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Jan. 24, 2025

#80 Chantel Prat: The Neuroscience of You

#80 Chantel Prat: The Neuroscience of You

My guest for this episode is Chantel Prat. If her name is not already familiar to you, she is the author of the book The Neuroscience of You. What got me really excited about having her on the podcast was her willingness to play with ideas about learning from two sides of the coin: the science of it in her academic world and the experience of it in my world as a lay person. 

 

We met in 2023 at the Journey on Podcast Summit where we were fellow presenters. In the last year, I’ve been putting together some pieces about learning how to stay present under pressure – even when the body starts saying “danger, danger.” Some if what I’m experiencing flies in the face of the typical coaching around managing stress. It’s made me curious about how the neuroscience of it works. So at the 2024 Podcast Summit, I spontaneously asked Chantel to help me make sense of it and she agreed. After our first conversation, we said “We’ve got to do a podcast.” So that’s the backstory.

 

As you will hear, this episode is all about learning. In our conversation, we truly geeked out together about how we humans learn, grow and change. Chantel asks two very relevant questions about what happens when we start getting the physical signals of stress: What is the feeling for? And what is the story for? 

 

What most impresses me about Chantel is that she models what she teaches. She is truly a learner, which is what makes her a great teacher. 

 

We had many quotable moments in this episode. Perhaps my favorite was when she said: “The feeling is the fuel that catalyzes change.” If you follow any of my blog posts or social media pages, you will recognize that I couldn’t agree more!

 

Now here’s a little more about Chantel:

 

Chantel Prat, author of The Neuroscience of You, is a Professor at the University of Washington with appointments in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. Her interdisciplinary research investigates how variable brain designs combine with our lifetime of experiences to shape the unique way each person learns, understands the world and operates in it. She is the recipient of a Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute of Health, speaks internationally at events like the World Science Festival, and has appeared in a number of media outlets including PBS, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, Popular Mechanics, and Travel + Leisure.

 

I hope you enjoy this episode of The Creative Spirits Unleashed podcast. Please be sure to share it with anyone you think would enjoy it!

Transcript
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00:00:02.879 --> 00:00:14.400
Lynn, Welcome to Creative spirits unleashed, where we talk about the dilemmas of balancing work and life. And now here's your host. Lynn Carnes,

00:00:19.670 --> 00:01:21.500
welcome to the creative spirits unleash Podcast. I'm Lynn Carnes, your host. My guest for this episode is Chantal Prat. If her name is not already familiar to you, she's the author of the book The Neuroscience of You. So what got me excited about having her on the podcast was her willingness to play with ideas about learning from two different sides. On one side, the science of it from her academic world, and on the other side, the experience of it in my world as a lay person, we met in 2023 at the journey on podcast summit where we were both fellow presenters. And in the last year, I've been putting together even more pieces about learning on how to stay present under pressure, even when the body starts saying, danger, danger, some might be completing that sentence. Danger Will Robinson if you're old enough. Anyway, some of what I'm experiencing flies in the face of the typical coaching around managing stress.

00:01:17.540 --> 00:01:32.450
It's made me curious about how the neuroscience of it works. So at the 2024 podcast summit the next year, I spontaneously asked her to help me make sense of it, and she agreed just to spontaneously, thank goodness.

00:01:33.079 --> 00:01:48.500
After our first conversation, we said, well, we've got to do a podcast. So that's the back story of how this podcast came to be. Now, as you will hear, this episode is all about learning. So in our conversation, we really geeked out, I mean, together about how humans learn, grow and change.

00:01:48.890 --> 00:02:19.250
So in that, Chantelle asked two very relevant questions, these questions that I love about what happens when we start getting the physical signals of stress, that feeling of discomfort. And she says, What is the feeling for and what is the story for boy? Are those empowering questions. So what most impresses me, though about Chantelle is how she models what she teaches. She is truly a learner, and that's what makes her a great teacher. So there were several quotable moments.

00:02:19.250 --> 00:02:38.750
I'm going to go ahead and share one with you right now. Perhaps my favorite was when she said, the feeling is the fuel that catalyzes change. Now, if you follow any of my blog posts, social media, all that stuff, you're going to recognize that I could not agree more. So now let me tell you a little bit more about Chantal, and then we'll get you to the podcast.

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Chantelle Pratt, author of the neuroscience of you is a professor at the University of Washington with appointments in psychology, neuroscience and linguistics and at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

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Her interdisciplinary research investigates how variable brain designs combine with our lifetime of experiences to shape the unique way each person learns understands the world and operates in it. She is the recipient of a Pathway to Independence award from the National Institute of Health.

00:03:06.830 --> 00:03:41.990
Speaks internationally at events like the World Science Festival, and has appeared in a number of media outlets, including PBS, Scientific American Rolling Stone, Popular Mechanics and travel and leisure. I hope you enjoy this episode of the creative spirits unleash podcast, and as always, be sure to share it. If you think it's something that you have a friend or colleague that would find it useful and it also helps when you rate it, it helps other people find the podcast. I so appreciate your you, my listeners for following me on this podcast. Please enjoy this episode with Chantelle Pratt.

00:03:43.060 --> 00:04:21.920
Chantelle Pratt, welcome to the creative spirits unleash podcast. Thank you so much for having me so happy to be here. I have been looking forward to this conversation since I spontaneously ask you to just give me some from a scientific basis, neurologic or neuroscientist coaching around my lay person experience of working with learning and learning under pressure in my nervous system, and we had a preliminary conversation. First of all, you immediately agreed, which I thought was incredibly gracious.

00:04:23.360 --> 00:04:39.019
And second, I really appreciated our first conversation. So as we kick off, a lot of my listeners know I never really know the question I'm going to ask at the beginning until it appears at this very moment.

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And writing so you don't know what it's going to be. We don't prepare like that. But you did say something as we were speaking, before we got on around the distinction between feelings and emotions, and you said it at a time where it's actually been a.

00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:19.920
Something that I have been really playing with the landscape of myself. So what is I have sort of started coming to my own conclusions, but I think that they're constantly moving conclusions. Where are you with that distinction right now?

00:05:21.240 --> 00:06:04.079
Well, first, let me say, of course, I would agree to have a conversation with you, and that I think one of the things that we have in common, I hope I'm not making too many assumptions, but I think we both really see ourselves as lifetime learners, as people who are like passionate you just said, this is where I'm at right now on this idea that, in and of itself, you just so casually said, this is where I'm at right now, but in that is so much knowledge about ourselves as dynamic beings, right? And, and, and I think that I just want to acknowledge that once we make up our mind about a thing, we close the door to taking in new information and learning, right?

00:06:04.079 --> 00:07:17.519
And I just think that that's a connection that you and I really shares, a lot of openness, a lot of understanding of ourselves as dynamic beings and as our of our understanding of these complicated things, humans, these complicated people in lives that we have as dynamic and we change, and we take in new information and we change our minds. So that's really cool. And I you know you and I talked, have talked previously about this work around learning to be comfortable under pressure and and learning through both sort of a cognitive or an understanding space and through an experiential or feeling space to expand your capacity under pressure, which I think is fascinating. So now I'm going to actually answer the question about the difference between feelings and emotions from my perspective, and give you maybe a little bit of scientific background on on like a study that I think exemplifies this really well. So I will first say that I am a cognitive neuroscientist, so all of my boots on the ground research is about how we understand things.

00:07:13.620 --> 00:08:33.860
It's about meaning making and not about feelings. But it's fascinating, because there's no space in which our feelings don't affect our emotions don't affect the way we make sense of things like only in the books do we set are we able to separate out thinking and feeling. I mean, it's all mushed together in this massively Amazing Brain that we have. But that being said, I do think a lot and read a lot about feelings and emotions, and so what I would say is that feeling is the way we take in information from our bodies, right? So we might feel heart, our hearts racing, we might feel elevated arousal. We might feel heat. We might feel, you know, so eat hungry, a feeling is is a the way that our brains detect signals from the body, and an emotion is the way we describe, Understand, label, experience that feeling in the previous context of what we've learned, how we've learned to name our feelings in the context of, importantly, storytelling the So, so an emotion is like a feeling plus cognition, right?

00:08:33.860 --> 00:08:52.299
So my favorite example of this is a study that was done probably, I wish I would have actually brought you the study, but it was probably 70s 80s, as an old study that was looking at what we called the chameleon effect, or how we catch one another's feelings or emotions.

00:08:47.320 --> 00:09:38.179
And in this study, what they did was they told participants that they were getting a vitamin B shot the signing up for a study on the effects of vitamin B, but actually what they got was epinephrine. So that creates a feeling that you don't know how to explain, right? It creates the feeling of this elevated body response, elevated arousal, without an explanation. And what these scientists found was that if you put a person after giving them the vitamin B shot that was epinephrine, in a room with another happy person, and then later, you know, you ask them how they're feeling, they would say, I'm excited, I'm happy. And if you put them in the room with an angry person or an anxious person, they would report they'd be more likely to report those feelings, those emotions,

00:09:38.480 --> 00:09:41.679
so angry, they would say they were angry. Yes, yes. So that.

00:09:41.679 --> 00:10:43.000
So the way that people talk about that study is is to talk about how feelings are contagious, or how emotions I keep using feelings and emotions simultaneously, but how we catch each other, one another's emotions. But another way to think about that, I think, in the context of what you do, and what I'm interested in, is we have a feeling, and it's. Our instinct to interpret that feeling, to label it, and then to decide what to do according to how we have interpreted that feeling, that emotion. And in this case, if you a part of that storytelling is looking around you and seeing how other people are behaving, right? So that that's that study is used to talk about the contagion of emotions. But we might just as well as say we have a feeling, and then we look for a way of explaining that feeling. And the emotion is kind of the result of the feeling in our body and the way our brains have interpreted the why, the why? Story behind that yeah,

00:10:43.299 --> 00:10:46.899
which I have found is essential for people to like.

00:10:46.899 --> 00:10:56.679
Our brains will not, not ask for why like that story, that story comes so close to the sensation is to almost be inseparable, correct, yeah

00:10:56.679 --> 00:11:40.600
and yeah. And I think a power, an empowering piece of knowledge is for people to understand that this is an interpretation, you know, the body, that you have a body, and that you are labeling this, this experience, but that it is an interpretation, and that there's a lot of physiology. Even at the neural level, you know, people will say, Oh, the amygdala is a fight flight. But at the even at the neural level, if you look at what somebody reports feeling and what the signal is, there's a lot of ambiguity. There's a lot of fuzziness in terms of, like, what's happening in the brain, what's happening in the body, and how you're reporting that experience, how you're labeling it.

00:11:40.600 --> 00:12:14.159
There is no question I have. I tell the story. And I think it was my second book, The elegant pivot of, you know, I'm a tournament water skier, and I was driving to ski, not for a tournament, but, you know, on the course in the middle of winter in Florida, one night, I was on my way down to the ski site, and I happened to hear about a study about how people labeled their sensation. And the study was, and you probably know the study better than I do, but it was, I think, ambush karaoke.

00:12:14.700 --> 00:12:26.899
So they divided people into three groups to do ambush karaoke. And the first group, they said, You're gonna, you know, feel some stuff, and, you know, we understand the nerves.

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And they said that's nervousness. The second group, they said, be calm, no matter what. Just calm yourself down.

00:12:33.740 --> 00:12:57.399
And the third group said, You're gonna feel some stuff, but it's excitement. And then they measured how they did with some kind of device that tells you how close to the notes and stuff like that, like shakiness of the voice and accuracy of the notes, I think, or whatever? Well, you probably can, especially given your background already know who did the best. By far were the people who said they were

00:12:57.639 --> 00:13:00.779
excited and is the worst calm, the one they told them,

00:13:00.779 --> 00:13:05.279
because ma'am by far. And what was interesting is you can't just

00:13:05.940 --> 00:13:09.299
you can't don't feel your feelings. Don't feel your feelings, don't

00:13:09.299 --> 00:14:10.080
feel the and I've been playing with the word agitation a lot. You know, I like the word froth. Froth and agitation go together. But if you don't, if you don't feel it, what you're actually telling your body is, it's even worse than you thought. It was, shut down. Shut down. Yeah, in my body, that's what happened. So I had all of a sudden, like, had this epiphany that the ski tournament that I'd been at in the fall, where I had done the worst I'd done, was because my brain went into the space while I was standing on the dock. Of you are a coach, this should not make you excited, you or this should not make you nervous. You should be calm. So I fell into the calm bucket or the calm story, and it was by far the worst I'd ever performed skiing. So the next morning, I remembered this little it was probably a PBS story or whatever I listened to on the radio on the way down, and I was standing on the dog, and I felt my heart start to pound, and I'm about to drop in.

00:14:10.080 --> 00:14:23.899
And any water skier will tell you, if you haven't skied for it's very intense sport. If you haven't skied for a few weeks or even a few months, you kind of go, can I even still get up? I don't know. So there's a lot of nerves, even if there's no no no. People around, and the driver goes, how you feeling?

00:14:23.899 --> 00:14:50.379
And I said, I'm so nervous. And I said, Wait a minute, I'm excited. Yeah. And I ran that pass off the dock, which is not that normal for for me. Anyway, a lot of people can do that, but I ran, I skied so well, and I've remembered that ever since, because the what I kind of realized is the feeling, is the feeling, the the empowerment for me is the story I tell about the feeling.

00:14:52.000 --> 00:15:11.279
Yeah, there's a lot there. And then I would also say that, like, calm is so what many people know, there's this phenomenon called the. York sees Dodson law, which is about arousal and performance. And actually, you know, calm is not the perfect performance state.

00:15:07.320 --> 00:16:08.159
It like if one could totally there's one thing which is like trying to ignore your feelings, which usually makes them amplified. And there's another thing which is being able to regulate your nervous system, which is good, but there are a lot of opportunity, a lot of things, whether you're public, you know, giving a public speech, or water skiing or whatever, in which you want a decent amount of arousal, because that actually energizes your body and your brain and improves performance, right? So there's this kind of, it's a U shape where, like, complete non arousal, depression, or whatever, is not your best performance. And then if you're completely over in the red zone, and you can't think and you're choking under pressure, you know you're not going to do your best performance. So that, like, you know the and I think that that's where the opportunity for your physiology and your story to resonate with one another becomes very important, right?

00:16:05.220 --> 00:16:12.899
Because that you said, and I can't remember if this was when we were just, I can't remember this is probably at the beginning of this conversation.

00:16:12.899 --> 00:17:22.220
Live use I was like, Was this before or now? But you know, you talked about how intimately intertwined our experiences. The story is, is such a integral part of our experience that it's hard to say, Oh, this is just, this is a layer that I'm adding to the feeling and and in fact, the the story and the feeling will influence one another, right? Like the the story is not devoid from the feeling, oh, and it can change the feeling, but it can change the feeling, right? So if you and I've done this, because there, you know, there are places in my life where I have anxiety, like many people, I hate driving on bridges, like slightly claustrophobic, and I can sometimes feel myself like I'm going to go over a bridge. I can feel my palms start to get sweaty, and all I have to say is, like, okay, like, this is, you know, I'm freaking out because I'm driving over a bridge. Like, this is okay, this is just about, literally, I have no reason to take a hard right and go off the edge of this bridge. Like, I can just keep going forward, but you can, you can, you can also spiral like, Oh God, I'm freaking out, you know,

00:17:23.239 --> 00:17:25.759
yeah, but what if we did turn

00:17:25.759 --> 00:17:31.759
right? Yeah. And it wants to plan for that, because we like to have control, right?

00:17:29.058 --> 00:17:56.739
It wants to play that out for me and like, Thank you. We've already played that out. Like, it doesn't end well. Thank you for playing that out for me. In fact, I will not make a hard ride over the edge of this bridge, because I I'm fairly sure it won't end well, but you can sort of do these anxiety spirals. And I think the interesting thing for me is the way that my, my first horse, who was an off the track thoroughbred, taught me this.

00:17:56.798 --> 00:18:30.858
She taught me this by being this incredibly, you know, 1200 pounds, 16 two hot, athletic Ferrari horse that was completely reciprocating my energy, right? And so it's like, when you don't know that you're adding, you know, when we add story and it affects our physiology, the horse is like, Oh crap, we're dying, right? And so, like, when she would get a little bit hot, and I would start to get tight in my legs, tighten my hands, she would be like, Oh crap, I was right.

00:18:30.858 --> 00:18:34.638
Something is going to eat us.

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And so, like, I experienced that feeling, story, feeling escalation with a 1200 pound rocket between my legs. And that was, that was a wonderful mirror to learn. Like, okay, I am actually screwing this up. Like I am, I am totally, you know, I am here to, you know, partner with this amazing creature. And like, I'm completely screwing this up. But we can do it. We do it all the time. I think to ourselves. And it's only when I had this opportunity, this very embodied other, that I was so clearly sort of vibing with or influencing that I could see the way the anxiety story, yeah, makes it worse, makes the experience worse. Like I'm she's maybe alert, maybe excited, maybe afraid, but my fear of her fear, and my response to that was sending us both down this spiral,

00:19:32.839 --> 00:20:33.500
yes, and it's not just with horses, it's the story we tell about other people's intentions, right, right? And how many times have I watched something that just a little moment of clarification would have created a bridge across some kind of conflict, but instead, somebody assumed the worst, and then they lived into that story, and then things escalated, and next thing you know, you got two people who can't work together. Or live together, or Yeah, and, and it all started with a story about what they were feeling, and what I find in my self and in my client base, to some degree, is a desire, sometimes to stop the feeling, but not necessarily to stuff it. And so, because I'm pretty practiced, it took me a long time to come out of what I would think of as shut down, like I was a non feeling person.

00:20:28.640 --> 00:20:48.339
25 years ago. I had to do a lot of things to get my body to feel things again, but it's like, okay, I want that feeling to stop. And rather than try to change the story. They try to change the feeling, or, more importantly, they try to change the thing creating the feeling.

00:20:49.539 --> 00:21:08.220
And that's what's gotten me intrigued about this whole idea about pressure, is we start looking outside of ourselves to make the pressure go away, rather than to recalibrate our system to make the feelings actually work for us instead of against us. Mm,

00:21:08.759 --> 00:21:54.460
yeah, I think there's two four. It seems like there are two forks there. So I would say, like, one is the story. So like, you know, it's like the interpretation of the feeling, like, this is back to the excited versus nervous. Yep, work, right? And the other was, is quite interesting. And so I would say, like, I think we can use this for storytelling. What is the feeling for? Right? So I think we should acknowledge and honor that our bodies are trying to help us both the white what is the feeling for and what is the story for? Can we do that?

00:21:54.460 --> 00:21:59.380
Can we do both? Oh, I love that.

00:21:54.460 --> 00:22:18.599
So I think you know, because unpleasant feelings are unpleasant. And if you think about, if you really think about it, sometimes extremely pleasant feelings. Like, have you ever felt so much love that it hurt, yes, or just so grateful that it hurts, right? Like, I think sometimes feelings are actually, if you just talk about

00:22:19.439 --> 00:22:21.618
that, can totally be a pleasant at

00:22:21.619 --> 00:23:23.240
the extremes. Yeah, at the extremes, like your joy, there's like this, some part of the joy that hurts, because, you know, it's going to be temporary, right? So, so, so I so in that space where people want to make the feeling stop, what I try to do. So I have, this is a post it note on my screen at home that I look at every day, and it says, Have the courage to feel all of your feelings. And the reason for that is that I believe that there's information. What is the feeling for? The feeling is the way that your brain and body, your brain and body are taking in information about the situation you're in, and they're trying to prepare you in some way. And so you know, to the point where you know, to some point, there's a point in which it makes sense, like, if I'm being poked or burned, I want to make that feeling go away. And that's what that feeling is for.

00:23:18.359 --> 00:24:36.500
It's for motivating an action, move your hand, yes, for motivating an action, but, but sometimes the the the opportunity for, like, exploring that feeling is like, what is that feeling for? Or why am I feeling that feeling is, is? I mean, most of the time, I think when there's, like, an uncomfortable situation and you want to make it go away, I think there's an curiosity opportunity there to say, like, Why do I not want to have this conversation with this person, or what aspect of this am I afraid of? Am I afraid of looking bad? Am I afraid of not, you know, of hurting myself. Am I afraid? You know? So I think that what is the feeling for? Where is it coming from? I think that having the courage to stay in your feeling long enough to ask a question about, what is my brain trying to tell me, or what is my body trying to tell me, is really good, and that's where, you know, the the interpretation comes in. But I still think like the feeling of the feeling is important. And in your case, you can exercise the feeling right, and the feeling, your your experience of a feeling, changes with with repeated exposure.

00:24:36.859 --> 00:24:59.920
Now, what is the story for I think this is also really important, because, you know, people do differ in how much they need to know why. Some people are like, I know A causes B and that that is, I can predict the future. We all want that. But the why piece of the story, the interpretation, is very powerful, because it allows us to go out of a stimulus.

00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:09.240
Wants kind of mindset, and it allows us, if we don't like a is causing B, if we don't like the way our life is turning out.

00:25:09.539 --> 00:25:17.819
This why? Story gives us some idea of the knobs that we can turn to change things, right?

00:25:14.099 --> 00:27:41.259
Like, just like I said, I my brain likes to envision going off the bridge when I'm driving this is not a thing that I want to do. It's not a thing that I want to try in the real world, but my brain is playing out the if then kind of scenario that allows me to build all these elaborate causal stories that then empower me to figure out how to do something different without having ever done it, or how to change something without trying infinite, without trying infinite number of things right now. So I think that that's important. But again, in the in the beginning space, where you and I were talking about moving through the world, being dynamic, learning and so forth and so on, once you've there's a point in which we close our our minds. There's a point at which we accept a story without evidence, and especially if I think this goes back to the idea of threat or froth or whatever, and when you were talking about clients or people who have interpreted something as aggressive, as dismissive, as anything that's like a threat mindset. It closes the door to this openness to learn. It closes our taking in of any information. It closes the feeling, it closes the thinking, it closes the storytelling. And so I think the why story serves an important function, and I think it's important for people to understand that we won't naturally feel curious about other options if we feel threat, if we don't feel safe. So I think, like the best tool I I could give somebody would be to say, like, is there, this is the way that I have interpreted this, but are there other ways to interpret this, or what is the best possible intention this person could that could have driven this thing, even just saying, like, let's get really creative. What's the best possible reason? You know this person could have behaved this way? Because once you get out of that, I've been attacked, I have been disrespected. Yeah, I've been, you know, whatever. Once you even just kind of plant that seed a little bit, it just relaxes the walls and opens up the questioning, the questioning piece of that story. You

00:27:41.259 --> 00:27:53.140
just gave the whole premise of the elegant pivot by book, The elegant pivot, see, because you it does that, but you know you're exactly right.

00:27:48.039 --> 00:28:32.420
It we shut down when we think we know. And the common story that often, as I drill myself down and drill with different people in my world, mostly coaching clients or whatever the story comes down to. The sensation has been attached to a lifelong feeling, I'm screwing up or I'm making a mistake, as opposed to, I'm getting a signal. And you just said, What is the feeling for? It's to tell you something's off. And so then you can say, all right, I it's off.

00:28:32.420 --> 00:28:46.900
Now the story is, I've got to go figure out what to do. But, but I don't have to, like, automatically know, because if I think I know, I've shut off all the other possibilities of what might really be happening,

00:28:47.319 --> 00:31:20.420
that's right, that's right. And you're everything you just said, the elegant pivot, everything you just said is consistent with my worldview, and I think it's one of the things I like best about my brain, is that the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know anything. And if you just think about this, from what there's so much, there are cultural ideas that I think, make everybody feel inadequate. There are cultural ideas that there is a right and a wrong, that there is a true and a false and and that is inconsistent with actually how I understand the universe and humans. It really is so like you know, so where our brains are are mighty powerful signal detectors. We have 86,000,000,080 6 billion neurons in our brain, but they exist in an infinite universe that is constantly changing, and despite the way you perceive the world, it looks like it seems to us like we're seeing a movie that we can perceive things in real time. It is not the case your brain is taking in sick, discrete yes or no, little signals, and it's. So filling in the blanks based on what it thinks is going to be happening, what is most likely to happen based on your lived experiences and your in your biological wiring. And so, like, one of my favorite quotes is from Stanislaus de Haines book how we learn. And he says, in the real world, things are rarely true or false. It's all essentially probabilistic, right? It's always we're taking in an incomplete signal, and we're making our best guess, and I think like this, at the sort of feeling storytelling at every level, the biggest favor our brain does for us is to remove that sense of ambiguity. It makes it it makes us very convinced that our reality, our understanding, is reality, because if it didn't, we would just be so confused. We could never cross the street without getting hit by a car. We never could if we, even if we stopped to take in all of the information, we'd be making a decision about the world 10 minutes ago, and that wouldn't get you across the street, right, right? So, so I think that, like, for me, just understanding that we're really connecting the dots all the time. I mean, I love to show like, remember this? Do you remember this internet dress that people couldn't decide if it was blue and black, blue or white

00:31:20.420 --> 00:31:25.579
and gold, blue or white or white and yeah, there's blue or blue or gold, right? Yeah, blue and

00:31:25.578 --> 00:32:35.298
black or white and gold and like that is such a salient example, because most of us learn at some point that color, the color we perceive, is related to a physical property of the universe, light, wavelengths, right? But it's not that straightforward. Our brains make inferences about color based on the context that we're in. Otherwise, we would all see things changing color in the sunset, and when we go into a shadow, our brains are inference generators. So if even something that is as directly related to a physical property of the universe as the color of a dress, is open for interpretation, and by the way, people who live in warm, sunny places like Florida, people who wake up early and see lots of things in natural light, are more likely to see that dress as white and gold. Are more likely to think it's in a shadow, whereas people who live in dark places like Seattle, spend a lot of time in artificial light, are more likely to see it as blue and black because they think it's lit from above. So this is just an example of like, if your previous experiences with light and shadows shape something as fundamental as the color that you perceive something, imagine how this scales up to interpreting your feelings.

00:32:31.578 --> 00:32:54.098
Absolutely, am I afraid? Am I excited? Am I Yes, both. We don't have a word. The Germans probably have a word. They have great feelings, words, but like, for both, like, I'm excitedly anxious, you know, I'm like, that's, that's a thing we just don't, if you don't have a label for it, you don't know how to think about it, right? So think how that kind of scales up.

00:32:54.699 --> 00:33:41.919
I mean, it scales everywhere. And that explains, by the way, I was like, Well, I fit the Florida, you know, light and all that, and I saw it as gold and white. Yeah, I that explains my worldview. And, you know, this is so simple, because, like, one of the most practical things that I help some of the leaders I work with do is to start every meeting they have with context. You would not believe how many people sit down at a room and start in the middle of the meeting and don't take 30 seconds to say, Okay, everybody, we're here to decide on XYZ, and they'll just start working on the thing. And I often have to raise my hand when I enter in one of those sessions and go, can we just put me on the same page? What are we here to do?

00:33:37.098 --> 00:34:16.079
Yes. Yes. Yes. You know any presentation, anything is like, give people a way to get on the page, because all those little different angles that you're talking about that infinite possibilities are coming in the room with them, the anxiety of the last meeting, the the nervousness about the next meeting, the question about what the boss is going to do with the performance review, all of those things are floating around like in a cloud, at least, just let them land for this moment and say, this base, this is, this is what we're doing. It's been one of the most powerful tools I've ever learned and then taught.

00:34:12.179 --> 00:34:16.079
And this I struggle with,

00:34:16.199 --> 00:34:35.239
you know, and this, this makes perfect sense in the in terms of what I how I understand the brain, because context is something we use to constrain this infinite possibility space, right? And it also like that very while constraining sounds could sound bad. It's very powerful because it allows us to be flexible.

00:34:32.358 --> 00:35:01.679
We're flexible. Humans are flexible. We don't respond the same way to a thing in different contexts. We don't talk to people the same at work as we do at home. If we're a bilingual, we have a whole different language for talking to people at home and at work oftentimes, right? And so it's a whole different repertoire of behaviors. And so for that reason, the context is part is kind of like the story. It's part of what we use to constrain our possibilities. In the way we understand things

00:35:01.739 --> 00:36:26.179
well, and I just got this insight as you were describing it, because when I'm working with people, a lot of my clients are leading people through big and scary change, you know, and you've probably experienced this in your world a lot, where there's an uncertainty, and uncertainty has a sensation, and our I feel like our brains really like to converge on certainty as soon as yes, we want to know. And what I just connected the dot for is at least, if you give somebody context, you may be making, you may be making a decision that, like leads to uncertainty, but you're certain that you're making that decision, right? So you're a little bit of certainty in the mix, so that people can put their feet on the ground and not feel this vacuum, because that's the sensation, almost, of uncertainty is a vacuum. And you know, I feel like right now, I'm looking at what's happening in Los Angeles with all the people that have become homeless, and I've experienced it right here in my backyard, with the flooding that we've had and all the people that became homeless, and now there's just different levels of uncertainty here, which is, when are they going to build the road back? When is the lake going to be back? Those kind of things, but that that uncertainty creates a sensation, that creates a story that then creates a behavior, and a lot of times those are not in alignment with our values.

00:36:27.320 --> 00:36:55.840
That's right, that's right, yeah, I think that this is, you know, when people you know there are two sides to the coin, and I believe that reducing uncertainty is one of the ways your brain defines success, like, I think that being able to predict the future is a brain a you know. So I think your brain has a few generate general operating principles. Just our animal brains. All mammals share this.

00:36:55.840 --> 00:37:38.719
And that is like these kind of operating principles. They guide our decisions. They guide what we learn. And one would be like, move toward good things. You know, how do you learn to find the good things? How do you learn to find rewards? One would be, move away from harmful things, right? That's a very strong instinct. And one would be, learn about these kind of probability, learn how to predict the future. Because, again, like, if I can make a decision in real time, I'm going to be more successful than if I'm making a decision about five minutes ago. And if I can make a decision, that's going to set set me up for success in 20 minutes or 20 years. Like, that's a huge that's a huge win.

00:37:34.219 --> 00:38:26.719
So it's our brains. Are these massive statistics generators and storytellers. Those are kind of like parallel, parallel mechanisms. One is like learning through experience. One is like learning through a podcast or a book or a class. You know, somebody tells you how things work, and you put that into your huge database to try and predict the future. So trying to predict the future is a goal of your brain, and it feels good when it can do that, and it feels bad when it can't. But I think it's really important in this space of change for people to acknowledge and understand that when your brain does do this prediction of the future, which it does all the time, it is constraining your possibility space. It is, again, this, predicting the future is good.

00:38:27.260 --> 00:38:41.860
Um, in this reducing uncertainty is good, it is removing options from your consideration so your brain thinks limiting your possibilities is success. Yep,

00:38:42.340 --> 00:39:09.360
yep. And, I mean, I will tell you, I've, I've done so many brainstorming sessions in my career with people where I'm trying to get them to have as many possibilities as they possibly can. And you've probably done this, it is so difficult to get people to keep going. It's like, Yeah, let's keep going, guys. And they're like, but I like idea number three, let's converge on that, you know? And it's like, yeah, I want to keep diverging people.

00:39:05.639 --> 00:39:59.440
And they Yeah, it's, there's a few people who tend to be okay at it and like it, but there are differences as a general population. That what you just said, we like to start constraining and driving towards the answer, and then we can move on and and by the way, let's take that to our horses. When I first started getting back on the horse, what did I always want to do? Yeah, go catch the horse. Hurry up, get him in there. When can I get on? When are we going to get the saddle on so I can get on? So, you know, it was like all of the other stuff before that was nothing. Boy, do I think differently about that. Now, you know the ride is it? I don't know about you, but my ride starts, and even if it's not going to be a ride, it's this, the minute I'm in the presence of the horse, even if there are across three paddocks, the minute I'm on, quote, unquote, on property, are we're starting, we're communicating. Mm.

00:40:00.539 --> 00:40:39.860
Hmm, it's so funny that you say this is a little bit of a tangent, but I have a three year old and and, you know, I'm intending to start him myself, probably when he's closer to four or four, but I had all of these stories about him. He's a very athletic, very talented, very beautiful horse. And I was telling myself all these stories, like, if I don't do this, am I, you know, is it a failure? You know, talking about feelings and stories and all this and and I just had this, I told myself a story that I believed to be true, that relieved all of this pressure.

00:40:35.780 --> 00:40:51.639
And that story was, I love my relationship with my horses, and even if one of them I can ride quite, quite decently. But I was like, even if I never rode them, and they were like large dogs.

00:40:48.039 --> 00:41:25.579
They are the they are incredibly happy, and I am incredibly happy with them. And I never, it never ceases to amaze me how that relationship allows me to, you know, in many ways, my horses are much more sensitive to me, and much more I'm doing all this stuff with my hands that no one will hear, but much more in partnership, I guess, than my dogs, who are great too. But, you know, yeah, and so just that whole like is writing the goal exactly, you know, just that, just examining that piece of the story, the feeling and the decisions that it guides, right?

00:41:22.519 --> 00:41:30.920
Because there, there's a possibility, you know, like, What decisions do you make about how to spend time with your horses and how do you feel?

00:41:32.539 --> 00:41:36.440
Yeah, as a as a result of that one piece

00:41:37.880 --> 00:42:12.599
of the story, yeah? And what? What is the point? What is this? What does success look like? What am I trying to achieve here? And one of the principles that has dramatically helped me in this game of raising my pressure threshold is the language I think about it as is to learn to take everything one step at a time, in tiny, little slices. And I'm trying to remember if you were still at the journey on podcast summit when Jesse Osborne was there.

00:42:09.780 --> 00:42:12.599
Yeah,

00:42:12.599 --> 00:42:15.719
he talked about the baby just, he just, like, showed you

00:42:15.960 --> 00:43:34.519
stood up and said, you know, he because he's, he's just so the audience can get a context. He's like a world traveling sailor, and does these amazing trips that a lot of us wouldn't even think. I couldn't even get out of the harbor, much less, you know, sail across the world. But he made it really clear, just because I have done that doesn't mean it was easy for me, and he had this just beautiful description of what happens. If you will just take one baby step, one one little tiny, it's like, but what I've discovered by breaking it down versus chunking to the end, which is, what another thing I think our brains do, that prediction machine, you know, you're giving me scientific language for what I've known is like, I call it gulp. Is, is when we take it, when we sip instead of Gulp, we realize we can do anything, because then the next, if the next step we took is too much, just break it down into a smaller step, sip, even, and then we can do it, and then you start to recognize the possibilities in the world, and that things that that scare you are only because you've tried to gulp too much. Break it down even further.

00:43:35.179 --> 00:43:44.559
And I think that there's like a like, what I would call meta cognitive learning or and that's what I think about with my horses, too.

00:43:42.278 --> 00:45:09.958
It's like learning about learning. And I think that Hannah Betts, at that same podcast Summit, said something to the effect of confidence comes on the backside yes of the decision, right? So when we're feeling pressure and we make a decision, right? So, so first, have the courage to feel the feeling. I think in your language, there's a piece. And Hannah also said, sometimes I just say I'm freaking scared, you know, like, just like, I'm scared. Okay, we're feeling the feeling. I'm a seven. This is, you know, like, investigate, get curious about the feeling, and then, you know, what is this What is this feeling for? So this feeling is for shaping a decision. So is this feeling for getting me ready to do something hard? Is this feeling getting me, you know, telling me this is not okay with me, if this is not okay with me, what's the next step? Right? So what's interesting is you're going to learn from that decision, whatever that decision is, do you do? And I think that this is the a critical thing when it comes to just, I avoid the pressure, right? So if, if you feel a kind of way, and you then move out of that space, what you have learned is something called negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is. Is a is a way of increasing the likelihood that you will quit, step away, choose not to do a hard thing.

00:45:06.239 --> 00:45:35.898
You know, reinforcement means you've increased the likelihood of that behavior. Negative reinforcement is something where you remove something noxious to increase the likelihood of that behavior. So if you're like I feel uncomfortable. I don't want to do that. What you've learned is, oh, I can. I can move away from hard things, but the but the threshold for what will be hard the next time is probably even smaller and smaller. And I think this happens with a lot.

00:45:35.898 --> 00:45:38.719
That's how we shrink our world.

00:45:35.898 --> 00:46:26.059
We shrink our world. And I think this happens unfortunately with a lot of elderly people right their comfort zone, as your capacities, inevitably, whether they be physical or mental, start to decrease in those 1% 1% 1% and you feel like, oh, I don't want to be the slowest person at the ATM. I don't want to, you know, this is society not having tolerance for our wise leaders as we should, you know, and it's like, and they feel uncomfortable because they're not where they were, you know, five years ago, 10 years and so they stop doing things, and as they stop going into social circumstances, hearing gets harder. It's harder to hear in a restaurant, so you don't go out and and again, like, as their inputs and as their willingness, you know, they're sort of decisions to go outside of that comfort zone decrease.

00:46:26.119 --> 00:46:45.818
So does that do all of the cognitive capacities and all of the social capacities, they just tank because you've sort of stopped stretching yourself. And so on the other side of that is like, you know? So, so let's say you say yes to the little thing, and you do it. You don't die, you don't embarrass yourself.

00:46:45.818 --> 00:47:49.778
Maybe you didn't crush it, but you you succeeded, right? So, like, what you've learned is, I can be I can you know this, this, this uncomfort can be preparing me to do something new, or, like, everything that's new because of the same thing we were talking about, wanting to predict the future. Everything that's new is a little bit uncomfortable into your brain period, so like knowing that, oh, but I can be successful here builds that confidence in learning. I literally just, I just gave my students back there. I'm teaching a class based on my book, the neuroscience of you, and I think that my students, I mean, I think I'm very easy going, I think I'm very personable, and also I have very high standards for what I want. I mean, they have an opportunity to learn how their brains work and leave this class within totally, much more empowered in their lives. And so I just kind of gave them back their first homework assignment.

00:47:44.438 --> 00:47:59.498
And lot of them did not get great grades. And I know that it was going to be, like, a shocking experience for them to not get a, you know, like they think, Oh, she's very friendly.

00:47:56.199 --> 00:48:59.199
It's going to be easy or but, but, like, it wasn't right. And so to me, I talked to them, and I was like, we're setting expectations right now. And some of you really met and exceeded my expectations, and some of you didn't. But I want what I want you to learn to do like you're reading these really hard things, and I think that the best gift I can give you is teaching you how to walk through the reading of these really hard things, how to try, try again, and you might not get it the first time. And, and, and so, you know, it's like, I'm going to give you the opportunity to respond to my feedback and do this again. And together, we're going to learn how to read, how to under, you know, it's like, I want to reward the authentic try. I want to re, you know, to acknowledge that not everybody has time to do this thing. But like, we're going to keep doing hard things, and we're going to move forward together, maybe at different paces. But like, you know, here's the expectation, here's what I want you to do, here's how you can take that into your own level and, like, try again. Like, I want them.

00:48:56.318 --> 00:49:02.398
You know, there are some people who are in the class who are, like, really into the U part.

00:49:02.398 --> 00:49:52.659
They really want to understand themselves. They're like, I don't do brains. I was like, well, you're going to. And it's so interesting, because there are some people who just have just decided that they can't, that the brain is hard and that they're a psychologist. They want to be a clinical psychologist, while I need the brain, but I'm really interested in the neuroscience of you part, like, and these, I'm seeing these students. I'm actually just challenging them to, like, think critically about this. And do you want me to tell you how your brain works? Or do you want to be able to learn and evaluate it yourself? And like, I'm already seeing them. Some of the people who who self identified as not sciencey types or not brainy types. I'm already seeing them grow in the questions that they ask in the way they approach these hard tasks. So I think that's the metacognitive learning how to learn and learning how to not get it right. Yeah, not quit, not get it right and say, like, I'm stupid. I don't understand this.

00:49:52.659 --> 00:50:01.438
Like, No, you didn't get it right because you're just, this is the first time you've taken a class like this, and this is hard stuff, and we're going to try again. And here's the specific. Fix and where to grow.

00:49:59.438 --> 00:50:01.438
And

00:50:02.940 --> 00:50:50.320
there's a what you're describing is like a tolerance for what I call the froth, which is that it's that learning space where we are agitated enough to need to change something, but not so agitated that we're we're having to tap out right, right, and not so flat that there's nothing to make us change. And what I've experienced for myself in modern society and in this push button world is that my own tolerance for for the froth, for frustration, for being in that learning space has shrunk at some level. Like the other day, I was returning something from Amazon, and now you don't even have to package it up. You walk in with your phone to a UPS Store, and

00:50:50.500 --> 00:50:54.460
someone wraps it for you. Yeah, they scan it or something. In five seconds.

00:50:55.059 --> 00:50:57.880
They scan the thing, hand you a receipt, and you walk out.

00:50:58.000 --> 00:51:29.179
And I was recalling when I thought, how, you know how amazing it was. And I could walk into a UPS Store, stand up line for a few minutes, fill out a form and hand something to them, you know, and now I would have lost my mind over that little, you know, three minute wait as opposed to 32nd Wait, yeah, and I wonder how much that's impeding our ability to learn, because we're not willing to be in the space of agitation and froth. Now

00:51:29.719 --> 00:51:57.518
there's a book. I wish I remembered the name of it, but it's something about it's something to the extent of the convenience trap that might even be the name of the book was it, was it? Is it the comfort crisis, the comfort crisis, that's it. That's okay. Yeah, so this is it. And it's like, you know, so we're, we're developing things all of the time that are supposed to make to remove this frustration and froth, right?

00:51:57.699 --> 00:52:16.978
But it's also like you exactly as you said. It's removing our tolerance for things that are difficult in any way, shape or form, and and, you know, so like for my students, it's an enculturation process, right?

00:52:11.878 --> 00:52:34.219
And so what I do is I speak to their brains need for motivation, and I and I explain it to them. So I say, like, you know, in my class, I am not going to tell you the answers. I am not. I say, your brain is not, it was not designed to passively consume information.

00:52:34.219 --> 00:52:51.938
Now I understand you spent four years in this university passively consuming information, because that's most of what you do. You sit in a lecture, someone talks at you, facts at you, and you're supposed to write it down and remember and regurgitate it. And they're like two dimensions, you know, the shallowest form, A, B, C or D.

00:52:47.739 --> 00:53:37.099
And I was like, that's not the way your brain was designed to learn. And here with me, we have the opportunity to make a real change. So, you know, and I think that that that it brings them to the party, right? It's like, this is not how you're this is not what you were developed for. You were developed, you know, your brain was developed to move around the world. Break a stick and see what happens, kick a rock and see what happens, take a right turn and see what happens. It's active. It's action. And I said, reading is an action, thinking is an action. You know, just sitting here and letting me tell you what's important and how it works is not an action like I want you to go read, I want you to think, and I want you to come back and tell me what happens, and then I can so brilliant. I can guide you. I can, you know, we can toss the ideas around, but they're not used to it,

00:53:38.300 --> 00:54:56.559
no, and, and I've actually wondered where did the idea that that was a great way to create learning come from? Because, you know, when I took over credit training at the bank I worked at, I looked into like, how are they teaching people to make credit decisions? And that's how they did it. They sat there and said, fill this block out. And for hours they'd have to, like, listen to passively, and I stumbled on a company that gave me a lot of these learning principles, gave me and my team, and we designed something that was much more active, because we also found when they showed up, you know, out of a fancy college with, you know, having been told they were the greatest thing since sliced bread and pry our next CEO. You know, just if they wait a couple of years, they'll be CEO of the whole bank. Don't worry. You know, that they were very entitled and difficult, difficult to teach. And we flipped everything on its head and started them out with the treasure hunt. And we said, you know, we said, show up your floor is XYZ, and this thing, once you reach the 20th floor, find your desk, and the rest of the instructions will be there.

00:54:50.619 --> 00:54:56.559
And so they had a treasure hunt.

00:54:56.559 --> 00:54:59.019
Here's where to find the restroom and the coffee machine.

00:54:59.019 --> 00:55:24.739
And, you know, back there. We had fax machines, and then we everything we did was pretty much experiential, and put them in live situations. We gave them real credit files and said, go figure out how to, you know, get this loan approved. And, you know, did mock loan meetings and all those kind of things that put them in in those but we kept them in the froth almost the whole time, you know. But they actually, once they figured out what was going on, they loved it.

00:55:25.278 --> 00:55:29.298
Yeah, it took me a really long wait, yeah, yeah.

00:55:29.599 --> 00:57:16.559
And, I mean, it took me a long time to realize in my, like, mentoring, you know, because sometimes I work with students for six years, like, a close relationship with my graduate students and stuff and and what was, what's interesting in that sort of exchanging ideas, or that teaching and learning, I think this would be the same thing for anyone who's teaching writing or teaching water skiing or whatever. What's interesting is sometimes you think your student knows what you know, because they can repeat what you said like you've given them the answers. Like, What the hell is a half halt. Like, who you know, like, I know now, but you have, you can hear someone talked about that you know for years, until you're like, oh, and you can repeat it, and you can, like, do a thing, but like, it's a feel, and it's an experiential learning. And so, like, what I realized is, I'm incredibly quick, I'm experienced, and in these spaces I was providing the answer and that, and they were nodding their head, or like parroting the answer, and I thought they understood, and they didn't. And it wasn't until they went to an exam situation where I had to shut up and they had to demonstrate their knowledge, I was like, Oh no, that was me in that gap between the known and unknown. So it, when it comes to fraud, what I'm it's, it's quite interesting to try and accomplish this on the 35 student level, but in my small student meetings, I ask them questions I know they don't know the answer to all the time, and I force them to practice being wrong out loud, like, and it's not, and they're, they're still, like, quiet forever. And I was like, here's why I'm gonna, like, come up with the wrong answer. Like, you have a lifetime of experiences that will allow you to generate an answer to this question. It might be like oranges when I'm looking for apples, but I want you to start generating answers.

00:57:16.739 --> 00:57:28.338
And I want, I don't care if 95% of them are wrong, because that's how you learn. You're active, you're creating, you're doing and also, I think you're learning to be wrong, and that wrong is normal and that that's not a thing to be afraid of.

00:57:28.338 --> 00:57:47.018
You're learning to not have the answer, and, and, and in my class, I want them to do that too. I want them, even if they don't know the answer, I want them to think about it. And I want us to, you know, bounce, to come to some kind of a growth of understanding together, but they have to practice like being wrong.

00:57:48.219 --> 00:57:51.639
So, you know, I know too.

00:57:48.219 --> 00:58:10.259
Oh, I'm, I'm so excited to hear you say that wrong is normal, yeah. Because the the thing I wonder, and I just have a question for you, because one of the things I have to do is help people help themselves walk out of the thing they do to themselves when they're wrong.

00:58:10.619 --> 00:58:49.418
So a lot of times they're super hard on themselves. And I'm a recovering self flagellator, I guess is, you know, I still can get a little bit hard on myself, but not like I used to more. I'm more now going, Oh, okay, that didn't work. What would work? As opposed to, oh, come on land, you know better, and you know that kind of self talk. How do you help people walk themselves out of that? Because what I have found is back to that negative reinforcement riff we had earlier, where you start shrinking your world. I think that also shrinks our world,

00:58:50.019 --> 00:59:55.059
right? Of course, if you don't want to be wrong, you don't participate. You don't try new things, that's right, you don't try new ideas, because that's all because you're going to be wrong. Yeah, yeah. And or even, like, trying to come even, like, I just, there's so many missed opportunities for connection and conversation in real life where people can appreciate that you have two different points of view, and that neither of you is right or wrong, that you're just coming from two different lived experiences, and you're both right and wrong, and neither you know it's just like, again, that fear of being incorrect is, is a is a crippling thing. And, you know, for and I have to, you know, I have to think about that too, and and in a lot of ways, the expectation that wanting to be to know the future, wanting to be correct is, is, I think, to blame for that. And for me, it's really just like two things, something that you talked about earlier, that I never touched on, which is you were saying, I think you were talking about Jesse and saying, like he said, people can't see basically all those little steps that you take to get to the end.

00:59:55.059 --> 01:00:34.519
All right. So part of that desire to be right and to be perfect. Perfect comes from a the fact that other people's effort is in a lot, almost always invisible. Yes, the and we can pin that we want to we're social, so we want to compare ourselves to one another. So, you know, in my in my class, a little bit, in my one on one interactions, a lot, I'm very I am very exploratory, and I am happy to say something that I think that could be wrong. Like, I'm happy to model that sort of, how am I thinking about this?

01:00:31.460 --> 01:01:38.480
Well, I said this because I'm thinking about this, but I don't know this, this or this sort of model that growth mindset kind of a thing so that they can know that I don't know. I mean, like, I we often read and discuss papers together, papers that I don't know about. And I remember one lab meeting where we're like, 40 minutes, I could not understand what this graph was, and everyone was kind of laughing at me, and I was laughing at myself. And I'm like, Wait, so like, up is this, and down is that? And they're like, no. Like, I was like, the last one in the room to figure out what this freaking graph meant, you know, but I didn't try and hide that. I didn't try and show shame for that, because I hope that somebody's like, Okay, well, she's made it pretty firm, and she can't understand this freaking graph. So if I can ask a question and I cannot know, and that's a part of the process, but, but also I just, you know, for me, I try and set the goal. The success is about growing, not about being at the end. So for me, it's like I would if I felt like I knew all the answers, it would be time to be to die. Like, what's the point? Exactly?

01:01:39.139 --> 01:01:51.159
I actually have I, you know, the coach I work with a lot says perfection is death, yeah, because where are you going to go once you actually reach perfection? There's no place to go,

01:01:51.579 --> 01:02:38.838
No. And even if, when I've learned, and this is like, really, really, really true in my writing, writing, not writing, course, it's so close is that some you know expectation, like just the expectations that you hold for yourself. You know it's great to set goals, and it's great to understand what your definition of success is, and so forth and so on. But, but you can just have a tiny expectation, and it flashes into your head like, I want this to be perfect. I want to win this award. I want to do this. And it kills every single bit of the process. Because I think for me, the goal really should be about growth. It should be about continuous growth. Because why else are we?

01:02:33.858 --> 01:02:58.659
You know, contrary to popular belief, we continue to learn throughout our lifespan, and you indeed can teach an old dog new tricks. I have a 12 year old basset hound that learned to shake after 11 years of doing nothing besides barking and sitting. She can now shake for her. I've proven that you can treat teach an old dog new tricks. But we are we have brains like that. For a reason.

01:02:58.659 --> 01:03:02.639
We are lifelong learning, right?

01:02:58.659 --> 01:03:13.318
So, like, I think having the answer, I think again, you can ask the question, like having the answer to x or being correct about X, what does that get you?

01:03:13.918 --> 01:04:05.759
It? Ideally, it should get you a better understanding of the world that you live in so you can inform your why stories. Or it should get you a better chance of making a good choice with this information. But I think that when we feel like very wed to being right or to having the correct answer, it's usually about something related to our identity, our sense of belonging, our you know, the stories that we tell about our worth at the end of the day, like, you know, if I'm wrong, if I'm incorrect, then I'm not smart, or I'm not an expert, or I'm not this. And when we feel threat to our sense of self or our sense of belonging, that threat, it works in the brain exactly like a physical threat.

01:04:02.518 --> 01:04:13.918
It does the opposite of opening up curiosity. So again, like, what I would do in that case would be to say, like, why are we why this is information?

01:04:13.918 --> 01:04:17.458
Like, let's be curious about your need to be perfect in this.

01:04:17.518 --> 01:04:36.498
What value you use the word values like, what value is that telling you like, why is your brain giving you that feeling, and what is the story that you're telling yourself around that feeling? And what's another story that opens up opportunities for you to learn and grow without making you feel threat to your sense of self?

01:04:36.739 --> 01:05:35.119
Yeah, oh, that sense of self, which you know, it creates like a, it's almost like a wall that we, you know, live behind, or a suit of armor that we put on every day. And it's, it's sort of a, it's sort of a false sense in general. And, you know, we, we, I've mentioned, like the idea of having a pressure threshold. And. That what I sort of am still putting together is there's a there's a moment at which that identity gets hit, like under pressure, and at that moment when I go over my pressure threshold, and I'm sure the nervous system is a big reason for this, I no longer have access to things that I need, like my courage and curiosity, my ability to listen, my ability to respond, my ability to my timing, even my feel, especially with horses.

01:05:32.360 --> 01:05:37.579
You know, we really think a lot about timing and feel right, and

01:05:37.579 --> 01:05:41.980
we just lose you're no longer in the present. Yeah, that's right. And so we story.

01:05:39.980 --> 01:05:41.980
We're

01:05:41.980 --> 01:06:08.099
not in the present anymore. And so what's the way to build that pressure threshold? And what I've one of my simple little go tos was to start going, oh, when I'm in the froth, reach for my tools instead of my rules. Because a lot of times when you're feeling that, it's like, Well, what was I taught or what worked in the past, as opposed to what's the situation calling for right now?

01:06:02.159 --> 01:06:18.000
And do I have the courage to even ask the question, what's the situation calling for right now? And what I what are the neurological questions I have?

01:06:18.059 --> 01:06:43.480
Is I think the froth is like you were talking about that study with the vitamin B and epinephrine, you know, and adrenaline, which I guess is kind of the same thing, but it's necessary to create motion, but after that, there's like a when it's resolved, there's kind of like a dopamine, serotonin, or something that happens. I don't know the difference between an endorphin, dopamine and serotonin, but

01:06:43.480 --> 01:06:46.360
they're all different.

01:06:43.480 --> 01:07:13.380
They're all different. Yeah, they're all different. Things that are that are happening in the brain that make you feel good. So endorphins actually really exist to help with the immediate response to pain. So like, if you've Okay, endorphin gets you, like, overriding physical pain. Dopamine is a reward, a pure reward, and and serotonin is really satiety, like, it's a something that tells you you've had enough.

01:07:09.360 --> 01:07:17.219
Like, serotonin and dopamine, it kind of often work in tandem.

01:07:13.380 --> 01:07:30.559
So, like, why? Like, why we wouldn't gold fish like, eat until we literally rupture our stomach like a goldfish actually will, is because at some point in that, like craving reward cycle, serotonin comes in and it tells you you have enough.

01:07:28.460 --> 01:07:44.139
What's one of the things that I think are really cool about serotonin is that 90% of it is actually created in your gut, but it's the stuff in your brain that makes you feel satiated.

01:07:39.320 --> 01:07:47.440
Satiated, yeah, I got it. And so that's like a peaceful, good feeling. So what

01:07:47.438 --> 01:08:19.679
I have found is if I will bank that feeling instead of wipe my forehead, hand across my forehead, going, whew, I didn't die, which is different, like, I never want to do that again, versus look at that I didn't die. That's actually, yeah, if I think the good feeling, as opposed to focus on the the close call, I raise my pressure threshold. If I focus on the Close call and go, Oh, that

01:08:19.680 --> 01:08:22.880
was close. And then, because then your brain is like, then you're,

01:08:23.359 --> 01:08:30.500
let's not drive again, because that brain almost pulled out in front of you, yeah, right? As opposed to, wow, did you see how I dodged that car?

01:08:28.819 --> 01:08:30.500
Who?

01:08:30.560 --> 01:08:34.399
Yeah? Gratitude, right?

01:08:30.560 --> 01:08:34.399
Gratitude, yeah, yeah. I have

01:08:34.399 --> 01:09:04.139
found that helps raise my pressure threshold, yeah. And that makes, just making that little twist with my clients has been dramatic for them, you know, whether they're making a presentation asking for a raise, trying to lead big change, starting to learn that these little moments where you thought things were making you wrong, bad off, you know, whatever that that how you recover from that could be like a little good feeling As opposed to a bad feeling, it totally changes their perspective on pressure.

01:09:04.380 --> 01:10:35.359
Yeah, I think, like, that's a really, like, neuro, chemically complicated situation. And one thing that I think is happening in that scenario is that you're pointing attention at different aspects of the experience. And when you point your sort of focus, you know, and that's one thing that story does, too, when you point your focus on something, it enhances that up the opportunity to learn from that, that bit of the story. And so, whereas if you focus on, you know, if you let the I almost died, like my knees are shaking and everything, because I was preparing for death or near death, or whatever, and and if you focus all of your energy on that, because it's a signal that's turned up really high, the brain will also kind of increase the likelihood that that's going to happen again, like I. Almost died, and that happened, and it was an extreme experience. So now, when I'm predicting the future, I think, oh my god, if I'm even around a horse, my chances of dying are excellent. Like, you know, you've, you've, you've exaggerated that bit of the story, and your brain is gonna, is gonna use this, the volume of your attention on that thing in its estimate of the future. And if you're like, I didn't die, you know, like I, you know, there's, there are, in truth, there are close calls all around you. Yeah, and, and all the time, we survive these things.

01:10:35.659 --> 01:10:39.319
And aren't we? Aren't we lucky?

01:10:35.659 --> 01:10:42.100
Isn't this a wonderful world where at any moment you could get hit by a bus and you didn't.

01:10:42.100 --> 01:10:52.479
Yeah, that's amazing. My chances today of getting hit by a bus are still very, very slim. They are out there, but my chances of not getting hit by a bus are much higher Well,

01:10:52.539 --> 01:12:38.359
and what I've actually discovered, and this, this actually happened with a dog toy on the floor so, and this is how I knew I had made some kind of progress, because if I'm starting to look for the the good side of it, if you will, or the, let me call it the problem solving side of it, as opposed to the OH SHIT side of it. Just to make a really clear distinction, I stepped on a dog toy one day, and I started to go flying across the kitchen counter. I was carrying groceries, and it was under the grocery bags, and didn't see it, and very quickly recognized that I needed to control my fall, or my head was going to hit the granite counter top, and made a very quick estimate that I had to control my fall and use my elbows, my arms against that, as opposed to letting myself do the full fall, had hit the granite what seemed to have occurred in the sequencing in my brain as I look back on it, because I thought, wow, I never had, oh shit. Now control the fall. I went straight to control the problem solving and that little, tiny gap where I didn't go into the mistake thinking, but I just went with the problem solving, thinking seems to have made it I think it made a difference in the timing. So I had a little, you know, split second difference. And because this was happening fast, and, you know, it still hurt my arms, but it was a lot better than hitting my head, and I've noticed that in several other places, and that's why I asked the question about, what do you do, and how do you help people not go into that self beating up cycle, because it seems to interfere not only with our ability to respond, but with our ability to connect with others.

01:12:40.340 --> 01:13:32.600
Yeah, you know, that's so interesting, because, and I wonder, with everything, with every interesting difference, you know, some part of it is biological, and some part of it is is experiential. And I think when I was on the podcast with Warwick Schiller, I think one of the things that we talked about is that I'm a late Panicker, so like in those it's quite interesting, like, in those kinds of moments, I am problem solving instantly, and it's only at the end, like even I'm riding a horse. Like, yeah, I was riding the the very like, energetic thoroughbred, and I was very much in my 40s, and I was having, she started. A horse came behind her and started and scared her, and she started rearing. And in the moment, I had no fear whatsoever. I was just like, Whoa, that was a big rear. Whoa, that one was bigger.

01:13:29.300 --> 01:13:39.319
I need to, like the third one is going to be game over. I need to, I need to eject myself from this horse. I need to, I need to push the eject button.

01:13:39.739 --> 01:14:12.060
Unfortunately, one of my feet did not eject. The rest of me did. So it was kind of a big, a big boo boo. But it wasn't until many of those incidents I've either ridden through or gotten off safe rolled. You know, I've had a moment when I was jogging long time ago with my dog and I slipped on the ice. And my husband like reports seeing this thing like he never knew I was a ninja, because I had, like, you, I had I had my dog in my hand, and it was ice, and I was moving forward, and I just like, knew.

01:14:12.060 --> 01:14:36.260
I was like, I need to turn my head, tuck my shoulder. And what wound up happening, because I had so much momentum, is that I rolled and got back up, and it just looked like I did a flip in the air, and then I was like, he was like, what just happened? It was like, I fell, but I'm fine, you know? And then it's only like, after that, when the the body hits, oh, and I start going, I almost died, you know?

01:14:31.220 --> 01:15:09.300
But that's a delay for me. And I don't know if that is something about temperament or like, because we know, like, there are these very early like temperament is something you can tell in a newborn, and it's related to the nervous system and how excitable they are, how like, regularly they sleep, how easily they cry, and and so I wonder, I mean, that no matter where it falls, experience. Yes, will help, right? And then getting out of and, and catastrophizing will not help.

01:15:04.020 --> 01:15:58.779
And, and, you know, I just had a conversation with someone I'm really close to a couple of days ago who was like, getting negative feedback from the world, and then adding to that by being very negative with themselves. And you know, it's heartbreaking for me when you are the one talking bad about yourself and and in that sort of catastrophizing or story space, I just said, I know all the reasons, like I hear you, and I think that's your brain trying to protect you from this, but ask yourself the question, like, Does that feel good, and is it going to catalyze change in the way that you want to right? So to sort of trying to sort of Empower, I feel this way, I'm telling myself this story, what's the how is this going to shape my decision moving forward? I think just practicing, well,

01:15:59.500 --> 01:16:18.720
that's and it's interesting, because you were just describing, like, for me later, is not, not a problem, yeah, it's not a problem. It's already over. No. It's like, No, my hat, my Oh, shit happens typically in the moment, which has been one of the problems with my pressure threshold, is just going having everything go offline. It sounds like sometimes your stuff comes online under and that's,

01:16:18.779 --> 01:18:45.639
and that's, I think that's natural, like, I remember a water skiing accident, actually, and we were on this boat with an EMT, and it was like a friend's wedding, and my friend was water skiing, and he had a bad fall, and he was going like this, and they thought he was goofing around, but he was like, oh, compound fracture his arm. And I was just like, you call 911, you get the skis, you get your thing, you get him and like that, whatever that, I think that that is a is a kind of a personality trait. There's some piece in there that makes that easier for me. I'm very thankful for it. But I do think that people can practice like, I mean, we know that right, no question. And that's and I think that you know you and I talked about this before, and I think it's worth saying again, in this learning, in this learning space, there are two kinds of learning. One is the kind of learning that anybody could do from listening to this podcast, right? So like they were just hearing our words, they will connect them, hopefully, to their real life experiences. And that will do have some kind of organization function on their memory. People can give you advice, and it can resonate, or it cannot resonate, and you can follow the instruction, you cannot follow the instruction, and then there's the learning that we do by doing right? And so I think that the power of this coaching froth tolerance is like, there's a lot of explaining, there's a lot of like opportunity for people to understand, to explore, to evaluate their story, but also, like a half halt. You're never going to learn it. You're never going to really be able to do it, unless, until you do it, like you and I can talk about this all day long, but if I never drove across the bridge, I would not grow my my froth, my pressure threshold, right? So they, you, you and I can talk about lifting weights all day long, and if I don't do it, I'm not going to get big biceps. You know, it's the same. So I think that that, yeah, so it's like talking having a place where you are truly, you know, seen and and someone else, there's an expert there to add that confidence and whatever it is that you need to, to have an experience that is some degree of out of your comfort zone. If you do not take that opportunity, you will not ever you just can't. We just can't grow our comfort zone from a book. We just can't. Can

01:18:45.639 --> 01:19:33.559
we can? I mean, we can. I don't think we can. And, you know, I used to, when I started the self awareness program, we would say, you know, it's like the difference between learning to ride a bike by getting on the bike or trying to read a book about writing to ride a bike and exactly what what I wish that was more in the teaching, and it sounds like it is in your teaching, but you know, early in our childhood, it it's if it ever was there, it's not there as much now, which is this understanding that we do have This inner life, this emotional being inside of us that has physical sensations that will inform us and that we need to learn to understand it, that it, it will run us in some way, so we need to learn to manage it.

01:19:33.798 --> 01:20:16.078
You know, I've actually watched my dog training with I have a two year old Doberman, and, you know, I've seen what can. And I watched the movie Marley and Me the other night, you know, where they had this wonderful lab who was really not wonderful. He was cute and great for a movie, but not well controlled, because they didn't really know how to work with the way a dog is. So they kind of just let him run wild and. I work with my Doberman knowing how a dog works. So she does. She would love to run wild. She would be boy. I hate to think if anybody that didn't know how to manage dogs got her, she'd be the most out of control dog they ever got. So I just think of our inner life sort of like that.

01:20:13.439 --> 01:20:20.039
I'm not trying to say we're dogs, but that we have this we're all two year old Dobermans.

01:20:21.359 --> 01:20:59.319
Well, I probably am, but, but our, our inner, our inner life, has so much, you know, that can be good for us and not good for us. But I wish we had been trained better on what to do with all of this stuff, you know, because that's a lot of my work is helping people get back in touch with those things so that they can perform their executive duties. And, you know, they're one of the things that I find really interesting is people lower in the organization think the people at the higher levels of the organization have it out together. They think they have it all together, and don't have it solved. I was like, Oh, honey, you should go to the

01:20:59.920 --> 01:21:03.539
executive on the inside, it's just invisible.

01:21:03.899 --> 01:21:12.180
I mean, everybody, the point being everybody is there's not really, none of us have got this all together, because this thing that's inside of us is really complex, as you've said,

01:21:12.659 --> 01:21:56.739
yeah, in the beginning, I think we started, and I said, you know, I study cognitive neuroscience, not these, these touchy feeling things, but there is no such separation. But we were taught this way, right? So the word we use is cold cognition. It's like thinking without feeling. It never exists, not in the lab, not for the boring tasks we do never it just never exists. The feeling is the fuel that moves us, that catalyzes the feeling is the fuel that catalyzes change, that catalyzes learning, that drives us through the world and and you're right that we're not trained in any way, and if we're trained in any way, it's not to express that feeling or to

01:21:57.880 --> 01:22:14.460
express the feelings that your parents expressed. Because if you ask 30 people, lay out what was allowed and not allowed in your house, it's not the same, but that's how they do it now, like that's that was their trading. It's what was allowed to be expressed and what wasn't.

01:22:14.699 --> 01:23:36.800
Yeah, and I think you know more than that or not. I don't know more than that, but plus that, and I think these be this feeling world that we have, that we are not trained, what to have the courage to feel our feelings, how to find the information and the feelings, is also largely invisible. So this is one of the things that I love about my work with horses, is that it has made me so much more sensitive to body language in people and to like how I how that, how our inner world we feel that it's private. But often we are going back to that contagion study. Often we are in spreading and influencing others, even if we're not aware of how we feel, we're we're spreading that feeling. And I think that, from a pure connectedness standpoint, it's so interesting that I think we feel more isolated and alone because we have this neglected space that others can't see and that we don't know how to show and that we don't know how to respond to. It's like an artificial barrier.

01:23:37.279 --> 01:24:22.760
Well, if you, okay, so this is just coming to me right now. But if you, if you connect that feeling, anytime something's off, that feeling of agitation, right? If you connect that that there's a problem with you, I'm making a mistake. I'm wrong. I am. They think I'm dumb, whatever, then what are you going to do? You're going to hide all that feeling, as opposed to saying, You know what, I make it, yeah, I'm not feeling so good about this right now. Or something doesn't feel quite right, you know. And I've started trying, you know, I shouldn't even say trying, I've started applying this awareness to my decisions. And it's amazing, if I will just say I need to sit with this for a bit, because I'm not quite there yet.

01:24:22.760 --> 01:24:57.220
Something's still off, but if I will give myself some time, the answer comes. It almost always shows itself to me. And now I'm not mad at somebody because you made me feel bad because you said something that's off, like you made a decision, let's start the party at five. And it's like, man, doesn't feel right, but you don't want to argue about it. And then you come back later, and you go, it's gotta be six because, and I knew that all along, it just now finally bubbled to the surface. Mm hmm, you know, just trusting that that feeling is acting as a guide, as opposed to an indictment. Mm hmm, is huge. Mm hmm.

01:24:57.880 --> 01:25:08.279
So maybe we can, we can offer. For this advice, and that is, don't judge your feel whatever you're feeling. You're feeling it because you're alive.

01:25:04.680 --> 01:25:08.279
Mm, that's

01:25:08.279 --> 01:25:45.338
so good. Well, and by the way, you were mentioning working with the horses when you're just in the moment with them, like that, and not judging how you feel or not judging what they're doing, they can barely stay away from you. They just are like real magnets connected to you, because they just love the feeling of you being in the moment. Yeah, soon as that mind starts, you know, I'm doing it wrong, or I'm about to put a halter on you, either one of those thoughts, especially with the Mustangs we work with. I mean, I can, I swear my body language hasn't changed. They're not reading my body language, but they can read my energy field and boom off again.

01:25:45.819 --> 01:25:47.979
That's my horses too.

01:25:45.819 --> 01:25:52.000
And they're, they're so, and I know that I have Powerful Goal, goal energy. So I have to be so.

01:25:52.359 --> 01:26:37.520
I have learned to to absolutely incorporate do nothing time. I would say probably like 80% of our time together is do nothing time. And I always start with do nothing time, because as a busy, goal oriented person, I would make the the correct, you know, my thing would be like, okay, if I'm only 10 minutes, we're going to be super focused, and we're going to do 10 minutes of backing up or bubble, or whatever the heck. And it's just, I walk in the barn, and they're like, like, get out of here with this, like, predator energy, like, we're going to back up. And it's just like, whatever it was, I was just so singularly focused on the goal, um, that they were like, wow, where are you, yeah, and where are you? Are not here. You are not here, yeah.

01:26:37.698 --> 01:26:47.679
And that agenda is just like a predator would be, you know, coming up. They know the difference between somebody coming up to get a drink at the water hole and somebody coming up to take a bite out

01:26:47.680 --> 01:27:53.439
of you. And isn't that interesting? Like, just, we could take that for a second and say, like, how much do we move through the world with that predator energy? Like, how in that goal space and that, like, this is about, again, like, about being right, about nailing it, about, you know, the outcome. And so we must have goals, and we must they organize and drive us through the world, but like it is, at a cost to being present and to evaluating the situation and reaching for your tools and responding to where you're at, not like where you expect to be, what you how you think your horse is going to show up, how you think you're going to show up, and and how do, how do people who don't have horses get that kind of feedback, but just thinking about us, I mean, I guess, like, it's just so rewarded everywhere, right? Like, you're a shark, you're a tiger, you're, you know, like you're moving through the world with a goal, you know, kicking ass and taking numbers and like, Yeah, but it is, you know, this is why I tell people like there's a cost and benefit to everything. You know, we talk about ADHD or distraction and paying attention, but when you use your goal to pay attention, you're actually distorting the world.

01:27:49.479 --> 01:28:05.220
You're you're turning up the signals on the things that you've decided are important, yeah, and you will be less likely to notice the things that are not important. So in a very real way. It's a moving away from the truth as it is,

01:28:05.460 --> 01:28:14.640
yeah, and that's one of the bigger challenges I have in coaching. The kind of people that I work with is that they're very goal oriented, and it's serving them in very big ways.

01:28:14.640 --> 01:28:49.180
And yeah, you know the the ability to, like, have a picture of where you're going, but then drop the picture and just move into it one frame at a time. And one of the most difficult things for people to learn, and I think this is amazing to work with horses this way, is I have a picture, but you tell me how to do it, the horse tells me what to do, tells me what they're ready for, and so forth. And what I have found is the leaders I work with who are willing to rent the idea that you can let the people tell you how to get your vision done, because you don't live on the front line.

01:28:45.520 --> 01:28:58.119
You don't sit there doing what they do all day long with your customers. You don't know what the place is, so trust them to tell you how to get the picture.

01:28:58.840 --> 01:29:30.140
But most leaders struggle because they're still trying to justify the picture, and it's like, no, you have a right to create the vision. This is your job, setting direction, looking out into the future, deciding where you're going, and they need to tell you how to get there. And when we do feedback along, you know, I don't get to do this very often, but where I have one of the biggest pieces of feedback is they make changes in the executive office having no idea what impact they've just had down here at the front line.

01:29:26.720 --> 01:29:40.539
And it's because they're not willing to, like, have that two way dialog which creates the connection, like we do with the horses, where the horse is giving us feedback and we're giving them feedback.

01:29:42.100 --> 01:29:44.739
And a lot of that.

01:29:42.100 --> 01:30:07.560
Again, I think that's a like, you know, keep keep reiterating this. But I think a lot of that comes from a culture of needing to know the answer, and thinking that leadership is about having the right answer, and that if you don't have the right answer, if you allow other people's face to come up with the answer, if you just open up the door. Were to they have a different perspective, like they have a different piece of this job, that that will be like a form of weakness, or, you know, oh,

01:30:07.739 --> 01:30:46.840
well, you ought to see what happens when I tell them that the DNA of leadership, as I understand it, is that it's asking for help. And people who want to have the answer rarely think asking for help is a good idea, because they think it's a sign of weakness. But then if they look at it logically, and I'm like, Look, if you could run the bank by yourself, would you go ask anybody else to be the teller and be the loan officer and be the one that issues the credit cards and all of that stuff? It's like, you have to have help if you're going to be a leader. Otherwise, why be a leader? Just do it yourself. And they're like, oh my gosh, I've never thought that way. And then they're like, kind of turn their whole world upside down. And then it's like, and that gives you permission to let them tell you,

01:30:47.260 --> 01:30:50.859
Mm, hmm, what it means.

01:30:47.260 --> 01:30:50.859
That's so clever. I love that.

01:30:51.100 --> 01:30:52.119
Yeah. So

01:30:52.300 --> 01:31:25.039
it's um, it's interesting to think about though, how our like this conversation, if there's a theme, it's how our brains and this inner world, like we started with emotions and feelings in that distinction, how it influences the way we move through the world, who we choose to connect to, how we connect what we're afraid of, what we're not afraid of, where we will lean in, where we will change, where we will Learn. It's this unseen part of us is what's driving all of it, isn't it? Yeah,

01:31:25.039 --> 01:32:17.159
and I think even in that unseen part understanding that some of it is nameable and some of it is not nameable, right? There's like the story, and you hear that some of us hear it, some of us don't. And then there's the feeling. And the feeling is, is another navigational system. It's an older navigational system, and it's informed. You know, the both parts of the brain, the speaking, inferring, storytelling part of the brain, and the feeling moving towards good things and away from bad things, part of the brain, they're both informed. They both have information, but we listen to them in different ways, and we let them, you know, drive our decisions in different ways, but they're both in there. They're both, they're both the ways.

01:32:13.500 --> 01:32:25.460
They're different ways that our our brains try and move us based on our experiences, based on the way we understand them. So

01:32:25.460 --> 01:32:41.800
I have a question about that idea you just said about the brain pulls you towards the good things and pushes you away from the bad things. It for lack of a better language. But I think we can't, you know, we think about moving away from pain or things that would hurt us, moving towards things that are pleasurable and so forth, which

01:32:41.800 --> 01:32:51.760
is stronger? Oh my gosh. Well, this is one of my favorite individual differences.

01:32:47.020 --> 01:33:37.579
So there are actually in the human brain, there are two separate pathways where we learn about reward possibilities and we learn about punishment possibilities. And in fact, I have a little game on my website where you can learn, you can actually do it and learn about your own I call it carrot and stick the original paper. It's called carrot and stick learning, and it's actually related to dopamine, but we have two separate dopamine paths. And what's interesting is that while no one likes negative feedback, right? So we always talk about you learn four times as much from negative that's actually not strictly true, but none of us like negative feedback.

01:33:33.739 --> 01:34:04.199
However, there are people in the world that learn better from from just avoiding bad things and they move through the world, you still land on the good decisions by learning a lot about what all the bad the worst options are. And in fact, these people are. You know, I joke that these are the people you want on your zombie apocalypse team, because when there are no good choices and you need to find the least bad choice.

01:34:00.600 --> 01:34:24.680
They're the ones want to stick learners. You know, most AIS, and most, you know most like computers that are set up to learn from rewards. It's called reinforcement learning. You you kind of the reinforcement learning algorithms and those parts of the brain, they land pretty quickly on the best choice, but they don't sample.

01:34:25.039 --> 01:35:29.779
They don't know what to do when there's no good choice. They don't sample around the lower reward spaces. And so there are genetics that drive the strength of those two pathways. And what's so some people are good at both. I should say like some people are equally strong. Some people are equally weak. But there are these, like, I would say, maybe 10% on either end of the spectrum that move through the world, mostly by carrot or mostly by sick. And you kind of know, if you have these people on your team, so carrot learners are, like, going to generate a lot of possible ideas. Um. And the stick learners are like, well, this is this could go wrong. This could go wrong. This could go wrong. And like, for me, I think I'm I'm pretty okay on both, but I tend to decision make by moving toward good things. And my husband is very like, but here are seven things, reasons that won't work. And while I hate it because he never gives me another option, it saves me from wasting so much time, because he's like, almost always, right? And I'm like, I have this one. I'm just gonna put a pole in the ground here, and we're gonna use this for x.

01:35:27.140 --> 01:35:55.600
And he's like, Here are seven reasons why you can't put a pole in the ground there, right? And there's no tension. All these things I don't know about, like, the support a pole, and like how you have to dig and all that, you know. And it's not just about things I don't know. It's about literally all the things that can go wrong that his brain has learned about. And I'm like, oh, man, yep, yep. So the answer to your question is that it's a it's something related to genetics, yeah, and it's different in different people.

01:35:55.840 --> 01:35:59.319
Wow. We learn different things from the same kind of feedback.

01:35:59.380 --> 01:36:03.000
We might learn a lot about the the choice that we made that was incorrect.

01:36:03.300 --> 01:36:20.840
Yeah, and you know, when I think about the different horses, because I'm on the board, of course, we have both pathways, Sue, yes, because we have, we've rescued a fair number of feral horses, and now some Mustangs. So both were very untouchable when we got them.

01:36:16.920 --> 01:36:49.000
The ferals were more scared and more willing to run away. The Mustangs also scared, but they have more of the fight path. You gotta watch them. They're they're more willing to move in rather than move away, at least the ones we have. And again, I think all horses are probably different. But thinking about this, there are, I could almost divide the horses up between which ones kind of go for the pleasure the ferals almost all ended up once they figured out that we could scratch them in places they couldn't reach.

01:36:49.060 --> 01:37:08.760
Yeah, they're like, You guys are great. Yeah, come back. Let me do it again. Give me some more scratches. You know, they love the they're kind of carrot, but some of them are stick. They need a little pressure to get them to, you know, move away from something they shouldn't do. Yeah, that's really useful.

01:37:09.420 --> 01:37:09.659
I'm

01:37:09.659 --> 01:37:27.619
glad you asked that question, because I often volunteer, yeah. And I would just tell people, if you go to Chantelle pratt.com there's a Brain Games tab, and there are a lot of different things you can do. One of them is the carrot and stick, and it will tell you right then, like you're 100% carrot, or, you know, give you feedback right there. It's probably about 10 minutes.

01:37:27.800 --> 01:37:41.500
Oh, I'm looking, yeah, I'm on it now. That looks fascinating. Alright, people go to her website at Chantelle Pratt com, because this is awesome. Oh, I love your who did the little drawings with a little I hired,

01:37:41.500 --> 01:37:44.380
I hired an artist to do those. Aren't they cute?

01:37:44.680 --> 01:38:08.640
They're brilliant. They're brilliant. Oh, I love it. Luke Newell, that was his name. I you know, I actually was going to hire somebody to do some of the drawings in my book. And then actually did hire a couple of different people. And when it was said and done, everybody liked the little scribbles that I had done better than anything the drawing people did. It's like, well, I gave them a little bit of money towards their drawing, and we're still going to use my drawings.

01:38:10.380 --> 01:38:13.380
So that says something about your scribbles versus mine, for sure.

01:38:14.159 --> 01:38:19.560
I don't know, I don't know you ever you might not have seen the ones in my book. I sometimes look at them going, these could be better, but,

01:38:20.939 --> 01:38:24.019
but But what part of your brain that's a feeling part of your brain?

01:38:24.079 --> 01:38:41.199
There, there I go. That's a little bit of that beating myself up, isn't it? Um, so, so as as we kind of come to a close, I always like, you know, you you've given us several pieces of advice, and actually called it out as advice as we were having this conversation.

01:38:37.340 --> 01:39:06.420
But sort of toward the end of any podcast, I like to give my guest a chance to just say, okay, based on this conversation that we've had, or something that we may not have even touched on, that matters a lot to you. What would you have my audience know or do or possibly think about changing something that they could do to either make their life better or less worse, if you think about it in terms of carrot stick

01:39:06.659 --> 01:39:12.180
better or less worse.

01:39:06.659 --> 01:39:59.920
Well, I guess in this space of learning that we've been talking about, I think one thing that amazes me is how most people feel inadequate in some way, in some space. And I think that this comes a lot from a illusion of what how easy or hard it was for another person to attain what they've attained, or even that there's like one right, one right way to do a thing, one right way to perform a thing, one right way to be. And I feel like this is not moving people forward in the way I like, while I know our brains kind of consider these things and say, you know, they become part of our story, I think that they don't motivate most people to move forward. So I think, you know, opening up space for.

01:40:00.000 --> 01:40:45.460
Yourself and other people to move through the world in ways that might be different, but not better or worse, is a gift, and like finding ways to use your feelings that might be unpleasant as informational guides getting curious about the parts of your story that you don't like. And I guess just when we're talking about be be better or be less worse, I would say, before you go jumping into that, ask yourself, why? Where's the where is the desire to be better or less worse in this space coming from? Is it really coming from you? Is it coming from your navigational system?

01:40:41.560 --> 01:40:45.460
Is it coming from your culture?

01:40:45.460 --> 01:40:53.199
Is it coming from some idea that you've had about what better or worse looks like? You know, and if you're tapped into your why?

01:40:53.800 --> 01:41:35.720
Then I think, you know. I think that what can happen is that you can find a partnership with your brain. You can you can align with the ways that it's defining success, and the ways that you have identified that you would like to change and grow, that can feel so much more interesting, more empowered than what can often happen on the other side, which is like a wrestling match between you and yourself, because you've got some idea that maybe didn't come from you about how you want to be better, how you want to be different, and maybe doesn't account for the things that your brain is doing for you that you don't appreciate or like, yeah.

01:41:37.640 --> 01:41:49.300
So everybody listening, you might want to hit rewind two or three times and go back and listen to what Chantal just said, because there are, like, so many layers in what you said.

01:41:49.300 --> 01:42:29.060
Yeah, it wasn't really one piece of advice. I feel, well, that's No that's okay, because the core about what is our Why is such a big piece. But where is that message coming from that it needs to be better or be less worse, and how can you form a partnership with your brain? Or two things that I took out really right for myself, and I already was like thinking, Oh, I'm so glad this is getting recorded, because I'm going to go back and listen to that several times. So that was really, really well said. Thank you. Well, so tell people, will, of course, have all this stuff in the show notes and so forth, but some people are going to be listening and going, I want to know how to get to her stuff.

01:42:26.479 --> 01:42:29.060
How do how do people follow you?

01:42:29.359 --> 01:42:38.539
Find out more about you. What are your tell them a little bit about your books again. This will all be in the intro and the bio, but go ahead and tell them as we close up. Well,

01:42:38.539 --> 01:43:20.159
Chantal pratt.com is the website you can go you can play brain games. I've got some information about my existing book. I need to update it with the new book, which will be all about learning, but that won't be out until 2026 meanwhile, I also have a sub stack. So it's there. Most of them are Chantal Pratt, PhD, so sub stack is a good place to read about what I'm thinking about in the interim. And yeah, so I think between my website and sub stack, you should be able to find pointers to lots of different things that hopefully will help you think about yourself and where you want to be in the future. That's

01:43:20.159 --> 01:43:31.819
so awesome. So folks, this is somebody who knows how to read scientific papers, get to the core of the details and the truth of the research, and then turn it into something the rest of us can understand, and that is a gift

01:43:32.000 --> 01:43:35.600
to the world. So much for saying that, Oh, I

01:43:35.599 --> 01:43:38.238
can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this conversation.

01:43:38.418 --> 01:43:41.979
So thank you so much for being here.

01:43:42.878 --> 01:44:02.399
Thank you, Lynn, thank you for helping me to expand, expand my pressure sensitivity and and and just geek out on learning and and experience and how to grow. I think we're both like, yeah, just all about that growth, all

01:44:02.399 --> 01:44:16.079
over it, although I will say, I have not always been a learner. I was, at one point I shut down. Please just don't mess me up person. But something broke open, and boy, has it been a fun ride. In the meantime, a little bit of a roller coaster, but it's been fun

01:44:16.619 --> 01:44:19.140
imagine, and just imagine where it's going to go.

01:44:19.140 --> 01:44:20.659
I mean, we're still going, still

01:44:20.658 --> 01:45:00.779
going. I have, I think that I've, I'm convinced that learning is the fountain of youth. So yes, yeah, I am. I am all over it and and all the all of you who are listening to this podcast, you you know that because you hear this, this from me a lot, and I'm so grateful to have you as listeners. So please, if you enjoyed this podcast, share it with your friends, your colleagues. Sign up for the newsletter at the coaching digest.com and would love to have your feedback and have you back for the next podcast as well. In the meantime, we'll see you on the next podcast. Thank you for listening to the creative spirits unleash podcast. I started this podcast because I.

01:44:58.118 --> 01:45:16.319
Having these great conversations, and I wanted to share them with others. I'm always learning in these conversations, and I wanted to share that kind of learning with you. Now, what I need to hear from you is what you want more of and what you want less of. I really want these podcasts to be of value for the listeners.

01:45:16.979 --> 01:45:29.779
Also, if you happen to know someone who you think might love them, please share the podcast and of course, subscribe and rate it on the different apps that you're using, because that's how others will find it.

01:45:26.359 --> 01:45:31.338
Now I hope you go and do something very fun today. You.
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