The 90-Second Rule That Will Change Your Life Forever!

Everyone I know is under strange stresses financially, business wise, and there's just an enormous amount of mental health issues, including many that affected my own family.

Most of us come to know what we feel through bodily sensation, and the good news is they dissipate that intensity. Their feelings are transient, and they dissipate in roughly an upper limit of 90 seconds. So that's the 90 seconds rule.

I showed him how his anger outbursts were really an ineffective way of dealing with sadness and disappointment. And it was a moment of, you know, kind of stunning awareness where he realized that, oh, yeah, what I really am is disappointed or sad. And I don't know how to communicate that. I've never known how to communicate that.

The military represents an idea of strength. When the military, any branch of the military first goes into an area, the first thing that they're doing is they're assessing for their needs and limitations. If ostensibly the most obvious symbol of strength actually starts with acknowledging needs and limitations and then secondarily asks for help, then from an entrepreneurial standpoint, that would be a crucial thing for entrepreneurs to learn.

This is the big leap. This is Mike Koenigs. I'm here with Gay Hendricks, who's been out for a while. He says some crazy medical things that he's been through. He's quite the warrior. So it's great to be back here with you, my friend.

Thank you very much. I'm hopefully coming to the end of a very long process. Anybody that hasn't been listening, Last year I had a kind of a freak accident where I cracked my knee and broke my femur in a bunch of places. And so I've had four surgeries over the past year and just had the last one two months ago. So I'm making a transition now from walking with a cane to walking on two legs and very happily. So kind of coming to the end of a long drama, but the whole thing has been, in a way, great. I, you know, I said the other day I wouldn't trade it to anybody for anything because I've learned a lot, especially about how to receive and let people take care of me. You know, I've been for 79 years. I was always the guy that took care of things, and I had to kind of lay back a little bit and let it come the other direction. And that's been a huge learning for me. It's really been life changing.

It's. It's been amazing watching you, and you've been remarkably positive.

I've. I'd never say I want to watch Anyone go through what you've gone through, but you've done it with such elegance and grace and such a heart and positively. It's. It's really astonishing. There's a great book inside of this experience whenever you're ready for it and I'm looking forward to the next part. Yeah, there you go. After you said no more, I don't know about, but it would really be. I think it'd be an incredible journey just to hear your reflections back on it.

Maybe that's something for me to take up with our old friend AI.

Yeah, but that's. Yeah, you're not the first person that's said that to me. But I've been doing a little bit of hiatus from book writing for a while and really enjoying a more spacious lifestyle as a result, instead of going down that tunnel for five hours a day. And.

Also, I want to. I'm very excited about our guest today. And actually to go back to how this began a week or two ago, you got in touch with me and said that you had met our next guest at an event and wow, would she be a great person to get on the Big Leap podcast. And I immediately said, yeah, because any friend of yours is a friend of mine and. But I'm eager to hear what it was that intrigued you and if you could then lead that into an introduction for Joan.

Okay, this is great because I met Joan. Joan, you'll have to help me out. This is Dr. Joan Rosenberg, by the way, multi best selling author. We've known each other, I would bet, close to 15 years. Does that sound about right?

It sounds about right. It would have been somewhere between 2007 and 2009. With Brendon. Yep.

We met at a Brendon Burchard event and we just took to each other and she's been unbelievably kind and insightful with me. We've done programs together. She's been a friend, a client, a confidant. She's supported my wife Vivian, also when we've gone through some challenges with Zach, and she also is the author of several books. So we just reconnected at a JJ Virgin event and we were going back and forth and I remember I said something like, how could I best support you? I don't remember what you said. I said, why don't you do a podcast episode with Gay Hendricks? Because I know you two will click like crazy. You have so much in common. And I think the way you process and think about things is at the minimum level, very compatible and yet very Similar, you've got similar energies and minds on some levels. And I thought it would be really, really fun to really talk about some of the most recent work you've been doing. Your most recent book, but also some of your past work is all as well. And I'd like to just talk about the 92nd rules, some of your core philosophies. But then Gay, you've always got remarkable insights and ultimately what I thought we'd do is let's create a toolkit for mental health. If that would be one of our outcomes today, I'd say our world right now. Everyone I know is going through an enormous amount of strain as of now. This is pre election period. I think we're going through a strange time economically, no matter what the government says. Everyone I know is under strange stresses financially, business wise. And there's just an enormous amount of mental health issues, including many that affected my own family. And I was talking about that at the beginning. So if we thought of this today as maybe an opening salvo into mental health toolkit and we got to incorporate Joan's work simultaneously, how does that sound?

Well, that sounds great to me because I'm also, I was familiar with Joan's 92nd book and I want to hear more about that because about 25 years ago I published a book called the Ten Second Miracle. So I want to hear what Joan is doing with those other 80 seconds.

That's great, guy.

Shall I just jump in?

Mike, tell us a little bit about Joan Rosenberg.

Yes, well let me, let me actually give a context because.

And if I, if I start with my own background, you know, and, and it lead it is really where two big questions came from for me and have turned into somewhat of a life pursuit. I started out as one of those shy, sensitive and somewhat wallflower, in fact velcroed to the wall kind of in terms of my, my social awkwardness when I was very young and I would look over at my peers and I would see them all gathering together, laughing, hitting each other on the back, whatever it was. And it was like, what is it that they have that I don't? And what, what came to me at that point was that they were confident and I was not. So, so my kind of, my first question is how does somebody develop confidence? And then as I got into my professional life as a psychologist, the I was kind of confronted with a second question because what I noticed was that as much as individuals thinking could get in the way of their functioning, I found someone's difficulty with unpleasant feelings and Their ability to handle them got in the way more. So the second question I wrestled with was.

What makes it so difficult for people to deal with unpleasant feelings?

So that's kind of context. These two questions kind of started to intertwine together. And in terms of the 90 second rule, it actually, the 90 seconds. I will always attribute that work to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight. And in that she talked about that when a feeling fires off that there's a rush of biochemicals into the bloodstream that activate bodily sensations, which are actually our feelings, and they flush out of the bloodstream in roughly 90 seconds. And so two things are really important here. One is that most of us come to know what we feel through bodily sensation. And the good news is they dissipate that intensity or their feelings are transient, and they dissipate in roughly an upper limit of 90 seconds. So that's the 90 seconds rule. And it also helps that solve that problem of the unpleasant feelings, which I can speak to more, but I want to stop for a moment. Okay, go ahead.

Yes, well, that's really informative because actually overlaps so well with the 10 second miracle. Because what I did was I went through tons of tape over the past. In those days, it was tape. And I looked for what was the moment that really changed that person's life or their experience.

And it was.

What I was getting at is that first 10 seconds, which is what do you do? And I presented a map of the sensations and where they are in the body and what they might mean. You know, people tend to store anger more up in upper part of their body and sadness down in the midsection and fear down, way down in the belly. And so I kind of mapped that out. But I'm very fascinated by. Because what you're doing is taking it kind of the rest of the way and understanding it also from a scientific perspective, which I think is really great, letting people know that those things dissipate within 90 seconds is a pretty good gift anyway to give people, right?

Exactly. And what ended up happening. So what I realized again, Mike, is that. Is that the.

When I wanted people to deal with unpleasant feelings, you know, again, most people kind of push back and go, no, I want to distract, I want to disconnect, I want to ignore them. But when I could convey to them that it was the bodily sensation they were trying to get away from, it wasn't that they didn't want to feel the whole range of what they felt. It's that they didn't want to feel the bodily sensation that let them know what they were feeling. So to your point, gay, for instance, if someone feels sad right at the, at the, in the, and it feels intense in the center of their chest and maybe disappointment is a drop down from that, if you will, then it's like, who wants to experience that sensation? So that's the thing that people, in my mind, that's what moves people away from feeling. So that I love that. I love what you did with the mapping.

And so if I could help them understand that it was brief at this upper 90 seconds, then most people would say, well, I can do 90 seconds. And now they were willing to lean into the bodily sensation and as a consequence of that, they were able to actually access the feeling more fully.

Yeah. Because what I found with a lot of people is that they think that if they open up to that feeling, they're going to fall into an infinite abyss. Right. And never come out the other side of it. Yeah. I thanks to Ms. Emma Williams, my high school Latin teacher, who sneaked in a little bit of Greek too. The Greeks had an amazing word that was one of their keys to mental health. So maybe we can use this as part of our assembly of the mental health toolkit. Mike Their word was alexithymia. And the word alexithymia, if you break it down into what it really mean is you can't put words to a feeling inside. You don't know what you're feeling and you're out of touch with what you're feeling and what it means and what it's actually saying. And so the Greeks and I've been on a one man crusade this lifetime to bring back the concept of alexithymia because it really explains a lot of what goes on with us. Because, you know, like they, they say The Tibetans have 200 words for snow or someone does and we only have one word. Well, you know, there's an infinity of information inside and it's this, you know, vast array of things we're angry about or sad about or sexually attracted to or excited by. And it's. I think we do a poor job of educating people how to get in touch with those because isn't it amazing that you have to go as a grown up and pay some other adult to teach you things that could have been done, you know, in the first grade?

Sure, sure.

I want to get a little practical for a moment.

Not that this isn't practical because I love the historical precedent.

But I speak a lot to a lot of business owner founders. And I see the.

Source of so much frustration and angst among them. It's usually revolves around change. And it's about being.

Feeling have this feeling of being demanding and knowing what they want and trying to squeeze out compliance from their teams and the combination of anger and rage and fear of loss they have because of that. And they don't get past this cycle of understanding how to drive their business based upon outcomes and results versus micromanaging. And I'd like to know.

You know, if you were going to create a toolkit, a practical toolkit for founders who are repeatedly stuck in the dictator versus leadership.

How would you provide a mechanism from getting from where they are to getting where they've been and stop practicing this fear cycle they've been stuck in their whole lives?

Nothing like a small question, Mike.

No, it's a big one, but I thought, yeah, might as well drop a doozy here.

Yeah, no, it is a big one, but. And I have. So let me see if I can sequence a number of things kind of all at one time. The first thing, the first thing to help the, the entrepreneur, the CEO, the, the whoever is in the dictating mode.

Understand is the change is the constant. That's the first thing. And, and that the more able someone is to negotiate change because it is the constant, the more effective they're going to be. So if I can help someone be what I think about as kind of flexible of mind and also so emotionally flexible and also intellectually or mentally flexible, that's going to be very important.

Because that's going to contribute to resilience, handling the change. And so that's the first thing. Let's first understand the change is the constant. And your ability to be flexible in the face of change is one of the most important things you want to hold on to. So, and we can think about that as beginning to adopt attitudes that will also make a difference. And so holding certain attitudes we can put in that mental toolkit or that mental health toolkit. And that one attitude would be that I'm going to be flexible and adaptive in the face of change.

And I'll welcome those periods of stability and routine with kind of grace and gratitude, if you will. That's the first thing. The second thing is that in order to deal with change or to deal with risk or to deal with whatever's happening from the standpoint of.

It'S not going the way I want is someone's ability to handle experiences, feeling experiences like disappointment or frustration or anger or sadness or embarrassment. Right. So. So that's part of that idea of. Okay, then the second thing is let's help you learn how to handle your emotions more effectively.

So that would. So that would be. And I talk about eight unpleasant feelings in the 90 seconds book that we've referenced. And, and so the. I've named several of them. And so the second big thing is let's help you handle how you. Let's help you learn how to experience and move through unpleasant feelings more effectively. That would be kind of the second step. The third step would have to do with communication.

And so from my standpoint.

And this is especially true with anger, that I consider anybody that escalates and so escalates in intensity, escalates in tone, in inflection, in volume, in. In meanness, you know, all the way to aggressiveness. Any escalation is doing a feeling, it's not expressing a feeling.

So, so the third thing for me would be teaching far more, you know, communication skills that are going to be far more effective in terms of what the individual is, how they are connecting with the people that they mentor or supervise. And fourth also has to do with this idea of risk taking. When you're entrepreneurial, it's all risk.

And what I have also found is, and what's interesting to me is that it's not about the risks that we take that people get, in my words, kind of fearful about.

It's when things don't turn out well, it's how we handle the feeling result or the under what I would call the unwanted or undesired feeling outcome.

Of whatever's taking place. So that brings us right back to the dealing with the unpleasant feelings. Because it's not the risk people are afraid of, it's the undesired feeling outcome that they fear.

And go ahead, appreciate that point because, you know, I was just thinking that the ability to handle change on the outside, the reason we put so much stock and teach so much about body intelligence is because the ability to handle change on the outside is so much related to your ability to feel and notice and register and speak to changes inside here.

Absolutely. Yes. Yes. We're very much in agreement. So. Yes. And I, I've been. Been to one of yours and Katie's workshop where, where there's also doing the things that have to do with bringing the body to a calmer state. So that's. That's great. We're in total agreement there. So, Mike, that's four of. That's at least four steps there for your entrepreneurial toolkit.

Yeah. A lot to think about. I'm curious.

Gay, when you listen to that, what's going through your head?

And how have you processed that same question in the past? Where are you on the same page? Where do you have additional tools or resources? I'm kind of curious how the two of you. Where your similarities are and where you have.

Additional resources.

Yes, well.

Just about everything that we do resonates very much from what I've heard from Joan so far and from what I know from the 92nd book. But I was thinking I had a memory come up as she was speaking of a consultation I did down at Dell back in the 90s. I. I did a lot more going around on site to companies in the 80s and 90s than I did there. There came a day where I said, oh, my God, I've got a million and something frequent flyer miles, but I missed my daughter's birthday. You know, one of those cognitive dissonance moments. And so I started cutting back. But back during the 90s, I used to plunk myself into Dell and other places, Motorola and other places, usually for two or three days at a time. And inevitably it would boil down to some missing piece of body intelligence, for example.

I think there are. Well, there are two or three things that are really essential in human communication. First of all is learning to speak honestly, saying, I'm scared if you're scared, or I'm angry or whatever it is, but learning how to speak the truth simply. A second thing is learning how to nimbly take responsibility, but not blameful responsibility or burdensome responsibility, but taking responsibility as a celebration of independence. And what I mean by that is there was this one moment in a consultation with Dell's number two guy who since passed on. He was in his 60s when I had this conversation with him. He suffered a lot from allergies and nasal problems. And he also was always having to apologize for anger outbursts. And he'd grown up in Brooklyn or someplace where, you know, people get more confronted or New York or someplace. And. But he was in Austin, Texas now, you know, and the Texans are real nice and everything. And so he would blow up at a employee, and then it would take three weeks to handle the fallout from that. But here's the missing piece of body intelligence, and it's just a metaphor for a whole bunch of other things like this. I showed him how his anger outbursts were really an ineffective way of dealing with sadness and disappointment. And it was a moment of, you know, kind of stunning awareness where he realized that, oh, yeah, what I really am is disappointed or sad. And I don't know how to communicate that. I've never known how to communicate that. The amazing thing is as soon as he learned how to communicate at that level, his allergies started clearing up too. And so I've noticed, and I think maybe you have too, Jonas, how, how intimately the body is and its illness mechanisms and its health mechan mechanisms are tied up with those fairly subtle body intelligence abilities inside.

100%. I'm totally aligned with everything just said. Okay. So, yeah, yeah. I, the, the oftentimes what I will, what I talk about is that people will do what I call transmute a feeling. So they turn, they turn one feeling into a different one. It's, it's really probably not that they're, that they're using a secondary reaction as, as the thing that they'll communicate. So here's the man that felt sad or disappointed. And the only thing he would do is then I would say talk about transmuting a feeling and then it becomes a default feeling. So the only thing he would then express is anger. And, and once, once he was able to express the truth.

The sadness and the disappointment, the, the, the way he was impacting others changed dramatically. And to your second point. Absolutely. You know, I, long time ago there were books about kind of the body is metaphor. And, and so the, this whole idea of how intertwined our physical well, well being is tied into our emotional and mental well being is, I mean it's, it, they're just, you know, linked so tightly together. So in terms of what you're responding to with the body intelligence, really amazing.

Too how that changes relationship. Like there was a moment early in my relationship with Katie. By the way, we're just celebrating our 43rd anniversary this month. Congratulations. Thank you. And, but early days in our relationship, we were in a habit of kind of criticizing each other. Both of us come from very critical families and so we would criticize and bicker and that kind of thing in the first year or so. And one day I had this moment of awareness which really changed our relationship. I was in the middle of criticizing her for something. Oh, I remember what it was. This was in the days before cell telephones. And so she was late getting home. She'd said she was going to be home at 7 o' clock and it was 8 o' clock or 8:15 or something. And when she got there, it turned out not only had she stopped for some groceries, but she'd been stopped by a cop and given a ticket for having an out of date. She still had her California plates on her car. And so.

But I was criticizing her for being late before I even asked her what happened. And as I did that, I realized, oh, wait a minute. I'm scared. I feel fear in my belly. I'm sounding irritated, angry, bickery. But what I'm actually feeling is scared. And I remember just standing there for a moment, and then I blurted out, I'm afraid you're going to leave me. And, you know, it just kind of came out of nowhere. But it was obviously something that had been cooking in me for a while and had come to the point where we needed to make some commitments to each other, you know, to either get closer or get separate. And so. But that was really huge because I realized how much of the time I transmuted, you know, But a lot of times it was based on turning everything into anger. That was really about sorrow or fear.

Yep, yep. Or vulnerability.

Vulnerability, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, I think that's so common, especially, Especially when we feel vulnerable, we feel helpless. And our. Many times, our response is to turn that right into something like anger and.

The other way around, too. A lot of people feel angry, but transmute it into sadness.

Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. I'm gonna add another. Another question to this. A scenario.

And it's something I've seen in myself. It's still an old cycle. I see it in a lot of the people I work with, and I, I, I call them trauma loops, but I don't know if that's really what they are. I don't know what the clinical name is, but. And I'll use a real practical one that I think any founder will resonate with any entrepreneur, and that is.

Have to generate revenue and get in a fear cycle of not having enough, running out, and feeling like a mule in their business. In other words, they're the cog that's focused on the results, and they're managing and maintaining the illusion of security for the business, for their employees, for their team members. Okay, so that's the cycle. And of course, the biggest fear is, holy cow, what if I ever miss a.

Payroll cycle or I can't pay my bills, or I've got a massive tax bill and I can't pay it and how painful that is. And again, this can be amplified. There's billionaires who can have this problem. It's not isolated to a single individual. But I know when I look at my own cycle in that, and I've observed it in others, is first of all it's sort of like, okay, what's wrong and why? In other words, am I to blame or is someone else to blame? Is there something to blame here? And then now we've got to fix this. And sometimes the founder doesn't know how to fix it, so they do their best and then they're like, well, now the problem is things weren't systemized, so that's someone else's problem. Or they don't follow instructions, they don't remember to do it. So then the Founder cycle is to turn inward and instead of asking for help or getting help because they've got their own self worth wrapped up in this.

Or shame associated with being unwilling to ask for help. And then this cycle keeps on perpetrating. And of course there are logical fixes for this, but I'd like you to just explain what's a healthy way to recognize and manage that and feel through it in a way that shifts the whole consciousness of the experience. And I know doozy's at you, but I like these practical, tactical ones.

No, no, no, I actually, I love that you're asking those kinds of questions, Mike. I think that's, I think that's great. So if I, if I dig again, if I dig into my own work, there's. I talk about emotional strength at the, in the very early part of the 90 seconds book. And, and I realized that I hadn't ever had anybody define what that meant. And, and so the, the, what I've come up with is, is two parts to it. One is this experience, this idea of someone feeling capable.

And the second idea is the idea of somebody being resourceful.

And that those two kind of act as a foundation of emotional strength. So what do I mean by being capable? Being capable has to do with being able to experience and move through the eight on at least the eight unpleasant feelings or difficult feelings I talk about so real briefly. There are sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, vulnerability, embarrassment, disappointment, and frustration. So at the minimum, I would want somebody to be able to experience and move through that in as comfortable a way as any one of us moves through difficult feelings, but that we face them, we don't walk away from them, because when we walk away from them, that's actually not emotional strength. That's where we actually are making, we're making an unmental health toolkit if we do that. So leaning into unpleasant or difficult feelings is actually a crucial element of the mental health toolkit. To the first, to that first kind of way you frame things. So the second part is actually Being resourceful has to do with.

If you will, kind of being willing to acknowledge the dependent side of our nature, meaning we have needs and limitations.

And so being able to talk about the needs and limitations that we're experiencing, you know, the. The need. The need for more money, the. The strain in whatever area, you know, of logistics that aren't coming through for the business, whatever it might be, that we're able to acknowledge those needs and limitations. And then the. The ultimate result of that is to being able to ask for help. So now asking for help is part of being emotionally strong. The. So two. Two other things that kind of go along with me around this one is if I were to start an entrepreneurial school, one of the first thing I would say is, you don't know. None of us succeeds alone.

And to get out of our heads that this is. And we've talked about kind of the Lone Ranger experience that many entrepreneurs go through. So it's starting with, again, a premise that we don't succeed alone. We succeed as a team. The other thing that. That I want to highlight here, and it's really interesting to me when.

When.

And I don't like using the military as an example, but. But it's for these purposes. The military represents an idea of strength, typically. But when. When the military, any branch of the military first goes into an area, the first thing that they're doing is they're assessing for their needs and limitations.

Where are their weak spots, and what do they do when they find the weak spots? They call in other resources. They go ask for help.

Right. So if ostensibly the most obvious symbol of strength actually starts with acknowledging needs and limitations and then secondarily asks for help, then from an entrepreneurial standpoint, that would be a crucial thing for entrepreneurs to learn.

On a comic note, I saw a meme on Instagram go by where it said the three hardest things for people to say are, I'm sorry, I need help, and Worcestershire sauce.

Well, we need to wind things up here, Mike. Yeah, this has been kind of interesting. We've still got a lot of material. We need to have Joan back again one of these days. How's that sound to you, Joan?

That sounds awesome. Okay, I would love that.

We've hardly gotten to second 52 yet.

I was thinking as we got started.

Imagining doing this, it's like, all right, I know the kind of questions Gay often asks because he gets into, you know, the deep thoughts. And then I wanted to do as many practical ones because I'm observing and listening to a lot of challenges. And because I've been speaking so much lately and listening to people describe, you know, as a, for example, they'll be like, oh, do you think AI can fix this challenge? And I'm like, God, really what you need is a really good therapist to start with because this is a mental health issue first and it's AI second.

But I, I really, yeah, I've really enjoyed this. So, so Joan, aside from we're going to send everyone a link to the book and I also wanted to share my Amazon stream here. This is.

90 seconds to a life you love by Joan Rosenberg and I have a link which you just go To Big Leap podcast.com 90Seconds you can get. There's a shortcut to it. But beyond that, is there any other thing that you would have an ask for? What? How could our audience best help you? Aside from get your book and study it and read it and follow you on your website? What else can be done to further your cause and further your work?

You know, one of the things that I've started to do, Mike, thank you for the question.

Is to do corporate wellness.

Because it allows me to be in front of more people at one time. So I'm doing a corporate wellness series. So if there's people that have any interest in me talking to groups, that would be certainly one major thing that would be super helpful. And you know, anytime there's a speaking opportunity and an opportunity to go well beyond a one to one, that's always of interest to me.

That's great. I know I'll speak because I've watched you speak as you're fantastically well loved speaker. Anytime you show up, people always feel like they've walked away with an enormous amount of value. And you're practical, you live in the real life. You can be theoretical as a professor and yet you're unbelievably compassionate and kind and you really do take the time to listen and contemplate and it's really clear, you know, how to hold the audience, whether it's 10 or thousands. So I love that about you. I appreciate you.

Thank you. Totally appreciate Gay.

Any final words before we wrap this up for. For Joan?

Oh, I'm really enjoying these excursions we're making into different ways of learning about ourselves and adjusting the attitudes and adjusting the.

Tools and so that you can both affect the inner change and the outer change at the same time. So I'm going to go back and somewhere on my shelf I've got the 92nd rule here. I'm going to go back and take another look at that.

That's great. Thank you, Kay.

Fantastic. Well, I'll officially bring this one to a close. Once again, the place to get a copy of Joan's book, 90 Seconds to a Life youe Love, how to master your difficult feelings, Cultivate lasting confidence, resilience and authenticity. You can go to bigleappodcast.com 90seconds. Also follow Joan@drjoanrosenberg.com that's a B E R G. And also follow her on LinkedIn. All that information is in the show notes and in the description copy of this YouTube video. So, Joan, love you so much. Thanks for taking time. Gay. It's so great to have your energy here again. And let's wrap this up.

Okay, thanks so much. See you.