Understanding How Your Brain ACTUALLY Works with Bizzie Gold

I know we want to feel like we're so unique and individual, and of course I believe our spirits really are, but what ends up coming through as a byproduct from our childhood environment, it ends up very patterned.

Is there a preferred brain pattern or is it just the brain pattern you have and there's a way to work with it?

Part of what makes the strong cluster of entrepreneurs and leaders, they are about as close as you can get to being able to establish objective reality, and there's a strong willingness to take self-accountability. Most human beings are unable to tell the truth because they can't actually see objective truth. There's always some distortion involved that is a byproduct of childhood environment.

I've seen some people with such challenging backgrounds that are amazing. People have like the perfect background and one thing tips them over the edge.

The more stable and loving your home life is, often the worst output as an adult.

Have you ever wondered, why do I keep doing the same thing even when I know better? Here's the answer. You're not broken. You're programmed. And your programming can be rewritten. In fact, the first step of it is decoding it. And that is what we are going to do with my guest today, Bizzy Gold. She helps people rewrite the deepest instructions that have been running their lives, these emotional and often invisible patterns behind why we choose what we choose, why we react the way we react, and why we stay stuck in situations even when we know they're hurting us. This is a really interesting conversation with an interesting person who didn't come through traditional psychology or psychiatry or mental health training. The reality is that might be her greatest advantage. And this is especially for you if you feel like you've been, you're doing everything right, but you still can't get the life or the health or the relationships you want. A lot of this stuff that's been driving your behavior, it's, it's not conscious. It's actually conditioning. It's old programming. So I will be right back with Bizzy Gold, and we've got a special surprise for you too, where you're gonna be able to uncover some of this for yourself. So stay with me. Bizzy Gold, welcome to the studio.

Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Well, this is gonna be a fun topic because we are gonna talk about how to unlock your patterns. But before we get there, I'd just love to set the stage as to how the heck you got to where you are, because you weren't the product of the traditional healthcare system where you go through and you decide you're gonna become a psychiatrist or a psychologist and go through all the training. You came from the outside. How did this create an advantage for you?

When you go through the academic system, you're often taught what to think, and you're taught fundamental building blocks that can create something called paradigmatic entrenchment, where you can't see outside of what you've been taught to see. And I think to some large extent, there is a cultural climate of, believing you'll be ostracized by your peers for daring to ask the wrong questions, or—

Because you will be.

You will be.

Quite often.

So I think when I look at any problem in the world, sometimes it's easier to see what caused the system to break when you're not so close to it. A good example, if you look at it in terms of an analogy, if somebody was close enough to a wall that had black and white pinstripes, if you were close enough to the black, you might say this wall is black. But the more you step back, the more you realize there's actually other things going on with the wall. So I think my childhood gave me a unique ability to spot the patterns and the cracks in the system and the self-trust and self-efficacy to keep driving toward a goal of solving the problem of self-deception.

Yeah, it is interesting having come— started in academics and seeing myself. I've always been a little bit of a rule-breaking rebel, and we were being taught things that just intrinsically, I was personal training people to pay my way through school, I knew were not true. But boy, when you try to argue that or share a difference of opinion, it is not a popular thing. So I would hope that everyone can be critically open-minded because I think the most interesting things quite often come from outside the system. Like, you look in the training world, a lot of the bodybuilders were doing things that then the academics went and started to do studies on. So I love that you have all of this real-world experience. And it sounds like it started when you were a child. So what happened there?

I grew up with a mom that struggled with mental illness. And when you're a child, you don't understand the concept of mental illness. You just know the behaviors that you're experiencing and the environment that you're in. So it was hard for me to reconcile that I could say something to my mom about something she had done, and she would essentially pretend she never did that. So an example of this could be if she was really upset at something, she might throw whatever was around her. And this mental illness was so pronounced that she could quite literally throw a brass candlestick at me and I could have a bruise or a mark and I'd say, Mom, why would you do that? I don't know what you're talking about. Just like complete flat-out denial, even when faced with a very clear factual record of something she had done. I grew up most of my life kind of just feeling like there was some big cosmic joke being played on me because I didn't understand that somebody could be so deep in their own self-deception that they couldn't see their way out of it. And that paradigm shattered for me when I watched the movie Fight Club at age 13. Have you seen that movie?

No, I haven't. But I heard you talking about it. I'm like, I never knew what it was about. I just didn't like the name of the movie, so I didn't go to it.

Cinematic masterpiece. Very beautiful. David Fincher was the director. I saw it when I was 13, and in the very last scene— sorry, everybody, I'm gonna ruin the plot— you find out that the two main characters that you've been watching unfold the story of the whole movie are actually the one person, and they just don't realize that they are actually one person. And it was just this one instantaneous lightbulb moment of, oh my God, my mom isn't trying to ruin my life. She has no idea that that this is all happening. She's so deep in self-deception. And it just set me off on a mission to try to understand what causes self-deception and how that self-deceptive pattern can be so deep that somebody would not be able to confront it even when all of the evidence is stacked against them.

I think of that movie Beautiful Mind, similar type of thing.

Absolutely.

I grew up with Beautiful Mind. I grew up with a very schizophrenic brother who had the things going on downstairs. Like, there was a whole war room going on downstairs, and my parents telling me that he was just shy. And it is very difficult when you're around these things. That's why I'm amazed you're like an 80-year-old person in a 10-year-old's body because it's so hard to discern fact from fiction and know what's real.

One of the things that the methodology that I've created does, and in particular the algorithm that I developed, it tracks early childhood inputs and how they correlate to outputs in perception of reality, emotional response, and behavior. So it tracks 9 different markers. And in my life, and this is possibly a little fork away from why you potentially turned on yourself first, like, am I, am I crazy? Because I never went to the, am I crazy? Yeah.

My parents told me I was. Right. Right.

Sometimes when there are enough trust breaks early on, instead of trusting my primary caregivers and thinking maybe they, maybe they know something that I don't know, I had already broken that trust with them. So I had already kind of reached this level of hyper-independence where it was just kind of, I was already a lone wolf at a very early age. So I don't think my brain gave me any other option but to trust my own experience in that moment. Whereas if my parents might have done some things that allowed me to gain their trust in certain areas of life, I perhaps would've been more willing to maybe turn on myself.

Hmm. So actually it was a good thing for you.

Yes, it ended up turning out well for me. And one of the things that I have found over the 12 years of studying this body of work is ironically, the more stable and loving your home life is, often the worst output as an adult. Really?

Yes. Wait. Okay. Go deeper into that.

That's a tough one. One of the things that we do in Break Method is we scan 200 different historical data points. So an example would be in maybe a typical therapy container, you'd be asked questions that are more narrative-based about your life story, your feelings, and your subjective interpretation of the experience. Break Method focuses solely on historical data because it's built off of the supposition that most human beings, similar to my mom, to varying degrees, are unable to tell the truth because they can't actually see objective truth. There's always some distortion involved that is a byproduct of childhood environment.

Don't all of us have that though?

Absolutely, every single one of us. And that is what Break Method actually helps us understand. Based on where the algorithm plots you on the brain pattern spectrum, which I'm sure we'll get to, it already helps us understand what unique lens of self-deception you would experience. So it would like you wear glasses, I do too. I'm just not wearing them right now. If I put on your glasses, I probably couldn't see anything. If you put on my glasses, you probably couldn't see anything. But when I put them on myself, perfect 20/20 vision. Our brain pattern creates this distortion that functions like a lens of glass. So for us, it feels like objective reality, but the reality is we're still wearing glasses. And if we learn how to take it off, we can understand what went into the curvature of that glass that's giving us the experience of being whole, or this is my objective truth when The reality is none of us actually see objectively. It's— right. Unfortunately, it's impossible.

Right. So how did you figure this all out?

I have to say, and I know that this isn't the answer that a lot of people want to hear, but I think many people who have stumbled upon something and have invented something that didn't exist before, there has to be something spiritual and out of this world involved. And that was certainly the case for me. I don't think this is something that I personally, Bizzy Gold, can take credit for. I think many people that find something new or novel, they stumble upon it because they had the right experience, they were in the right place at the right time, and they actually had the courage and commitment to actually keep pushing the boulder up the hill. Because when you're inventing something that didn't previously exist, everyone's against you. I'm hated and loved, both very polarizing, and it's been that way for the majority of my career.

Thankfully, I've gotten tougher as I've gotten older and Well, there is no one out there doing amazing things who is not both loved and hated. It is the necessary polarity. It is one of those things, you know, I coach a lot of healthcare practitioners. I'm like, if you really want to change the world, you're going to have haters. And it's the hardest thing. I'm like, if, if everyone loves you, you've got, you know, you haven't done anything remarkable because just in doing that, there's going to be likely half the people that go, oh my gosh, this thing. And I fully believe that. I know that my really important downloads Most of my words and ideas come when I'm quiet, when I'm in meditation or when I'm out walking, or literally now I can go to a Joe Dispenza retreat and just get in the building and the energy is so high, it just starts going, "Fwoop." So I'm with you on that. And I think we've got an audience that gets that too, that knows there's something bigger out there than us. So this thing came through you. How did this all happen?

I was actually having an argument with one of my dear friends at a coffee shop who I actually happened to be seeing in a few hours, exciting. We were having this argument about the nature of emotion being either feminine or masculine nature, like a conversation topic that you wouldn't ever think would crack this wide open. And yet somehow, in arguing with her about this, I all of a sudden start seeing a diagram. So I grab a napkin and a pen. I'm trying to draw out this diagram. It ended up being one of the keystones of my body of work. I just didn't know it at that exact moment. So in starting to argue with her about that and have her understand what I was trying to draw, I stumbled upon something that I now call ELI in my Break Method work, which is how we interrupt emotional response with a series of logical questions to actually allow us to be able to respond both to the present moment, but also be able to access intuition. So I don't think— example would be, and it's certainly true of how I created Break. I think we were all meant to have the ability to act on intuition, but because for many of us, our childhood environments damages our self-trust. We're not able to quite tap into that frequency. And then even if we do, we're certainly not able to take action on it. And I do think that that's one of the reasons, thankfully, I had just the right blend of early childhood trauma that I did have a high level of self-trust, which is why when some of these things come through, I'm willing to commit to them and maybe go through the period of unknown, whereas somebody might discern an intuitive message and be like, I don't— I'm not so sure yet, right? There's the desire to have something feel more controlled or perfect before they take action. I've always been a take action, messy and figure it out as you go along.

I am just thinking about how contrarian your belief is about, you know, you've heard of ACE, of adverse childhood experiences, and how these things play out into our adulthood and how problematic they are. In fact, what you're saying is very different than that.

So I don't think that they necessarily are contrary to each other, but we're looking at different things. So I'll give you an example. We have scanned over 15,000 people.

And when you say scanned, what is— how are you scanning?

So brain pattern mapping scan is going to run you through those 200 historical data points.

And what if you can't remember?

So these are all things that are easy to remember. So example would be like, were your parents married?

Uh-huh.

Where, where, at what age did they get divorced if they got divorced?

So it's almost like an ACE thing, but longer.

Exactly. So it's all, when I, when I say historical data, there's nothing that's really up for interpretation. So there really isn't anything that. Technically you wouldn't remember. And any area where there could be something vague, for example, let's say somebody started off in foster care and then eventually moved in with a household. The brain pattern mapping questionnaire accounts for all of those sort of items so that no one ends up just kind of in no man's land in the middle. So your aggregate responses to those 200 historical data points are what actually run the predictive model for us to determine which side of the brain pattern spectrum you're on. And out of all of the 8 billion people in the world, we have found that there's actually only 8 brain pattern type variances. So it'll basically put you out into the brain pattern spectrum, which is divided into left and right halves. There's two primary patterns on the left and three primary patterns on the right. When we look at this data, what we've found is that there's a Goldilocks and the Three Bears, if you will, level of trauma that actually correlates with a high level of self-trust, a high level of self-efficacy, independence, feeling like you're very driven by purpose, perhaps toward workaholism, which is why also this cluster of people tend to be very successful. And they tend not to need to know what's going to come next because their childhood environment certainly didn't allow for that. If there's a constant experience of chaos, you have to become adaptable and you have to be willing to figure things out as they go along. All of these qualities end up correlating to somebody reporting a very good quality of life. Now, on the flip side of this, when you see people who are raised in a loving, stable home where they didn't experience any trauma, perhaps what they would describe as their biggest traumatic wound was favoritism with siblings, or one sibling having access to something that they didn't have, getting their pony ripped away. And when you think about these things, if you've experienced a lot of trauma, you look at these and be like, oh, it sounds like a breeze. The sad thing is, in trusting their parents, and their parents often either enabling or creating some sort of entitlement quality, these kids end up not trusting themselves. They become dependent rather than hyper-independent. Some struggle with codependency, some struggle all the way to complete dependency where they just don't leave the house because they're so dependent on their parents that they don't know how to live independent lives. And their parents often praised mediocrity. So now the kids don't realize that they kind of suck at things, and they've been programmed to believe that they can just be the victim and it's everybody else's fault, when really your parents coddled you and you didn't actually learn that you were mediocre and you didn't learn at the right time how to push yourself, whereas those on the left often did push themselves.

I wonder too, you know how like it seems like every decade there's a different parenting style in place and then you see the ramifications of it and all the, uh, kids, everyone gets a trophy.

Oh yeah. Everyone's a winner. It is a disaster. And in Break Method, we do track generational patterns. I think one of the things we're seeing now is that many millennials and slightly early kind of Gen X millennials, in an effort to try to parent differently than we were parented, many have pendulum swung too far to the other side and they've become much more attachment parenting, overly available, overly coddling, not a lot of boundaries.

Those are the kids that won't leave the house, right?

Not leave the house, and sadly are more predisposed to struggle with mental health issues, addiction, suicidal ideation, gender dysphoria. When we track all those client data points, they are almost exclusively correlated with great homes, you know, great in air quotes. And I'm gonna say this, those on the left side of the spectrum that did experience kind of this right mix of trauma input, this doesn't mean that they aren't struggling in their intimate relationships, because frankly, that is where they are most likely to struggle. That doesn't mean that they might not struggle with addiction. They could have very addictive personalities. You know, workaholism is just one form of addiction, but that could spill into other things. But what I'm referring to is self-reported quality of life. The people on the left, even in the midst of relationship woes, they love what they do. They know who they are. They don't need the world to validate who they are. And because of that, you have an experience of loving your damn life. And that That's where we see the highest concentration of both entrepreneurs and the top 1% of—

I was gonna say, all my friends are the people you just described. I'm the person you just described.

I get that.

Same. And I was just thinking, gosh, have I gotten my kids not to leave the house? They really like being around. You know, I always brag about how they say when your kids graduate from college or graduate from high school, that's like, you're never gonna see 'em again. I'm like, not my kids. They like live down the street. Maybe that's not so great.

Just knowing you as just from the moments that I've had with you, I think you probably gave them a nice balance of other inputs that made them tough and maybe how to accurately self-measure. I doubt you coddled them into mediocrity. You don't strike me as the kind of mom that would praise mediocrity. So you probably gave them the right balance to pull through all right.

But the big deal with all of us parents is like, where's the manual? It's, it's all hard and we all do the best we can. And like our parents did the best they could. So we're here now. We have these inputs. And I'm assuming that because of what you figured out, you have a way to transition people. Because, I mean, that's the big question I see is you see people who are struggling and I'm kind of looking at going, well, why aren't you doing your work? You know, because we've all— we all have our things. We all have whatever we were, however we were raised and the challenges. And what you've just said, because I've seen some people with such challenging backgrounds that are amazing. People have like the perfect background and one thing tips them over the edge, which I always thought was more that they didn't build the stress resilience. Yeah, the resilience is the key.

There's a way to reverse engineer based on the data sets that we have what inputs you effectively have to give your child to put them in the right spot on the brain pattern spectrum. 'Cause it is sadly very formulaic.

Wow. So is the— I love formulas.

I'm very left-brained. I do too.

Is there a preferred brain pattern or is it just the brain pattern you have and there's a way to work with it? Like what happens with that?

So there are two sections on the brain pattern spectrum. So if anyone ends up doing brain pattern mapping, what you'll see when you actually go through your diagnostic eval is you'll you'll see this brain pattern spectrum. So XY axis equal left and right sides, and there are two rectangles, one larger rectangle on the middle or the center left, and then there's a much smaller rectangle on kind of the far side of the right. These two rectangles are where we see the highest reported quality of life, entrepreneurship, wealth, strong families, all, all of the things that most people strive for. And those are the areas typically that you want to be able to effectively you parent your children to achieve. What ends up happening in most cases is that when parents stay together and they are loving and supportive, but they do find that right balance to still let their kids struggle in a curated and intentional way so that they still build resilience, that you don't coddle them and trick them into believing that they're great when maybe they actually need to work significantly harder, it places them into that much smaller rectangle on the right-hand side. And then those who experienced a more disorganized, chaotic childhood tend to be spit out center left side of the spectrum. When you get out to the very far left and right sides, you start to see mental illness cluster. When you start at the center of the spectrum, this might be helpful. What ends up plotting you in one spot or another are increases or decreases in specific attributes. So if I were to start in the center and I were to just kind of step my way out to the left, every step I take, I'm gonna become more hyper-independent. I'm also gonna have a stronger level of self-trust. Where I don't look to others to solve problems. I just immediately try to figure it out on my own. And as you can imagine, self-efficacy is gonna follow self-trust. If I know what I'm gonna do, I'm much more likely to just go and do the thing. You also start to see a very clear centering around purpose that also tracks. If I trust myself and I'm gonna do it, you build purpose in that, right? You, you look at problems and you just, you're solutions-focused. You go toward the problem. So those are all things that go up to the left. You also are going to see an increase in situational awareness, and I think Awareness is really important because this is what ends up leading you toward pattern recognition. If you are aware of your surroundings and you're aware of the person in the setting, rather than fixating on what somebody's thinking about you, you're able to capture a lot of information. And in many cases, people that are in the center-left, they also have a photographic memory. You're more likely to be present than your right-side peers were able to capture all the data and retell it reasonably accurately. I know we talked about how seeing objective reality is not possible. Part of what makes the strong cluster of entrepreneurs and leaders on the left is that they are about as close as you can get to being able to establish objective reality. And there's a strong willingness to take self-accountability, to look at where the error was without dwelling on it. And again, just kind of reorient toward being solutions-focused. But if your situational awareness is completely maxed out, out, you're going to become paranoid, right? You won't know what to take action on. There is a pivot point where something can become beneficial, and then it can actually be something that becomes detrimental. So when you go too far to the left, you tip off into paranoia and often isolation, because everybody potentially feels like a threat. So you end up isolating yourself as a result.

So for someone who hasn't taken this brain mapping, I don't know what it requires. 20 20 minutes. Is this like— what does it cost to do it?

Like, it's $21.99, but I will give you a code for your listeners.

Wow, cool. Because I was like, all right, independent of that, because I'm going, now how will someone use what you're saying if they haven't taken the brain mapping test?

But so what it ends up uncovering for you is like we talked about with the lens of glass, and it goes back to your, your earlier question too, like, what do we do about it? Why, you know, what do— now that we know these things, What do we do with that? How does that fix the problem? Once you understand where your brain pattern is skewing or distorting the information or the data that you're bringing in, you can actually correct back to objective reality and you can see where you and your brain's desire to be efficient are forming assumptions that are not actually 100% aligned with the objective record. So even though you feel like you're present, there's still a presupposition about what is going to happen. And if you're very aware, you might be right, but you also might be a walking, talking, self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

Okay, well, we all are, aren't we?

Of course.

Give, give me a concrete example of that.

I'll give you an example from my life. My brain pattern type is center-left, but a little bit more back toward the center. So if you go back to this idea of kind of hyper-independence and situational awareness, I'm definitely nowhere near the paranoid side, and I'm also nowhere near the hyper-independent where I'm completely isolated. I'm very much a people person. I like my alone time, but I could be around people most of the time and be fine. My husband is not that way. He's on the far right. My brain pattern is constantly scanning to see who is going to let me down and who is incapable of keeping themselves emotionally regulated. So everything I'm looking at, my brain is always trying to run a sequence of what do you need from me to keep you stable.

And is that because of being a kid with an unstable mom?

Absolutely.

Can you ever stop that, or will you always have that?

Absolutely.

Like, I'm gonna check the horizon for a brass candlestick flying out.

You can definitely stop that. And that's part of what we do in Break Method that take— it's the program that actually takes 4 to 6 months. My brain is going to kind of run that sequence, you know, where, where are the threats? What, what do you need from me to keep the threat at bay? And as a result of that, my natural brain pattern is going to completely lack self-preservation. I won't at all think about what I wanna do or what I need cuz because I can't even see it. I'm blind to it in the moment because it's about everybody else and keeping them managed. So as you can imagine, doing that for a long time, it's going to lead you to burnout.

Yeah, it's just— it sounds exhausting.

So one of the things that we look at with Break Method is obviously what unique pattern of self-deception you're going to experience, right? Why in those moments am I blissfully unaware of self-preservation, and how do I make myself become aware of it? There's something that I call the ACB pathway, and this is essentially how your brain is going to scan the information information or the data in its world, and it really starts to look at things like pixels. So if you've ever looked at a picture, if you really zoom in, it's made up of a bunch of tiny pixels. Our brain is actually scanning pixels much in the same way. And because the brain wants to be efficient, we're often scanning pixels and before we've really looked all the way at it, it's already restricted the assumption and decided this is what this means. Once we've decided this is what this means, the brain is going to bring all these early childhood formulas forward and it's going to restrict the choices that you're aware of in that moment. B in the ACB pathway. We move from an assumption to a conclusion. And as soon as we've concluded something, all of the possible choices that we have, that's like an aperture on a camera. It just shuts down and we can't see in that moment what our other choices are. This is why an example, if somebody was struggling with addiction and you're like, you're sitting here telling me that you wanna be sober, don't go buy heroin tomorrow. They could look at you and they could really in that moment decide, I really wanna stop buying heroin, but what might they do tomorrow?

By heroin.

By heroin. Yeah. What they're scanning for in their environment in that moment is going to restrict what behaviors they have available to them in that moment. In the mental, emotional state that they're in when you were talking to them, they really wanted to be sober, but something must have happened between where you were in that meeting and when they bought the heroin that suddenly made them decide, my only option here is to buy heroin. Similarly, I shared that my mom would throw anything that was near her. Same with my little sister, honestly. If I were that type of person and you said something that really offended me and I couldn't control myself, technically all of my behavior choices, I could throw this at you, but I'm not like that, so don't worry, I'm not gonna throw it at you. But technically, somebody who was emotionally dysregulated who had that pattern, they might if you piss them off enough. My brain is not going to even show me that as an option because that's not who I am and that's not how my brain puts things together. I'm more of a peacekeeper. I'm more leaned toward fawning. When we are able to understand how your brain pattern and the 9 markers that we track set up both the pattern of self-deception, also how your brain is now going skew and create these formulas that are actually going to drive behavior, then we can actually correct. A brain pattern is gonna function like something constitutional. So an example would be whenever somebody looks at their pattern, we're like, these are the things that we bet you experience. And it kind of freaks people out because we're usually able to even get to the secrets that you keep and all of the behaviors that you might've been really good at masking to a point where people will start crying, like, how could you know that off of these questions? That's so creepy.

Wow.

When you're able to understand that data, one of the things that I always tell people is now that we understand the what and the how, we have to keep this in mind that this is gonna be what your brain keeps trying to pull you back to in times of stress, exhaustion, when life throws you a bunch of curveballs, but we're able to get you to effectively rewire where you're not that person anymore. You're able to— How do you do that? Exactly. So that process is something that takes about 20 weeks. I shared with you that one of the very first diagrams I ever got was the ELI triangle. Once we understand the 9 markers, so the top 2 markers, I I call it the neurocognitive funnel because I think in a lot of mental health containers, you try to fight behavior at the level of behavior where it's essentially like, don't do this, do that. Very ineffective because that requires willpower and not—

same with that.

Not when people have willpower.

Like, these things don't work.

I have a lot of willpower. I'm sure you do as well. So those things have been maybe less challenging for me than they are for some. But again, that goes back to brain pattern. I, even based on someone's brain pattern type, I could tell you this person's gonna do what you say, or this person's never gonna do what you say. Here's how you can work around it, right? Or this person is likely to do what you say in the early stages. And then as soon as we get to their transitional behaviors, you're going to be the bad guy that's trying to restrict them and put them back into eating disorder. So, because there are people that they'll do that, they'll put you on a pedestal, and then we can already see in their brain pattern typing, once they do that, you're going to become the bad guy in 3, 2— wow— attack you online. So it predicts also early transitional and late stage behavior, which is important because example would be in an employee employee. An employee might show one side, and they show that side in the interview. Maybe they show that side the first 2 months that they work for you. But what happens as soon as they start to feel comfortable? We move into a transitional stage. Because they feel secure, we've now moved into a different iteration of who they are. And oftentimes, that is not a behavior pattern that you actually would have hired for had you known about it sooner.

Sounds like something you should definitely do before you get married.

Absolutely. As you can imagine, opposites attract is absolutely true. When we look at brain pattern typing, we do tend to marry our exact mirrored opposite. This can actually work out really well. If you have two people that are too close to each other on the brain pattern spectrum, they're highly likely to friend zone each other because you're too similar to really create that spark or polarity. But as you can also imagine, when someone's on the left side and someone's on the right side, you fundamentally don't see the world the same way. And what you choose to do about what you're seeing that's already very soul and separate is often also at odds with each other. So one of my favorite memes— and this is certainly true in my marriage— in Every relationship, when it comes to the dishwasher, one person is the Scandinavian architect and one person is the raccoon on meth.

I'm a raccoon. I'm a raccoon on meth.

High five! Raccoon on meth.

It's so funny to hear that guy tell this to Tim because literally I've gotten to the point where I pretty much just set everything on top because I know what's going to happen. I put it in there and he redoes the entire thing. Same with making the bed.

Oh yeah.

Oh, making the bed. He's— I said, were you in the military? Like, what is up here with this?

That is all brain pattern type driven. So another example would be once I know precisely where somebody is on the left side of the spectrum. I can tell you whether you're likely to skew a situation positive or negative, right? And because there's positive and negative self-deception, I can tell you what your habits are around laundry, around scheduling, around meal planning, what you're like as a parent. Because we really— I know we want to feel like we're so unique and individual. And of course, I believe our spirits really are. But what ends up coming through is a byproduct from our childhood environment. It ends up very patterned to a point where when I train my therapist to do the practitioner sessions, there are certain diagnostic evaluations where certain pattern types will quite literally say the same exact thing at the same time every time. And therapists are like, this is crazy.

Have you, have you heard of Taylor Hartman's Color Code Personality? Okay, so when I met Tim, I made him take all these different assessments, and one of them was this Color Code. And it's that we have this predominant color that is our personality driver, and we've always been like this. And so someone who's and we're a mix of colors, but there's one that's predominant. So red is the leader, and there's dirty and clean sides. Like the clean side of red, Mother Teresa, they'll change the world. The dirty side is like Hitler, and he's gonna destroy it. And then there's like the peace, the white one, keep the peace, but they'll also have, you know, they will not do anything for themselves because they don't want to get anyone upset. Blue is very intimate, relationships matter, but they're also harshly self-critical and worry all the time. I've got a blue son, and he came home with all A's and one B+, and I asked him about the B+, and he went in his room, room and sobbed. And I'm like, "Oh my God, I should have. I didn't. I just was— I didn't mean anything." And then the yellows just want to have fun. They're great to be around, but they forget to show up. When we were doing this before, we had someone in the audience who scored as a red, and they were yelling at the guy who was giving the talk, saying, "I'm not a red!" You know? And the guy doing the talk was laughing because he goes, "Only a red would behave this way." Would do this.

Yeah.

You know? So it's, it's so interesting with these things because they just help you kind of reflect. I think in a way create some peace for yourself. Like I've looked at what's going on with Tim when he has to reorganize every— everything has to be in its place and very regimented. And I just figured his dad died when he was 10, his mom died when he was 16 of ALS. She was— he was with her for a year as she died. Absolutely horrific. He was the baby. His brother had to come back in. I thought this is his way of maintaining some semblance of control. That's what I figured.

Absolutely. You either oppose through creating control, or you can also go the other way depending on other input factors, where then you just say life is chaos completely, so I'm just gonna actually—

I'm gonna be the—

yeah, so they can— we tend to repeat or oppose, but very rarely do we do something in the middle. And that really speaks to what we have to do with the break work, which is if you figure out where you are— and I haven't gone into what makes the right side the right side, so I'll make sure we do that for the those of you that are listening that are like, well, I wasn't the one on the left, so what about the other?

The left side and right side are not the right side, left side, like brain left and right, right?

Not necessarily, though they do seem to have some interesting correlations with political affiliation.

Oh wow. Yeah, which— that, that's gotten so bizarre anyway.

Yeah, I mean, like, the right's the left, all the left, right?

I don't know.

In general, as you move to the right side, there tends to be a stronger desire to fit in. And as there's a stronger desire to fit in, you're more susceptible to peer pressure and you typically have a stronger sense of duty, but you also fixate on what others are thinking and feeling about you, which, as you can imagine, is—

That's a horrible place to live.

Horrible place to live. And it's extremely subjective because there is no objective record to even lean on. You're trying to interpret facial expressions, voice tone, and that's even less concrete than like, did you or did you not throw a candlestick?

Right?

Yeah.

It's a little bit harder.

And often people there, they get very much stuck in their head and rumination. They're much more likely again toward, as you move toward the far right side, toward suicidal ideation, gender dysphoria. There's a very strong cluster there. Personality disorders tend to all cluster right there as well.

So one would think that a lot of this stuff is more genetic. And I, I'll tell you, this is where I come from is I'm an adopted kid. I am nothing like anyone in my adopted family. So much so that I was like, did I, I was like the alien dropped off in the middle of this whole thing. Mm-hmm. I meet both sides of my birth family, and they are models, scientists, entrepreneurs, athletes. I'm like, "Oh!" Versus this— I mean, I couldn't have had more opposite upbringing versus the people that I'm genetically tied to. And the people I'm genetically tied to, I talk like, look like, like the same foods, like the same, you know, same career paths, like all the stuff that I actually am interested in is that side. I'm nothing like the other side. And so you wonder like, what's the difference between the nature-nurture in all of this? Because what you're saying seems more nurturing.

The top two markers at the top of that neurocognitive funnel, so the top two dictate your perception of reality, and there's an origin and adaptive. The origin is 100% nurture. The adaptive is 100% genetics and genetics, epigenetics, the je ne sais quoi in the spirit realm that we don't really know how to define. That is going to be essentially what you choose choose to do with the inputs that you were given. And that is absolutely going to have genetic predisposition tied into it. The 3 center markers are early transitional and late stage emotional response. That's the biochemical component. And then the 4 markers at the bottom are early transitional and late stage behavior response and how they unfold chronologically.

And this just all got downloaded.

Yes, over a period of time. So it wasn't like in one moment I knew all of it, but it started with the ELI triangle and then understanding what the process was of how to interrupt emotional response as I was going out and lecturing, because at that point I was already teaching things that were tangential to that. So then I had this kind of open forum to express these ideas and test, you know, test things. And also really to just kind of let my intuition run wild in a 3, 4, 5-hour container. And it got to a point where at the end people would, you know, come to me and they're like, you know, that was fire. Here's all your best quotes. Like, where's this even coming from? And in that moment, I was I was like, I don't honestly even know, but I'm— I know that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. That was in 2014. By 2017, January, we launched the first version of the actual program that we held online. And from 2017 to 2019, we ran it 4 times a year, and we always were very methodical about tracking incoming data, outgoing data. And for those years, I was watching the patterns go through. And as I was doing this, I didn't realize at the time I was building an algorithm because I don't think I would have thought of it that way. But by the time we got to 2019, 2019, I realized what I had been scanning that whole time was a very large dataset that I was eventually going to turn into a predictive algorithm. And that took place in 2021.

Amazing. It sounds like dogged persistence, but it also just sounds like the next book I'm writing. My agent wanted me to write something totally different. Mm-hmm. I go, I have this thing. And it just was like, phew. I go, I just will wake up and it usually is like 4:00 AM and it's just like, foomp. And it came out at me. This is how I also create supplements. And formulas. It's like, I wake up before, I'm like, oh darn it. And it all comes out. And I believe that when you're really in that, you are life's purpose and flow, you don't really have a choice. I mean, you could ignore it, but it would keep coming.

It probably would have killed me if I had ignored it. It was much too strong. And similar to what you were saying, when I got myself into this arena where I was constantly going on tour and teaching seminars and teaching lectures, I might understand maybe a title of what I was going to teach, but I often wouldn't actually know what I was teaching until the night before. And I actually had to—

Did that stress you out, or did you just trust it?

I did trust it. And maybe in the very early stages, I'm like, God, are you gonna come through? Yeah. But after enough experiences of that, I started to trust the process more. But what would happen is I would go to sleep and I would actually watch myself give the lecture in my sleep. So I would watch—

You do this too?

You do this too?

You do this too.

I would see all the visuals and then I'd wake up and be like, all right, well, I guess we're awake now at 4:30, and I'd have to go create all the lecture slides. And this is how I've created everything that I've done.

It's hard with CME talks because you're not allowed to do this, this like everything just changed like the night before. But I'm so used to now just things are going to have to shift a bit. A lot of times I just have to then memorize everything because you can't change your slides. You just have to do the thing.

That's something that I've started to do as I've had to do more of that lately, which is I just create a really loose architecture and then I sometimes just add in things and just always work At least it's somewhat in the realm of what they're expecting.

It does stress me out though, a little bit. I still am at a point and I kind of go, this is gonna— it's all fine. This is how it always happens. And it always does. But you still have that little thing back there going, what if it doesn't this time? You know, I'm naked on the stage trying to tap dance.

One of the biggest speeches that I've done was actually in DC for a big event back in 2018. And that was the biggest crowd that I've ever spoken to. And still that night I went to sleep like, really?

Nothing?

Hello? Hello?

Anything?

Help me out. And of course, sure enough, you know, 3, 4 in the morning, I got up, saw the whole thing, and it was still to this day probably one of my favorite speaking engagements ever. But that one really waited till the very last second. I didn't even have a title. I had nothing. I was just like, well, wow, we're doing this. We're committed. We're here.

Yeah.

Not even a title. Yeah. Usually I at least get a title. You know, I got something to go on. I got some breadcrumb to follow. Follow. And what's interesting is, so for roughly 12 years, I was kind of extracting this data, you know, manipulating it in a multi-dimensional space to try to understand the interconnectedness. Eventually, I'm nursing my son, who now— my son is about to turn 4. He was probably a month or two old. And this was when I saw the brain pattern spectrum for the first time. So I— all the patterns existed. I knew all of it, but it was like I couldn't get up above it enough. I was too close to my work to see it from a higher dimension. And I'm just sitting there nursing my son, just drifting out into space. And all of a sudden I'm like, holy shit. And I look at my husband, I'm like, babe, take the baby. He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, take the baby. I need to draw this right now. And I get out, I do all this stuff. And I look at my husband, I like, I did 3 lectures back to back just sitting there because I was trying to capture everything that I could see. And I show my husband, he was was like, babe, he was like, I think this might be the end, like it might be the end of your work. It was like, that was when it felt complete. And there was probably a year and a half to 2 years before that where nothing had changed. And then all of a sudden it was just this one moment where I think I just had more peace and rest in my life. I was taking more time off to be with my baby. And all of a sudden it was just massive lightning bolt. And then I could just see all of the interconnectedness. And that was when I was able to really take the algorithm and the technology side across the finish line.

Amazing. I think that's a life lesson for all of us. It's like when you jam your life full of everything, you don't give yourself the white space to just see the things that will really make a difference.

100%.

Speaking for myself. Did you hear that, self?

I know, right? Me too.

Listen up.

I've been telling myself I really, really, I need a break. And I keep trying to block off really good chunks of time. And then every time I go, my assistant is just—

You know what's going to happen if you do this. It will just get done for you.

I know. I did. I'm an avid skier, which is part of the reason we moved to Sandpoint. And I'm pleased to announce I blocked off one full ski day every weekday or every week of the entire ski season.

So that's— Every weekday would be even better.

Every weekday in my dreams. Maybe next year. I'm going to have to really hustle.

Isn't it so funny though? It's like we're our own bosses. And I always go, "God, I can't believe all these things." I go, "Wait a minute, I did this." I did this to myself.

One of my assistants For instance, this one day I was like, you know, I know that you put this in the nighttime. This is really my only time to be with my kids. And she was like, busy. I'm saying this with love. You have to stop saying yes to things if you want me to not put stuff in the night because there's literally no other space to put it. So I love you, but you gotta stop.

My executive assistant, she protects me. She will protect me from myself. And I literally had to tell the team, I go, you must protect me from myself because this is my big challenge because it all sounds so fun and exciting. Same. I'm like, stop it. Okay, back to everybody listening. So for someone listening right now, what are some things that they could take away besides the fact that they are going to get to do this, which is really exciting? What are some, some things they could take away right now? Be happier, make some shifts, become more self-aware.

Number one would be being very acutely aware of the input equals output scenario, because every single thing we do— if you are a parent with kids, if you have a partner, every word that you utter, every look that you give, there's an output for that. And if you've been with somebody for a long time, you've created some pretty deep ruts in your relationship. And here's what I want to say to you, and it's so hard: you have to pretend that every moment is brand new. Which is—

how do you do that?

So hard. You've got to challenge yourself to understand what is the pattern that I'm currently in. So a simple way to look at this would be, let's say that somebody listening is in partnership. You have a very specific way that you guys play ping pong together, right? I like to ace on the serve, and I always hit from right to left. If I'm hitting from right to left, that means my husband is only able to hit from one tiny corner of the table over and over and over again, because if I'm not changing, he doesn't have anything to respond to that's different. If I can try to backtrack and figure out what is our most common repetitive conflict, what do I do in this case, what does he do in response, you You have to take whatever that formula is and consider it to be like a pattern of hitting across the table, and you have to do something different. You have to do something very intentionally different. Hopefully not just go to the complete opposite side of the table, because I think that's what people tend to do. The answer is, I'm gonna wildly pendulum swing, and then you're causing a different kind of problem that's of the same magnitude. One of the things that is certainly something that anybody could do is just go back and review of the last month of your relationship. Relationship? What are the common themes of conflict that have come up? Do you raise your voice first? Do they raise their voice first? If you raise your voice, do they retreat and need alone time? When they need alone time, do you feel abandoned and chase after them? And if you chase after them, do they actually go inward even more, and then you feel even more deflated?

I'm sure no one could relate to any of that.

None of it.

What if there are no real conflicts? This sounds crazy.

No, no, I'm— they're mostly—

but I would assume that's also an issue. So I'm—

it is. It's for sure issue. That can happen when two people are too close to the center on the brain pattern spectrum. So there's a big old circle in the center that we call the circle of complacency. In this position, if you think about the different attributes here, people take very little risk. But when you take very little risk, you're also going to have very little reward. Your life might be very repetitive, mundane. If both of you skew toward people pleasing or keeping things in or compartmentalizing, you might technically have no conflicts. But do you really know each other? Do you live a life that's very mundane and boring? Do you have things that maybe you do desire to do, but you either are not in touch with that yet, or you don't dare speak it to your partner? People that end up in the center— so where all of our break work is to help people be able to create dynamic range to get back to center, but still be fundamentally who you are. And I hope people hear me when I say that what happened to me makes me really good at my job. It makes me a really shitty wife if I'm not careful, right? So the majority of my work is how do I oppose my patterns so that I am not this way in my friendships, not this way in my relationship.

How would that show up? Would it show up as you being uber independent?

If I'm focused on something, it's almost as if my sensory experience shuts off and I only have tunnel vision to what I'm focused on. And my husband, if I'm not careful, he's JJ Virgin said that I could just completely ignore him. He could ask me the same question 5 times and maybe I kind of automatically, "Mm-hmm, mm-hmm." But I'm not actually listening. I have no idea he's speaking to me. I also am very much naturally struggling toward time management because same sort of tunnel vision. If I'm really into something, if I'm supposed to be somewhere at 6 o'clock for dinner, I'm going to really ride that all the way to the edge and be like, I could I can get there in 20 minutes, even though everyone's like, and the narrator said it would take 75 minutes. So like, how are you gonna get 75 minutes in 20 minutes? So my brain will do this sort of positive self-deception skewing where if I'm not careful, I'm late. I can make it look like I don't care about somebody else, their time, right? It's like I'm taking advantage of them. So another thing that I can certainly do is in an effort to not upset my husband, which this is something that, thank God, I've gotten much better about. I'm very aware of what my truth is in any single moment. And if I felt like the person was safe, I would blurt it right out. No questions asked. Easy peasy.

When you say, if I felt like the person was safe, meaning that they wouldn't use it against you or meaning you wouldn't hurt their feelings or what?

So I think for me, safety just means that they're going to remain calm.

Not throw something at you.

Yeah. Just if they can, if they can hear what I have to say without getting retaliatory, without getting emotional. I have no problem with saying it, you know, but my husband does tend to be a little bit more on the emotional reactive side. I'm far less emotional.

Interesting. Who goes to that? Or is it just what you're used to?

Well, I mean, I think to some extent it's got to be familiar because that's what I did in childhood. But I will say my husband actually, because my husband did break when we first started dating, we have a great relationship and he, he's aware of his patterns. So he does the work, I do the work. And when both people are really committed to that, you have a really beautiful relationship. Relationship. But let's say I hadn't done the work. If I sensed that me sharing something— let's say this is something that certainly happens to me— I'll commit myself to something without talking to my husband about it first, and he hates this. Sometimes I've known about it for 4 weeks in my mind. I'll tell him tonight, I'll tell him tonight, I'll tell him tonight. And all of a sudden I'm like, babe, I love you, please don't hate me.

Tomorrow?

Tonight we have guests coming over for dinner. He's like, babe, why? Why do you do this? And it's because in those moments there's always a, I'll do it later, I'll figure it out, it'll be fine, right? Just positive self-deception. It's not that I'm, you know, trying to keep something from my husband, but the reality is that's still ultimately what I'm doing. And that's a perfect example of how self-deception can cause us to do something that is absolutely not what we intend, where we hurt somebody or make them feel like we can't trust them, when really it's because our brain is so distracted with these other things that we have no idea what we're doing. But when you become aware of it and you understand how disrupt some of those. We talked about the ACB pathways. I now see— can actually watch myself do it in real time and open up that aperture. So I can see I need to call my husband right now and be like, babe, I committed us to dinner in 6 weeks. I also put it on our large calendar. Love you.

Bye. Very cool. So for everybody listening, tell us about the— so it's 200 questions.

So the historical questionnaire is 200 questions. At that point, the model has actually created this 9-marker prediction. At that point, you now get to self-evaluate, and we are watching with heat mapping to see if you are able to see what we see. And then you're also, then after you go through that phase, able to order your behaviors. So we're also able to see how self-aware you are matched with the predictive algorithm. So an example of this, I actually have a business partnership with Dave Asprey, and I was on his podcast earlier in the year, and so many of his listeners did brain pattern mapping. And one of the interesting trends that I saw was that their ability to organize their behaviors in the correct sequence was unlike anything I'd ever seen. That doesn't mean that these people are healed, okay? So we can— you can be very self-aware and still be a very self-aware asshole. And I'm not saying that his audience is, I'm just saying that awareness alone, awareness alone doesn't mean that you're great, you know? Because I think their ability to understand what they do and in what order they do it was very accurate, but that doesn't mean that they weren't still struggling with a variety of other things, which leaves me with another reminder to the audience. Awareness is not at all going to cut it. It's a step on the path, but unless you know precisely what actions to take, rewiring efforts are going to be very all or nothing. It's going to be very push-pull. You're never going to really create that sustainable experience that rewires you for the long haul.

And so someone goes through this test, they'll see that they have the awareness if they wanted to go deeper? Then you have coaching programs?

Yes. So Break Method is an online program that you can do that takes anywhere from 4 to 6 months. If you want to do it with me, it's a little bit different than if you want to just do it with our team. And there's a variety of different options. There's an online-only program, and then there's one to actually go through it with somebody. It's 6 one-on-one sessions no matter what, so it's a very specific set sequence. If you look at it in contrast with mental health at large, much of the sessions are driven by narrative, which we already know are skewed and not actually all that helpful to what we're trying to get to.

I never found it to help one bit.

You probably spent more time trying to diagnose the therapist.

I was like, this is just silly. Who are you? Like, I don't need to rehash this. This isn't changing anything. Absolutely. Now, I did do, I did do some therapeutic plant medicine that changed. Yes. That definitely helped. And it seems like these things could be all put together and be really incredible.

100%. And I think we are, we have some partnerships in the works with people who are focused on psychedelics. Where brain pattern mapping helps us understand what the core patterns are that need resolution so that you can blend that with the actual rewiring process. Amazing. And I know that we started off by talking about the academic piece, and interestingly enough, we just had our first study, peer-reviewed study, go live last week, which is very exciting.

So cool. I love, I just love all of this. I mean, we had one way of doing things forever. When my son started having struggles, I'd already seen what happened with my brother, so I wasn't going to go that route. And I sought out Daniel Amen, who at the time, they were like, Dr. Amen, blah, blah. You know, he was like so outside the box. Now everyone's like, oh, okay. Now he's like mainstream. Isn't it funny? And I just love the fact now that we are doing research on psychedelics. We're doing research on all these other things. I mean, just when you look at psilocybin, it's incredible. So I love that you came in and doing this and now are validating it so that the people that need that in order to feel safe to use it can. So exciting. I'm going to put the link to all of this at jjvirgin.com/buszie. Thank you. Not spelled like it sounds, spelled B-I-Z-Z-I-E. Is that your real name?

My real name is Elizabeth, and my little sister couldn't pronounce it and started calling me Bizbeth on her own, and then Biz Biz, and then I've been stuck with it ever since.

Okay, I won't call you Biz Biz.

You can call me Biz Biz.

I was nicknamed Poppy growing up because of pop art.

Biz Biz and Poppy sound like they're very similar.

So, all right, jjvirgin.com/busy will link to the assessment, the code, and then I'm gonna also link to some of your other, like, you've had some great sessions out there, so we'll dig up some of your favorites too.

Thank you. And there are some from my podcast that I think—

Yeah. Oh, we'll link to your podcast. That's definitely definitely the thing to link to. So we'll link to your podcast too. What's the name of your podcast?

The podcast is Decoded, and you're going to be on the podcast very soon, which I'm really excited about.

Fun, fun. All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate you coming over.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

I don't know if it was just me, but I'm like, listening to these things being described, I'm going, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. And that's me too. Here's the thing. If you were hearing any of that, that's not a problem. It's actually amazing. It's a starting point. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not failing. You're not stuck because you lack willpower. You're simply running on patterns that were built for survival, but that's not necessarily the life you want. And the great news is these patterns can be rewritten at any age, especially now when clarity hits and we finally decide that we are done living on autopilot. So if today opens something for you, share this episode with a friend, hit subscribe because we are just getting started here at Well Beyond 40. And again, remember, And remember, I have that great assessment for you to take too. And I'm gonna link to Bizzy's podcast Decoded so that you can dive deeper in. All right, I'll see you next time.