Why High Performers Stay Trapped In Their Own Thinking

What is going on, guys? Welcome to Rewired Live episode 21. I believe it's 20, 21. So we're gonna get into today why you are stuck in your head as a high performer, as an entrepreneur, as a any, any sort of person who's out there making it happen. Okay, before you do that, if you are not in the Built community the number one place for you to tap into what we're talking about, the tools I have, the free resources, to be around other people who are dedicated to doing the internal work. Because the internal work is the singlest highest leverage multiplier you could possibly do it— be doing in your entire career and life. Because when you learn how to deal with this internal stuff, your thoughts, your emotions, your nervous system regulating reconditioning your identity. It's the most powerful stuff you'll ever do. You'll feel better, you'll show up as a better person for your family and for your kids and for your friends and for your colleagues, and most importantly, for yourself. You're going to be able to multiply the results that you have. So you're making a certain amount of money, you're getting a certain level of output, you're gonna freaking multiply it. When you learn how to deal with this internal world. It's the biggest game changer of your entire life because I lived on the other side. I lived on the side of 15 years running around like a freaking madman, anxious, stressed out, overwhelmed. Go to bed with a pit in my stomach, wake up with a pit in my stomach, scared for every meeting, scared for every seller call, worrying about every deal falling through. Is miserable. No one wants to live like that. And guess what? You don't have to. Okay, so get into the community. If you're on LinkedIn, you're gonna see it in my bot under the post. On top of the post says like, view my website. Boom, click there. Facebook, a little bit harder to find, but it's in the profile. If it's on YouTube, link is right down there. Um, takes you 30 seconds to join or make an account if you don't have it. You can just, um, Make one and just tap in, plug in. So why high performers stay trapped in their own thinking? So awareness is the foundation of everything. That's why awareness is the first pillar that we talk about. Now, you might have heard about awareness before. It's, you know, you can call it mindfulness training, you know, the scientific words like metacognition, this and that. Awareness is just basically like understanding that you have this little spotlight in in your head, and it's deep behind everything, okay? And this spotlight is— you could think of awareness like attention. That might be an easier way to think about it. Your awareness equals your attention. What are you paying attention to? That is where your awareness is. So it's easy for you to understand that, you know, you're watching this live, your attention is here. But while you're on this live, while you're watching this video, you might have a thought come into your head. Right? A thought comes in your head, oh yeah, I gotta do that thing later. Your awareness, your attention is now distracted by that thought, right? Now you're distracted. Now you're thinking about the thought. Your awareness is no longer where you are. And all of our suffering, right, and being trapped in our thinking is because we're identifying with our thoughts. We think that this little inner voice in our head that's constantly talking, which is really just called the default mode network in your brain, and it's constantly going like this. Why is it constantly going? It's trying to predict. It's trying to keep you out of the unfamiliar. It's constantly trying, okay, what if that happens? What if this happens, right? That's how we are designed to survive. That's how we survived all these years. Now, obviously we live in environments that are very safe now. It's not like we're living in villages anymore or we're trying to fend for our lives out in the frickin' middle of the woods, but our bodies don't know that. They're very primitive systems. So we need to understand how to get out of that loop of thinking. Now, someone who identifies as an overthinker, first of all, it's a pattern that you need to stop identifying with. As long as you say, oh, I'm an overthinker, guess what? You're never not going to be able to be an overthinker. It's just who you are. Instead of, oh, I've had a tendency to overthink, or I've had a pattern of overthinking. That's the difference, that awareness. But the reason you overthink is because these thoughts come into your head and you don't know how to— first of all, you don't know that you're separate from them. Like, your thoughts are literally just words. It's just a thought. It doesn't mean anything. And the highest performers in the world can recognize those thoughts. They can be aware of the thoughts and they can just let them go, right? They can be freaking I remember I used the tennis example of Novak Djokovic talking about how, um, when he's in the match— I actually retweeted it on my Instagram— when he's in the match, his ability to perform in the match comes down to his ability to stay present. What does that mean? Okay, he's playing tennis, then a thought comes into his head after he has a bad shot. Oh my God, what if you mess it up? 'But what if you lose this?' And then if he keeps putting attention to that thought, he says he's no longer present. What does that mean? He's now— his awareness is focused on his thoughts now, right? His awareness is in his thoughts. Nope, he's got to bring his awareness back to where his feet are in the tennis match, because that's what's going to allow him to perform. And anyone in any sport who ever, like, gotten in their head— maybe they were playing really well, now they're in a rut, right? Because they're associated with their thinking. They can't get out of their thoughts and into the present moment. And the dangerous part about being lost in your thoughts is it also physiologically puts you into a state of stress and overwhelm and anxiety and dysregulates you. And when you're in that dysregulated state, you're at an inherent disadvantage because your brain is offline. You can't think as clearly, you're not as relaxed, you can't execute. So awareness and regulation go hand in hand, but they're like the fundamental pillars that lift up your life because you need to be aware of when you're dysregulated and regulate, and then you can choose what to do. So those pillars are absolutely massive. So back to overthinking. You're not overthinking. Your brain is thinking just as many thoughts as anyone else is thinking. The problem is that you're just like associating with every single thought. Like you come into, into work and you're just worrying about things, right? You're, you're not gonna— what if this happens? What if that happens? And every time that you're taking that spotlight of awareness off of what's in front of you, what you're doing, and you're putting it on your thoughts, right? You're siphoning energy into that and you're feeding that thought. So if that thought's a happy thought, great, you're feeding that and you're creating a happy state of being. But if that thought is anxious, which most of them are, negative, this and that, you're feeding that thought and thus cultivating that state of being of negativity, of anxiety, of stress, of whatever. So you have to understand that you're— and I forget who said it, but where your attention goes, energy flows. Now you, again, you can think about awareness, intention, they're synonymous, meaning that they're this, they're the same. So attention, awareness. When you, you have to be really pay attention of what, pay attention to where your attention is. Where is that attention? Because where your attention goes, your energy flows. Keep your attention in the present moment. That's what mindfulness is. I was just listening to some material on Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living. He came out with the book in like 1990. He's like a mindfulness kind of teacher and talks about it. I think the mindfulness just gets a bad rap. Gets a bad rap. Like it's kind of wrapped up in the meditation and the woo-woo, but it's not. Mindfulness is cultivating that skill of awareness to recognize when a thought comes into your field, you can be aware, oh yeah, there's that thought, and then right back to where you're going. That's the skill that we are practicing with awareness. That's the freaking skill, right? Because otherwise, if you're, if you're not aware, thoughts come into your head about how you can't do it or how you're not going to make it or whatever the case may be. Thoughts come into your head and they overrun you. They take over your life. Same thing with your emotions. If you don't have awareness, your emotions completely run your life. You like, you get anxious and you start resisting it and you don't like make space for the anxiety. That's a whole nother conversation, but getting comfortable with emotions in your body is like Emotional Regulation 101. No one's ever told you that, hey, it's okay to feel stress, it's okay to feel anxiety and sadness and all these things. It's normal. What causes a problem is when you resist these feelings, you resist the feelings of anxiety and stress and sadness. You create— then you create a trigger in your life meaning like because this event or situation caused you to feel a certain way, instead of just feeling that emotion and letting it pass through, you push the emotion away. And now that event, whether it's public speaking or sales or posting on social media or having difficult conversations or putting yourself out there, now creates a trigger because every time that event happens, there's an unprocessed emotion of anxiety that wants to move through you, but it's stuck. So that's why you have to feel emotions to complete the biological process. Now, awareness also creates a gap, right? So, so being aware, first you have to fundamentally understand that you are the observer. Okay? You can think about yourself sitting in the audience of a theater and your thoughts that come in, okay? They're like the actors on the stage. They're saying this, they're saying that, it's all over the place. Your emotions are like the lights, the sound, right? The special effects of the stage. So it could be like loud in the theater and people are killing each other on stage and whatever the case is going on, but you're not, you might feel that in your chest while you're watching the show, like, oh my God, this is intense. But you know, like you're okay. You know, you're not the show. You're gonna be okay. Same thing with you. When you have these scattered negative thoughts, you have these negative feelings, you know you're not your thoughts. You know, you're not your feelings. You can sit back and just be okay with feeling these experiences in your body. So when we can be aware of that, it creates a space, right? So with stress, we have the stress stimulator, the external stress, and then we have our stress response, how we respond. Now, we can't control stress, external stressors and pressure, and that's what we talk about in BUILD. You can't control external stress or pressure, but you can control your response to it And that response starts with your, boom, awareness of your thoughts, right? Awareness of your, um, emotions. So because you want to be aware in the moment, in the moment of when that, that thought comes in, if you can catch it and let it go, you can get back to what you're doing. If you don't catch it, that thought comes in and you're you're kind of reeling. You get on that hamster wheel of the mind and you're just running, right? Thought comes in, oh my God, if that deal falls through, God, can I— you can't do this. Like, especially if you're like in a business, like, what are you doing, man? Like, you're not meant to be an entrepreneur. You're not good at sales. Like, who are you kidding? You haven't even got a sale in one week. That's a thought. And it's like, oh yeah, there's that self-limiting thought. Let it go, right back to what you're doing. But what we do is we get distracted by that thought. You're no good at sales, man. You haven't gotten a sale in a week. What do you think you're— and then we start reeling on it, right? We start— we get— well, we get up on the hamster wheel. That's like what it's happening. Like, when you feed a thought, it's like, oh, all right, we're gonna climb up the ladder into the mind and just get on the hamster wheel and just sprint and go absolutely nowhere. Because then we're, oh my God, yeah, you're right, you can't do it, this and that. Then before you know it, you're in your head for the rest— the next 3 hours, 4 hours, the rest— next day, the next week, next month, you're in your head. You're living in your head. These thoughts have freaking real estate rent-free in your head. All right, so you need to have the awareness to be able to see the thought and let the thought go. Think about like how much this is taking from your ability to perform. How much more money could you make? How much more success could you have? How much further could you make it in your business if you had the one simple skill of being aware of when negative thoughts came in, observing them, and letting them go. Think about it. Think about it. Because if you are, if you are letting these thoughts take over your body, and you're becoming dysregulated, and you're out of whack for 4 hours during the day or 5 hours during the day, 4 or 5 hours that you could be closing deals and doing other things. That's an incredible amount of time. Imagine if you could recognize that thought, boom, you feel the stress, you feel the anxiety, but you know how to deal with it and you let it go and you're back on track in 60 seconds, 2 minutes. And then you're right back to what you were doing, right back to closing deals, making stuff happen, being productive because you had the awareness to recognize. So the awareness is the gap, right? We have the stress stimulator and the stress response, and that awareness gives us the gap. With no awareness, we have a trigger in our environment, and boom, our stress response is just going. We're dysregulated. And once we're dysregulated, our brain goes offline. We can't do nothing. So the awareness is like the space. It's like, oh, stress stimulator, boom, we're aware that there's a stress stimulator, and then we can choose our response, right? We can choose how we respond. And that's the, the whole thing. Um, so you, you are not your thoughts, right? I really like to look at it like this, a spotlight. You can think about it too like an ocean, like your awareness is the deep ocean and your thoughts and emotions are just the waves crashing on the top. Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're big, it's very rough, but when you go deep under the water, that's your awareness. I think the best analogy, I like the theater analogy where like you're sitting in the audience and you're looking at the stage and the lights. Other analogy I like is the cloud analogy. Like, you are the sky. Like, I can just like visually see, like, imagine your thoughts. Like, there's all these like thoughts, it's kind of like out there, you know? And I'm like focused, but then the thought just kind of comes into my head. Oh my God, what about that? I gotta do this, I gotta do that. They just come in, they get generated, they're like little clouds. They come in and your awareness— remember, it's like that deep awareness is like deep inside you. It's like behind your thoughts. You know what I mean? Like, think about, think about, you have your awareness here, right? Your awareness is deep here. Then you have your inner world and then your external world. Think about that visually, right? Like there's a line. Okay. So here's your awareness back here. We're aware of our external world over here. Like, you know, I'm looking at my computer, I'm driving my car or whatever. Like we understand that we're aware of our external world. The place we're missing is the internal world. And the internal world is like creating everything in the external world, you know what I mean? So we got to be aware of this internal world first. We have to understand there's like two layers. It's like we have our awareness, there's the internal world, which is our thoughts, our emotions, our nervous system state, um, all of that stuff, our beliefs. That's our internal world. And we've just been ignoring this for our whole life. Like, we're just trying to— we're gonna look through it Like, we're looking through this— the inner world is like the lens that you experience the external world with. So that's the whole thing with awareness, is like creating that awareness of your internal world so you can start to manage it. Because how are you supposed to— how are you supposed to get back, like, fix your problems, guys? How are you ever going to fix your problems and live a more peaceful, amazing, love-filled, exciting, wealthy, abundant life if you're ignoring your internal world. You gotta— the inside— your dream life starts from the inside out. You have to understand that your dream life starts from the inside out. Starts on the inside. That's where it starts. Such with the thoughts you're thinking, being aware of your patterns, being aware of your emotions. What's driving you? What are the subconscious patterns that are just driving your life? We're highly programmed beings because if we had to consciously think about everything every day, we would, we would have no ability to create anything. Every single day I was like on my computer, I had to be like, okay, put my hand down on my mouse, right? And then I gotta, okay, now I'm gonna press down with my finger and hit this. I'm gonna do that. And I'm gonna, my finger's gotta go like this. And I have to, if I had to think about that every day, I would be drained in like an hour. I wouldn't be able to do anything. So your body is like automating all these processes because it's very expensive to use your conscious mind metabolically. It's very expensive. You'll get tired quickly. So it's like, we're never going to be able to survive out here if we're trying to think about everything. Your brain's trying to automate things quickly, as quickly as possible. So, you know, and we've programmed our, ourself to think and act and behave and feel in certain ways. Because we didn't understand how our system worked. So now we gotta unravel all that, but it starts with just being aware of what the patterns even are. If we can't be aware of what the patterns are, how the heck are you gonna change it? So this is what it means to be conscious. Oh, you're conscious now. When you were unconscious, right, you didn't even know what you were doing. You weren't aware of, of your thoughts, of your emotions, of whatever. But the whole concept of you are not your thoughts, it applies everything. You're not your thoughts, you're not your beliefs, you're not your stress, you're not your emotions, you're not your reactions. You are not any of those things. You are the one that's observing those things, which is your awareness. It's like that deep, so peaceful back there. It's observing everything. Right? So cultivating a strong sense of awareness of what's going on inside of you is going to help you deliver externally, because right now inside of you is just a freaking chaotic mess. It's an absolute chaotic mess, and we have to quiet all that stuff down. So tools to begin practicing this stuff— the, the best thing is it's a very simple shift. It's just like instead of Oh, you know, shaming yourself. Why did I do that, you idiot? Because that's that little voice in your head, right? That after this live is gonna be all right. I gotta do this, I'm gonna go wash the dishes, and then, oh yeah, then I gotta call John. I'm gonna call him up, and then I wonder what he's gonna say. That little inner voice, it is just, again, it's a default mode network, but it's just designed to try to predict. That's not you, it's just your brain thinking. It's like your brain trying to figure out what's going on. Understand, you are not your brain. You are not those thoughts. When you understand that, you can just observe them and let them go without them having take over your whole world and affect your entire day, right? Affect your entire day. So the simple shift is when you catch yourself shaming or being anxious or stressing out or worry— oh yeah, there's that thought of worry. Oh yeah, there's that pattern of worry. It's literally just a pattern. It's really just a pattern. Then you let it go. You let the pattern of worry go. You let the thought of anxiety go. You let the thought of stress go. You just let it all go. That's it. So simple. Now it's gonna take time. This is a skill just like anything else is a skill. Just like anything else is a skill, this is a skill, okay? You're gonna get better at it. The more you strengthen your awareness, which is your prefrontal cortex, the easier it becomes. Let me tell you something about the brain, okay? You have a part of your brain— your brain is constantly trying to take in— let me confirm something real quick. What is it? Yeah, it's the thalamus. I just wanna confirm that. So there's a part of your brain called the thalamus, and the thalamus is constantly taking in information from all of your senses to determine if you're safe or not, subconsciously, right? Am I safe or not? If it believes that you are not safe, and this is all happening in like milliseconds, if it believes you're not safe, it's gonna send two signals. One to your amygdala, which is like the smoke detector, which is gonna send your system into a state of fight or flight. I think amygdala triggers the HPA, hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal, something like that. Something like that. Triggers that, and that's what puts you into a survival response, right? Cortisol, adrenaline starts dumping into your system. And that's good, 'cause if you're walking in the woods and you think you see a snake, you don't wanna wait for your mind to be like, "Oh, is that a snake?" Yep, that is a snake. Oh, snake's in your leg, you're dead. So the second your brain thinks it perceives a threat, boom, in milliseconds you're going into survival so you can jump back, right? It's dumping that adrenaline into your system so you can be like, whoo, and also cortisol into your system so that if you needed to fight it or run from it, you'd have the energy to do so. So, but at the same time, a signal's getting sent. It's called the low and the high road. Joseph LeDoux talks about this. This is like his famous finding. So it sends that signal to the amygdala, also sends a signal to the prefrontal cortex, which is where we're aware. Now, the signal to the amygdala always gets there quicker, and that's by design so that if it is a real threat, you can jump back subconsciously before your mind comes online. Now, what happens is once the signal gets to our awareness, we jump back, we're like, "Oh," and our heart's racing, but it's like, "Oh, it was just a rope." It was just a stick, right? That ever happened in the woods? You're like going, you think you see something, oh my God, jump back, right? Because your system subconsciously thought there was danger, triggered the amygdala, which triggered your, your fight-or-flight response. You jump back and then your awareness comes online 2 seconds later like, oh gosh, just a, just a stick. And then you're like, okay, calm down, heart goes down. So that's what we're training though, is like all throughout the day you're going to get triggered here and there by things like really quickly But you want to be aware of when your body is getting triggered, when your heart's going quickly. You want to be aware of that. And then you want to, um, basically, you know, you can tell yourself to like— so the thing about regulation is like, if you catch it early, you can use top-down regulation, which is like where you're aware of it in your body. Um, you can kind of like think your way out of it. But if you get too dysregulated, you have to use the bottom-up, which is like breath things like that. But the whole point of awareness is to understand when you're dysregulated, you're triggered by an old pattern, you're in an old state, right, of anxiety and stress and worrying and running around. And then you can do what you need to do to get out of it. But you're just— you're training that awareness. And again, you're always going to react to things, like you're going to feel it in your heart, you're going to feel that pounding, and that's normal. But the difference is that you pause, like you're aware. It's called interoception, the ability of your mind to be aware of your body. Instantly you're aware, oh my God, I'm reacting. Someone just said something to me. My boss just said this. A teammate just was completely out of line. You feel yourself reacting, but in your mind, you're like, okay, there's the body reacting. And then you're slowing your breath down. So the quickest way to get a hold of that autonomic nervous system response is to slow your breath down. And I think the physiological side is the quickest way. It's the double inhale. Slow exhale. Every time I do that, even just one time, it feels better. But you might want to do that 3 times. You can do this right in the middle of the day. It takes you 30 seconds total, right? Nice slow exhale, right? So every time you exhale, you're signaling your parasympathetic. Inhale, you're signaling sympathetic, right? So You always want to make your exhales longer than your inhales. And that's going to put you into a regulated state. So that's the beautiful thing about breathing is that you don't have to believe that it works. It just works. It just is. So understand that, but that's how you begin to train yourself to regulate in real time. So you have a negative thought, or you get dysregulated, or someone triggers you, You train your awareness to catch yourself when you're being dysregulated, and then you can use the tools to get back to baseline. Now, the cool thing— here's a— here's— there's a crazy thing though. If you've been operating in fight-or-flight, in stress for a long period of time, your amygdala actually gets more sensitive, which is like the smoke detector, right? It's the part of your brain that triggers the fear response. And the more you live in survival and fear, the more reactive and sensitive your amygdala gets, meaning smaller and smaller things will set you off. But the more you practice awareness and mindfulness in being aware and using that prefrontal cortex to be aware of your body and XYZ, the threshold to trigger the amygdala grows. So now it's like it takes more and more and more and more and more to set you off, to trigger that amygdala, to trigger your stress response, the more that you practice being aware. So as you're aware of your thoughts and you're aware of your emotions and you're aware of your bodily states and your beliefs, just over time practicing that skill, you're strengthening the prefrontal cortex um, and you're actually going to increase your ability to not get stressed out so easily as well, which is super cool. So with all that being said, this is the foundational skill for all of you guys. This is why you're trapped in your own thinking though, because you're identified with your thinking. So what we want to do is we want to begin to Be aware of it, let it go. Be aware of it, let it go. Be aware of it, let it go. Be aware, that's all we're doing. Aware, let go. Aware, let go. Aware, let go. All right? That's all I got for you guys today. Tomorrow we'll kind of go into, well, we'll see what we go into tomorrow. I'm gonna go through my things. But yeah, if you haven't joined the school community, you can get in there, link is right below if you're on YouTube. LinkedIn, it's at the top. Facebook, it's in the bio. Um, hope everyone has a wonderful Thursday. Uh, till next time, all the peace, all the power.