EP 199: April Seiftert, PhD | Unleashing the Power of Mind

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, Dr. Fleet Mall. And in this episode, I welcome Dr. April Seifert to the Radical Responsibility Podcast, who's a psychologist, data scientist and entrepreneur with a PhD in Social Cognitive Psychology. We're going to explore together how the brain can deliberately rewire itself to change our behavior and life experiences. We'll learn how the role of mindfulness and meditation and rewire neural pathways in positive ways for positive neuroplasticity. And we'll discover the power of overcoming cognitive dissonance and challenging negatively positive, negatively biased filters to promote personal growth. So, fascinating conversation with a leading expert on neuroscience, mindfulness and cognitive psychology, Dr. April Seifert. And I'm really thrilled to be here today with my colleague, Dr. April Seifert. Welcome.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Oh, I'm really glad we can do this together. So you're also one of our co hosts for this summit. So I know you're doing some really great interviews and it was also really important as well to have you as a speaker because this is right in your sweet spot. The intersection of positive psychology and neurobiology, neurophysiology and so forth. Dr. April Seifert is a psychologist, data scientist and serial entrepreneur. She holds a PhD in Social Cognitive Psychology from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and has spent over a decade studying the ways our minds store information, form habitual and subconscious thought processes and how all of that impacts our behavior and life experiences. Additionally, her work in the field of life design complements her psychological training to create an impactful way for people to truly design their life and experiment their way forward to a truly aligned life. Dr. Seifer is also the founder and president of Sprocket CX, a boutique company dedicated to using research, data, science and psychology to help businesses uncover insights that drive customer behavior change, engagement and growth. She is also the co founder of PeakMind, the Center for Psychological Strength, a company dedicated to creating psychological trainings and well being resources for individual and forward thinking organizations. She is a dynamic and in demand speaker and host of the top rated podcast Building Psychological Strengths. And that's where we first met actually. You had me on your podcast I believe.

Yeah, and here we are now. I mean it's been a really great long term friendship that's developed so Very grateful for that first interview.

I'm very grateful as well. And I think that's maybe even three or four years ago you had me on your podcast. Been a little while.

Yeah.

So here we are at the Rewiring your brain World Summit. And so I'm curious about how the process of rewiring your brain, or, you know, kind of how that language, that analogy kind of works for you, and then how that contributes to building the psychological strength and resilience that you talk about a lot in your work. And I wonder if you can just describe the relationship between looking at it maybe from a psychological perspective of the things we do to build that psychological strength, flexibility, and resilience, and then what's maybe happening at a neurobiological level where we use the analogy of actually rewiring the brain.

So when we talk about psychological strength, we're really talking about a set of capabilities that we can develop. It's things like emotional intelligence. It's the relationships we form with other people. It is our cognition or the way that we think, and whether we're thinking in a biased or unbiased way, attitude. I mean, there's so many things that go into psychological strength because there's a lot psychologically that we need to keep ourselves moving, call it in an effective and optimized direction. Now, what's interesting about the mind is that you've probably heard this in a lot of places. Our mind's biggest goal is to get us through the day alive, right? But our mind's biggest goal is not to help us thrive necessarily. So what our mind does in order to get us through the day alive is it's really good at looking for things that might harm us, which means, as a general rule, our mind is biased in a negative direction if left unchecked. If you just allow it to do what minds do, it tends to produce a lot of anxiety. It tends to point out negativity in our environment. And all of these things that we know are not conducive to us feeling our best and feeling like we're moving through life in a way that we want to. So I love that you call it rewiring, because the way that our mind naturally wires itself is not in the direction that a lot of us want to be able to go. And so taking the time that people are spending on this summit to intentionally work on some practices that can help their mind rewire in a more positive direction is really important, because what you're essentially doing then is correcting that imbalance in our Mind, nobody's saying let's pretend like the world is. There isn't negativity in the world. Nobody is saying this is a rose colored glasses situation. Rather, if left unchecked, your thinking is biased. And so what we're saying is let's bring it back into alignment with what reality is. Let's see the world in a bit more of a balanced reality as it actually is.

So you're a cognitive psychologist. So I want to frame things a little bit here before we go further with the conversation. So you've been using the term mind. And you know, when we talk about rewiring the brain, we're actually talking about the physical brain. And then we can talk about mind in terms of our cognitive experience. And I think from the perspective of cognitive psychology, you'd be looking at it a lot that way. We can also talk about mind as just this whole sensorial.

Phenomena of being conscious, being a conscious being. And we're experiencing not only thought, but all our sense perceptions and moods. I mean, our whole experience of being a. And so, and you know, when you get into consciousness, you have what they call the hard problem of consciousness. How does that even arise from these neurological processes of the brain?

And I think even in our, in our, you know, not philosophical, but even in, you know, really neuroscientific understanding, say you have the rewiring the brain analogy kind of works on a certain level. And that the brain does have circuitry, but it's much more than just like the motherboard on a computer or a circuit board. It does have circuitry. But, you know, probably what we think of as mind is really a phenomena that's more like waves going through this very complex organism. Right. And so, but nonetheless that when we make changes in our behavior and our thinking patterns, this does change the actual kind of neural pathways of the brain. So we're talking about physical changes. So I'm wondering if we can talk about how.

You know, many of us can have, we can find ourselves in adulthood with a brain that has obviously a lot of good wiring, good neural pathways, or we wouldn't be able to function at all. But, but can have some neural pathways and some wiring, some habitual patterns, some things that kind of get in our way and cause us to struggle. And we know that we can gradually improve. So looking at it from a purely psychological window, we know someone who's sort of struggling psychologically, we can provide them with tools to where they'll develop greater psychological strength, greater emotional intelligence, greater adaptability, psychological flexibility, things like that. And we also know from current neuroscience that that means there's really real changes going on in the physical brain. Right. And so I'm curious about if we bring it into some of the things we can actually do and some of the things that you invite people to do in your trainings and with clients that will increase psychological strength and that, you know, in that sense, there's actually a re. Patterning going on in the brain. So I wonder if you could. We could begin to talk about the things we can actually do to do that.

But.

But also in the context that we actually really are making changes in the brain.

I mean, one of the ones that I guarantee people have heard. I'm going to give you one specific one and one more broad set of behaviors or tools. The specific one is one that people hear all the time. And I think about 50%, probably less than this audience, but about 50% of people I talk to just, ugh, roll their eyes. And this isn't the answer they want to hear. Meditation. Meditation, a meditative practice in a matter of a handful, maybe two handfuls of weeks, if done deliberately, can actually lead to noticeable changes in your brain on an mri. I mean, we're talking about a deeper wiring across the two sides, two hemispheres of your brain, which just allows for more connectivity in your brain. And this is interesting. So that's kind of on the brain side. I want to hit the mind side too, though, because.

When we think about the things going back to something I said before that the mind naturally does, being in the present moment is not one of those things. Our mind spends very little time in the moment that we're living. Instead, it's casting back, it's future casting, it's rerunning scenarios. It's very repetitive thought. It's worrying about or trying to predict something that might happen. So we time travel back and forth for the majority of our day, and what ends up happening is we spend so little time in the present moment that it actually requires practice to teach our mind how to be here. And meditation can really help with that. And that's, you know, one of the predispositions for having strong interpersonal relationships, enjoying life, being able to see and actually experience all that's around you. So meditation is the very specific practice that I would recommend. And then the other side of the coin, it's more of a general, how do we. How do we put. Even throw gas on this fire? Right? How do we get these changes and the experience that we have of them to happen faster? I like to Say that you can't think your way out of a mindset problem. You can, but it's slow and sometimes ineffective. Instead, our mind will store information more quickly and will change information more quickly when it's linked to a behavior. So I mentioned before that our mind wants to get us through the day alive. It's, you know, seeking out negative information.

The best way to convince your mind, no, in fact, that public speaking experience is not, in fact, as threatening as you think it is. No, it is not going to kill me is to actually go do it. It's to prove to your mind, I did this and I'm okay, even if it doesn't go perfectly. The point is to convince your mind that you actually are going to survive in these new settings that historically have seemed novel, have seemed out of the ordinary. And our mind looks to novel and out of the ordinary things as, oops, that might be risky. So anytime you have something that you have almost an avoidance motive from, when in actuality.

If you're being honest, it's something that you want to be doing or would better you or a relationship or something.

Getting some behavior involved in that change is going to rapidly increase how quickly your mind sort of changes its tune about that behavior. So meditation is a specific one. Adding behavior is the more general term rather than just sort of deliberating and thinking about what you might want to change.

Well, those are both really important. They're somewhat related. I want to talk about meditation in a moment. But what you're saying about behavior is that adding a behavioral strategy, in other words, taking action, can be more effective than a purely cognitive strategy in terms of actually shifting a mindset. And a mindset being a set of beliefs that we have which actually are ingrained in our brain, brain and our neural networks. But it's a set of beliefs that we have, and.

We'Re filtering all of our experience through these mindsets. Right. So you're saying the most powerful, direct way to change your mindset is actually take action that will prove to us that our beliefs that are holding our back are no true, and beliefs that might move us forward, in fact are true.

That action might be small. It's the smallest approximation of the real thing that you want to do. You're sort of wading yourself into the pool sometimes from what feels like a zero death entry. And that's okay. But this is all basically the process of exposure in anxiety, in the anxiety space has a lot to do with this. So figure out where that limit is or what is the call it dose of that behavior that starts to make you feel a little bit like you want to pause and avoid and take that step. You don't have to go into the deep end of the pool right away, but just starting to nudge that boundary can really be effective and quick.

So titrating exposure to increase our tolerance, which is a key strategy in most trauma therapies as well, and kind of points to Dan Siegel's idea of the window of tolerance. And leaning into the edges is one way to, in a workable way, without throwing ourselves into the deep end of the pool, as you said. But just leaning into the edges, maybe coming back, leaning in, coming back, that pendulating idea, we can gradually expand that window of tolerance and something that before would have just felt way too stressful. I can't do this now. Maybe we'll find ourselves able to do it.

Exactly.

So meditation. So there are lots of forms of meditation, and you talked about most of us, until we kind of train ourselves to do otherwise, don't spend very much time in the present moment. And I think in neurobiological terms, there you were referencing what's called the default mode network, which is an important necessary part of our brain that's evolved for specific reasons. But in most modern humans, it's overactive. It loves the time travel. Go into the past, ruminate about the past, go into the future, fantasize about the future, worry about the future, keeps a running commentary going about kind of what we think is the present. It's all our self sensing and identity formation and opinions, all the rest of it. It's a noisy chatterbox between our ears that when any of us first try to meditate, we go, I can't do this. My mind's racing. Right. That that's the default model network. And it seems like there's a lot of strategies, meditation being one of them. Some of the new advances that they're finding in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and other things. There are certain things we can do that sort of begin to take the default model network offline, which then gives us access to attention, stabilization, awareness, healing, all kinds of good things. So now with meditation, there are different types of meditation. You know, there's meditation that can be contemplating things, there's meditation that can involve visualizations or affirmations or, you know, there's all kinds of things. And then I think what you're referencing, correct me if I'm wrong, would be more of a. And where a lot of the research has been around Pre and post MRIs for people doing even like an 8 week meditation course is more the mindfulness meditation where you're actually training the mind. You notice the mind wander, you bring it back. Like we constantly choose to place our attention on an object like the body or the breath. And when we notice the mind wandering, we bring it back. Mind wanders, we bring it back. And we do that in an environment of being curious and open and non judgmental and self compassionate and so forth. But we just keep retrieving the mind from a state of distraction back to a state of presence. And over time we're kind of developing the muscle of mindfulness, the muscle of attention, the muscle. Our neurobiology is developing new neural networks which allow us to be more present in our life.

I love that you brought up the other forms of meditation that would fall under that broad umbrella. Because when I talk about the this mindfulness version, which I'll get to in just a second, what I don't want people to think is that they're either doing it wrong or it's not actually meditating. If they're doing more of a loving kindness practice or a visualization. Just like any other type of, you know, therapeutic medium, there's different reasons why you would use each of them. So there are great reasons why you might use visualization in terms of visualizing yourself succeeding. Mirror neurons are a thing, right? So we can start to put ourselves into a situation where we're using those mirror neurons that sort of see something happening in the world and don't know the difference between it happening out there and happening to us. We can use that to our advantage. Also. Loving kindness, of course, we want to cultivate those feelings for other people, for ourselves, the connectedness that that brings. Both of those have great utilities. Mindfulness, though in particular, and training your attention to call it be where you want it at that moment is particularly useful in keeping our mind or teaching our mind to live more frequently in the present moment. Because if you think about what anxiety and rumination are, that's your mind going off in a different direction. And the faster you can recognize it and the more effective you are at bringing it back, the lower, the less you're going to experience those sort of feelings of anxiety that interfere with life. And tips that I'll give people is usually when you start it's that default mode network that makes you feel like it's not working. The fact that you noticed it means that it is working. That's exactly what's supposed to happen. Experienced meditators are frustrated by the fact that it's still happening. So definitely don't let that dissuade you. And think about different ways to keep yourself in the present. Concentrating on your breath is only one. Some people like to close their eyes and maintain the connection to their visual field as though they're staring out into a vast space. And when you lose your visual field and realize you've lost it, then you need to bring yourself back to the present. You can use tactile. Like, if you have something that you can put your hands on, that you can feel, you can use tactile senses to do it. There's a number of different ways, but the whole point is keeping your mind in the present moment. And the last point I'll make about this is that I alluded to it earlier when I said we want to make our attention do what we want it to do. Anxiety and I tend to push on that because that's what most people experience most often in terms of disturbances and things that maybe they want to lessen in their life. Anxiety tends to take our attention and focus. Focus it only on the thing that's making us anxious. It goes back to that survival mechanism. If there was an angry tiger running at me right now, I probably wouldn't be looking around to take the scenery in. I'm going to stare right at that threatening thing. And so anxiety does that to us. It narrows our attention so that all we can see is the threat. And that happens cognitively. It narrows it to one thought or. Or it can happen physically in your environment. You narrow your attention to one object, and one way of combating that is to learn how to widen your attention, how to force it to take in more than just that one thing. And that's another thing that meditation can help with. So sometimes you do want to narrow when you need focus. When you need to persist at a particular task, narrowing attention can help. But sometimes we do want to widen it, and that's when we want to almost dilute out the amount of attention that our mind is giving something that is particularly distressing to us.

Yeah, I'm glad you included the broad spectrum of meditation. Any object of meditation, whether it's a word, a sound.

The breath, the body, a visualization can be used as a mind training practice. Right. We put our focus there, the mind wanders, we bring it back. As long as there is that mind training aspect, even loving kindness meditation you referenced, the meta practice is certainly another mindfulness practice in that way, when done that way. And there's actually been research, MRI research done on the loving Kindness practice as well as taught by Sharon Salzberg and others.

And there are, I think some forms of meditation. They may do wonderful things, but they involve a little less of that attention training. So that's kind of. But you can use really any form of meditation if it has that aspect of being aware of where your attention is in the moment and when it's, you know, wandering, bringing it back to something, whatever that chosen object is. Actually you can even have the chosen object be your wandering mind, but that's pretty advanced meditation. It's very difficult to sit and just be present to and witness the wandering mind without getting lost in the wandering mind. Right. You also referenced, you know, so what's the value in being more present in our lives? Well, that may seem like a no brainer, but some of them, well, why. And maybe a lot of us don't even know. What do you really mean by being present? I walk around, I do my day, I'm doing my, I'm very involved in my activities, my job and you know, my home life and with my kids and so forth. And you know, I feel like I'm kind of present, you know, and. But the problem is when we're not really present is that overactive default mode network, which is that chatter between our ears going on all the time. And maybe until we become aware, we may be blissfully, to a degree, unaware of it. So part of the root awakening may be when we first realize how much chatter is going on there. But the problem is, as you mentioned, is the survival focus of our biology. We evolved to survive.

And our neurobiology hasn't changed that much from the day when we were more exposed to nature and there were saber toothed tigers and all the rest of it. Right. So.

So that creates what's called a negativity bias. And we do tend to pay much more attention to negative data and then spin things to the negative. And so when we do let the mind wander, where does it go? More than 50% of the time, maybe a lot more than 50% of the time, it's going to go to the negative, to the anxiety and to the worry. So one of the strategies for being happier, really, in fact, there's science that says a wandering mind is an unhappy mind because exactly that reason. And a more mindful mind tends to be a happier mind because we're more present focused. So.

From a perspective of cognitive psychology, could you talk a little bit about understanding how our mind processes data?

And that's kind of continuing with this discussion we're having we process data and it can be passed through all kinds of filters. And maybe it would be healthy, you know, to have no filters. That would probably be hard to do. But when it's going through a lot of kind of negatively biased filters, that's going to reinforce things that are not making us, you know, do so well, probably. So I wonder if you could talk about it from a purely cognitive psychology perspective of how our mind processes data, how that influences our thinking and how that influences how we're feeling. And then it can influence our behaviors which then create a loop that just keeps reinforcing these things, these patterns. So could wonder if you could talk about it from that perspective for a bit.

I want to use three sort of principles or phenomena to make this point. So we're going to talk about confirmation bias, which is where our mind is more likely to attend, to seek out, find and believe information that supports a previous set of beliefs. So we'll talk about confirmation bias. We're also going to talk about this idea that our mind is really good at looking for things, but not good at looking at things. And then we're going to bring in that age old what fires together, wires together. Right. So confirmation bias, we'll start there is, you know, we're encountering a ton of information on any given day and we are just by nature of being human beings with a mind we're more likely to see and notice and believe information that falls in line with previously held beliefs. There's a lot of reasons for that. The evolutionary explanation for it I think is, works just as well as anything else is that our mind is trying to conserve energy, it's trying to get us through the day alive. So it's trying to hold on to an energy store as much as it can so that it's got that in reserve if we need it. And so it doesn't want to spend it taking, you know, attuning to everything. So it has to filter something out. And the cognitively easy or frictionless way of doing that is to notice things that we're used to noticing. We know exactly where to file them away, we know where they go. Cognitively. This is just, it's a, it's a heuristic, obviously a bias, but a shortcut rule of thumb that our mind uses. So confirmation bias.

What that means though when you pair it with something like what fires together, wires together is it is that self fulfilling prophecy loop that you mentioned. Right. We have this previously held belief so we see other things that confirm those beliefs and these things continue to fire together. And it's like carving a groove into a table and rolling a marble down it. It's going to roll down that groove that you have carved so deeply every single time. So when we give in to things like confirmation bias, we're actually strengthening or firing together those concepts that were there previously, which might not be ones that we want. And the last thing that I wanted to mention is this idea that we're good at looking for things, not good at looking at things. So the analogy I like to use here is let's say you're at the zoo and you're in one of those, like, enclosures where there's vines and trees and there's like, a little water feature and all the stuff in there. And let's say all that was there to tell you what animal was in this enclosure was a single card with just the animal species name on it that nobody even really knows what those are. Unless you're trained in that. How easy would it be to find the animal? You have no idea. Does it have scales? Is it big? Am I looking for a bug? Is it a bird? So we're looking at this enclosure, and we have nothing to anchor on, and we can't find the animal that we're looking for. Zoos are smart, though. They want you to see the animal because you wouldn't pay to go there and not see any animals. So they put a little picture of the animal along with its official, you know, species name, and that helps you find it. Because now you're looking for something, you're like, oh, it's fuzzy and it's little. There it is. It was brown, and it was on that brown piece of wood. I see it now because we're good at looking at something.

These other pieces that I mentioned play into that. Because when we go around in the world, again, operating by default, allowing our mind to just sort of do what it tends to do or do what it does.

It'S like we're looking at the world. We're just passively taking in what gets through that filter, and we're missing a bunch of. So we're kind of starting to stack a whole bunch of things on top of each other. I love where this is going. And again, to your point, when we're not intentional, that usually ends up being pretty negative. So instead, we have to intentionally take our mind and tell it to look for the information that it's not naturally letting in. So it's something that we have to try to do. We're much more. It involves Much more effort cognitively than just passively consuming. But it's important because again, it balances out your thinking. It's making your mind actually deliberate. Do I believe that thing before? Because now I'm seeing contradictory evidence to it. Hold on. And instead of just strengthening and strengthening what our previously held beliefs are, you know what? I'm just, I'm not a good person. I'm not good at this. People don't like me or I'm not deserving of something. We're actually seeking out contrary information to that belief, and we're starting to balance the scales a little bit by looking for that information. You're much less likely because of the cognitive bias that we have or the confirmation bias to see that information as you're just sort of looking at life. You have to make it more of an intentional practice to balance the scales. And for each one of us, that's going to be a little bit different based on what our previously held beliefs are and what, what we're working on in terms of changing them.

Wow, this is fascinating. And there's so much there. So when you spoke about meditation, you talked about the value of being able to focus and then also the value to be able to take a wider perspective. And actually in meditation training, it almost always begins with some kind of focus. And with training, then we're able to kind of zoom in, zoom out. So with time, we can do more open awareness type meditations without losing our attention, without losing our focus. But initially we might even want to just focus on the micro object of just the sensation of air moving across the skin at the nostril or something. It could be that type, the focus. And as our mind trains itself to be more present, then we can gradually broaden it out. So then applying this to what you're talking about is working with this confirmation bias and with our various kind of ingrained beliefs and assumptions and so forth. Often that ability to zoom out is one very valuable thing of being able to release that. Right. Because our assumptions, belief tend to narrow us down and we're really only looking at the data that will confirm our assumptions and beliefs. If you're describing the confirmation bias, the ability to consciously kind of open and some. We call it not knowing in Zen. Right. Relaxing into openness, not knowing or beginner's mind. And so.

Part of what it seems like we have to learn to have a greater tolerance for is cognitive dissonance. I wonder what you're thinking of that because, you know, if we're always in avoiding cognitive dissonance then we're going to just be driven by confirmation bias. Right. If we have a low tolerance for, I don't know what's going on, then we're going to just really stick with our beliefs and assumptions. Right. So I wonder if you could talk about the phenomena of cognitive dissonance, because that can be an uncomfortable place to be.

For sure. Nothing in psychology, but typically when we think about physical health as well, very few of the things that make us grow and become more effective happen really easily with no effort. And so when we think about dissonance, it's going to require effort to sit with it. So when we talk about cognitive dissonance, what it means is that to some degree, we're working with two things that seemed opposed or seem opposed. We have two beliefs or two thoughts going on that, well, if this one's true, then this one must not be able to be true. And unfortunately, a lot in psychology, it's not so much about what is true with a capital T, truth, but what is effective for me in this moment. So at times it might be more effective for you in that moment to be zeroed in on one object. Right. We talked about the idea of needing to be very precise and be very focused. In other times, it might be much more effective for you to have that wide attention. Similarly, if we have beliefs about ourselves.

Identity is something that our mind will protect more than almost anything else. Our personal identity. And that means personal beliefs about us. So just like we encode information about everything else in the world, we encode information about us as well. And our mind will fight to keep those beliefs because that feels like a personal attack if we let them go. But we have to get to the point where we can sit with that dissonance, because our mind is not going to allow you to become something, something that it thinks impossible or that it thinks you hate. So, you know, we talk about things all the time around, like reframing what people think about wealth and abundance. Your mind is not going to allow you to become a person that you have a negative belief about, even if that person that you're trying to become is someone is aspirational to you, something that you would love to become. So there's a lot in here around just biases and how our mind works. And it isn't so much to say, you know what, attention training down to the most specific detail is more important. No, it's not. It's expanding our attention. Nope, nope. It's this other. The point is to have enough tools in your toolbox that you know which one to pull out and deliberately use in that moment to more effectively move forward. And the last thing I'll. Last point I want to make on that is I love the way that you set this question up because it hit so many different things that indicated you can practice that meditation and you can get better. You can practice on having an open mind and get better. You can practice at your tolerance for ambiguity and get better. You can practice at having a more balanced mind and contradicting the confirmation bias, and you can get better at it. That's why we call it psychological strength. These are not things that people are just naturally good at. No one's good at them because we all are human beings with minds. But the more you practice, the better you get. And it just takes a little bit of time.

Yeah, it's pretty common sense. If we don't. If we don't work out, we're not going to have strong muscles. Right. It just doesn't happen through thinking. I wish we could play a tape while we're sleeping and we'd wake up, whoa, my muscles are out there.

But, yeah, there's so much in what you said. I love that you brought identity into it. You know, one of the classics examples I've heard many times that talk about cognitive dissonance. Many people have had this experience where you want to buy a car and you're doing all the research and you're trying to decide between, I don't know, the Toyota and maybe the Jeep or the Honda or something, and you're doing all this research and you drive them both, and you just really can't make a decision. You're so torn. Right. But that's a very uncomfortable place to be. And finally, let's say you choose the Toyota. You choose a Toyota hybrid or something, and. And you think you probably made a smart analytical decision, but in the end, you most likely made an emotional decision. Or you got on the car lot, there was a red one. Oh, I love it. You know, anyway, you made the decision. You're driving out in the car and you drive around and what do you see? You see nothing but Toyotas. Do you see Jeeps or whatever, the other canoe? You don't see them, and you go, oh, my good. I made such a wonderful decision. There's so many. I mean, we've all literally had this experience. And what that is, is our discomfort with cognitive dissonance moving us in to only noticing or paying more attention to the Toyotas on the road, where it really seems like there's many more Toyotas than there are that other car we are considering that we've now moved away from. And it's really an important phenomena, but it runs even deeper than that. When it starts hooking into our identity.

Then those get really deep, because then if I change, who am I? Right. Or if you know, or you know, or it can feel like an attack on ourselves to change. Right. And that's getting into some pretty deep, deep wiring there. Right. And part of it is also used example, like let's say we're trying to shift our mind around, you know, wealth and abundance. And let's say because of our conditioning, we grew up. And boy, did I have that. I mean, I had many different sets of conditioning from my family upbringings and.

Becoming a hippie in the 60s and becoming a meditator, all these things that kind of demonize wealth and abundance and demon, you know, the whole thing. Right. And so.

You know, sometimes we talk about there that we all have a blueprint. Like in some trainings, they talk about we have a money blueprint or a wealth blueprint, and that's going to determine where we are. And if we try to move outside that blueprint, we're going to get all these internal cognitive dissonance messages going. Get back where you belong. Right. It's almost like a thermostat. Right. If we get below what our blueprint says, you know, it's going to light up the fire and we're going to get going a little bit. But if we start to get above, it's going to turn on the air conditioning. Cool your jets, buddy. Get back down into that bandwidth where you are. Because being outside of the bandwidth creates too much cognitive dissonance. Now, there's a good thing we can use in that. You mentioned one of the strategies for change is really actually taking behavioral steps that will change our perception about our comfort level or ability to do something. Also, I think one of the more effective strategies is working to change a blueprint. Because if we can change the blueprint and move it up here, let's say, then that inbuilt discomfort with cognitive distance will help keep us at that whatever new level we want to be at. So we can kind of use some of these. We'd like to learn to be free of these things and be completely conscious all the time. I wonder about your feelings about this. We'd love to just be conscious beings making purely conscious decisions, free of any conditioning all the time, but that's a little unrealistic. So we do Want to somehow grow beyond some of these habitual condition control things. But we can also use the way the mind works to our own benefit. I wonder if you could address that a little bit.

You hit the nail on the head with the first step of this is even knowing what those blueprints are. And if you ask yourself, and the characteristics that come to mind are going to be different based on who it is that's watching this. But if you ask yourself, what are people like me like? What do people like me do? What do they not do? What are people like me good at? Where do people like me belong and where do we not belong? You start to get some clues as to what those blueprints are. Depending upon your race and ethnicity, depending upon your gender, depending upon your age, depending upon your socioeconomic status, growing up, especially your religion, where you live in the world, we have these complex intersections of those characteristics that set you up, depending upon your family of origin and what they may have said. We have these complex sets of beliefs that we think are sort of the rule manual for how we're supposed to go through life. And many of them are not actual rules. They're just rules of thumb that we've been following, that we continue to follow and perpetuate. And so being aware of what those blueprints are is the first step and then working to understand. And I wouldn't do this with all of them at once. I would focus on one thing. Just give yourself a chance to, you know, make a good. Make a good change in your life. We know we can't tackle everything at once, but work on finding evidence to the contrary. Again, look for evidence to the contrary. Really? No one like you has ever been able to do that. No one can. How did. Okay, fine, let's find somebody else. How did they get to that spot? And so thinking through those and starting to take some of those actions that I mentioned before, it's going to feel fake in the beginning. You might feel anxious or like you're sort of posing as someone else. That is your mind saying, nope, I don't like this. This is contrary to what I'm used to you doing. And I don't want to have to think that hard. I want to keep this energy reserve that I have. And so it's going to send you. When our mind gets stressed out, it sends us anxiety. That's just what minds do. And it tries to get you to fall back in line. And even when that is something positive. So, you know, we keep talking about wealth and abundance, but who Wouldn't want to have an easier job paying their bills. Like, who wouldn't want to be able to give their family a comfortable lifestyle? Who wouldn't want to be able to give back to organizations and charitable causes that they think are important or help other people in need? There's nothing negative about that. And so if we start to take some of the steps, those beliefs might be the thing that are holding you back from just trying that little business that you thought about doing or for asking for a raise at work. These behaviors that are very real that we can do.

We don't because of a set of beliefs that in a lot of cases, these things don't even occur to us because we just think they're so outside of the realm of what's possible. So I go back to, again, awareness. You got to know what those blueprints are. An idea of maybe where they might have come from can be helpful because you can kind of keep that person or set of people in mind as you're kind of working through this stuff, but then figuring out what those behaviors are that it's holding you back from. And again, the small steps. What's the first tiny step that you could take to just start wading into the pool?

I want to talk about some of those steps in a moment here as we complete our conversation. I wanted to try this on with you. So from what we were describing of how these kind of neurobiological psychological blueprints function and how they.

There's another way to talk about the conditioning that we've experienced and how they almost function like a thermostat. When we get outside, we're going to experience anxiety, discomfort, cognitive dissonance, and so forth, which is the message to go back to where you belong. Right. Get back in that comfort zone of your blueprint. Right. And so it might seem like, well, one strategy is to be happier in life, but just stay in your blueprint. Right. Just stay there and you'll be happy, you'll be okay. Right. Somehow that doesn't seem to work. It seems like there's almost within our being and the depth of our being that there's almost. It seems like life, not just human, but life, has some impulse to grow, to change, to thrive. And that somehow the idea of I could just. I could just stay safe in that blueprint and I'll be okay, and life doesn't seem to ultimately cooperate with that. I mean, I think a lot of us tend to take that strategy quite understandably. So because we get all these messages from Our brain. No, no, no, don't you know. But it doesn't seem to work to just try to stay there in the comfort zone either, because life seems to.

Not allow that on some level. I'm curious about your thoughts about that.

You're assuming that the only thing that's going to thrust you out of that comfort zone is stuff that you can control.

We all know, I am certain every person who's listening to this can think of a small handful of things in the last, call it, three to four years that have happened outside of our control. So one, it doesn't work because you don't have control over most things. And two, what you're assuming, even if you did have control over it, you're assuming that the walls of that comfort zone won't move. The unfortunate thing is the walls of that comfort zone, what we should call it, is familiarity zone. The walls of that familiarity zone are created by you having experiences that your mind has learned will not hurt you. And so they become comfortable or ones that you are familiar with. The less that you're going and having experiences that you're staying familiar with, the narrower those walls become. It's a use it or lose it situation. So we all know people who, or have heard about people who have had extreme phobias of. And there's a lot of other things going on as well, but phobias of leaving their homes or, you know, encountering certain types of objects and that type of thing. Those. The walls of your comfort zone, to our point earlier, they can move out, they can widen. We can do things to live a bigger, bolder, more vibrant life. But if we don't, if we try to just stay in that nucleus of our comfort zone where we're really comfortable, the walls can also close in on us as well. And it makes your life small and it makes even doing things you could do previously more difficult.

Yeah, there's some high performance. You know, people kind of really into high performance. They talk about you should do something that terrifies you every day. Now, that might be a little extreme, but we can at least do something we're a little uncomfortable with every day. Right. And I think you're pointing to that as one of the strategies. So I'd like to talk just a little more as we enter conversation about some of the strategies. So you talked about some kind of meditation. Mind training is very helpful. You talked about, you know, taking actions, even small steps that are maybe a little outside of that familiar zone or that comfort zone that can help us grow and Begin to get evidence that maybe our beliefs and assumptions weren't that accurate, that no, I could possibly do this. And so that's a general kind of guideline that we could just.

Try to lean into the edges of what's familiar and apparently comfortable to us. Do you have any other. Any very specific practices or strategies that people can do to. Because it's so easy, you know, we can say we'll do a little, but then our life takes over and everything we've been talking about all the anxiety to keep pushing us back into the familiar. So I wonder, any other ideas of actual tools or practices that might give us a, you know, an on ramp and, you know, appreciating a life of growth.

More you mentioned earlier about this is one of the changing your relationship with your default mode network and that negativity, the sort of running chatter in our mind. I want to talk about three different. We're going to say organs, for the purposes of this example, in your body and what happens when they become stressed. So let's talk about your stomach. Let's say your stomach is stressed. Let's say you haven't eaten for about six, seven hours. What does your stomach do when it's under stress? When you haven't eaten, Your stomach growls, right? But that's how you would describe it. My stomach is growling. You don't say. I am growling. You're not. You're not your stomach, like you are growling. Your stomach is. Let's talk about your heart. What happens when you put your heart under stress? You go run a 5k as fast as you can, you go sprint down the street. What's your heart going to do? It's going to beat fast, right? My heart is beating fast. Not. I'm beating fast. I am not beating. It's my heart. And I mentioned this before. What happens when you put your mind under stress? And that could just mean you used conditioner instead of a shampoo first today, right? When we put our mind under. Under stress, it has a very predictable response. Anxiety in the form of a negative default mode network in the form of like bodily sensations. But here's the difference that anxiety happens in our voice, our own voice. Usually we think it's us. It's not us. In the same way that you are not your heart, you are not your stomach, you are not your brain.

We are that. It's the hard. It's the hard problem. Like, what the heck is consciousness? What are we? Like, we're not this little homunculus driving around inside of our brains. We're not, but we somehow think about ourselves, the conscious being, as the same as our brain or our mind. And you're not. So this is a little bit of a. Of a sort of verbal way of doing it. But changing that relationship between you and that default mode network can be so freeing because it allows the anxiety to happen. But you aren't anxious. It's not you. Your mind is anxious, but that's a separate entity from you. And that's what's called putting psychological distance between you and. And a set of sensations or thoughts or feelings that are impeding something that you want to do. Sometimes that little bit of distance in the beginning is all we need to give us the room to move forward. So start thinking about your brain and your mind. That's why I said organ. Start thinking about that just like you do your heart and your stomach. My mind is feeling anxious right now. That's okay. You absolutely can move forward even if your mind feels anxious. And it's even better if you combine some of the practices that I know you've had, Kristin Neff and others in the compassion space in different summits that you've put on. That's where some of the compassion work can come in. My mind is feeling anxious. You know what? Of course you are. You meaning my mind. It is separate from me. Of course you are. We're doing something new today. But you know what? I'm here with you, and it's going to be okay. Talk to it like it's a separate being, because it is. It's not you doing any of that. And sometimes that can give you just that nudge of confidence or that nudge of distance that can help you take that first step in whatever that small behavior is that you want to try.

Wow, that is fabulous. It's really. In that psychological distance, therein lies the whole of human freedom. Therein lies the path. Right. You know, the ability to just, you know, because so often we'd say I'm anxious or I'm this or I'm that and just that ability. No, my mind is really anxious right now, or my body's, you know, experiencing discomfort, anxiety, or my brain is really kind of on fire today. Right? Just that ability to have that little bit of more connection with that larger witness awareness, or some people call the self with a capital S or whatever it is, but it's the big sky as opposed to being identified with the stuff. Right? And that's really the beginning of psychological freedom. And ultimately then rewiring our brain for psychological strength. So yeah, this has just been incredible value. Thank you. Incredibly valuable. So thank you so much April. Just really a joy to have this conversation with you. So thank you and wish you all the best and please be well.

All right. Thanks so much.

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