing in every school that took this I'm enough program for their kids. Because, you know, we forget when we send our kids to school, you go to school to learn how to have healthy self esteem. The job of a parent is to give your kids healthy no matter how much broccoli you give them or Mandarin lessons or organic stuff. We need high self esteem. And it seems that schools and parenting are not teaching us how to have that. In fact the opposite. We have AI now that's doing our homework for us. I go into the bank, there's no teller. I go to the store, there isn't a single teller. It's all done by computers and machines and I think we've forgotten that. You know, our self esteem comes from human relationships and feeling we matter and feeling we're connected and feeling we're contributing something to the world. But now even though we're born hardwired and there's our wiring again, wired to find connection and avoid rejection, we live in a world we're actually finding disconnection and rejection. I know. You know in Japan you can now rent a robot to keep you company. You get a robot dog. And in Japan they had an issue of middle aged women going to jail and saying I like it, I don't want to go, I love it in here, I've got friends, it's like a girls boarding school. So I do wonder what we're doing to the world as we replace people with machines and robots. Because if our greatest need is to be connected, what are we doing disconnecting people the way we're disconnecting them now?

Yeah, it is pretty scary. And things are accelerating so much. I mean, I guess one of the positive spins on it is it'll free us all from, you know, kind of being so tied to work and labor that we'll find new ways to connect around arts future and so forth. But, but who knows? I mean our work lives seem to be pretty strong source of our sense of meaning and purpose in life and sense of self worth and self esteem. Although there are obviously it doesn't have to all be tied to work. And in my own country we have this kind of protestant work ethic that can become another kind of, you know, you're only as good as your work. Right. And that's very limiting as well. So be interesting to see how things are going to involve with AI and computers and machines and so forth. So what I heard you talking about even in, you know, what you're including in that program for school children, I wonder if you could talk about the power of kind of repetition and practice. Because we know from, I mean there's a famous saying from the Canadian neuropsychologist Hebb that neurons that fire together wire together. So we create new neural networks by repeating activities, repeatedly associating activities. So if you continually reframe things and, and repeat phrases or hold images in your mind or, or do some journaling around these things that you do that. I wonder if you could talk about the power of embracing these things as kind of practices that we do regularly. I mean, you talked about that. You have. You write down I am enough all over your home and all kinds of different. You've been doing that for a long time, right? So that the repetition there. Could you talk about what the repetition creates in terms of how we actually begin to change the landscape of our. Of our unconscious and our brain, if you will.

And what's a really good thing is to wire that into something else. So imagine every time you're in the shower, that's when you begin to say it, because what else you can do in the shower? Oh, I love the smell of this soap, or I love the smell of the shampoo. There's not a lot you getting washed, but you're in water. It's a very meditative state. And if you decide every time I'm in the shower, which I mean every day, I'm going to say, I'm enough, I'm enough. I'm significant, I matter. I'm lovable. And the more you do it in the shower, eventually it stops being what you do. It becomes who you are. So our neurons, of course, respond to behaviors. The more we repeat something, the more it's automatic, which is why babies have to. Now I get a picture of my daughter with a banana, and she got it in her hair, in her ear. She didn't get much of it in her mouth, but of course she doesn't say, now, I still can't eat a banana. So when we repeat something, the mind learns by repetition. But what's so good is that when you repeat a behavior, a good behavior, like for instance, if you start to praise yourself every day, I'm a good person, I matter. I'm kind, I'm lovable. While you're wiring in that new behavior, also wiring out the old, you're coding in something new and letting something old go. If you keep saying, I'm really good at memory, I'm really smart at computers, you can't, you see, the mind can't go in two lanes. It's got a terrible memory. I've got a great memory. It can't drive in both highways. So you have to make a decision which I'm going in that one. I've got a great memory. Got a great memory. Got a great memory. Because your mind can't think conflicting thoughts, it can't hold two beliefs. And I often hold up a BlackBerry. Here's a BlackBerry. The old phone, did you ever have it yet? I don't even know how to use that now. That's so funny. I had a black ray for five. I'm looking at it, I have no idea what to do with that because now I've moved to an apple, you see, and I know the apple and when I look at the apple, I look at. I don't know how I did it. In the same way as if you always have a desktop and you get a laptop, it's very confusing. With a mouse, I always use a laptop. So when I have a desktop, I'm moving that mouse all around the desk because I'm not used to it. But if I had it enough, I'd get used to it. But it's interesting to think about that. What was my first ever phone number? I don't know, because I say the new number so much that I can't say the new number and remember the old number. You know, if I'm listening to a song, I'm thinking, what is that band last thing I've got to switch the song off to remember. And so we have to remember the good stuff about the mind learning. It doesn't just learn by repetition good habits, it's also forgetting old ones. If you're learning praise, you're forgetting criticism. If you're learning to be nice to yourself, you're forgetting to be mean to yourself. If you're learning to get up every day and eat, have a green smoothie for breakfast, you're forgetting to eat donuts. So it's a two way thing going on. Every time I eat salad, every time I eat vegetables, every time I eat some green stuff, I'm forgetting the junk. Every time I reach for an apple instead of a candy bar, eventually I prefer the apple to the candy bar. Who'd have thought that was possible? I mean, it's like taking sugar out of your coffee. At first it tastes awful, you go, oh, I like it, really sweet. But then you think, actually, I'm going to use it now. Actually, I can't even imagine. Let me try it. Oh my God, I used to drink it like that. That's disgusting. That's a wonderful thing. You know, I used to have tea with milk and honey in it every day. I don't know what I was thinking of. And now I have tea with a little bit of almond milk and I couldn't even imagine having tea with cow's milk and honey. The whole thing sounds so bizarre. Yeah, I drank that for years because that's the good thing. As I wired in the better tea with almond milk. I coded out the old stuff. And we're so busy thinking, oh yeah, I'm putting in this new stuff, but you're also letting go of old stuff. And that's a great thing because the mind cannot hold conflicting beliefs, it can't hold conflicting thoughts. It learns by repetition. Good stuff and lets go of old stuff.

Well, I'm so glad you shared that. And it really points to the, how leverage these practices can be for transformation. Not only are we doing the work to code in a new positive habit of some kind, a new behavior of some time, but in doing so, we're actually diminishing the power of the old habit or we're letting go of the old habit. So that, wow, it just really points to the power of these transformational practices. So what if you could talk a little bit about, you've developed a.

A.

Program for helping people work with the issue of weight and having a healthy relationship with food. And we all know there's this multi billion dollar, maybe trillion dollar industry, I don't know around weight loss and everyone struggles with it. Most of the out there don't work. And so I'm wondering how the approach you're taking to help people actually make lasting change in terms of their relationship with food and, and then maybe being able to, you know, be within a more healthy weight range for themselves.

You know, I started off in that very industry because I was working for Jane Fonda in the 80s, teaching aerobics, going for the burn, living on that very Jane diet of diet hot chocolate, diet yogurt, diet coke, and I think diet oatmeal. And I realized even then, you know, this business is a business of abuse. We talk about punish those pounds, go for the burn, do a punishing workout, be good, be bad. You need a strict, I need a stricter diet. And all these words just make people hate themselves. You know, your body is designed to eat food and when it's full, it will stop and you have an appetite that regulates it. But of course, every time you go on a diet, what happens is you're resting, metabolic, metabolic rate drops. So you're resting, metabolic rate drops. Which again, nature made that happen to keep you alive in times of famine when there was no food. Your Metabolic rate slowed down a lot so you didn't lose too much weight. And lo and behold, when you stopped eating less, you would gain weight immediately. So you had the excess weight for lean times. The two things happen when you go on a diet. Your metabolic rate goes down, it doesn't go back up. And if you get too heavy, it goes down even more. So dieting puts you at a terrible disadvantage and it messes up your relationship. Saying, oh, you know, I love food. You people say, oh, I love food, I love pizza, I love cake. No, no, no, that's not love. That's actually abuse. Loving food is engagement. Oh, this is delicious. Let me really savor this wonderful piece of chocolate or this gorgeous piece of fish or this wonderful piece of ch. Let me savor it, this mango and engage with it. But instead we eat so fast because we're taught that too. You know, the school bus is coming. Hurry up. The person who finishes first gets more dessert. If I bolt through the food, I get seconds. You know, you cannot make a baby bolt food. They engage with it. They will not take a second spoonful. You're there with a spoon. Come on. Until they've really engaged with the first. And we start to train that out of kids that eat quickly. Hurry up. If you finish, you can have some cake. And it's such a sad thing that we're doing. And then we make ourselves go on diets, we start to have this love hate relationship with food. You know, I was in Africa and my tour guide, so can I ask you a question on it? He said, is it really true that in your country people have food in front of them and they don't eat it? I said, yes. He said, why? It looked like I was an alien with two heads. Is it true that women eat food that make themselves sick? He couldn't even comprehend in Zimbabwe with not enough food, why, why that would be possible. And I thought, yes, that must seem so strange. And again, dieting messes you up. It stops you loving food. It makes you hate your own body. And the only way you can have a body you love is to love the body you have. Your body as the most mind boggling, priceless thing you'll ever own. And if you can just start from loving it. It's like, I love my body, so maybe I should have a green smoothie, not a Krispy Kreme doughnut. I love my body. Maybe I should have an apple or some blueberries. Not a big piece of cake. Of course you can have some cake. I love my body. Enough to just have a little bit that was yummy, I don't need more. So it's coming at it from love, not abuse. You know, it's one point to put good stuff in and take bad stuff out. And it's important to engage with food and to realize that when you're put on a desert island, you look for three things. Food, shelter, procreation, in that order. Food is first, shelter. Second, Procreation is the last thing because without food nothing matters. But diets make you hate food and hate yourself. And then dieting fails because I'm going to go on a diet to look good in my jeans. Well, I've done that. So now I might as well go back to eating all the cakes again. It's a real lose, lose. And so dietless life is really about going back and coming from self love. If I'm a food lover, eating badly is actually being a food abuser. It's saying that it's not what you eat, it's what's eating you. It's learning these hacks. Nature wants you to binge on sugar because sugar never poisoned anybody. Nature wants you to eat food when you see it. Nature wants you to remember where sugar is. And nature wants you to be scared of hunger. So instead of beating yourself up then, oh, this is just my body trying to keep me alive. But I don't have to go back for the sugar. There's been a vending machine next to my desk for 20 years. It's not scarce. Or thinking, yeah, if I have ice cream in my fridge, I'll go back. So I'm just not going to buy the ice cream. I'm going to leave it in the store or going to buy one cake and not ten. I'm going to. If I've got things for my kids lunch, I can remember to put them in a cupboard I don't look at every day. So it's learning certain hacks that are kind to you. Understanding again, you're wiring. We're wired to do certain things. We're wired the minute we see food to want it. Which is why when you sit down in a restaurant, they bring the bread. But I think they've eaten all of that because I'm now thinking about food and it's so unfortunate. The food industry is also, you know, we have something called the bliss point, which is how many sugars can I get some before you're physically sick? At the Moment it's about 22. Some coffees in places like Starbucks and Costa have 22 teaspoons of sugar. I mean, that's abusive. Who would ever wake up and put 22 teaspoons of sugar in their coffee? Who would know that pasta sauce can have 10 to 15 teaspoons of sugar in it? That I was in Whole Foods, I bought some chicken soup, my husband had a little cold. Second ingredient was sugar. I said, why have you put sugar? Our customers like it. I'm your customer and I really don't like it that the second ingredient in this chicken soup is sugar because it feeds infection. So I'm buying this soup to help my husband get better and it's got the worst ingredient in it. And then also what dietless life does very well is to explain. And again, it's sarang we eat something if the picture is right, you know, if somebody sneezed on your lunch, you wouldn't eat it. If somebody spat on your dinner as they put it down, you wouldn't eat it. But the picture, you know. So we have food companies calling things Happy Meals and Fun size and Barn Fresh and Sun enriched. And we have foods like Sunny Delight and Wonderloaf. And the worst possible foods have got these names. Divine Heaven, Love Heroes, Celebration. And I say, look, you have to change if you want to stop eating yogurt covered raisins. They're just sugar covered lumps of sugar. Call Coca Cola embalming fluid, osteoporosis in a can, because that's pretty much what it is. Call jelly sweets boiled up cow's feet, you know, make a different picture because when you make a different picture like this, you know, I couldn't eat pigeon, for instance. I could never eat pigeon because I look and think, oh, I couldn't eat those. I couldn't eat snails because to me the picture of snails is really unattractive. I couldn't eat liver or kidneys. I mean, there's lots of things I can eat. I could eat lamb, but I couldn't eat kittens. I could eat lamb, but I couldn't eat dog or donkey or horse. Why can you eat lamb but not donkey? Because the picture is completely wrong. I could eat beef, but I couldn't eat gorilla. Why is that? Because I eat cow's milk, but I wouldn't eat gorilla's milk. But actually gorilla's milk is probably a better word than cow's milk because we have closer DNA to chimps than to cows. And then it all sounds so crazy. You think, oh yeah, I simply couldn't eat that, but I could eat that. We only eat if the picture is Right. And food companies spend millions of pounds making the picture right for something that's terrible. McDonald's has got so much sugar, it's more like a cake than a bun. But then we begin to understand this, manipulate our wiring again, our wiring is, if the picture is right, I'm going to eat it. And if the picture's wrong, if I were to pick up an orange and it was covered in green mold, I wouldn't eat it because the picture's wrong. If I went to eat some fish and it was all slimy and smelly, the picture's immediately wrong. So if you want to succeed at eating or make the pictures of good stuff, right, you know, I love beautiful salads, and I love vegetables. I love really good quality protein. I really am not interested in sugar. I'm not the kind of person I look at donuts go, they're just fat and sugar. There's no nutrition in there. And a good thing to do is not say, what do I want? But what does my body want? I. When I'm walking into a restaurant or buying groceries, I always. I never say, what do I want? I say, what does my body want? Because if you just ask, what does my body want? Because you're wondering, you know what I want. I want embalming fluid, emulsifiers, colorants, preservatives. Knock me out with all that stuff. Your body finds that food a terrible punishment. So just saying, what is my. But what would my body like? What would my. What is my body asking for? Which is never sugar. That's your brain. In the same way, if you sniff white out, I think you call Tippex whiteout. Now, if you sniff chemicals every day, your brain will want more. It doesn't mean you need them. So the whole program is about being kind to yourself, understanding your wiring, understanding your primal brain, understanding what makes you tick, and eating in a way, because you know, if you want to eat more, eat less. You'll live 16 years longer on the planet just by eating selectively. So the way to eat more is to eat selectively. And if you want to do anything good for yourself, just take out sweeteners and margarine. If you did nothing else but that for the rest of your life, that just those two things would massively impact your health. And that's easy. I'm going to take out all those sweeteners, I'm going to take out margarine. And here's another thing. Just take out refined sugar. You don't have to live your life without dessert. But nowadays Especially in America and Europe and the uk, you can find so many delicious things made with coconut sugar or date sugar or monk fruit. So just take out refined sugar, do something amazing or do what they do in Sweden, they have sugar. Saturdays, you only eat sugar one day a week. And then you think, oh, Saturday I have cake. And how lovely. I enjoy it. I don't bolt it down. There's no guilt. I've got a cake because you just do it once a week. And I still do that. I think I just have sugar every seven days. Doesn't matter which day. Have a little bit I can enjoy. I didn't have it for years and then I somehow just did. I was traveling so much, I was on so many planes. I thought, okay, I'll just have a little something. And now once a week is a good way because I want to take away the guilt and the self hate. I ate sugar. I shouldn't have done it. But there's so many ways to be healthier, you know, and understand that fat is your friend and sugar is your enemy. We think fat is bad. Fat is great. It makes testosterone, which burns fat. We have this thing called essential fats. I mean, that's the very clue in the name your brain, every organ of your body needs fat. So have things like avocado and nuts and seeds and oils and oily fish and celebrate them. So don't take away the fat, take away the sugar. You did nothing. But that, that in itself would really, you know, help. You have a lot of things we look at like Alzheimer's and dementia because of this high sugar diet and this diet that's so nutrient dense and full of chemicals. So your brain will love you for giving it healthy fat, more fat, less sugar.

I love also that this message is coming through what you're saying, that we do have this wiring that's meant to keep us alive and that our biology developed when the threat of starvation was very real for most people. And we don't have to feel bad about that, that we don't have to feel bad about our impulses. We just need to train ourselves to make good choices and develop the right pictures or not the right, but good pictures that really represent healthy. So our brain connects the right pictures or good pictures with good choices. But we don't, we don't have to fundamentally feel bad about that urge to snack or that urge we can stop feeling bad about ourselves. Seems to be the beginning.

Yeah, because we've all heard of fight, flee, freeze, but actually it's fight, flee, freeze, feed if you were out in the Serengeti and you saw a lion and you ran and you hid and you got away, the minute you were safe, you go, okay, I need some berries. I need to replenish all that lost energy. So if you did the fighting or the fleeing, the next thing is feeding. If you did the freezing, it's like, okay, even that would be so stressful, you'd replenish. But now of course we want to run away from our emails, we want to run away from our boss, our to do list. So we still have this. I want to fight this, I want to flee, I want to freeze. And the next F is feed. So it's fight, flee, freeze, feed. Under stress we have this tremendous urge and need to replenish lost calories. So when we're stressed we go, I need cake, I need takeout. And again, don't be that, that's your body trying to keep you alive. Just say, thank you body. Thanks for doing that. But you know what? I'm not going to eat pizza today. I'm going to have a lovely hot drink, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to have a bath, I'm going to light some candles, I'm have going to to call a friend, I'm going to read a book, I'm going to put on my favorite show because I'm not a caveman and there's nothing to replenish here. So always when that happens instead of going, oh, my body's so annoying, makes me want to eat in stress, go, thank you body. You're trying to keep me alive. I get it. In this instance, I'm good, I've got it. I'm going to have a lovely hour watching my favorite show and then I'm going to make some delicious soup or grill some fish. I don't actually need a takeout here. So it's just dialoguing back, you know, remember the for your mind is the Ferrari, you're the Ferrari driver. But if you had Ferrari driving lessons, you'd manage that Ferrari, which is the subconscious very well. And the dialoguing is the lessons. And how can I manage this magnificent beast called my subconscious mind? By talking to it, recognizing, understanding it and acknowledging it all the time and even thanking it.

Well, I love that you, you pointed to because so many of us I think fall into kind of self medicating with food and many other things. And, and it's not that, that impulse when, when we're feeling that urge to self medicate. That's that's wisdom. The body's telling us, yes, you need something, but maybe a hot bath or hot drink would be better than the cake and it would actually be a better medication. So the fact that we're feeling something, we can see that as the body's with them, it's just, just changing, changing the prescription, possibly to a healthier prescription. But. But we don't need to feel bad that we have this.

This nerves. That's the body saying, yeah, you need something, you need a warm bath or you need to relax or you need something.

Yeah, and you need to tune into the feeling. Because what we're taught in the Western world, you've got a feeling. Eat the feeling, drink the feeling, shop the feeling, medicate the feeling, spend the feeling. You can't cake your feelings or beer your feelings. You can't shop your feelings. You have to feel the feelings until they no longer require to be felt. They're the most real thing you have. So when you think, I'm feeling a feeling, I need to eat, you actually need to go, what am I feeling? Well, I'm feeling resentment, I'm feeling rage, I'm feeling hurt, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling lonely. I can just be lonely. The cake isn't going to make any difference. I'm going to eat the cake and still feel lonely. So I'm going to sit with being lonely and feel it, have hot drinks. They're very, very good for you. And I think, yeah, well, if I'm lonely, maybe it's my job to do something. Well, just think, today I'm lonely, tomorrow I'll be out with my friends again. So it's what I call triple A. Be aware of your feelings, totally accept them and then say them out loud. I'm feeling lonely or sad or, you know, last week I was feeling bereft because one of my dearest friends died. And it was very painful. But eventually, I think, you know, I have to be so glad I had her for so long. I'm terribly sad I lost her, but I can't eat the feeling of bereftness. I can't drink it, I can't medicate it. I can't go out and buy stuff. It's a feeling and I feel it because I loved her so much. She was such a beautiful person. And so the media says, oh, when you feel a feeling, medicate it somehow. But you are your feelings. You have to feel them, even when sit with them. Grief, sadness, all the things we feel. Loneliness, abandonment, you've got to stay with it. And at least if you acknowledge it, you might think, you know, I'm lonely, I need to do something about it, or I am feeling something. But, you know, eating your feelings, they just regroup and come back. So it doesn't accomplish anything. So when you're feeling a feeling, sit with it, be aware of it, accept it, deal with it, don't eat it, because it's gonna just regroup and come back stronger than ever.

Yeah, that could be a whole nother conversation. I think you could frame almost all of our individual problems in life and all of our social problems from the fact that we've been so enculturated to not be willing to feel. And we're constantly running away from our feelings. And if we are willing to feel, to touch into our feelings and feel, that also gives us probably a little better chance of making a better choice. If we do feel, yeah, I'm feeling sad. It might be good to do this. So I'm feeling a bit stressed out. Maybe a warm bath might be nice. So if we're willing to. To feel it, that then gives us space to make a better choice. From what you're saying or just, you.

Know, feeling of you want to mourn something. You know, it's so crazy saying, I shouldn't be sad, as I think I shouldn't be diabetic. I shouldn't be angry, as I was saying I shouldn't be in the menopause. I mean, you are your feelings saying I shouldn't be unhappy. So saying I shouldn't be aging. Your feelings are the most real thing you have, and they're your friends even when you don't like them. And if you're feeling sad because someone's died, then you're going to have to mourn that. And you're feeling sad because your kids have left home, you're going to have to refund that. Hey, I did a great job. Some people's kids never leave home. They're handicapped their entire life. And people say, oh, you know, I've got. I'm. I've got empty nest syndrome. No, that's failing to adapt. You've done a great job. That's why your kids have left home. Oh, I'm feeling awful about getting older. And you have to reframe those feelings and think what's good about them. And there'll always be something good. Even at their worst, there's something good about it. You know, many people, women especially, when their kids leave home, they fall apart. But you've done a great job. That's a wonderful thing.

Well, thank you so much for everything you shared today with us. Marissa has been incredibly rich and empowering and liberating. Really. So I really appreciate you and the work you bring into the world. And thank you so much.

Thank you for inviting me. Me. Thank you so much.

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