Ep.165- "Shift On Demand" with Dr. Sean Sullivan

This is the You Winning Life Podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode, we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, trainer and certified entrepreneur coach Jason Wasser.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the You Winning Life podcast. Today's another incredible episode as we talk to Dr. Sean Sullivan. He's a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder and CEO of One Perfect. It's an enterprise mental health and wellness platform that delivers personalized mindset shifting called Shifts. He began his formal psychology education at Harvard University and completed it with a psychological residency at the University of Texas Health Science Center and a postdoc training at University of California, San Francisco. He's been featured in national and international publications, including the New York Times, Forbes, and Huffington Post. His clinical research focuses on applying technology to improve mental health. And as a psychotherapist for over 20 years, He also wrote popular psychology books, articles, and has created countless digital mental health, wellness, and peak performance courses, apps, tools, and virtual reality treatments. Based on his research around the impact of teaching how to strategically shift your mind in a matter of a few minutes, i.e., shifting, Dr. Sean Sullivan has developed Shift Therapy to guide anyone through shifting into a better state of mind on their smartphone. In under 10 minutes. So we're very much looking forward to this conversation. And as we recorded it, we did have some tech difficulties. So if that pops up on your side of the editing, we apologize. But it's— but it was a really incredible conversation. And I hope you guys take a lot out of it. All right, guys, welcome back to the You Winning Life podcast. But you guys already know that. And funny enough, I had a conversation with one of my good friends the other day, who we started brainstorming the possibility of a whole different name, title, branding, everything. So if you have any ideas that you would love and think that this podcast should be renamed, this platform should be renamed, hit me up. Love to hear it because it's part of the community and really wanting to connect and reach where people are at versus where we started off. And we're now over 150 episodes in, which makes me really excited to welcome Dr. Shawn Sullivan to our show. You heard a little bit about him in our intro, but Shawn, welcome.

Thank you, Jason Wasser. Yeah, great to be here.

So number one, like, we're both in the same clinical world, and we're talking about how to maintain a change overall, right? One of the things that you specialize in is shifts, which is kind of one of those little buzzwords in our industry. How do we have a client have a shift? But you've really capitalized on that mindset shifting experience. So I want, I want to start off with a little bit of what you do, the platforms that you're connecting with people, and then we'll take that into the philosophies and the mindsets that you and I were pre-gaming about.

Yes. Yeah. All right. That sounds great. We were having fun knocking it around a little bit, and I'm really looking forward to getting into that. I think there's such a rich conversation in this, this idea of practice something versus becoming something or being something, right? So, but just to back up a little bit, yes, I'm a clinical psychologist. I've been at that for a long time. And a lot of the research that I did right from grad school through becoming a psychologist and then treating patients that's out here in San Francisco, was focused on how to apply technology to psychology. So 20 years ago, this was a little bit newer, and now it's really come into its own. And I learned some major things by, by building different kinds of technologies and seeing what works and what didn't. The main thing in this, again, will relate to our conversation, is that if people aren't using what you're sharing, then no matter how well it works in the lab, it doesn't really have an effect in real life. And so that's, I think, some of the logic that led to the concept of shifting and the product of Shift. A Shift is a short 5 to 10 minute digital experience that guides you into a better state of mind anytime. So the example of it as we use Shifts in the One Perfect Shift platform, so oneperfectshift.com, you can go get your free Shifts there. Or you get the app One Perfect Shift, and you can get a much more personalized experience there. But what that means is that you come in and you say, I'm lonely, I'm frustrated, I'm angry, I can't sleep. It could be I'm unmotivated at work. So anything really from some of the mental health experiences to wellness, you just want to work on something, or to performance, I need to do better for a meeting upcoming. Identify that and then get a shift in the next few minutes into a better state of mind. And, uh, I, I— we're both clinicians, right? So the real shock to me was that this worked, to be honest with you. Um, we— our model is therapy, right? So you come to a session an hour long roughly, and you do sessions over time, and that builds, and you get progress over time. And so this is a bit of a different concept. It's that you're in a particular state of being, of mind, of experience at any moment. And you can identify the state that you're in, and then you can quickly shift it. That doesn't mean that shift is going to keep you— move you from sad to happy and keep you there forever. It just, uh, what we learned, and the surprise was that 90% of people roughly in our pilots with University of California out here for 2 years showed that they reported they were— that they had shifted toward or into a better state of mind in 5 minutes. And so the fact that the tool works is, is remarkable to me. And that really excited us and got us into thinking about it in a lot of different ways and practicing with it in different ways.

So that mindset alone— so I love this, this, this concept, because as a licensed marriage and family therapist, our training is systemic, right? And then one of the models in that postmodern thinking of counseling, psychology, therapy, whatever words we want to throw at it, is solution-focused brief therapy. Right? So our goal is to have those shifts in moments, because it's not always about the insight, it's about the 180 degrees different. Like, in other words, figuring out what our attempted solutions to solve our problem is and realizing that we're just solving problems from the same mindset, and therefore we're gonna have the same outcomes. But if we can figure out what's our beliefs, assumptions, and expectations, and then flip that or articulate that, even figuring out why we even wait, why that's our presumption, and then going to a, you know, a different willing choice of expectations, actions, beliefs, we can have that shift too. And unfortunately, like, you and I know this, right? Because you're coming from the world of clinical psychology. And I come from a family where my grandmother on my mom's side's two brothers were old school Freudian long-term clinical psychiatrists, right?

The 30, 40 year That's such a great background for psychology. Just, you know, whether you use it or not, practically speaking, that really informs how you're able to think about, I think, the process of change and the power of the unconscious mind and all of that.

Right. But their thing is, it was, they have clients for 20, 30 years. I want to have a client over 20, 30 years, but I don't want them to be in my office every week for the 20 years. In other words, I'm, I could be your therapist for the rest of your life at different developmental stages and different challenges going up. But I don't think you need to be in my office consistently constantly every week for that entire timeframe, which is what are we handling right now? And what's the stuck beliefs there? So I absolutely completely believe that what you found and are doing absolutely works, because I see those, you know, shifting miracles happen all the time. When people are one, willing to let go of that expectation of I need to, you know, listen, there is compounding interest and growth, right? That's, that's just a given. And, and like you were describing, but I absolutely completely believe in why I'm so excited to have this conversation is that state versus trait, right? If people are going to a Tony Robbins event, and that's what he's talking about, state versus trait and shifting your mindset and how you can do it in physiology and nervous system and neurology. It's funny how now all of that stuff that wasn't part of our training early on is coming back into us, and why the sciences and why the technology world that you've combined psychology with is so essential to us moving forward as humans.

Yeah, good point. You reminded me, I grew up on some Tony Robbins stuff as a performance athlete, learned how to use that. And yeah, it was, it was performance psychology in my mind. But you're right, he comes— it's more personal development, but in terms of how people think about it, but yeah, it's so powerful. And I think that there's a clear synergy between learning to shift in 5 minutes and then using those shifts in therapy to work on something. You talked about, right, focusing on where, where was the previous mindset coming from, what are the historical precedents. So they really pair well together to me. And as I reflected on it, one of the origins of this concept of shifting was that I've been a psychotherapist now for 20 years. And I realized that every session I think I've had, I can't think of an exception to this, the first 5 minutes, person comes into the room, we sit down. This is back, you know, when we did it in person, but same applies on video. And you're in, you're dealing, they're dealing with what is occurring for them right now, no matter what the diagnosis or treatment plan or today's plan. They're coming in with hot a lot of times with whatever it was at work or they're thinking about, which makes sense. So, so am I presumably throughout my day. But that first 5 minutes invariably entailed us connecting to one another, shifting naturally together into a place where we could do better work. And I came to realize this is such a natural process, provided that the context is there to do it, that why don't we take this as the fundamental skill of, of your own mental health? If you can learn to shift your state, that means that you can, no matter where you are, you can come into a better place to address whatever it is that you're looking at. And that might mean you're doing great, but you need to get into a performance kind of focus state. I think one of the really interesting things that's come up in a lot of dialogues I've had around this is, well, people need to connect with the idea that they are in different states naturally throughout the day. This is a really important first step. Because until you know that, it's tough to absorb this idea, oh, I can change my state. Well, first you have to understand sort of what a state is for you.

Yeah, Esther Hicks and the Law of Attraction. I know this is like out there in the woo-woo land, but it's— she has a statement that's this quote, it's, you can't get there from there. Right? So I have a lot of times, like, I'm sure this is so consistent in your practice, as it would be with all clinicians, is that the client comes in like, and they're just oversaturated and overflooded, their physiology is right, they're dysregulated. And like, everything's like, you know, and like you just said, we have to— all right, let's, let's let's just relax for a second. Let's connect. Let's, let's synchronize our breathing. So if you're not necessarily saying consciously to them, but we're setting up the scenario, right, of the situation for that change to happen. But I love always just like reminding my clients of when they're coming in, they're flooded, and they're just like dumping. I'm like, okay, I hear you, but you're not going to get there from there, right? In other words, you're not going to get the goal. You can't even— we're so stuck in that let's just call it for general sense of terminology, negativity, right? Flooding that it's, it's virtually impossible for you to see a positive outcome when like draws like and you're moving that momentum in that same direction. So, so this is really powerful. So like when you're, when you're going into this first 5 minutes when someone's using the app, especially the more it gets streamlined for them, what are some of those little, you know, indicators or mindset or little nuggets that they're focusing on in that timeframe to bring them to this awareness?

So, yeah, there's, there tends to be a structure to a shift. And I think there's some key pieces to it that repeat. And that's sort of what we're getting at here, right? So the, what I came to see was that the, the action of identifying that I'm lonely, sad, frustrated is a really big step, because that's let, that's letting you know that there's a mind state, there's a state going on for you. And so let's say that that's the first piece, especially if you're doing it on your own. Even if you and I, you know, we're going to do it for each other. I would— might say, you know, how you identify— let's identify how you're feeling, even on a scale of 1 to 10. It can be as blunt as that. I'm a 3. I'm not feeling— so we will begin there. And then the idea of setting the intention to shift into a better state over the next 5 minutes seems to be a really important component of it. So that— and that actually differentiates in my mind shifting or a shift from, say, meditation or mindfulness that almost has the opposite intention, which is to be very present-focused, but not to set a future intention. And it has really powerful and important implications in doing that kind of a practice, I believe. But for shifting, we do have a very specific intention, and that is to get to a better place as defined by you. So we come into— we'll set that intention usually after taking a long deep breath. Listen— setting your intention to listen, put 100% of your attention to listen to life. And it might be listening through your eyes, through seeing. It might be listening with your ears. And as I— as we go through that sort of instruction an activity, I'll often suggest noticing after a little bit of silence whether there was any shift in your state. Because if you can notice right off the bat what I call a mini shift, sort of a small physiological shift, it's a really nice analog for a bigger shift. And to me, that is— that's the core of getting better at this stuff, is recognizing the mini shifts. And then being able to pair that with those moments throughout your day when you shift into a negative state. So if you can find, oh, I'm anxious. Oh yeah, I know how to shift. Deep breath. Oh, I already mini shifted. Okay, now we're really, now we're really rolling. And it tends to be then we'll go into content that's around the topic, right? So if you're lonely, well, let's think about what loneliness means. What does it mean to you? And, and, and Maybe that's the— you were talking a little bit, you can get there from there, right? That's sort of, okay, let's go to here, other place that you're comfortable, familiar with. What I love to think about in this stuff is that everyone has a different perspective on how they think about loneliness. So it's really, it's really helping someone to get into the state where they can reflect on their most valued or important reflection on that topic. Because when you do, then it automatically shifts you.

Yeah.

And there's a lot to go on. There's other things we do, but that's how we get going really.

It's so interesting. So I was watching Ramit Sethi's new Netflix show. I think it's Teach You to Be Rich. Basically, it's based on his book I'll Teach You How to Be Rich, and I can't remember the name of the title. It's something along that— Be Rich or How to Be Rich. And the question he asks all the people that he's coaching from a psychological financial coach perspective is, What does your rich life look like? And we can ask that question in a myriad of ways. What does a— right, if we figure out like someone's lonely, I, you know, I would look at it as perspective of what would a non-lonely life look like?

What would—

you know, I would ask them, well, what would be your opposite term, right, of, you know, what would that look like if we weren't using the word lonely? What would be the positive variation of that word that has no direct impact right? It's not lonely and not lonely, right? So what would that word be that would give you a rich experience, that would, that would have that connection, that would have— and have them come up with that word. And I see how hard it is, how— because again, it's that momentum, it's that the buildup of years of challenges, and how, you know, our work is so important to just ask the right questions and set the right, the right place and the intentions and, and support them through challenging them to think differently, which is a shift, which is a shift.

Yeah, that's a— yeah, right up sort of broader shift even, but fundamentally, what are your mindsets? And I think that, that actually is such an important idea that, um, for a lot of us, especially if we're talking about and focusing on the, the primary difficulty we're having, then we might not have a clear conceptualization of where we're trying to get. It's very hard to visualize what not loneliness looks like if you've had a history and life of loneliness. You might be able to imagine it for someone else. But it's very sort of artifacted, abstract. And so the more concrete you can bring it, and, you know, we know with, with trauma, this is what happens, right? There's this big blank spot when you come, come around to these areas that you haven't engaged with from an emotionally peaceful state. And and felt supported and present to be able to build that vision of your life. So even— yeah, exactly. Asking the right question and then sitting in that environment together and supporting the process with the physiology in a place that it still feels peaceful to engage the imagination there. So yeah, I love that. And I think it's a link to how, you know, a shift, an intentional shift over 5 minutes can then lead to, okay, let's do some real deep work together.

Or just be happy that it felt better than it was, right? Which I think is just a— I don't want to negate that at any level for, for one, the work you're doing, but two, for people who are listening. And it doesn't always have to be about solving a problem. It could just be about this feels any bit better, and nuancing and noticing the nuance of that. And, and I think that's such a massive win for people. I know it is for me, for me, when I get into my own stucknesses and malaise and whatever that might be, which I think is kind of universal at this point. There's a lot malaise going around. But I know that like, even just doing something different and moving, you know, using those scaling questions, right? If I'm feeling like on a scale of like overwhelm or fatigue and that malaise, it's a 9, what would an 8.5 look like? And what helped, you know, that's less drastic than a 4, right?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, one of the, I think, really happy surprises that's come out of this to me is that, you know, I mentioned roughly 90% of people will report that they were able to shift it into a better place. And so the downstream effect of that is that inside your brain and body, you now know on some level that you have a skill that can get you to a better place.

Yeah.

And for me, the way that this paid off, I see it, you know, with people who learn to shift all the time. My, my personal life, it was in the middle of the night. I was all this anxiety. Oh, I'm not going to get enough sleep. I have to do this. This is back when I was— I just become a psychologist, starting a practice, all this debt, you know, all the things we go through. And you're supposed to be able to help people. So when you're waking up in the middle of night with anxiety, you're not feeling super competent, you know, as a therapist. And so I—

it—

for that reason, I realized I really need to address this problem. And it set me on this adventure of, okay, well, what's 5 minutes I can develop in order to shift it. And I did that, and then it started working every single time, like, very reliably. But the— as I said, the downstream effect of that was now I don't have anxiety overnight because I don't fear it because I have a solution to it. So all of us— so much— and we touched on this a little bit earlier, that once you know that you have a particular solution, your life changes completely. It opens up because the fears that underlie all of the things that we find ourselves in therapy for, generally speaking, they relinquish when you know that you have a tool that works for you, or a skill, whatever you want to call it, a lifestyle, let's say.

Yeah.

And a lot of that does go back to that meditative mindset, not necessarily the meditative practice, but then that mindset, or maybe it's just the philosophy of dropping resistance around the outcomes, dropping resistance around the belief of it, right? It's a lot of our— I find a lot of my effort and inertia and challenges in my life as well, right? And I'm sure you see this with your clients as well as with my clients, is that it's— they're working up against this wall that they've self-created, and therefore there's nothing they can see on the other side of the wall. But it's the belief about that thing, right? It's that assumption about the thing. It's— a lot of it's self-created. And I love the idea of dropping the resistance and how quickly that can happen. So the idea that there's tools out there, right? And when you just the idea of you sharing that, right? Like, this is how I was as an early, a young clinician, just with, right? I love the vulnerability component that we got pushed away with. I don't know how much it was in your program. And, you know, there was always debates of self of therapist, right?

Right.

And, and I'm at the point where, like, you know, clients, I pretty much will share, I mean, within obviously logical and ethical means of usefulness, of where it creates a normalization of what they're going through, you know, journeys and stories of my own experiences. And sometimes I'll just say like, well, I have a client who went through this, right? Or, and would use their fictitious story as my— it's really my story, right? So, so if it's really— if it won't be the best way of use, but I wonder, like, you know, when you're, when you're sharing that, like, this is something that you went through, how often do you find that to be more helpful just from a clinical perspective? Forget the technology side, but just as person-to-person clinician, when you're like, yeah, I went through that.

Yes. Uh, so you're, you're so right on. Uh, you know, listeners probably have some sense of this, but just to color it in, as a therapist and through the training, um, historically, you were talking about psychoanalysis in, in your history with that a little bit. Now, back then, the, um, the training was that you didn't share anything about yourself. You were a blank slate, and the patient at that time was meant to be projecting against this blank slate. Well, we've come a long way from 120 years ago with Freud, which is where that came from, and learned that the, the number one single most powerful variable for predicting success in outcomes of therapy— so meaning that you come in and you get something good out of it— is your report as a client of your relationship with your therapist. So if you have a— if you feel you have a good relationship with your therapist, then your outcome— it correlates with positive outcome more than any other variable. So I think it's for that reason in the research that we've come to learn that being genuine in a relationship is what establishes a trusting, um, relationship that can be the container through which, you know, good things happen. So that's all sort of prologue to saying also, I suspect you and I both have personalities where it's just instinctually you, you, you don't want to hide. You want to serve, share, and of course in a responsible, relevant way. And it depends on, you know, who you're working with, what they're working on. But, you know, I don't think leaving the sense in someone that you're hiding from them is ever going to be really that productive for either of you, really.

So do you see a challenge? Because we're now moving into the AI front, right? We're there. It's happening. It's, you know, all my, all my visions of Terminator. And, uh, is that true? No, I don't know. Yeah, because I've really engaged. I really, you know, I've done a ton of stuff with ChatGPT and really gone down that rabbit hole and watching YouTube videos. So, so I've, you know, usually I'm not the earliest adopter to things, and I'm kind of waiting to see like, okay, where does it take place and set and setting in, in, in just in general in the world and in our industry. But I really have, uh, fully embraced it because I think that comes more from my entrepreneurial side of my of my brain, my practice, than my clinical side of my practice. And I found it to be tremendously useful when like coming up with ideas or treatment plans or questions or, right, because you can say, you know, pretend you are so-and-so with this philosophy, ask me questions from that place, which is crazy. So in other words, you can have Freud as if it's Freud or as if it's, you know, Erickson or as if it's any clinician, because it right now knows its works and it's going through and sifting and sorting and asking from that vantage point. Questions to sift and sort through. So you can have a co-therapist with you in this process.

Yes.

When we get stuck, which is super cool. So, so I think—

cool. Like, it's, uh, the— yes, it opens up the future both to the Terminator side and to some of those, you know, amazing visions that you're talking about. Yeah, we've thought about it a lot.

Right. So that's what I'm wondering, like, how can we— how can, how can it be leveraged more, right? Because I know if someone's, you know, is AI part of this protocol? Is there been conversations now with what's going on, how to leverage more AI to make it more in tune and in sync as the user evolves with it, it evolves with the user? What's the, what's the vision for that within, within your, within your platform?

That's such a great question. And probably we're going to be talking about this and getting better at answering it, hopefully, as, as we go. But I think we just happened at the company that produces and shares Shifts is called One Perfect. So at One Perfect, we've been testing those Shifts through pilots and then with— we sell into organizations, right? So the universities or enterprise for their employees, employers that want their employees to be able to make a Shift in 5 minutes because they're running between meetings. So those are our customers in addition to just any individual do it themselves. The next phase of this product that we're now recruiting what I call shift therapists to join us. And by the way, a shift therapist doesn't need to be a clinician, clinician background, because we can train them because of what you're talking about. And so what I mean by that is now that we have this catalog of shifts that we've tested and know work for years, we can ask AI to improve them, to keep testing them and to improve them, but based on constraints that we know work already. And what that means is that if you're a shift therapist or I'm a shift therapist, that someone comes into the One Perfect Shift app, says that they look at the options for live shift therapist if they want a live session instead of— currently it's a digital audio or video session for 5 minutes. This will be a live session where someone will show up. You can see, okay, so Sean has a great background in giving shifts on motivation. He's got 5 stars there. I want a motivation shift. I'm going to choose Sean. Now we come on, come face to face, and I have the script that is a shift that's been proven, written by a psychologist and tested that way, and then enhanced potentially by AI for your history in the app. So I think that there are all sorts of use cases around that. Now, as a shift therapist who's been trained basically by doing lots of shift shifts and then getting rated on providing shifts. And you go live if your shift rating is high enough, right? You're able to put a profile in the app. But we can provide you the script for this person that we believe based on data is going to work the best. However, we're combining that the most important thing, which is this live human connection with some AI supported tools that with guardrails on them, Amazing.

Amazing. I think we're just at the beginning of this. I know about a year and a half ago, I interviewed one of the founders of Muse, the headband meditation app, and everything like that, right?

Yeah.

So it's so cool to see, right? And that's— I mean, that's not AI-driven at this point, but it's just really good data and science and showing how you can train your brain, right? You can set up meditations for 5, 10, 15 minutes, right? But it's still much more, like you said, it's a little bit more— it's passively active, versus actively active, right? So in that meditation stance versus what you're doing is a lot— sounds a lot more cognitive. We're thinking about it, we're processing through it. So I'm— you and I were talking a little bit more about like the lifestyle of things versus these being like one-on-one interventions or— All right, so as you might have noticed, there were some glitches and you might pick up in the editing that, uh, there's some stuff going down. So we're back with, with Dr. Sean and it's 2 days later. You may not notice that, but we're going to give you the behind the scenes of I lost the internet and everything went out about an hour here at home. So we're gonna pick up the conversation as best as we can, and if it seems like it's a little wonky on your end, we apologize. But we're gonna pick up back where we left off. So the question I was asking you as we got rudely interrupted by the interwebs was the idea— we were talking about meditation and other approaches being active in the sense that they are something you do, but meditation is like, right, you said you're letting things happen, you're not focusing on anything. So there is a passive process to that. So, you know, I was wondering on your perspective of the difference between doing things that are actions but passive, but versus creating things that are active and embedded into your whole mindset and lifestyle as a whole.

Yeah, that's, that's really an interesting one to me, because I think it gets at the distinction, at least in my mind, between what a shift is sort of by definition and what a mindfulness practice is. So the assumption underlying mindfulness is that your, your singular intention is to be in the present moment, observing the content that's occurring for you within you and in your outer world also in the present moment. And that's really your, your fairly limited scope of focus for that exercise. With the Shift, it's more of an active exercise in the sense that you've set an intention to move your state, your state of mind and body from where you were to a different state. You see a subtle shift, let's say, in the intention that you would bring when you do a more active exercise. Now, I just go over that to frame the difference between what a lot of people do in their wellness practices and what a shift is. But I also think that overlays interestingly to the broader question of, building a tool into your lifestyle. For me, and what I found working with people, is that it's a lot easier to build a habit when you have a more specific outcome intention because you can more easily measure whether you achieved that intention, that objective, meaning moving from maybe feeling a little bit unmotivated to feeling more motivated over the course of 5 minutes. And that reward that occurs if you're able to do that is part of what makes the habit sticky. And so when we're talking about building it into your lifestyle, it's really important that the habit actually gets built in a way that, that makes it into a habit so it can continue. So just some thoughts on that one.

Yeah, I love this. So the term sticky, I mean, I know that's kind of coming out of the world of neurology a little bit, right? Where we're playing with neural pathways Jason Wasser. I love one of the videos I reference a lot my clients to is the Dr. Joe Dispenza TED Talk where you can actually see in video form what's happening in neural pathways and how they rewire and fire together, right? So it's kind of like to have a cool visual of like what we're doing by retraining our brain and our nervous system. To have that visual is really powerful to see like, okay, so this stuff actually works. It's not woo-woo, it's not mumbo-jumbo, it's not, you know, let's go hug a tree. This is actual everything talking about from the second we started is neuroscience.

Yes.

Right. So the stickiness is right. It does take time, right? The idea of like, well, does it take 30 days to have a new habit? Does it, right? Or a new practice or a new— right.

It is.

But that all does come out of neuroscience and the research on that.

Yeah, yeah. I think that the concept of neuroplasticity, which we can talk about a little bit, I think most people really are familiar with that concept now. It's essentially the idea that your neurons which are the cells that make up your brain, change based on the content that you process in any given moment. And as you do it repetitively over time, those changes solidify. And your example there of looking at a brain in real time, I think, has been a huge component of what makes— that brings it to life for us. So you can now imagine, because you have that visual image of what's occurring inside you as you take certain activities. And while we're on the topic, let's just highlight that the intensity with which you focus your attention is one huge driver of those changes that occur in your neurons, and then the repetition that you do it. So we were talking about the habit. What was the word we're using? Sticky, right? So yes, sticky is kind of has this, it's, it has the feeling of that that visualization in the— what's the word I'm looking for— the concreteness of what's going on inside your brain. So in both of the examples we were talking about before apply here. If you're doing mindfulness, you're developing the brain pathways that enable you to observe the present moment and the content of the present moment. So you're strengthening your capacity to do that as you practice it. And if you're shifting, you're enhancing those neural pathways, let's call them, that used to have you in a place of unmotivated in our example and now are being trained by the trigger of feeling unmotivated to moving towards motivated over time. So yeah, all of this is about neuroplasticity, I think. And it's really exciting to look back in the history of our field and see 30 years of this research and how all of that effort and work on the research side then became paired with practitioners like us who tested them in the real world and said, okay, oh, it is the repetition, it is the intensity, it is the understanding of what you're doing that really amplifies the effects. So, and that's super exciting. It's empowering to know, oh, I can take steps and it's going to literally change my brain, which means to me at the most fundamental level, it means The content that you're processing right now is training your brain for tomorrow. You're not going to produce exactly the same brain states, but they're going to be similar. They're going to be more and more similar the more you do it.

It's so fascinating. I've been having conversations with people who've been stuck in a pipeline of, let's say, political or philosophical frameworks, right? Whether it's podcasts or books or whatever. And I'm— my new question to them is not trying to convince them to not be there, but my, uh, is— I mean, I'm not looking at like, hey, you should stop doing this. I'm looking at it from the perspective of, is what you're doing allowing you feeling more, more uplifted, more joyous, and more connected to more people around you? And what I see, that, right, once we have that confirmation bias and we go down that pipeline and we're just reconfirming and looking, uh, attaching to more things that are similar right, that is training your brain and it is training your neurology to only see through that dominant view. So therefore, it becomes more and more difficult to hear or have relative influence from anything that contradicts that. And I think that's kind of where growth stops in a lot of ways, right? Because you're now just, you know, it's just within that own wheelhouse, and therefore no relative influence of anything that could enhance it is coming in. So I'm finding that the people that are looking to be more open, it does take, right? It's untraining, retraining our thoughts and our brains. But I think like asking that question, like you're talking about with motivation or connection or hap— you know, happiness, which is not really what we should be aiming for, but contentment is the word that I, that I like more than happiness, is what are you constantly exposing yourself to? What are you reinforcing that with? And is that giving you any different outcome than what you actually desire? Then the approach is, is not going to— it's not going to get you there.

Yes, yes. Yeah. So I also see this one as a tricky uphill battle, right? And the reason for that, there is also neurology research that looked at— this is during— I believe I'm getting this right conceptually. It's right. If the details are wrong, you have to forgive me. You can, you can kind of go look up the research. But during neurological surgeries, we do research sometimes. And one piece of research that was done was giving people inputs onto their brain during open brain surgery that produce different emotion states. And so you could press the happy area of the brain and people would start to feel better. You could press sort of on the anxious pieces of the brain and, and people would feel that anxiety. And what was discovered through this research is that people preferred, when asked, to have the self-righteous areas of the brain triggered. Because in spite of the fact that you and I might say that a preferred feeling is happy, joyous, stress-free, a stickier feeling is self-righteousness, is the reinforcement that I'm right. And this, you know, we can talk about where that comes from, right? There's a whole biological history that, that is likely related to why we lean into that. But it really— what it does is it means the media goes to the lowest common denominator to trigger us in those ways. And although we talk about them as negative affect, in fact, people choose them over positive affect. And so until you really observe that about yourself, I think it's hard to understand why the heck would I want this angry feeling? I think that the, the helpful thing there is to recognize that that's sort of implicit within us. And then ask yourself where you want to live. I mean, the, the incentive I would say that you could give to people is to tell them that stress, which is, which correlates with this self-righteousness, is completely unhealthy for you over time. Chronic stress is very negatively correlated or positively correlated with negative health outcomes. So the more stressed you are, the more self-righteousness you produce in yourself. The worse over time. It's just that in the moment, it's pretty sticky.

Yeah, that makes so much sense with everything because I've been navigating the terminology of like, we're in the age of the narcissist right now. I think that's like our— right, we're in the age of the Aquarius, and I don't know what we've been in, but I think we're in the age of narcissistic traits. And I think like this whole toxic mindset of like, 'F your feelings,' and, you know, 'I don't really care about you, and if it bothers you, that's on you,' right? And obviously nothing we also have to take self-accountability and self-responsibility. But the just blatant, sheer, what I was just terming as narcissistic traits, really is better explained by what you just said, which is there's this self-righteousness, but the self-righteous indignation.

Yeah.

And I think, right, you're really hitting on something that I'm very much looking forward to contemplating much more of. How is this showing up, one, for me as a person, two, what I'm noticing and being aware of and what we're all noticing, being aware of, especially as we're going into another election cycle. We're always in an election cycle, but going into a presidential election cycle and looking at— and I challenge people to look at that from the perspective of which candidate is being the most self-righteous, which is showing most indignation, which is coming from a place of anger versus a rising tide raises all ships perspective. And I think that's a lens of do you feel like the antidote is compassion to self-righteousness? What would you say is the antidote parallel from a church?

Yeah, this is why I think it's an uphill battle. To me, each of us needs to recognize that inclination in ourselves to lean towards the 'I was right, I knew it, I want to win.' Of course we want to win. That is very core to our evolutionary success, right? But I think that the trick is, is recognizing that, um, if you're being manipulated, if that part of your brain is being manipulated by, um, you know, somebody that is— or it doesn't have to be somebody, right? It could be sort of any, any set of circumstances that is presenting you with a false narrative, right? Where it's like there's only winning and losing is usually the narrative. And so you can frame stories in ways that really trigger that self-righteousness but are not full stories, right? They're black and white stories as opposed to recognizing all of the gray in between two versions of opinions in the world. And so it— but again, I think it's a heavy lift just because it takes quite a bit of intention to observe that within yourself and then not react to it in real time when you're are getting bombarded by the media now with, with efforts at triggering— what do we want to call it— your self-righteous system. Yeah.

What a powerful perspective. I think that if we look at it from a place of like, okay, how can I move to empowerment and drop the attention to the things that are triggering us or that are designed to trigger us to benefit from— for their benefit, then I think that is like helping us give those like training wheels training wheels on an upscale battle. But I don't know if training wheels will be the best tool when you're going uphill, right?

But I'm kind of visualizing it as a motor.

We need—

we need that little hybrid motor kicking us in. But it's, it's certainly interesting. And I know you and I talked about that podcast. My buddy sent me that link, um, from Sam Harris's Making Sense podcast, and it's in episode 315, and it's about 44 minutes in, uh, where he goes and steps up like these— what he calls the ladder. I forgot the terminology, but he goes through the different types of like argument or mindsets that people have, whether it's a lawyer, whether it's a zealot, whether and advocate. There's other terminology he uses about like, to be honest, of like, where are we coming from when we're trying to connect with each other, when we're trying to engage a person, a thing, a situation, a challenge, a goal? Where are we in that? And I'm not a Sam Harris expert, but I just hear bits and pieces from different friends. But I just like how he broke that down from here's the ladder of how someone approaches this from a mindset perspective.

So yeah, yeah, I'd love to take a look at that. It sounds like a nice model for understanding yourself and, you know, where you potentially could get triggered. So, and the more we know about how, how we personally can get triggered, I think the better shot we have of seeing it happening in real time.

Yeah.

The whole idea of taking a big old step back, a lot of times in shifts, which is what I largely work in, we'll What we're doing is saying, you know, let's say that you're frustrated with something or someone. The— we're doing part of the process is taking a big step back and observing, or ask yourself about how you would want to have dealt with this situation. If you look at it, you know, from a year from now, how do you want your life to unfold? How do you— what will you be proud of having done? And when you frame questions that way, it takes some of the immediacy out of that self-righteousness and the winning and losing and gives, I think, a broader perspective of the individual incidents that we deal with. And so that seems to be a big component of shifting people, at least when they come in frustrated and hot and they identify, I'm feeling frustrated, I want to, you know, get back to peace, is taking the time to take that step back and observe what's— what does my best life look like ultimately? And is this part of it? Because your life is ultimately made up of all of these moments stacked on top of each other. But I found that to be a powerful tool.

Yeah, that is, because I see it as like even bigger. Like, what is it like? What are you most afraid of happening if you, you know, when you see this happen in general over and over again, if you take it away from that person or that thing. And you make it a very macro 10,000-foot view. What does this represent to you in general? When people do this in general, what does that mean? Or what are you protecting from that? Right? I feel that like, that gives another way of looking at it, which I love the way you phrased it. So my final two questions as we wrap up for you, and it doesn't have to be in either in any order. One is, what are you reading, listening to, watching right now? And two is, where are all the places that people can track you down and get connected with your— with you and all the resources you're offering.

I unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, um, am watching a lot of a show and really like it a lot, but it is designed to make you indignant, I think. So apropos to our conversation, Succession. Oh, watching Succession.

I mean, I just started season 3, so—

Oh, did you? I mean, it's a lot of fun. It seems so— it's written so well. The acting's amazing. I love that. Yeah. I'm not sure that's, you know, inspiring on the psychology side of things, but it is if you look at it.

I mean, I see it as a family therapist, right? Especially working with family businesses. How, how cool from my perspective of like, all right, maybe this might be, you know, again, talking about narcissism and all the different personality challenges that you have there. Yeah, addiction, all the other things. It's fascinating to me. No different than I love watching Billions and looking at like Wendy Rhodes and like seeing the ethical issues of her being like a performance psychologist in the practice, right? I love looking at those things or seeing The Office, how if you ever saw this, that each people in the office have a different personality or psychology disorder.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

And see if you can go back and look at each character as, as a personality diagnosis. I actually did an episode of an archetype of that archetype of that, like who's the anxiety disorder, who's the dissociative, Who's the, you know, who's got the bipolar, who's bipolar, who's the—

yeah, and they're all—

then that's each what's going on in the office, right?

That's fun. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, so there's that one, but I think it really is a good example of, in my life, how I can be attracted to that sort of self-righteous thing, because that is sort of what that, you know, is vicariously having you live through. It's like, oh, I can't believe they're doing it, but I kind of like watching watching it, you know. So it really is an example of that. And maybe, you know, that's what we talked about. You can learn from that by observing. Maybe keep it in your entertainment instead of in your real life. So there's that. I'll give the opposite side of the spectrum is Eckhart Tolle. I always listen to Eckhart a lot. I'll read him, rereading The Power of Now frequently. That one feeds me, fills me with presence anytime I'm listening to Eckhart. So I suggest that one. Andrew Huberman is doing great podcasts now. If you're interested in learning a lot of the research behind some of the things that we're talking about, I think he's doing a really nice job. And in One Perfect Shift, on perfectshift.com, and then the apps are the One Perfect Shift apps are the place you can get involved with what we're doing, learn how to shift, become a shift therapist, you can get training to do that. And that means you're good enough at shifting yourself where you can start to teach other people., to do it. And by doing that, getting people together live to do it, we're seeing, at least in the initial research, amplified effects of the shifts. Um, so much happens when we look into each other's faces, especially— well, when, when it's someone you trust, positive things happen. When it's someone you don't trust, a lot of negative things happen inside you. And so we're, we're trying to leverage the impact of that natural physiology to enhance the value of our shifts.

Love it. All right, so everybody check those, those out. If you want any more resources, you know who you can reach out to, either one of us. Um, as always, leave— if this episode you found useful or you know someone will be helpful and beneficial to, please, please send it out to anybody you know that you can connect with. And, uh, Sean, again, glad that we were able to pull off round 2 so quickly with all the tech difficulties.

Yeah, we did it. That was fun, Jason. Great spending some time together. Appreciate it for listening, everybody.

All right, we'll talk to you guys soon.

Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life podcast. If you are ready to minimize your personal and professional struggles and maximize your potential, we would love it if you subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at You Winning Life.