A MASTERCLASS On How To HEAL Your Mind & Overcome Negative Thoughts EP 1290

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I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing.

Welcome to the School of Greatness.

My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock.

The power of your life through this specific theme today.

It's going to be powerful.

So let's go ahead and dive in. Say I feel cold. And ice, right? I mean ice, it's 30 degrees. Can I control my mind to say, you know what, this is actually a hot tub and you feel warm and you're feeling hot right now? Or is it too much physiological barriers to break through that?

To some extent you can. So, I think the question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative The.

Story we tell ourselves.

The story we tell ourselves actually means something for the body. And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now. And so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work. But I think the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there.

Right, right.

Now, that does not mean- Most people.

Actually who are depressed depressed just aren't smiling as well.

That's right.

When you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?

The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures, when we're feeling good we tend to be in more relaxed and extended postures, all true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind. That's a first step. Think about like two interlocking gears. It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going.

So how do you get it to dance together?

Exactly. So subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold? So, a couple things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name and you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So, that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts. So, I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought.

Can you think of two thoughts at the same time? Probably not. So, you can only have one thought at a time.

Right, but they come very fast.

But it comes and goes. So, you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think. Otherwise, and a spontaneous thought will pop back in. That's right. Based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment, it's just going to keep popping in. So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?

Right.

So I'm a big fan of wellness and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes and there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say, in science. And what I love about your questions, you're asking for really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. You know, what a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort. and that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you meet the love of your life, someone likes your photo, the great love of your life, you complete something. But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are en route to our goals, when we're in pursuit of our goals, and we think we're on the right path.

This is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal, because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater. I felt this thing for two minutes and now that's it?

That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process.

To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right?

Well, and it can be to some wins along the way. But growth mindset, which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol Dweck at Stanford, is the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things. One is I'm not where I want to be now, but I'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself.

In fact, Don't reward the result, reward the effort.

That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do, they don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process. And actually Carol's one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that loved doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case they knew they couldn't get it right, but they love doing it and it incidentally or not so incidentally these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process.

Yeah.

Cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.

Our interpretation.

Our interpretation. But it has to be attached to reality. So, one should never confuse- what is real?

Right.

So, if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels. and they're setting up a new business, for instance. And it's hard. If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole, potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day.

They're taking a step.

They're taking a step. If they can reward that process internally, two things happen. First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger, so you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine. And what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press journal, a couple of years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and we release more and more epinephrine. It's kind of adrenaline but in the brain. With more effort, we're going to get more epinephrine. Every time you put in effort. So every time you make, for this, let's keep it, if I were to keep it in the business context, every time you write that email, every time you, let's say it's a person who's a craftsman or a crafts woman, every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account. You're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausted. This was done in a beautiful study, actually, where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment. So sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress. And other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere. Epinephrine's climbing, climbing, climbing and eventually they quit. Now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you anyone the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this actually, football's a good example, two teams play, say the Super Bowl, both teams are max effort the entire time. Yeah. Max effort. The team that wins suddenly, in a moment, has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days. They can talk, I mean, they had a huge party.

They were exhausted right before that.

Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind, except it was neural energy. And what happened was effort is this adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, eventually people quit. they just quit. The dopamine is able to suppress that. And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it.

So we need dopamine to keep the effort going. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

That's right. Dopamine is not just about reward. It's one of the biggest misconceptions. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. It's like a jet that propels you along a path.

If any, how do we get more dopamine?

You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind.

Like how?

Okay, so that's a great question. First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements. I want to be really clear. There is a drug, there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine. They're called cocaine and methamphetamine.

The problem is- that's what gets us.

Addicted because it feels so good. The problem is, exactly. The problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source, it becomes the goal and the path. It becomes the path and the destination. And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine and that baseline on their life goes down very, very quickly.

Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good.

That's right.

And that's the greatest feeling you'll have so why do anything else when you can have that feeling?

That's right. And if you think about, remember these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies. They were designed to do anything. They were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt. So in an animal context, an animal that, let's say, is hunting or it needs food for its young, it's gonna feel agitation. That's stress. That's cortisol. It's like hunger. My babies might not eat. I might not eat. Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's gonna feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching. Foraging is called in the animal behavior world. It's foraging. At some point, it might catch a smell of something, a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty. At that moment, dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path. Whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain that's involved in depression and disappointment. that if it goes to that place and turns out it was the wrong path, there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again. So you don't give up.

That's right.

You just don't repeat it again.

That's right. And those events that remind you that's.

Not the path to go down. That's right. Interesting. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience. Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously. You're gonna repeat those. Those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those.

So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

That's right. So you asked how do you do this? So to really make it concrete.

And is there too much, is there such thing as too much dopamine? Well, if you're not on drugs.

So cocaine and amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life. They make people very focused on things outside of themselves. That's the other thing that dopamine does, it can be positive or negative. But when we have dopamine in our system, we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment. You can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that. But, you know, I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes. So it's like, get after it, you know, what do sharks do on Monday or I can't remember the specific things. Or then there are the, like, sometimes it's just time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin, right? And then dopamine is the get after it. molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were going to break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort. Just effort with no subjective label on them, good or bad effort, whether or not it's stress or you're pursuing something you want to do, it's just exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.

So how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us?

Brilliant question. It is a skill that we learn. So that is really nice to know. It is never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better. So I have four adult children. They learned this. They grew up with this stuff. And as I have learned new things, they have been my lab rats. So they have been trained literally at my husband and they all work for me, by the way.

They are either all amazing kids or messed up kids.

Totally, yeah. Yeah, we will have to ask the question. Well, Dominique is my producer. so I think she's sort of doing okay there. But yeah, the thing, the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind, Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia, and then going to the mood sort of things like that we can accept grief, anger, etc. These are not illnesses. This is the biggest message that I probably have, the second biggest. The first is that mind is the source, and if you don't get mind right, everything else, you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self-help, but unless your mind is right, you won't even use that stuff. It's just data. And so there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away, but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away. So despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses. In fact, they're very helpful. They're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told. They are actually responses and because they are responses of our mind in the world, we use our brain and body to express them because we've got the mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts and then from we use that to speak. We're using our physical to store what we've processed and to convert and then so obviously if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess. But because our brain's neuroplastic and we, if we manage our mind, we can change our brain, we can change our DNA. Literally, that's what I've shown in my research. You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally. If you change your mind. If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, if you are in acute trauma, for example, and you go through, just, okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've been testing out a glucose, continuous glucose monitoring device. and for some research purposes. And I happened to while I was wearing it, because you wear it and then you track your levels. And I wanted to see in terms of mental health and the neuro cycle that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact. And I happened to be going through, experienced a very acute trauma in our family over December. And in the moment of the trauma, I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. Now that's heart attack level. And I immediately managed my mind through the neuro cycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system anyone can learn it. And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it. And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA's dropped, your homocysteine's up. All that means is that your immune system is going crazy. Exactly. You've got a cytokine storm like we talk with COVID And in fact, your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever. that it will recognize that as an invader like a virus like COVID. So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind. Think, feel, choose, you build thoughts. Thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories. So thoughts are made of memories, like trees are made of branches. This is toxic. It will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had COVID or if I had a flu virus or if I measles or something or any kind of damage in my body, the immune system sees that as threatening survival because we are wired for survival. So this is not survival. So your immune system says, Hey, that's a threat. Let's send out the army. T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages, let's go fix this thing. And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing. So initially inflammation is to isolate and fix. Exactly. Isolate and fix. And then you're supposed to fix this up. sort this out and find the root cause and then this goes away and then the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away. But if we don't deal with the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are in enacting, that the constant arguments or these certain, you know, we all have these toxic patterns or no one's immune. We all, and the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either trauma based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed. But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress, even to the point where your DNA is affected. And I showed in my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X. And where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails, for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres.

And telomeres are a proxy for how you are managing your mind. Very interesting. New York Times so aren't they also based on how long you'll live as well?

If the telomeres are longer? Exactly, totally correct.

So those are under attack and dying.

You'Re probably physically gonna die as well.

Exactly, that's exactly what I showed. So we had subjects at the beginning of my clinical trial that I put in this book. We had subjects and I've actually got a picture of this person's one of the subject's brains. This is inside looking inside their brain and the blue represents someone who's totally depressed, flatline, brain flatline, literally. And this person's, all their biomarkers were up there in cortisol, inflammation, Etc. But this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat. Blue means a very, very depressed. And this person was, their narrative was tremendous. Torment in their life. They were offline. They were battling with work, relationships, a lot of stuff. Everything was off. Everything was off sleep, you name it. They were at really to check out.

A force inside and out.

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Which is this on?

This is on page.

This is on.

I should tell you. I should know the page off my heart. 161.

Okay, I think you.

You've probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. But so this person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA, we looked at their telomeres, they will tell you how it. the shorter they are, the weaker your cells, the shorter your life span, the more vulnerable you are to disease. So they were sitting, so that will show in terms of your biological age. So their telomeres were short and unhealthy. Their ages were in the, of this particular subject, and we had a group like this as well that's similar. They were biologic, their chronological, the actual age was in their mid-30s. But their biological age- 70 or something. Yes, a sickly 70 year old. That's crazy. Within crazy, within nine weeks of mind management. No, I didn't work on, I don't use drugs. I didn't, I do talk about diet and stuff, but in this particular clinical trial was pure mind management, just the neuro cycle. Just get your mind under control. And that gray means that their brain stabilized, that the brain waves that they were actually managing. So here they were saying, I am depression, I am hopeless, all the biomarkers, DNA, Here they're saying, I now know why I feel depression. I'm not depression, I now know why and depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause. It's not who I am, it's not an it, it's not an illness. By 63 days, and these numbers are very significant, they were actually seeing behavior change in their life. They were saying, okay, so I know I still get depressed, but I know why and I know what to do. And there were changes in their behavior. They were back at work, they were back sleeping 25 25% improvement in sleep. And I mean, all kinds of like the relationships, not suicidal anymore. And I mean, that's, I can go on and on and on. Wow. This subject over here was in the control group, so they got no mind management. And what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos. And that red shows complete brain that is like a tsunami in your brain, which the biomarkers were terrible, this person's DNA telomeres were very short. And so with mind management in nine weeks, we how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health. And that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise, which are very significant.

Like leafy greens and plant-based.

Exactly, which is significant. And also there's been some work on meditation, but there's been no, I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate intentional mind work to change. And then we saw significant drops as well in inflammation markers and blood markers. But the biggest thing was their narrative, the person's story. So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again. And they had also had this acceptance, and this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when you started, was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose-tinted glasses. That's crazy. It is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful. We have this really weird philosophy, which has been about 40 years in the West now, where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that we must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress. So it's been lumped, our misery of life has been medicalized to quote a a brilliant psychiatrist and Dr. Anna Moncrieff. So we've got to really watch out for that. But actually the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses. They are just survival instincts. It's telling you, hey, pay attention. There's something going on.

You need to go and- Something's not working.

Something's not working. Something's not working.

And it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed. And that'll block the greatness. So are you saying, am I hearing, did I hear you say that there There isn't a mental health disease. It's more of just a pattern or something that we should be mindful of, but it's not an actual disease.

No, it's not a disease. And I know this counters the current philosophy, but if you look at the science, there's a large body of science. In fact, if you interpret all the science around this field and you really look at what's being tested, you actually will see it's not a... They've been looking for the neurobiological correlate. They've been looking for where in the brain is depression. And for years, we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression. I mean, that's not even it was a theory never proven, great for marketing, for selling drugs, and also a simplistic way of telling someone, Hey, you're depressed, don't worry, it's chemically imbalanced, let me give you a drug to fix it. You know, we want this quick fix mentality. So as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix. But life's not like that. Mind is not like that. Mind is separate from brain and body. You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis this treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body. But when it comes to mind, that there's this gravitational field, this force, this think field, choose thing, it's not going to go, a medication is not going to change how you're thinking, feeling and choosing. It's not going to get rid of this. It's just going to numb your brain. So maybe you don't feel this while it's working. But at the same time, as then when that drug wears off, this is still there. This is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem. So this is increasing your vulnerability. The longer it's there, the more you increase your vulnerability to disease. Oh my gosh. You know, and this is what gets you stuck. And these are the patterns. So no, it's not an illness. It is a normal human response. Here we, a pandemic. We all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health. Mental health has always been an issue. Notice from the beginning of time, mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting, with war, with whatever. So mental health is not on the rise, but the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease, has created a whole new problem. So here we sit with, before the pandemic, they started doing a population study in the mid-90s, and this is when I was still practicing early days of my practicing sort of 10 years into my work, and I started seeing this trend of, and I was watching the study where people were, the decades-long trend of people living longer, So we know, we all hear this message, this is what we've heard, people are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology. None of us question that. But something happened in '96 that did start questioning that. By the mid-2000s, it was an established researched fact that we don't live longer anymore, that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed, and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair, where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases, and the age group most being affected are between 24 and 65. So people at the beginning of their career and the prime of their career and through that age group are dropping down dead like flies and it's considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the bone, lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's weaker. Why? Lifestyle, which is mind driven, how am I eating, drinking, sleeping. But more than that is what's my mind behind all of that? How am I actually managing the day-to-day moments? How am I managing the patterns, the traumas, the established toxic habits? What am I doing about that stuff? And that's when we ignore all of that, because this current trend of science is saying, oh, those don't matter. What matters is the symptoms. Let's just look for the symptoms. Checklist, diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop up to 10 years more of their you know, it's like it's adding on, they've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have a chopped 20 years off, up to 20 years of their lifespan. People on psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body chopping up to 25 years of their life. I mean, this is serious. So here we have this already existing, then the pandemic hits. Now another year, they say that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives. But there's such a contradiction because they're saying, hey, there's this this adverse circumstance, grief of loss of people, uncertainty, medical and not knowing if you're gonna live or die and how long is this isolation gonna go on and economic impact and whatever, the whole lot. That's trauma and they're saying that when they're saying but this is the way to treat it. Let's label it, let's diagnose it, let's medicate it. So here we've come into COVID with a problem with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems and scientifically this is all being researched and shown and now we've got the pandemic and now they wanna carry on that system that didn't work to this, which is going to make it even worse. So we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's one in four people on antidepressants or depressed. 100% of people are depressed and anxious and concerned about this COVID pandemic. 100% of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and and one of the others, a large percentage of the population, and I'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research, but estimates it's probably 30-40% of people will have extreme trauma from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff, where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the -19, 8-19 if you look at a continuum of 0 to 10, 0 to -10, and have things like psychotic traumatic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases. They are simply in that traumatic situation, you're having a traumatic response. Think of someone who's a war vet. I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers. And I mean, the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do, you know, they come back and try and we all know the problem of trying to, you know, reconcile back into civilian life after you've gone through. I mean, you know, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long, stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature. And now they, instead of them being allowed to process this trauma, they're coming back and being told that they're diseased. And he would tell me that what they do with a lot of, we don't hear this sort of thing, but he told me this, they will inject things like Risperdal, which is an antipsychotic, into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic and they psychotic for a reason. It's their coping. How do you how do you deal with this? Of course you're going to be angry, you're going to be frustrated, you're not going to be able to love like you did. You have to be able to embrace process and reconceptualize. Giving them a drug is not going to make it, not going to help it. In fact, it constrains the brain. It restricts the brain. You can't, there's no chemical cure for that. This, this is, that's not, that's just going to add fuel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain. So now you put chemicals in and.

Now that's not going to, that's not going to facilitate change, we have to do something.

So it's like a narrative.

Do you feel like there, I mean, is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people? You know, when they say, oh, I have a depression, it's a disease or bipolar, or I have this mental health disease, or I have a chemical imbalance, I was treated with this. Don't try to say I don't because this is who I am. Is that, do some people have that or is that, that's a result of Go ahead.

The narrative of I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people have been given. They're not given an alternative reaction, I mean an alternative narrative. So the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast, I want to validate your depression, your anxiety, your grief, your despair, your PTSD, whatever label you've been given, I want you to, I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label. You're not diseased, you're not a broken brain. You aren't, your brain isn't defective. You are going through something. So you aren't something, you aren't that, you are going through something. You're experiencing something. You're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment. So it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope. so what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing. So the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair. The cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through and learning how to, not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape with the abuse or the war trauma or the that it can, it will drive a person crazy. And that's not crazy in the sense of illness. It's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these and your immune system and everything screaming out to you and saying, hey, let's fix this. So a disease label invalidates it. And for a moment, it might be nice to know, okay, well, there's a label to how I feel because it kind It gives us a bit of, feels like we've got a bit of control. So initially that gives you comfort, but don't see yourself as that. It's better to say, I'm experiencing post-traumatic stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD or I have the sickness of PTSD. It's better to say, I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar, these intense swings because of my whole story than saying, I have bipolar, I have a chemical imbalance. I mean, just research is coming out the other day, show that we've got to stop saying this. The top psychiatrist that lead this field will tell you we've got to stop saying this, that there's no ways that serotonin imbalance, you can't even measure that. There's no gene for, there's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it. It's what you've experienced that's the cause. And then that moves through your brain and your body. So obviously your brain and your body respond. So we will see changes in the brain and the body. We will see neurochemical not necessarily serotonin imbalance. That's just one. Sometimes it's dopamine, and if dopamine's down, serotonin's often, and anandamide's often, and I can give you a list of big chemical terms, and that's gonna change every function in the structure of your brain, and your DNA and your telomeres, and 1400 neurophysiological responses are off. So, you know, that's the response though, and that doesn't mean that you have this thing hidden inside of you, this scary thing that's controlling you. and that invalidates. If someone comes back from war, someone's had a sexual trauma, to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through. But if I say to you, Gosh, that's terrible. Tell me about it. I want to hear your story. I want to support you. Your depression and anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on. there's an origin story, there's a source. So can I listen, can I help, can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it? And that takes time. It's not a 15-minute appointment where I can give you a label. That takes time. That's not also, and it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work if they're used in the right place, but to try and put a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them. You can't condition, you have to reconstruct. So it's kind of like an algebraic equation. X is the situation. Y is how you should want, you want to function for mental peace. So you've got X plus Y. And so here we are in our X situation where we are a sort of human experiencing life. We're supposed to be at Y and you put the two together and what the current treatment says is that, okay, now we're going to create Z. We're just going to ignore X and Y. We're going to create a new thing and that new thing is you diseased. But that doesn't work. It's actually X plus Y equals XY. X is what you're going through. Y is where you want to find mental peace.

You talk a lot about practicing meditation and also prayer. And you say something that was interesting. that you said about using silence to hear in between the lines. So can you share what that means to hear in between the lines through prayer, meditation, mindfulness, and kind of what this all means? How can we understand this? There's a lot of noise about it, but what does it really mean?

When I hear the word mindfulness, to me, what it really means is intentionality. What I mean by that is, are you crafting designing and intentionally creating your life, or are you just coasting in the passenger seat of your life, which is just dragging you and driving you wherever it's taking you? And so it's the difference between being the driver or being in the passenger seat. And so to me, living intentionally is what allows you to live a life of by design. And so I'll give you an example of what mindfulness can look like. There's something in the book that I talk about called the three S's, which are sights, scents, and sounds. Now, if you think about that, we're exposed to sights, scents, and sounds every single day.

Yeah.

Every single day. But how many of us have crafted those to be sights, scent, and sounds that we want in our life? So this is what I realized when we were monks, one of the most important things was was, what was the first thing you saw, the site, when you woke up?

And right now, most people are probably seeing their screen.

Yeah, I think 80% of people look at their screens first thing in the morning and the last thing at the night. So you're seeing your screen first thing in the morning, but what are you really seeing? You're seeing everyone else's priorities, you're seeing everyone else's issues and challenges, you're seeing everyone else's messages to you, which means you're already starting your day off reactively. But what if you started your morning looking at a painting that inspired you or a picture of a loved one that brought joy in your heart or your favorite quote by Lewis or by anyone else that when you read that in the morning, you were like, oh yeah, I feel in charge today to make a difference in the world. So imagine the first thing you saw in the morning was something inspiring. How much would your day change? That's mindfulness. Mindfulness is being intentional and mindful about what you are exposing yourself to. Let's talk about sounds there. so sounds were something that I started to study actually much later from a modern life perspective. But when we were monks, we would wake up to birds, we would wake up to water, we'd wake up to gongs or cymbals. Chants. Exactly, which are all beautiful sounds. Now, the crazy thing is all of us wake up to something called an alarm.

Now, I'll write this down.

Literally, I don't know why anyone would want to wake up Alarm. Why would you want to wake up alarmed? It means now your system is alarming. Like why would you want to do that? Why would you want to wake up in shock? In a state of like a jolt? I don't think that's a positive way to wake up. So changing the sound that you wake up to. Now I'm not saying that everyone can wake up to nature sounds. Maybe you're one of those people who just hit the snooze button again. But what if you woke up to a sound or a song that brought you joy? when I lived in New York for two years between 2016 and 2018, I started to feel quite exhausted by the end of the day. And I was really looking into, like, why is it that I feel tired? And I started to realize I came across this term called cognitive load. And what it means is that a lot of the sounds that you hear in New York City are sounds that are insignificant for your mind to process.

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Drilling, construction work, taxis honking, driving, cars screeching, scratching, people yelling at each other. People yelling at each other on the streets. All of that sound is called cognitive load, where your brain is now trying to make sense of meaningless sounds.

It's also just like, should I be afraid? This is a loud sound. It was my brain going to fight or flight, like I need to protect myself. So you're always being alarmed.

Yeah, exactly. And you hear sirens. The amount of sirens that I remember hearing on the streets. Now, when you hear sirens, sirens have an emotional trigger and they have an emotional response to them. So think about your day. Think about when you come home from work, or now you're working from home. What sound do you want to hear when you're working? What sound do you want to hear at the end of the day? when you sound design your life, that's called mindfulness. That's being intentional. And then finally, scent. Scent is such a powerful sense that we're not even aware. How many of you, when you smell your favorite food, can't already wait to eat it? Like, you can almost taste it. Yeah, you can taste it already without just through scent. Why is it that every time you walk into. Yeah, my favorite. Yeah, I think pizza has one of the best sets.

Well, your wife, Rodney's got some amazing food. That was amazing set. When I walked in the kitchen last.

Week, I was like, this is amazing. That was for you. That was special. That was for you. That was a good meal. That was a really good meal. She really appreciated that you love to eat, too.

She was happy.

Her heart was full.

Exactly. Bring a former jock into your house.

And you'll clear all the food out. She was like, I've never seen someone eat that much. big American dude. I was like, Louis is like, you know, he can eat. And so, no, it was great. She was so happy that you appreciated it so much. She really appreciated that.

But the scent is important in your life.

When you walk into a massage spa, it's the scent, the eucalyptus, the lavender, the sandalwood, it puts you in a peaceful state. Dude, scent puts you in Zen without trying. And so mindfulness is intentionally creating a life that makes you feel what you want to feel without having to just create the feeling from inside. You may say, Jay, you know, I really struggle trying to be positive. I struggle trying to deal with anxiety. I struggle trying to be focused. Your sight, sense and sounds can help you do that.

Yeah.

And you start creating an environment where you naturally feel that. Like today, when I walked into your studio, I saw your books, I saw these motivational quotes, I saw a boxing glove, and it's like all of a sudden, you're like, oh, I'm in a uplifting environment, right? So you already get triggered.

Exactly. Yeah, I think a friend of mine mentioned one time on the podcast, Chris Lee said, you, want to create an environment like a rainforest where things can thrive and grow, as opposed to having an environment like a desert where things go to die.

That's beautiful.

And if you have sights, scents, and sounds that are like a desert for your life or your heart, then it's going to be hard to grow those things from your heart. But if you create an environment of a rainforest where things can grow, water, nature, cool air, things like that, then you can really start to cultivate that growth. You mentioned about creating and designing your life. How much of the world do you think we receive by being here? And how much of the world do we create ourselves?

Yeah, that's a beautiful question. It's a complete dynamic dance between what the Vedic tradition would call fate and free will. So fate is what is already created for you. And a good example would be the place you were born, the type of family you grew up in, the socioeconomic background you had. It was already there when you walked in to the world. But within that, you had choices where your free will came about. You had the choice to either do what everyone in your neighborhood did. or to do something different. You had the choice to have a relationship with a particular person or not. So what happens is that we're constantly creating new spaces from which we have another choice. Right. And so you kind of see as this dynamic dance between, okay, now I'm in this situation and now what is my choice in this situation? So I would say, I'm not saying it's equal. I'm saying it's a dynamic balance and a switching process. where you're constantly creating a new level and then now in that level you have a next choice.

Because we didn't have the choice to be created here. We were here and that wasn't our choice. Now everything after that is our choice, right?

Yeah, and there are some, obviously there are some traditions and I'm a big diver into like reincarnation and past lives. So according to the beliefs of reincarnation and past lives, you have at some point made a choice to be here. But taking it more simplistically, the truth is that when you're brought into a situation, the best analogy that I've heard and it's been told for years is of a father is an alcoholic. One of the sons that he has decides to become an alcoholic because his father's an alcoholic. The other son decides to never drink alcohol because his father's an alcoholic. So they were exposed to the same situation and same scenario.

Same environment.

Environment, but they both made different choices based on their experience. And that's the choice element. That's the element that we should be trying to empower in our lives because we can constantly say, I'm limited by my environment or I've been restricted by my environment. And hey, it's true. There are so many of us that have been limited and restricted, but by now you repeating that, you are going to repeat that restriction in your life.

How much of a positive environment supports us in our growth or holds us back? There are some people who have the perfect family situation, resources, beautiful backyards in nature who are lazy. And there are others who have divorced parents, abusive parents, abusive friends, an environment of a desert. And they figure out a way to thrive.

Totally.

How much importance does our environment play in our overall success.

If you look at the examples that you just shared and you really analyzed life, you'd see very little because you see people craft their own life. So a good example for me is that when I came back from living in the ashram and there were other people who may have been monks who'd also left the path, and I came back to a not financially successful or supportive family. So my family doesn't have abundant wealth and couldn't necessarily have taken care of me or paid for me forever. And I had to figure out my own life. And that to me was a great sense of impetus and incentive to go and figure it out and learn new skills and network and meet people. And I saw other friends who'd parents had like a property portfolio with like 10 properties ready to hand them over. They had a BMW the second that they came out, whatever, you know, from their own life. Or I even have friends that had all of that and didn't become monks and didn't even find careers. So I've also got friends that I went to school with that today don't even have careers, even though their parents were really well established.

Right.

Which has all of these examples have continued me to believe that we truly have influence in our more than our environment. Our environment affects us for sure. It plants seeds and weeds into our life, but there is still a choice. And I think even if you feel there isn't a choice, simply by accepting that there is, it means you have a chance to get out of there. And I think that's what- Because if.

You don't accept that there is, then.

You'Re just gonna stay stuck. Correct. There have been so many times in my life and there's a beautiful quote from Edison. I don't think I said this last time, but if I did, it's worth repeating. He said that when you believe you've exhausted all options, remember this, you haven't. And the reason why I love that is your mind continuously feels stuck when it's tried the obvious. And that's why a lot of creativity and focus studies say that the first 10 ideas that come to your mind are never the most interesting. It's when you get into the 11th idea that you start breaking the pattern. And so if someone asks you, oh, what's your best business idea? Your first 10 ideas are probably not that innovative. And so the mind constantly gets stuck on that train and you've got to keep reminding yourself that there is another door. There could be another pathway. I was thinking about a piece of advice that, so one of my closest spiritual mentors who was in London, I knew him since I was probably like 12 and probably since I was 18. He passed away this year from stage four brain cancer. And he'd had brain cancer for about, I think like three, three, four years now. And so I hadn't really had a real interaction with him for the past few years because every time I saw him, he wasn't fully functioning in his short-term memory. His long-term memory was there, but his short-term memory wasn't. And I remember speaking to him probably about seven, eight years ago and asking him the question. I said to him, you know what? I've got so many ideas. There's so many things I could do. Where do I start?

And.

And he said this beautiful thing to me. He said, you know what? Your role should be to open up every door possible. And he said, let the world close the doors you're not meant to walk through and walk through the ones that remain.

Open.

And what I realize is most of us are just not opening up enough doors because we think we only have the option of two doors. We look at life as binary, zero and one, zero and one. Right?

It's just this or that.

A or B, this or that. And, I mean, I. I think you'd say this, too, about you and every guest you ever had on. I don't think life is ever this or that. It's like this, that and that and maybe that and that. And there's always a gap, of course.

The challenge that people have is that I've sensed a lot. is the fear of criticism when you go after something that you weren't supposed to do or that people don't think you're supposed to do. Why do so many people fear criticism from peers, family, friends, the media? Why is that such a big fear and how do we overcome criticism from others?

Psychologically, we feel a sense of safety and security when we think people agree with us. Right, that is just psychologically true that we would rather avoid conflict and sit in a space where we agree and therefore we have something called confirmation bias and the echo chamber where we keep surrounding ourselves with thoughts and ideas that are similar and reaffirm our beliefs. Now, I think that you can have that and at the same time entertain ideas that you're not sure about yet. and so one of my favorite examples was MIT did this study where they asked people which person was more creative and innovative and they showed two charts. One chart was employee A and the other chart was employee B. The chart for employee A, all of the people they knew, knew each other and knew them back. So it was almost like a closed loop. And employee B, they knew lots of people who didn't know each other and they found that people who have more people in their network who don't know each other are more likely to be creative and productive.

Really?

Why is that? Because they expose you to opposing ideas and they may counteract how you think. So one of my favorite examples of this is a conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and one of his mentors. So Mark Zuckerberg told this story at the Facebook headquarters a few years back. I wasn't there. I've seen it on video. I'm sure that's available. And he talks about how when he was struggling with the direction of Facebook in 2009, he approached his mentor. And his mentor happened to be Steve Jobs. Wow.

Pretty cool.

Wow. Pretty cool. I wish. Really cool. Yeah, it's so cool, man. And so anyway, so Mark Zuckerberg goes to Steve Jobs and he says, I'm.

Struggling with the direction of Facebook.

Remember at that time Facebook was five years old. There was no fan pages, I don't think. I don't think it was, there was no creators, I don't think there were fan pages. It was very much used university students at that stage. Like, I think it was mainly like Ivy Leagues and college kids. And I don't even think it was international in a massive way, very early days. And now we can't even think of that. But 2009, I mean, you know, you just about had the iPhone and just about had Instagram and YouTube. So he went up to Steve Jobs and he said, you know, I'm struggling with the direction of Facebook. What do I do? Now, Steve Jobs at that time obviously was already he, the founder of one of the biggest brands on the planet. And obviously the brand still is. He had access to investors. He had access to business coaches. I'm sure he had access to life coaches. He had access to health experts.

Health experts.

He had access to anything.

Like, I don't think there was anyone.

Scientists, phds. I don't think there's anyone in the world who Steve Jobs couldn't have called up at the time. And Steve Jobs said something amazing. He said, you know what, Mark? I think you should go. and live in an ashram in India. He did not.

He did.

He goes, and when you go to live in the ashram in India, that's where if you spend some time there, that's where you'll find your answer. Shut up.

And Mark did it.

No way. Went to the ashram.

It's a true story.

How long? I, I believe he was there for, I believe, I've seen two online. I've seen two versions of the exact time he was there. I've seen some people said it was a couple of days or a week or some people said it's a month. So I think it's, it's hazy how much time he he spent there. But he went. And he says that based on that experience, that's where he found the direction of Facebook, to be connecting people. Now, the reason why I love that story is because it's the unobvious, alternative, random connection. And when Harvard did a study of 3,000 executives, they looked at and asked them, what's the number one skill for being a good leader? And a lot of people would say, communication. A lot of people would say, Vision, strategy, humility. And the number one answer that they got from 3000 Executives was the one word, which is called associating. And what that means is the ability to spot patterns where everyone else doesn't see them. And that's the connect that real leaders can spot patterns and connections in anomaly. So most people be like, what is an Ashram got to do with a tech platform?

On. Right.

But that is where you expand your mind to find answers that you never expected.

How important is creating alone time.

With.

Noises, people, busy work to allow your mind to expand? Is that the only time in that silence? I think you mentioned it. Silence to hear in between the lines.

Yeah.

Is that where we start to hear what we're supposed. creating where we're supposed to be heading, our mission.

That's, yeah, I'm really glad you brought that back. I wanted to get back to that. So when we talk about, there's a beautiful statement by David Lynch, who's movie producer and deep meditator, and he says that prayer is how you talk to God, and meditation is how God talks to you. And whether you believe in God or the universe or spirit or divine, whatever it means, the point is that that there is a dialogue and a conversation.

Prayer is like you're speaking.

You're saying, Here's what I want.

Here's how I feel. Help me.

Help me, yeah. And meditation is more receiving. Receiving, yeah. And so I love that statement because I think it makes it very clear that we have to have a dialogue with the universe. We have to have a dialogue with people in our lives. We have to have a dialogue, and there's both giving and receiving. So when I talk about hearing in between the lines, the best example I can give you, Louis, Let's take a look at you and your relationship and mine and my wife's relationship. One of us is always traveling.

Yeah.

So you travel, your partner travels, I travel, my wife travels. Sometimes we're missing each other. Imagine you've got really busy and hectic. Do you think, and anyone listening or watching, you can ask the same question. If you were really busy and hectic and stressed out, do you think your partner feels comfortable to tell you how they feel and get your attention.

If I'm busy, stressed out, overwhelmed, will my partner tell me how I feel about themselves or about... Yeah.

Do you think they would feel confident to be like, Louis, I need to tell you something really important.

I don't think they would.

They really wouldn't because...

They don't want to stress you out more.

They don't want to stress you out more.

You're not present, all these things.

Exactly. So exactly that. And so what happens is when you're still, your mind and body actually get to speak to you and give you signals of how they feel. And so when you're still, that's when you notice that ache in your foot that you haven't noticed for a month. Sometimes when you slow down, that's when you get sick because your body wasn't allowing itself to be sick because you were pushing it to get through stuff. And so just like your partners can't communicate with you until you slow down, your body and mind can't communicate with you until you still. And so there's a beautiful Buddhist teaching that says, what movement does for the body, stillness does for the mind. And so when we find that space, stillness and solitude, you really are able to hear your deepest desires and challenges, your physical pains and areas of growth. It's one of the reasons why when people meditate, they feel sleepy afterwards and they think they're doing it wrong, but actually they're doing it right. Meditation just told you you needed more sleep. yeah, meditation was just a signal. So sometimes when I meditate with people that I'm coaching, they're like, pass that on. Some of them will be like, oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry Jay, I'm just feeling so tired. And I'm like, no, then sleep and rest. Yeah, that's what your body's telling you because you finally listened. And some people are like, oh Jay, I feel so energized. And I'm like, yeah, because you allowed yourself to be in line with your.

Body and now your body's saying that you feel energized. And that's great, you've got that energy. Go work out, go build something. Or you've cleared out those negative thoughts or you've let go of those distractions or that resentment and so you're not feeling this weight so you feel lighter.

Correct, and so that stillness and silence is one of my favorite ways for you to actually build that relationship with hearing your inner voice.

Is there too much silence? Like if you say, okay, five hours a day, is there a tipping point when you're like, okay, I think you do two hours every morning, but a lot of people say, well, I've only got 20 minutes maybe. Is five hours too much? Is an hour? What is the maximum or minimum, or sweet spot, you think, for people to be silent every day? To live a great life?

I think 20 minutes is a great starting point. Because 20 minutes is significant enough time for your mind to switch off. So we hear that studies show that we have 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day. 80% are negative. 80% are negative. And I'm guessing a lot of them are repeated.

Yeah.

And so if you're only gonna say I'm gonna do five minutes, it just takes five minutes to switch off. Like it takes five minutes to just overcome that noise. And so I'd say that 20 minutes is a good amount of time. And hey, you're not trying. And I think this is the challenge with meditation mindfulness. You're not trying to empty your mind. You're just trying to be present with it and actually listen to it and experience it.

How so much of the actions and being in integrity with our word to ourselves is necessary as well.

So you're starting from I'm lovable and I'm gonna go on dates and I want this person to say I'm lovable. But if you're eating burgers and fries and staying up all night and turning up with chipped nail varnish and dirty hair and a stained t-shirt you're not really saying I'm lovable. You're not really saying I'm a catch. You know, if some guy turned out beer all over his t-shirt and egg in his beard. You wouldn't think, oh, he's a cat, any more than a guy would think you've turned up in dirty old leggings with chipped nail varnish. So, when it again, that's abusive behavior. If you want someone to believe you're lovable, you have to believe you're lovable. First you believe it, then you start to act in a way that says, yeah, if I'm lovable, I should take myself to bed.

Now.

I don't really need to watch any more episodes of Catherine the Great tonight. I can do it over the weekend. I don't need eight slices of pizza. I can have one. So it goes back into the message you're sending out. When you know your lover, when you resonate it, you act in a different way. You're not a people pleaser.

You help.

You're nice. You wouldn't go, well, I have what you're having. I do what you want. I don't care. I'll go wherever you want to go. You have an opinion and you'll say, oh, no, that's not my thing. I don't really like that. I don't want to do that. I'm not going to drive for three hours to see you. If you're not prepared to meet me halfway, then it's not a good place to start. If I've got to pay the bill all the time.

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If you never, you never ask me how is the conversation going back and forth? Is someone listening to you? Are they transmitting or receiving? Some people just transmit. They go like a hair dryer. They go And the whole day is them talking to you and they never ask you how you are. And that's not respectful. Respectful is saying, oh, did you, you keep interrupting me, you're not asking me anything about me. I've been on a date, there's only one thing about me, and I realized I don't need to put myself through that. And if you have enough respect, you'll say, you know, we've been talking for an hour, this is actually not a match. I wish you great success in finding love, but you're not for me and I'm not for you. And you have that that sense rather than dragging out another six hours.

Just about being nice.

I deserve better and again it comes back to your needs and in the beginning when all my clients have what I call unmet needs, they come in and the guy wasn't loved, I wasn't nurtured, I wasn't praised, I wasn't supported, I didn't feel safe and when a child has an unmet need and a baby's need is very simple. Children need to feel safe, secure, loved, connected, significant. And as we get, oh, we need all of those. We also need you to feel proud of us and we need to feel interesting and worthy. And if our needs aren't met at an early age, we give up the need or we give it away. And you see that in relationships so much. I've given up the need that you care about me, but I'll care about you. Or, I'm giving it away. It's your job now. you're gonna have to make me feel attractive, interesting, sexy, worth being with. So I'm giving my need to you.

A lot of work.

Yeah, a huge work, because now you're still needy, but someone else's job is to meet your needs, and they can do it very well for a while, but then they get bored, they have their own needs. So if you give the need up, no one's gonna love me. I expect all relationships if I always get ghosted. I've now given the need up. I've got my cat, I've got my Ben and Jerry's in the freezer. My Netflix and I'm just not gonna even bother. I'm gonna, I just know it's not gonna work. I've even stopped dating. So I've given the need up. I've even given the need up to have a great job and I'm living a life that's not very satisfying but I've given the need up. Or I've given it away. Someone out there is gonna have to turn up and meet my need. I need to feel the same thing. Significant connection. connected, loved, safe, but you've got to do that for me. But there's a third way which is meet the need yourself. As weird as that sounds. If I need to feel safe, my husband's out of town, I go, hey, how can I feel safe you've left town? I lock the doors, have a little alarm thing that I never use but when he's out of town I know where it is in the bedroom. You know one of my clients said, well my husband goes away I have to go and stay with my mother of 85 to feel safe. I'm like, what's she gonna do? She's 85 years old. How can that be that you've given your need to be safe to someone of 85? Every time your husband leaves town, you take your kids to your 85 year old mother. So she's given the need away. But the idea is, okay, I got a phone, I got an alarm, I got a great system. I know all just to believe you're safe. So if you look right now at your unmet needs, they're always gonna be the same. Connected, safe, secure, significant, valid, worthwhile. You need someone to be proud of me. I need to feel I matter. And it may sound kind of weird to go, okay, I'm gonna do it. I matter. I'm significant. I'm secure within myself. I'm proud of who I am. If you decide to meet your unmet needs, you feel so complete that then you'll meet other people who can also meet them. but it's the opposite of needy. And that's if I'm in a relationship, like, okay, I've got a list here and someone's gonna have to tick all these boxes. And the second thing with needs is when you find someone to have a relationship with, you've got to put your needs in three piles. So, gonna use all these cups. So you have to say, okay, this need is non-negotiable. You're gonna have to meet that need. I need to always know where you are at 2 in the morning. I need to know where you are. I need you to call me. I need you to be home in time for dinner. I need you to put your underpants in the laundry basket. That is a need I'm not prepared to sacrifice. That's okay. But then you might go, you know what? I can put the underpants in the laundry basket. Is it really worth all the arguments? So the second thing, you know what? I can meet this need. I need a clean, tidy house. My husband doesn't even see mess, but I'm just going to do it myself. or maybe we can get someone to come in. But the second need, you meet it. And the third need, just give it up. It's someone says, it's just not worth it. See, if I said, I need my husband to make a huge deal about my birthday, hey, this is a need. Birthday's a huge. I want a gift. I want it wrapped. I want ribbons. I can say, meet that. I can say, you know what? I can find myself a great gift. I can do that myself if it's not that important. Or I can Is it really important? I've got every, do I need all these gifts actually? It doesn't matter which one it is, but no one can meet all your needs. You've got to have that need is non-negotiable. That need, I can meet it, and that need, I'm going to give it up. So my daughter is an artist and I realized immediately the need for tidiness, there's just no way, because people who are messy don't see mess. They can't meet you go, yes, I'm so, they don't see it. So I couldn't say to her, hey, you need a tidy room all the time.

Right.

I could go in and tidy her room every single day, but you know what? I just learned to shut the door. I gave up that need and it made our family so much happier because she lives in chaos and I don't. And she's a painter. And one day I went and I stapled plastic all over her walls and her carpet and that was great. I never worried about it again.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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