How to Stop Reacting Emotionally and Blaming Others | Grant Dziak

Learn how to have gratitude for the people that you believe hurt you. People always say that, like, you triggered me. No, you have a trigger inside of you. It's not their responsibility to not hit it. I'm the common denominator in every single bad thing I ever experienced. Man, what an uncomfortable thing.

For most of human history, our reactions were shaped by direct experience, real consequences, and the people immediately around us. Today, we're constantly absorbing opinions, Outrage, comparison, and pressure from people we may never even meet. My guest today is Grant Ziak.

Nailed it.

Nailed it.

Thank you. Grant Ziak is a mental performance coach, perspective specialist who helps people understand the patterns driving how they think, react, and live. Grant, so good to catch up. How much of who we are Is just a reaction that we've repeated so often, it started to feel like identity.

Well, first of all, James, dude, thanks so much. It's so good to catch up with you too. And see you, man. I firmly believe that that's everything that we are. It's, we're programmed and we don't even realize it a lot of the time. So the first half of our lives, we are programmed without even understanding that's what's happening to us. Our parents obviously, hopefully are doing the best they can. We're surrounded by loved ones, ideally, who are doing the best they can, but they're also only doing based on what their programming is and what they know. So when you pull back and you look at the big picture of, let's say, the personal development world, you have terms like generational trauma and patterns. Of course you do, because I was raised by a mother and a father who were raising me in the way that they were raised, who were raised by parents that were raised the way they were raised. And so, I mean, like, if you look at us as a biological species today, we haven't quite evolved and picked up to the technology environment that we live in now. So it's like we haven't fully adapted and yet we're operating somewhat on these old patterns and these old systems. Some are great. Don't get me wrong. I think there's a lot of aspects of the way I was brought up That we might call old school belief systems, patterns, respect, ethics, morals, values.

I love that.

Some of them aren't also conducive today. So it's the ability to realize that we have programming in our lives and whatever we have repeatedly done, the behavior from the way we eat, the way we wake up in the morning, the side of the bed that we sleep on, the hand that we brush our teeth with, whatever it is, the way we drive to work. I use this example all the time. Think about driving somewhere 20, 30 minutes away on a regular basis every day. And all of a sudden one day you kind of like just wake up and you're in the parking lot and it's like, man, like, how did I get here? And you mean to tell me you were driving a 2-ton vehicle, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 miles an hour, right turns, left turns, stoplights, and you didn't hit anyone ideally. And it's like, and that was all on programming. So like, what else in our life is just programming without us actually understanding. It's just from a repeated series of behaviors that we've done. And once we understand that, we can actually go in and reprogram ourselves.

Well, you bring up a good point. A lot of people don't realize they're doing this. So how do you know when you're reacting instead of choosing?

One of the best things, so I have kind of like a litmus test I use with people, with clients that I work with, is they, because that's the first thing that comes up is, Am I reacting or am I responding? And it's, well, try this. Let the first word that you respond with, if it's in a situation with another person, let it be a breath and see what changes in that one breath. Because what you're doing is you're interrupting the pattern and that's your pattern. That pattern is your programming. So if you can interrupt that and then you give a different output. So let's say, Historically, whenever my significant other has presented me with XYZ, it results in this argument. I get defensive. I lock up. I fire back. At what point do we both think we're just defending and protecting ourselves? And so we think we're responding because of course we always think highly of ourselves, but it's also the ability to understand how we're actually showing up. With this, without this biased approach, because to us it feels so justified because we live in a society where we're so overstimulated all the time now that it's so easy to feel like everything's an attack on you. Everything's out to get you. And the reality is it's everyone's kind of just doing the best they can. But in order to allow yourself to perceive that, that in and of itself feels vulnerable. So to consider that you're not actually attacking me feels like I'm boxing you and I'm going to turn a blind eye to you for a minute. I can't let my finger off of that. So I gotta, I gotta be on guard all the time to ensure that you're not going to harm me or that I can protect myself in that process. When I'm perceiving that, your brain has this really cool mechanism in it called the reticular activating system. It finds whatever you tell it you're looking for. So if my physiology, if I'm shoulders shrugged up, if I'm closed off in front, Heavy breathing. If I'm telling myself a story that you're probably out to get me, so I'm listening to every word that you say from this aspect of how do I react to this to get my dig in, to get my best point across, to win, to not essentially die, then it doesn't matter what you say, how kind you say it, how polite you are about it. My brain, that reticular activating system, is going to find and manipulate the information that you're giving me be a 100% attack and I'm then going to feel so justified in defending myself.

Well, you mentioned like the shrugged shoulders. So what happens in the body before the mind catches up?

Yeah.

So from like the easiest way I think of it is from your neck down is your subconscious mind. And from your neck up is your conscious mind. So if you think about it in terms of your body is your emotional center, your feminine energy, your long-term memory, your habits, your patterns, And from your neck up is your short-term memory, your masculine energy, the protecting, the doing. This is why we can do, we can like, maybe we're trying to change our eating habits or our physical body. And we have a trainer who tells us, or a nutritionist who says, you're going to have to, you've eaten McDonald's every day for the last 30 years. You're going to have to eat this way for 8 weeks before you really see results and feel a change in your system. Logically, short-term, you go, yes, that makes sense. Then 3 days into the diet, the long-term memory takes over. This isn't how we operate. This isn't how we live. And it creates a feeling and then sends the messages to the brain. And then the brain goes, let's find all the reasons this diet doesn't work. This is BS. This isn't for us. So we find all the justifications and the reasons to keep ourselves from doing this thing that feels foreign to us. So no matter what we're trying to change in our lives, it's always going to be unfamiliar. So it's always going to be perceived as a threat. And this is why the first thing I teach people is nervous system regulation.

I always bring this up because I look at it as like, okay, we need to be, we need to be upfront about our human nature. So if we're upfront about our human nature and not, you know, trapped in our head's idea of what something's going to play out, do you recommend taking it slow, baby steps? Like, is there, how does, how should someone go about, let's say a diet change, for example?

I don't necessarily think we need to take it slow. I think we need to understand the mechanisms that are happening. And 'cause, 'cause that's all it is. It's like, we're saying I have to adjust myself to the mechanisms, but typically we don't understand the mechanisms. So we'll give ourselves an out of saying, well, 3 days in, it's such a struggle. So I guess 3 days in, I can ease up on this a little bit. But it's kind of like, if I understand what's happening, I just have to push through this. I'm reprogramming myself. My, it's not that I actually don't want this new food. It's not that I can't live this way. It's not that this is going to be impossible. It's that my brain is creating a mirage in front of me telling me this is impossible because it's actually going to keep me safe from this unfamiliar thing. And in that moment, if you realize, because you're going to sit there and it's like, well, the broccoli is not trying to kill me, but your system is recognizing unfamiliarity and your brain does not prioritize happiness, joy, anything like that. It's survival, energy efficiency, and pain avoidance. So it wants to stay in the same pattern and it doesn't rate a hierarchy of like, oh, you know what? This, this was good, but it could be better. It just goes, hey man, I know we've done this before and look, we're still alive. Let's repeat that pattern over and over. So when you're trying to make a change in say your diet, if you understand that resistance that you're feeling, it's just your brain trying to cling onto what it knows. That's when we go, I lost my motivation. You didn't lose your motivation. You just now have the presence Of old-term programming popping in. If you understand that, it's like you can see it for what it is. And I always compare it to the first, like, tattoo I ever got. Hurt like hell. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, you know, you're like, oh my God, like, how quickly can this get over? And then before I went for my next one, I learned what the process of getting a tattoo is. You know, the needle's got the ink on it. It's going down through the dermis. When it pulls back out, it's leaving that ink inside. And from the very beginning of that ink entering your body, your immune system's trying to carry it away, but it's so dense, it stays there. The next time I got a tattoo, I didn't feel any of the pain. I watched it the entire time. And I was like, this is so cool. 'Cause now I knew what was happening. So often it's not that we can't actually withstand pain. It's not that we can't withstand discomfort or, or unfamiliarity. It's that we don't understand what's happening. And that lack of kind of like an endpoint makes everything feel impossible.

Why is blame though so much easier than self-examination?

Because it's outward, you know, cause self-preservation says I'm not wrong. Self-preservation says I'm right. And your emotion plays into all of this. Like the, the, the hardest thing and most, I'd say difficult thing about like an excuse is that it's legitimate to you 100%. It doesn't make zero difference what kind of motivational BS you want to listen to on YouTube. Talking about excuses, like to you, it is so legitimate and it actually doesn't even feel like an excuse. It feels like the absolute truth because that has been your lived experience, but it's also the lens that you've interpreted that experience through. And that's typically based on your past. So in order to say, I'm willing to experience a new future, a new experience around the same situation, whether it be relationship, your body, your health, Money is a big one for people to bust through these like kind of glass ceilings we put on ourselves. I can't just force myself to do it because that's like forcing myself to go, man, here's this super scary house. And like a haunted house, I just, just go in, just face it anyways. And it's like, you can tough your way through it, but that doesn't actually shift the lens that you're experiencing it through. So I'm, all I'm encouraging people to do is go like, what if you could shift the lens that you're going to experience this historically horrific thing through? And it no longer has to be horrific. What if it's intriguing? What if it's exciting? What if it's totally fine? What if you can rewrite what it actually is? Well, in order to do that, I have to clear the channel first. So if I know that the first thing I have to do is regulate my nervous system, then that's going to affect the lens that I'm perceiving everything through. Let's say I keep finding myself in the same pattern of relationships. That's a, that's a very big one with people I work with. You know, it's like, and I, and I found myself in that over the course of, uh, from 14 to, I don't know, 14 to 38 when I got a divorce. I mean, I wasn't married that entire time, but relationships.

Yeah. Right. Right.

Um, it's, it's like, I, I, I had to step back and, you know, I'm sitting there after my divorce. Why does this always happen to me? I'm a good guy, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I just stopped and I was like, well, I'm the common denominator in every single bad thing I ever experienced, man. What an uncomfortable thing. I had to take a deep breath. I had to regulate myself because immediately I wanted to resist that. I wanted to fight that. I didn't want to consider that because no, look at what she said here and did here. And this was wrong. I'm not excusing that. This, I'm not saying other people's behaviors, other things aren't difficult, whatever it is. I can't control those things though. I can only control myself. So I have to reflect on myself. It was so much easier to try to blame, but if I continue to only blame other people, I would still be the exact same, which means I would show up into the next relationship the same way, which means I would call in the same kind of partner, which means I would create the same pattern in my life. I was the thing that was always going to be with me. So I can focus all my time on trying to blame someone, but the only way I change my experiences moving forward is if I change myself. So when I learned how to regulate myself and look at what my pattern was, I was able to actually identify why I was kind of attracted to the kind of individual I was before.

But I mean, you know, of course you're bringing up the saying, it's easier, you know, it's easier to say than do. So what, what should we look at in ourselves before looking for someone to blame?

Well, this is why they also always say, You'll change when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change because we don't want to change. Like we're resistant to it. Remember, your brain's priority is survival, pain avoidance, and energy efficiency. So are we surviving? Are we alive? Yes, we're alive. Now, as I am alive, I want to avoid pain and discomfort as much as I possibly can. Well, how am I going to do that if I'm experiencing any level of comfort? Well, energy efficiency, pattern recognition, habits, your frontal cortex, Your brain takes up 5% of your body's mass, but it consumes over 25% of the calories you eat in a day. It does not want to have to think. That's why you don't want to change. It's not because we're weak. It's not because we're unknowledgeable. It's because your brain is literally resisting changing. I had, I drove back and forth from Northern Ohio to Columbus for 13 years when I was going to school down there, plus 4 years before that, because I was dating a girl down there, 17 years altogether. 10 years into that, I learned a different route about halfway through where I could take a left turn. It got me there 20 minutes quicker. There was so much less, uh, like police on there. So like no speeding tickets. Yeah. Every time I came to that turn, I'd be like, ah, let me do that. And then I get there and I'm like, let's just keep going straight. Why? I knew this was going to be more beneficial. It was going to be better for me, but I still like desired to go with the familiar. I didn't have to think. I just wanted to go. I didn't want to have to use that thought process. That's why whatever you repeatedly do over and over and over and over, your frontal cortex goes, let's stop thinking about this. Let's stop having to like be intellectual. Let's just pass it off to the midbrain and call it a habit. This is how you reprogram yourself. It's uncomfortable. I used to be 310 pounds. I used to eat McDonald's like it was my job. I like, like fast food was my thing. I'd go to Chipotle. I'd smash 4 or 5 burritos and that, like, it was impressive. I could, I could put away a lot of food. I still can. I'm not like that. My inner fat kid is still well and good. But the reality is, is when I started to eat differently, it was pretty uncomfortable at first, but I just, I hated the way I felt so much more. So the pain of staying the same and feeling that way became greater than the discomfort of eating a different way. And I stuck with it long enough. Now that's been 14 years, 15 years ago at this point. I can't imagine, I literally can't imagine eating some of the things that I used to eat. And I'm not saying that from like sitting on a pedestal. I'm saying that from the aspect of like, that's just the way my body is now. Whereas it used to be, I couldn't imagine eating the chicken, the beef, the more organic foods, all the stuff that I eat now. Whatever you do repeatedly, it like your brain does not care. It's just, we're typically set up in a way that, like I said, we're programmed the first part of our lives. Those aren't our choices to that program. Like we're not consciously choosing that. That's no fault to anybody else. It's just the acknowledgement that goes, all right, I'm a grownup now. I'm a, I understand the mechanisms. I can choose to reprogram myself. I don't have to be stuck with this life. I don't have to be stuck with these ways of doing things. And it comes down to like a very primal nature of us as a human species. When you understand these very innate aspects of yourself and like you can really affect them. It's like a chess game, but you know, I always compare it to like on a football field. Like, why do they have coaches up in the press box and on the field? Well, because in the press box you have a totally different vantage point. So if I'm down in the mix all the time, which would be like not regulating myself, I'm experiencing everything. I'm feeling everything. And I'm not saying we shouldn't feel our emotions, but when our emotions and our feelings control our behavior, that's when we get into a world of hurt. So it's the ability to shift your perspective from being on the football field and like you can't really see everything the same way. Like, think about everyone who's out of shape eating chips and sitting at home and they're like, oh my God, look at you. Why didn't you pass the ball there? I could have done that. Of course you could. You have a very different perspective than the individual that's actually experiencing it. Same reason why you can give the most amazing relationship advice to your best friend, but then when you find yourself in that position, Totally different. You justify, you go, uh, that's not me, that's not going to work with me. No, it's just you're uncomfortable and you have your own emotional attachment to it.

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When I first started dating my now wife, Margaret, I remember like early on I was reacting to her the way I was with my previous girlfriend. And she quickly kind of like said something. She, 'cause she, I, I had shared with her that dynamic I used to have with my ex-girlfriend. And so she was able to name it. So maybe that's a piece of the process of like, hey, by me owning my responsibility, I articulated to my present girlfriend Margaret at the time. Right. And then she was able to then mirror back to me when I started to do it, because that's, that's the one thing. I think about is who do you have at your side reflecting back to you these things? Because sometimes it's hard to see when you're all alone.

Totally. It's, it's, it's very hard. It's like you can't see the ingredient label when you're inside the jar, you know, and that's, and that's what it is so much. And that's why it is, it's, it's so important. But I think, you know, obviously for you to have been at the point where you were able to articulate what it was that you'd experienced and the way you'd responded to that before. And then on top of, for your wife to be able to reflect that to you in a caring, loving way, of course you guys would be together because you would have been attracted to each other because that would have been the only— because you obviously did a level of work on yourself to get to the point to be able to acknowledge those patterns within yourself. And this is why I'm such a believer with people that are like, they're single and it's, they want a relationship. They want a partner so bad. They crave a partner so bad that they're willing to just kind of take scraps. They're willing to take whatever. And the reality is, is whatever you get is typically going to be a very direct reflection of your progress of wherever you're at, because it's like a CB radio. Whatever channel you're on, only other people on that channel are going to hear what you're saying. They're only going to, you're going to be resonating the same. People outside of that channel, Aren't going to hear you. So if you're on channel 10, but you desire someone on channel 14, they're not going to hear what you're saying. You have to elevate yourself to channel 14 and change the channel. And then those people— so as I do the work on myself, as I elevate myself, as I introspectively look at myself, which is again, that thing that kind of feels like, like when, when you shared that, that was a level of vulnerability. You were opening yourself up. To the possibility of this being held, not, I'm going to say held against you, but like put back in your face at a time where you know that if that was happening, you would feel so justified in it. So I imagine when she presented that back to you, there was a part of you that was almost like claustrophobic in your own body. It's like, come on. Like, no, like, and then it's like, ah, this is the part. This is the actual thing that I can change right here.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, when, when she reflected it back, I was able to get that distance from it for a moment and go, oh yeah, she's right. Like, this has nothing to do with her. This has to do with the previous person. And this is residual, you know, patterns from that. Um, I have to think though, that for someone to really do that work, we have to understand the difference. So what is the difference between taking responsibility and blaming yourself?

I feel like we get so caught up on blame because we, it's the easiest route. It's easier to feel angry than it is to feel sad. And it's so, it's easier to hold anger and we don't typically hold anger towards ourselves. I mean, don't get me wrong. We'll be very self-deprecating as humans, but it's like more than anything, when we think of anger, it gets projected outward. Usually you're doing this to me. Someone else is causing this. Why are you in that situation? They didn't force you into it. Like what put you in that situation? What put you into that relationship? What put you into that business endeavor? At what level did— are you the one to point the finger at? Because every time you point a finger, you got 3 pointing back at you. So it's like every time you want to go, yeah, but you, and it's like, no, you made me feel this way. No, somebody else was a stimulus. There was something that already lived inside of you that it was their behavior was reflecting that it was activating that part of you. Because that same person can give that same response to 20 other people and you're going to get 20 different responses. And you, it created this certain emotion. So they didn't make you feel this. It's that there was something inside of you. If you don't want to feel that, instead of depending on the rest of the world to adjust the way they behave and the way they show up, which is like hoping to win the lottery to pay your rent, it's like, what can I do to remove this trigger altogether? You know, like people always say that, like, you triggered me. No, you have a trigger inside of you. It's not their responsibility to not hit it. It's your responsibility to remove that trigger altogether. So you don't have to experience it. Painful things happen. Yes, people do do things to us. Like we experience pain at the hands of other individuals that are outside of our control. We didn't want that. And one of the coolest— there's, I mean, there's a lot of different approaches on this. And, and I feel like mine is one that a lot of people that are very locked on to their pain have a tendency to want to call it invalidating or discrediting. And that's not what I'm going for at all. I'm, I'm more of, I'm not in denial that painful things happen to us, that emotional things happen to us. But the, what I believe is that the trauma is not the bad event that happens to us. It's the way we respond to it. It's the way that we go about coping with it, because then that's us shifting and changing and altering ourselves. Yes, the stimulus came from something else, but the way we chose to handle it, and sometimes that literally is a means of actual survival, but to then never go back and readdress that, you're just keeping that alive forever and ever and carrying it on. Because at the end of the day, I can blame my father for being an abusive alcoholic man. My entire life. But I would also be the one walking around with that resentment and that anger forever. I love the guy now. I have so much appreciation for him. I shifted my perspective on him. Without his contrast of what I don't want to be, I wouldn't have such a love and appreciation for my mom of like what an amazing woman she is and everything I do want to be in terms of the way she treats people and handles things and shows up in the world and is so giving and loving while also holding boundaries for herself. It would have just been. So I think the easiest way to look at responsibility instead of blame would be to learn how to have gratitude for the people that you believe hurt you, which is difficult for a lot of people. And it's like, I don't want to give them any credit for anything. You have to. Nobody changes when things are good. Nobody, like, like nobody has ever been in a relationship. They're like, I just want to suddenly get an even better body. It was that heartbreak. It was that, it was that breakup. It was getting cheated on that drove you to go, I want to better myself. I don't like this. I'm going to live in a different way. I don't want to experience this again. Pain is one of those beautiful portals. So anyone who's brought pain into our lives, yes, I'm not saying let them back into your life. I'm saying learn to have an appreciation for that. Because if everything was just sunshine and rainbows, like you wouldn't change, you wouldn't evolve. You would have no reason to. Your system literally does not recognize any reason to evolve. It's like if you go into the gym and you lift the same weight every single day, You're not going to change. And it's like, you have to force your body to a point of failure. So it goes, we have to adapt. We have to shift.

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There's different, or at least I think there's different degrees of blame, right? So there's, there's the blame of like, I don't want to take responsibility. I think there's another side of blame, which is I'm scared to feel the unknown, or I'm scared to really not know why this happened. So I have to look for a reason. Do you see those as different, similar? Because, and I'll, and I'll preface this with that I get caught up in looking for a reason for why X happened, which is a form of blame, right? I'm looking for something to lob onto. as to why we're either in this situation or that person is in that situation so that I have— well, I don't even know really why. I don't know if it's learned. I don't know if it's because I just— it's a form of control. I don't know. But how would you look at that?

So I think, I think while I, I position a lot of things around relationships, uh, like you typically intimate relationships, friendships, family relationships, whatever it is, I base it around relationships because what I work with people on is the relationship they have with themselves. The relationships you have outside of you is a direct reflection of the relationship you have with yourself. I think we have, I think trust is a beautiful example of this. You know, I don't trust anyone because you don't trust yourself. Well, I have to trust you in order to get to this point. Yeah. You're outsourcing your trust and people go, well, but this person broke my trust. They might've broken your trust, but you can't really tell me they cheated on me. You can't tell me that them cheating on you was your first sign of a red flag. You ignored the red flags. You turned a blind eye to a lot of things. You took on that business endeavor. You signed that contract. You did this thing. You bargained. You bargained with your soul. You said, I will— I don't like the way you behave. This is a red flag to me, but God, I want love and acceptance so much. And I can only find that outside of me that I'm going to give this to you. And I'm trusting that we're going to— we have this transaction. And a lot of times these things aren't spoken about. And unexpressed expectations are premeditated resentments. And then we just hold onto those resentments for so long. And the reality is, is that we are creating the expectation in our head. We're like creating this contract that we assume we're both signing and the other individual's not signing it. So I felt that too, like after, especially after my divorce, I'm like, I'm never going to trust anyone. Like I gave her everything. I trusted that this was going to be. And What I came to realize is I outsourced that a long time ago. You know, I gave it away and it's because I didn't trust myself. There were so many things that told me that this isn't right and I ignored them. And so it wasn't other people that I didn't trust. It was myself that I didn't trust because I didn't choose me. And your entire, your body and your brain are a self-preservation mechanism. They like you, it wants you to choose you. For example, when you choose to get 8 hours of sleep, it's not just that you're getting that 8 hours of sleep. It's that your body system can relax and it goes, oh God, you are going to actually give us what we need. Cool. Now my other systems and mechanisms can fire. I can sleep adequately. Like, you will never outperform or outwork your body or brain. You just won't. When people are like, God, be stronger than your thought. No, like that's literally not a thing. Can, does, is something telling you like, maybe I want to stop when I'm running a marathon? Sure. And I can mentally push through that. But what I'm talking about is way beyond that. It's, it's, it's that I'm going to outdo this. Like I'm going to starve myself because I'm going on a vacation in 6 weeks and I want to look really good in my Instagram photo. Your body gives zero shits about your Instagram selfie that you want to take. It's going, we want to stay alive. So you will never outwork it. But when you give your body and brain what it needs, it gives you what you want. So as I learned to trust myself and I, and I prove that not just through these, not through like affirmations to myself, but legitimately actions and learned results that I show myself in life. When something doesn't feel right, I don't just go along with it. I've walked away from many, many lucrative business endeavors throughout my life because it did not feel aligned. And every time I walked away, it There was that aspect where it's like, oh man, that's a large amount of money I'm walking away from. But internally it's like, man, I got me no matter what. Like I had such a different level of trust for me and I felt so much like, I don't even know how to say it. It was like when Popeye eats his spinach, it's like something just fulfilled me from the inside out. And I was like, I can do anything.

And it's an interesting example though, because do you think fear of being left out shapes what we believe?

100% because of tribalism. Because then it comes back. I think it comes back to that primal idea of survival. So many people would rather be wrong in a group than to take the chance of standing in alignment alone. And it's like, and it goes back to that idea. Like, I'd rather be loved for who, or I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I'm not. And it's like, So many of us feel like we lack purpose. We live lives, we do jobs, careers for 10, 20, 30 years, only to wake up one day and go, man, like, this isn't my life. Like, I don't enjoy this.

And we're angry.

We're angry individuals. And anger is a secondary emotion. It comes from the pain of confusion. And that stems from when your reality does not meet your expectation. So if I'm expecting to have this happy, joyful life, but I'm living literally in every way for other people's approval, acceptance, love, whatever it is, like I'm literally not living my life. I'm living a perceived assumption of what my life should be from a collective. And I'm gonna go, who gave you that? And it's like, I don't know. Like they can't name anybody. Like when people are afraid of, let's say posting on social media, Well, I'm, you know, I'm just nervous of what people are going to say.

Okay.

Who, what are their names? Who are they? I don't know. It's like this collective pain point that we just assumed the sense of rejection from the tribe, the tribe just being other people in general. And, and that's the crazy thing is when you realize your brain is primed to move away from pain before it is to move towards pleasure, you're always going to focus on the people you're going to lose in your life before the people you're going to gain. So it, I always tell people, I'm like, dude, your tribe is out there. You're, you're surrounded by all these people right now that don't feel in alignment with you. You don't feel like you guys have a lot in common or get along. And you are so afraid of losing them because your brain is primed to focus on not losing those people before it goes, man, if I lose these people and I actually behave in this way, like I have a whole group of people that would love me for me. I'm more focused on the people I'm going to lose as opposed to what I'm going to gain from it.

We kind of mentioned this at the top, like how we're exposed to these opinions. I mean, Thousands of opinions we would never have ever in ancestral history been exposed to, right? I even think of occurrences, like something could happen on the West Coast, and here I am on the East Coast, and I'm hearing about it in real time. But had I been in ancestral times, I would've heard about it 5 years after a fire or something, right? And it would've been through clans coming together or groups coming together, and it's told as a story versus a real-time kind of trauma experience. So I feel like our nervous systems are being exposed in modern times in ways that they biologically weren't developed to deal with. So, how are there tools to support us in these modern times with this massive nervous system overload? Yeah, man.

That, and that's exactly what I work with because more than anything is think of the analogy of when people go skiing through the woods, they tell you to focus on the path that you want to be on. Don't focus on the trees that you want to avoid because We're all afraid we're going to hit a tree. And, but what do we do? We naturally think if I can see the threat, it can't get me. But where your attention goes, your energy flows. Literally where your eyes go, your body follows. So I'm looking at all the trees that I'm afraid of hitting and boom, I end up hitting a tree because as I'm looking at this tree, I don't see this tree. The point isn't how many trees can I see at once? Where do you want to go in life? And that's the thing is when you ask, but what do you want in life? They can't, they struggle really bad to tell you what they want. They can acknowledge what they don't want. They can acknowledge the pain that they don't want to experience anymore, the feelings that they don't want to have, but that doesn't give you a target to aim for. So when we're constantly inundated with social media, and so dude, every time you scroll, that's dopamine. And you'll sit there and people will talk about people with substance abuse addictions. If you can't get up, if you get up in the morning, the first thing you have to do is check your phone. You might have an addiction and you can't walk room to room, or you can't go to the bath. Like how many often do people go in and their legs go numb sitting on the toilet because they're not just going to the bathroom. They're sitting there and they're scrolling and scrolling and reading and catching up on everything. And you'll go, well, that's because that's my only time to myself. So you're telling me that you, that's the only time you have a sense of calm in your life? Of course you're going to be inundated. When your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, your excretory system shuts off, your digestive system shuts off, your reproduction system shuts off, your immune system downregulates, and everyone's sick. We have no sex drive. Everyone's like, I can't poop. And it's like, look, that's because we are constantly living at this elevated state. And yet we wake up every day and we go, man, I need it. It's just, it's the same thing as that. I have to check in with the things that I know to be. And you've programmed yourself so often, you've hidden it behind nobility. I check my phone first thing in the morning to make sure my clients don't need anything. My boss doesn't need anything, whatever. My family's okay. But all you're doing in those first 20 minutes that you're awake and your brain's operating in theta, and you're— so that's programming. That's what we have from conception until 7, 8 years old when we actually get logical thinking. Like, like you're programming yourself to say, I'm indebted to have to serve everybody else before I ever take care of myself. And this is where I say, like, the best thing you can do is be selfish before you try to be selfless, because being selfish and filling your cup is the ability to then go out and give to people still. I'm not saying be a selfish individual and like knock over the old lady at the grocery store and take the last box of cereal. I'm saying be selfish enough to give to yourself that when you show up to give to others, it's coming from a place of overflow as opposed to a place of transaction. Like, I'm— and that's what we all do. I'll give to you, but I'm expecting you to give back to me. Look, I show up for my friends, but nobody shows up for me. Well, you're showing up for them, expecting them to do something back for you. And yeah, of course you want these to be reciprocated, but what if your expectations could actually become the boundaries that you have in your life? You know, this is what my expectation of a friendship is. I'm going to show up because this is the kind of person that I am. I don't care how they respond, but if I experience over and over them not showing up for me, cool. That's a boundary. I don't feel like maybe you're someone I'm going to give that same kind of energy to. I'm not resentful towards you. You're your own person.

Boundary, meaning like, well, then maybe that's a friend you don't want to have in a sense, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, you start to redefine as you show up and you're not expecting— you're being the friend that you want. And if that person doesn't show event— you know, over time doesn't show up that way, you start looking for people that do.

Like I said, you love them all the same. Nothing exists without its contrast. Like, if you didn't have the pain in your life, you wouldn't— like, if you didn't experience the heartache and the bad relationships, the, the way you were raised that we can all have a level of complaining about to some degree, whatever it is, you would not appreciate the beautiful things in your life. You wouldn't appreciate the friendships that you do have that you truly value and treasure because you would have no sense of it. Like when I used to work, I would do 2 weeks in San Diego, 1 week back in Ohio. And anyone who knows Southern Cal is like, the weather's absolutely beautiful all the time. So I would get out there from Ohio and I'd be like, oh my God, this is absolutely amazing. And 2 weeks later, by the time I'm going home, I didn't even think about it. Until I got back to that really cold weather, I'm like, oh my God, I want that again so much. I'd go back out after a week. I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. And that's just what I was surrounded with and I got used to it, so I didn't appreciate it. So it's like I had to have the contrast to be like, I love this so much. So if you have anything in your life where you're like, man, I'm proud of this, I enjoy this, I love this, even the trajectory I'm on, maybe I don't have things that I want yet. And that's another thing is We live in a time right now where we, we see social media all the time and we go, man, if I had what this person had, I wouldn't have my problems. That's not true. Not, not at all. First of all, you don't, you see like 5% of somebody else's life on social media and you fill in the other 95%. You go, oh, they're so perfect. And trust me, from the endeavors I've done throughout my life, I've met a lot of these people. I've interacted. I've worked with a lot of these people. Some of the people that seem the happiest, the most fulfilled, the richest are the most broken and the most poor. And I see people who have maybe just normal paying jobs, not any huge sense of notoriety, not a ton of millions of followers. And man, dude, they live the most beautiful, joyful, fulfilled lives. And it comes down to that idea of like, am I fulfilling myself or am I trying to fulfill others? And I think that's what's going to make me feel fulfilled.

Okay. So someone listening, Realizes they've been living mostly on reaction. So what's an immediate step they can take to start choosing differently? Cool.

So in that moment, there's, there's really, there's 3 steps that, and it's, it's like this, to remember that emotions, your reactions, call them emotions because you're reacting based on emotion, happen in 90-second cycles. So if let's say I'm in an interaction with let's say a significant other or someone who's— it's conflict. If, as soon as you catch yourself, like you can feel that sense in your body. And I always see it like a thermometer, like in an old school cartoon where like your head's the bulb at the top where like the mercury is going up and then it just explodes. But you can feel that. When you start noticing that feeling in your body, you have about 10 seconds from the moment you start to trigger to the point where your system actually kicks in. And for women, once you're activated, it can stay active for up to 24 hours and men up to 9 hours. This is why a man and a woman can get into an argument, go to bed, wake up the next day, and the guy's like, how's everything going? And the woman's like, I'm gonna kill you. Like, because like, why are you still so hung up on it? Because her system is literally still perceiving the threat, whereas yours has reset as the man. So let's just both agree that we don't want that shit at all. And that's the thing. You have to just say, like, every time I do this, I experience the same thing. So I want to experience this difference. So first thing I can do is Open my body up because I'm physiologically the way I hold my body, shrugging my shoulders, closing off in front. This is primal. Like you don't go, oh, my organs are all right here. Let me protect myself from my husband, my wife, my kids, my friend who's pissing me off right now. This person online, we're closed off, which is sensing to our body going, man, like I have to protect myself. Think of a boxer, the way the boxer stands, tucks everything in, protects himself. We shrug our shoulders, open your body up, lower the shoulders. So think breath, inhale, fill that belly up. If you can do a belly breath where you truly extend your belly and you don't shortchange it, you just nice big belly breath, exhale through the mouth. That's going to do wonders for you as it is. As you continue breathing like that, let the shoulders drop, let the belly soften. Then Orientate yourself to the room. So that is orientation is the number one way that your system recognizes I'm safe. Because if there's a threat in front of me, I'm hyper— I'm tunnel vision on it. But if I can take a breath, I'm safe. If my body's opened up, I'm safe. And if I'm looking around the room and I'm just naming things in my head, light switch, light, camera, light. Door, and you're actually focusing on these things. Your system is not focusing on the threat. You're giving yourself this window and you can choose to do this, do this for about 90 seconds and that emotion will pass. And this is the part you always run into. So what, I'm going to be in the middle of an argument with my significant other and I'm just gonna be like, all right, give me 90 seconds. Yeah. What's the alternative? You're going to experience the same thing over and over and over. Walk away. And if they want to keep going at it, walk away. Well, that's going to cause problems too. Yeah, but that's going to be a problem you're also going to be able to handle from a grounded embodied place, as opposed to this reactionary place. You do this over and over and over. The more often you choose this, like we said in the beginning, whatever you repeatedly do, your brain doesn't care what it is. It stops reacting and it goes, we used to do this, but this new, this new program that we have, We're obviously doing that more often. So it implements that as the new program. So it can be the same stimulus and whatever I've chosen to do over and over and over, that will now take its place. So you will get to the point where you choose to regulate and breathe. And in the beginning, it's like anything else. It's very complicated. It's like, it is, it's a little frustrating. It feels tedious. So I got to stop and I got to breathe because it feels against everything that you want to do. We want to get defensive. We want to put our dukes up and like get ready to fight someone and fire back and say the thing that's going to cut them the way we feel. But it's, you got to realize it's a mirage. The pain you're experiencing is a mirage that you're interpreting. You are the one interpreting that. They're irrelevant. Whatever they're saying, it's actually irrelevant. And I'm not dismissing what's happening, but take them away altogether. And let's just say it's a business situation. Keep yourself regulated and you can make level-headed thoughts. You can come up with creative solutions to it. And for anyone that wants to Be like, well, how, how should I just dismiss it when somebody else does this to me? And I always think about the story about the guy that's out in a boat in the middle of a lake and he sees another boat approaching him and he's up on deck and he's saying, stop, stop, stop, whatever. And eventually the boat keeps going and it hits him and he's pissed off. He's angry and he's yelling at the other captain like, how could you possibly do this? Only to step over the edge of the deck and realize there's nobody in the other boat. The same amount of damage is done to his, but he doesn't have anyone to direct it towards. Now his brain just goes into, okay, how am I going to fix my boat? And it's like, we're always looking for an enemy to channel our anger towards. And if there isn't an enemy there, now we're forced to actually create solutions. So you can replicate this by saying there is no enemy. Like this person is not an enemy. And it's just an old primal strategy to protect yourself. It's running on an old program. And the more you want to sit there and defend it and go, no, this, this person is saying these very hurtful things. They're speaking words. They're saying things. That's very different than being harmful words. They're just speaking. You're interpreting them as harmful words. It's your interpret— your interpretation is everything. Your perception creates your reality. Create whatever reality you want.

I love that, Grant. That's really powerful. It makes me think as well, because you mentioned, of course, the perspective shift, the things that you can take ownership of, you know, kind of the intentional breathing or conscious breathing. But it makes me think also something I tell people when their cravings are really intense and they're in their kitchen and they're thinking about eating some kind of junk food that they really don't want to eat. I'm like, Don't beat yourself up. Just literally go for a walk and change the environment. Like, literally change the stimulus. And to your point, you suddenly don't have the craving or whatever. The stimulus isn't there. So it's like, it's, you move on to something else.

Well, and I think that's such a huge point. And I've experienced that myself a lot of times. Like, you end up with some sort of craving at night for some sort of food. And what have you always done throughout your life? You've probably gone to the fridge and you've gotten it, or you fulfilled it somehow. And it's like, what if you did something else and you let that feeling pass? And we're, but we go, it's not going to pass. It's going to persist. I have to, I have to feed it. And it's like, do you know that? Have you ever let it go? And then all of a sudden you do something else and you don't feel that craving anymore. I, and I started doing this with, I would, I was notorious for waking up in the middle of the night. I could like follow nutrition all day long, yet I'd wake up at like 2:00 AM and somehow smash like 2,000 calories just standing at my like cabinet. And I'm like, peanut butter adds up real quick. And it's like, I remember like literally one time, like literally grabbing the peanut butter and I like, I put the spoon in and I was like, I was like so close. I was just like, no, stop it. Like just stop it. And I washed the spoon off and I put the peanut butter back and literally just that action of doing that, I was like, That's cool. Like, I don't— like, I'm just gonna go back to bed. I get— like, I'm literally just gonna go put myself back in the bed. Like, everything in my body's going, get that shit, eat all of it. But it's like, if I— I'm in control. I'm actually in control. I don't have to do this. Go just set this down. Now physically move my legs, walk back into the bedroom and lay down.

Boom.

Fell back asleep.

Yeah.

It's like, you gotta make that choice. And then, and then, you know, something really important, I think you, you've captured is, you know, sometimes you got to be in the discomfort. Like the discomfort isn't our enemy. It's, it's, it's what, it's the bridge that takes us, you know, to the other side of this habit or whatever it is, or this, this, uh, this thing that we're stuck in, you know. Question I ask everyone at the end, if you could wave a magic wand, bring back an ancestral practice, what would it be and why? Hmm.

Sunlight. Sunlight. Like, like, like literally getting out in nature where everything's so industrialized now. We, everything's comfort. It's immediate. It's, you know, you sit on, you can sit on your couch all day. You can run your entire business from your laptop, not move once, stream Netflix, Prime, Hulu, whatever it is. Literally the only movement you would have to do is get up and walk 5 feet to your door to get your DoorDash that got dropped off that you ordered on your cell phone. And it's like nothing had happened, you know, human interaction. And I know I started out with sunlight, but like, as I get into it, it's like just interaction in general, like putting yourself out there. We, I feel like we all hide. And especially ever since, you know, 2020, I feel like we got into this mode of avoiding interaction with people and everything every day. is getting us to a point of less and less human interaction. Every restaurant you go to, there's a kiosk now and there's not a person. And we're losing that. And it's like, there's something so beautiful about community and nature and putting yourself in it and really understanding what it is. And that's actual comfort. That's actual medicine, as opposed to we think the couch and the Netflix, that's comfort. No, it's just what you're used to. And there's something so much more powerful. And I, dude, I used to be a huge proponent of that. I, like I said, I was 310 pounds. And as soon as I started reintegrating myself back out into literally nature and all the little things, getting sunlight on your face, you know, like, like actually like getting vitamin D, getting good sleep, like these things, you know, you can call them biohacking, but it's like, is it this huge new technology? No, there's like, yeah, there's a lot of cool products out there, These are also products that are just replicating what we used to do ancestrally.

Grant, I mean, we'll have to have you back because we could go so many more places with this conversation, but I wanted to keep it kind of encapsulated into this one kind of realm of responsibility versus blame. But so appreciate reconnecting with you today. Where can people go to work with you and learn more?

Yeah, I mean, my Instagram is kind of— I do a lot through Instagram, so it's just my first and last name, just Grant Ziok. And then my website, just grantziok.com. And it's a little, you know, my entire website is a really great place, I think, for people to get a vibe of what I do. And the entire idea of my website is a perspective shift. It's not a sales page. There's the abilities to connect, to book podcasts, whatever it is. But it's not a sales page. It's like, here, step into this world for a minute and see if it resonates with you at all. I would say Instagram or my website.

Excellent. Well, thank you again for your time. And thank you all for joining us on this episode. I think what I think about is presence and what are we doing in our daily lives to stay present with the moment. So, I hope this show will help you reflect on your own presence and how you're showing up. And as always, stay curious.

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T- pluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.