Creative on Purpose Live - Nancy van den Berg Cook

Lights and boom, just like that, ladies and gentlemen, we're back here at Creative on Purpose Live. Thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to Creative on Purpose Live, insightful conversations with inspiring difference makers to help you live your legacy. I'm your host, Scott Perry, Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose. If you're ready to step into possibility and the difference only you can make, visit creativeonpurpose.com. You'll find insight and inspiration for better living while making a bigger difference. And if you sign up for the 3 30-second mind shifts, You'll get additional goodness delivered to your inbox every week. Let's meet today's guest, Nancy Cook. Welcome to the broadcast. Please tell our viewers who you are, what you're up to these days, and where can people go to learn more about you and the difference you're making.

Hi, Scott. I'm happy to be here. Um, yeah, I'm a clinical psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst, uh, now for about 25 years, but I'm, um, And before that, I was a research scientist. And before that, I was a fashion model. But my new, uh, confirmation is going to be working on the problem of empathy, but not empathy as everybody needs more empathy and compassion, but empathy as, uh, oh my God, my empathy is killing me because I'm just so overloaded with everybody else and all their problems. But Um, so, um, you can reach me at my website that's listed there, and then you can also reach me on Facebook. I have a group called Empathy Revolution, uh, setting healthy boundaries with heart.

Awesome. Uh, and Nancy and I were, uh, able to collide with each other through a program called the Conscious Launch Accelerator, and it's a program put out by Conscious Marketing. Richard Tobager is an upcoming guest on the show. Some of you may remember my interview with Kylie Slavik. She was also a part of that, that adventure as well. And Nancy, I'm just, one of the reasons why I was so interested in having you on is that just very, very recently, I collided with the work of James Hollis, who is also a Jungian analyst. And I was really, I was so fascinated with his work that I literally have read everything he's published in just about a month. Um, and then you introduced me to, uh, um, is it Murray Stein? Mm-hmm. And I just, I'm about just a, a few chapters away from completing one of his most recent book. Um, so for, for my guess is 9-year-old Nancy Cook didn't wake up one morning and say, I want to be a fashion model or a Jungian analyst or anything else. So I'm just curious if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit. Of your origin story. How did you come into the work that you're doing now?

Well, yeah, it's a bit of a long story, but I was in— living in Phoenix. I was discovered by my art teacher, who was a very cool, hip young woman in the '60s, and she had a friend who was a fashion model, connected me with her. Long story short, I ended up going to New York for a competition, and then eventually I ended up going to New York City to work for Ford Model Agency at the age of 16. This is typical for me. I think, oh, let's just do this, you know, and then later I'm thinking, oh my gosh. So, um, and that was amazing because I got to go to Europe, I got to see the world, but I started also discovering things about myself, as one does when you're 16. And that is that if I was at a modeling shoot and everybody was happy and there was a good atmosphere, then it could go really well. And meanwhile, you have a camera in your face, right? So, uh, but if people were there that— people I cared about or anybody who was in a really bad mood, I would— I didn't even know it. I was picking up the vibes. And then later I'd get the magazine that came out as a, as a foot photographic model, Seventeen magazine, Brides magazine. I'd get the magazine that came out and I'd see myself looking really sad or stressed. And so anyway, that's fine, we worked around that. And I started getting very bored and very depressed being 16 and 17, 18 in the world on my own. And, um, my sister-in-law started talking to me like, well, what do you really want to do next? And I was already had decided I'm leaving this, I don't want to do this anymore. What I was going to do, I have no idea. I was never that child in the family that everybody says, oh yes, he's gonna be brilliant, you know, and he's going to have this career. It was like, no, youngest of 4, a girl, no clue. But my sister-in-law was— is very astute and lovely, and she just started asking me, what, what did you like when you were in high school for the 3 years I was there? Because I left high school. And then I said, well, I really liked, uh, I liked my biology course, and my teacher liked me for some reason. I can't figure out why, but my teacher was awesome and he liked me. Well, that was the very beginning of me starting to go back to get my high school education test, going back to community college, getting into chemistry really quickly, and realizing I love this. There was a dual surprise of like, oh, I, I can do this? Question mark. Yes, I love this. Yes. So with a lot of struggle and took a lot of time and working and not completely on my own, I made my way eventually into the University of Michigan where I got my Bachelor of Science degree in nutrition. And then I was really completely in love with nutrition and metabolism, and I continued to go and move to Berkeley, California. I moved there not to— for the, for the university there, although it's a very big, great university, but I was in love with somebody, and California compared to Michigan was amazing. So, and then a long story short, again with really hard work but just being really in love with the subject, I ended up getting my PhD degree. However, by the time, you know, so that's, you know, you work on the degree for 5 years maybe, and you're doing research the whole time. I started realizing that this was kind of exhausting me, not the parts of it that I love, but what you actually do. So, and I started working in the metabolic nutrition lab at Children's Hospital in Oakland. You end up doing budgeting, you know, you end up doing a lot of physical tasks that are really boring. I— and, and there's always pressure to publish. Anyway, I was getting really disillusioned. That, that could— it's the thing that we all need to realize as we go through life. We think this is fabulous, and then when you really learn what you're doing every day and what it— you know, and maybe you change yourself, then you can kind of rethink things. All this time I'd been interested in Jung. I'm sorry, this is a long story, Scott Perry. All this time I was interested in Jung from a really young age through my older brother and had been reading Jung and was excited very much about things like psychological types. And long story short, I quit my job. I quit working in research when my son was born. And then in about 2 years, I had another brainstorm that I was going to become a Jungian analyst, which was again this thing of, you, you know, Jungian analysts are people who are really, you know, brilliant and, uh, you know, special and dedicated. And, and I know I can be dedicated, but I didn't think I really had the intelligence for it. But I saw a film by Marie-Louise von Franz where she was interpreting people's dreams. She was just given a dream straight out without knowing anything about the person. And, you know, the brilliant person that she is and practical person, she could say a few words not knowing the person that would really impact the daily life of the person who had the dream, that would be really helpful in a practical way. And then I— after that film, it was clear, okay, I'm going to be an analyst, not because I'm a brilliant Jung scholar or a philosopher or anything else. I'm a clinician. I want to help people, and I know that dreams help people. Um, so that was another long story. You know, it took me— that was 1989, and I finally got my, um, certification as Jungian analyst in 2004. So, but again, just really crazy about the topic, always more to learn, really fascinating things. Ways to really, you know, help people transform and become more themselves. And then that was 25 years ago. So I've been— and I also got a PhD in a PsyD, um, psych— Doctor of Psychology, excuse me, in psychology. And I've just devoted myself for 25 years to working with people.

Love it. Um, so Young is one of the practitioners of what's called depth psychology. And maybe, um, just for, for viewers that, like me, have not really got a— you know, I think Carl Jung is a name many people recognize, but not many people are familiar with what makes his approach different from his contemporary Freud, or for, from the things that, you know, we see practiced now, like positive psychology or cognitive emotional behavior therapy and things like that. So what's the— what do you think, um, is the defining element of Jung's work that, that resonates with you and, and makes it distinct and powerful from the other ways that people can, can pursue therapy?

Yes, well, that— there are several things, but we don't have time for that. But, um, one thing that's always spoken to me is that he was a physician and he knew everything about physiology, and he treated our psyche— whatever this is, we don't know what it is, it's just not— it's just the whole of ourselves, our body and our mind. It functions to keep us healthy, just like our body does, by regulating itself, balancing itself. And that whole concept of that, our psyche and our psychology is like an organism that is trying to heal itself, is behind all of the work that he did and what I do. You know, I'm not going to fix people, their psyche is going to do it, but they need, you know, support. So that was one thing, and because that really made sense to me, and I still use my knowledge in, um, physiology, and I follow like the neuroscience trends and things. But the other part of it that's very powerful is that he was really the psychologist for adult life. He was about adult life, what happens when people in their adult life reach a point where they're depressed, unhappy, they can't go forward, and they need to really transition and transform. So that whole notion— I mean, Joseph Campbell later kind of elaborated on it, and Jung is the founder of depth psychology actually. And, um, uh, that, um, I got so much into Jung as the founder that I lost my track.

I think that's, that, you know, I just to, to shed a little bit more, I mean, what's really interesting to me is, um, the approach that is, uh, you know, with all the various facets of our personality and our attitudes and our behaviors and, um, just the, the invitation to bring to consciousness the things that are so often unconscious or subconscious as, as a healing mechanism and a way not just to heal yourself from the inside out, but also to form better relationships, you know, with other people as well. It's been really fascinating to read more about it. So I just thought that our viewers might like a little bit of information about, about that. I am very interested in your current endeavor, Empathy Revolution. Empathy is, empathy and compassion are two topics that we talk about a lot at Creative On Purpose and in the work that we do there. I would love to I'm always curious about other people's kind of definition of terms here. And so what, what do, how do you think about what empathy is?

Yes. So it really wouldn't be the normal definition that people use every day of empathy. It is not about having compassion or it's not something we can develop or that we need to develop. Every single person has a perceiving capacity. Their brain is picking up other people's emotions. So some, of course, some are more sensitive than others. And, but what I have found, you know, doing work with people and then also following the neuroscience, I began to realize that this empathy function is kind of, you know, if it tends to be on overdrive actually for a lot of people, people that are naturally sensitive, people in a dangerous or uncomfortable situation, you can imagine every different situation where somebody needs to be alert and figure out what other people's emotions are. We're not doing it by choice, it just happens, but it gets kind of on this, turned up really high, and then people are kind of overwhelmed by it. So you might think of somebody, you know, a younger, let's say a woman who has to meet the president of the company, and it's going to be a very quick meeting, no problem, but the president of the company is very kind of cold and then even makes a frown while they're talking. Well, her empathy neurons are going berserk. It's like, he's frowning, what's going on? And then— and it's not that she's thinking it, she's actually— that's the other part of it. Our empathy goes through our brain, but that means our brain mirrors what the other person is feeling. And when our brain mirrors it and feels it. Of course, it goes into our body as well. So that's why, you know, you can get tears or you can laugh at somebody you don't even know. So what I found with people is that, uh, it just becomes really overwhelming. We don't know how to manage it. Nobody even says it even exists, you know. So, you know, when I was 2, you know, 4 years old and picking up people's moods and feeling worried or bad about myself because I felt something wrong going on, nobody said to me, Oh, Nancy, um, you really have a good empathy function. You, you were reading that person really well. They have mixed emotions right now, and you're picking up the negative emotions. And, and so, Nancy, but you need to learn how to manage that, because otherwise you're going to be running through your own system everybody else's emotions all the time. And when we have a lot of other people's emotions in our system, in our mind, we can't focus on ourselves. It's not to be selfish, but in fact it's less selfish if we can stay grounded when we're with people instead of being sort of swept away. So this is such an important theme, and I'm just— and I've developed ways to work with it, to kind of again become aware of what's going on in our body, to manage it, to get, you know, get a grip on it. Also this sense of like you say, learning who we are deep inside so that we can get a more centered sense of self, so that our empathy doesn't have to be on high alert to protect us. We, we feel more grounded and we feel safer than we learn how to use it. So that's about it.

No, that's fantastic. Um, just a question that came up for me as you were speaking, because what my, my journey with empathy as a concept really came pretty late in life. And it was really at the core of some of the teaching that I was engaged in through Seth Godin's Alt MBA and then the marketing seminar. And then I became, you know, a head coach in some of his programs. And my first conversations around empathy were with my wife because I couldn't, like, I didn't get it. And so, what is that?

Yeah.

Yeah. We, so we had conversa, you know, we take a walk together most days and we, for a year, we were just talking about empathy and we were reading about it and sharing what we were learning and saying, oh, that doesn't quite sound right. But, you know, that's close. The thing that, you know, I kind of, one of the things that I arrived at that I would love your reflections on is Um, you know, the importance of distinguishing, for me at least, between empathy and compassion. Empathy is our ability to see, hear, and understand someone else's experience and situation. Um, but compa— like, there's an effort to empathy, which can be very exhausting, as you're pointing out. It takes a lot of emotional labor to put yourself in someone else's shoes and really, um, understand their experience.

That's not really what I'm talking about, because it happens without you wanting it. Too.

Fair enough.

It's a perceiving function, so you're getting it. But anyway, you were exactly— I agree 100%. It takes a lot of energy to try to be really compassionate and stay open and understand people when you're either whatever, nervous, you know, overwhelmed with their anger, whatever. Yeah, so I didn't—

well, go ahead. The next— the thing that I was getting to is the teasing apart You know, what I see very often is people putting compassion and empathy together.

Yes, exactly.

And they're really, I think, two different things. There's the effort of empathy can lead to the action of compassion. And so it's one thing to be able to see, hear, and understand, and, and to be drawn into someone else's experience, as you're saying. It's another to decide to take the next step to, you know, try to actively help someone. But the most important thing to me about both, both these concepts is that most people that I talk to think of themselves as highly empathetic and compassionate human beings. But when I ask them about the conversation that they're having with themselves about themselves, there's not a lot of empathy and compassion being practiced internally. And so what I, what we talk about at Creative On Purpose is how do we practice these things from the inside out? How do we take care of our primary asset, which is ourselves, our wellbeing, our capacity, so that we can be of more fuller and beneficial service to others. And I wonder if you had any kind of ideas around how people can do that.

Well, yes. And that's exactly really why I'm interested in helping people with this from my way of seeing it, because What happens if we really are tuned into other people, automatically, um, carried away by other people? We end up doing what other people need, you know. We're just picking it up. They're gonna feel unhappy if we say no, so we just are trying to avoid saying no. Um, and that's just an example, but it's very decentering, you know. It's like we're running the other person through our body and we can't really stay very grounded in ourselves. Um, and we— if we can't stay grounded in ourselves, then we can't think clearly, we can't focus, we can't make really clear decisions, you know. We can't even be loving when we want to because we're so fed up with that person's emotions, or, you know, the child tugging on me, and I don't know how to just turn it off a little while. So if, you know, being kind of drawn, um, unwanted and overwhelmed by other people really ends up with us really not liking ourselves— most of us don't really like ourselves very well. It is— it's work, you know. And I think that's what exactly what you're doing. It's work to get out of a kind of automatic loop of whatever you know, I'm not doing it right, I'm a failure. But certainly if we can't have boundaries where we feel clear about what we want— we can't even feel clear about what we want if we don't like ourselves and we're— we can't focus because of everybody else's energy.

Yeah.

And also we don't get, you know, it's zapping our energy too, to the people that that I'm speaking about that really have a lot of problems, I really say that's empathy burnout. We've been having this, of course, with the pandemic, and I work with clients who tell me, you know, I just, I'm just so exhausted and so burnt out just from being in the same house with my family. I can't disconnect my, you know, these little connections in my brain to those people and what they're feeling and doing. So, um, yeah. So it's exhausting, and then it goes against the work we need to do of self, um, self-discovery, like you say, and, and self, um, self-love. But love only comes through really knowing ourselves and our true selves, I think.

Absolutely. Well, in, in the, the few minutes that we have left, I, I have two, two kind of final questions. One is, I would love for you, if you can provide just one insight into the process that you do to help people with this, you know, empathy, um, situation, or if, um, or just an additional insight about a starting place for how they might cultivate, um, a healthier relationship with empathy that will promote their wellbeing, um, and, and energy level in it as they still seek to help others.

Yes. And the, the key is that's why we're doing this so we can help others openly. But yeah. I think when I work with people, it's always a beginning of just trying to become aware what's happening in the moment. So let's say revisiting the meeting with the new CEO and just trying to think physically what was going on with me, what happened to me when he frowned, you know, what was going on in my thoughts, why was that uncentering? So there's an element of just learning physically what happens with us when we automatically register other people's emotions. And then the other part of it is, um, the getting to know ourselves better so that we can, um, begin to feel more stable and trust ourselves. Obviously, one of the keys is being able to sort of center and stay calm in myself. Well, there are many beautiful practices for that, of all kinds of meditation and spiritual practices and great coaches like you. So that will all help, but the, the, the key is then to use whatever method you can to be aware what's going on, and then, um, you know, focusing in on yourself and with breathing or whatever so that you can stay centered, so you can just say, I really love you, but the answer is no, instead of, okay, well, if you really want me to, and then later hating that person.

Well, I love that you brought up the boundaries. I think that's so important. And what I just was hearing in what you were saying is, you know, number one, you have to become aware that, you know, that there's something that needs paying attention to. And then I love, um, your call to, to be present with what is happening. And, um, you also brought up the idea of trusting ourselves. And one of my favorite quotes of all time is Goethe's quote, "As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live." And I think those, all those things are so vital. And I really appreciate the work that you're doing to help people around this area. And the folks that are tuning into this broadcast are people that would like to, you know, aspire to or want to advance in the difference only they can make. And as someone that's making a significant difference in the world and has, you know, put in a lot of emotional and sweat equity into, you know, building a thriving enterprise that seeks to help others, If, if there is just one final, um, encouragement, a tip, a quote, a maxim, an exercise that you would share with people who, like you, would like to fly a little bit higher in the difference only they can make, what would, what would you tell them?

Well, there are two pieces to it. One piece is really take the time, you know, psychological types, other types of tests to really get to know who you are, what your talents are. Nobody else is telling us. So there's a sense of settling in and learning more about who we are, and then trusting that when we find something that we love, our energy is just going to flow into the world. That energy is dying to get into the world, and if we can't find a way to get it out, it kind of turns on us. So it's, it's double— it's really going with You know, what's right for you? And that takes some work. And then from there, you know, the energy will come. That's my thing that I'm always telling people. It will come. Really? No, it'll never come. Yes, it will come. And then you'll go forward, you know? Yeah.

I love that. I, I'm hearing a call to trust ourselves and also trust the process or trust the cosmos.

Exactly.

It would love to conspire in our favor. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Nancy. Um, and We appreciate everyone that's tuning in. Nancy and I appreciate you lending us some of your valuable time and attention. We hope today's broadcast motivates you to take a bolder step into possibility and living your legacy. We— you can learn more about Nancy and the fantastic work she's doing at flowcouncil.nl. That stands for Netherlands, for those of you that, like me, were not sure. And of course, it's great to see you at Creative on Purpose anytime. If you're listening to this pod— as a podcast, please consider leaving a 5-star review. It helps more of the right people collide with the work that the guests are doing. Now take this insight and inspiration from this conversation and fly a little bit higher in the difference only you can make. Nancy Cook, thank you so much for giving us some of your time, attention, and wisdom today.

You're very welcome. Thank you for having me here. It's great.