Train Your Brain to Silence Your Inner Saboteurs with Shirzad Chamine

0:00If you're serious about sustained change, you do really need to rewire your brain and rewire your reflexes. So all these saboteurs are my automatic way of reacting to life's challenges. I've done it for so many years. They're the automatic way, which means they have muscle power. In my brain, they have built neural pathways, which is the brain's muscle power. So the only way to truly change is we need to intercept these and then do this thing that I just talked about, the PQ-Rub's brain activation, and then choose differently. And each time you choose differently, you begin to lay out a new neural pathway, a new wiring and muscle power in the brain, that's the positive side.

0:39And so what I talk about is you can't fight muscle with insight, you need to fight muscle with muscle. So in order to really change, you need to lay down the neural pathways of positive response. In MRI imaging, you can literally visually see there's more gray matter in the positive region of the brain, and there's less gray matter in the sabato region of the brain. You have rewired your brain in a way that it actually shows up in MRI imaging within eight weeks. Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

1:15I'm ready for my close-up. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with us this week. Oh my gosh, this is going to be so exciting for everyone. I can't wait for you to meet our guest. Shirzad Shamim is the New York Times bestselling author of Positive Intelligence, Stanford University lecturer, and pioneer in mental fitness. Shurzad's groundbreaking work integrates neuroscience, cognitive behavioral psychology, positive psychology, and performance science into practical applications that have transformed millions of lives across the globe. Shurzad, thank you so much for being here today.

1:47My pleasure, Heather. I'm so glad to be here. Okay, how did you get into this work to begin with? It sounds so incredible, but not like something someone would just fall into. Multiple stages in it, But basically, I grew up in poverty and in a ghetto with a father that I was terrified of. And it turns out I was in clinical depression the first 30 years of my life. I didn't even know that I was diagnosed in clinical depression. I was 30. And so it turns out that there is a lot that messed me up as I was growing up. And it all culminated in I had started a software, a venture-backed software company, I've been a visionary, attracted all these luminaries and investors to my company and great investors and great team members and also clients.

2:35And a couple of years into it, I walk into my office and my heart sinks because in my boardroom was sitting the chairman of the board, my president and vice presidents. It was a palace coup. What was happening is people had gone to that board and said, Shirzad has shifted from being a visionary leader to such a horrific micromanaging and controlling leader, we can't stand working for him anymore. And on that day, it was the most painful day of my professional life. I was demoted as the CEO of the company I had founded. And the pain was so searing that I had to figure out what is going on inside of me?

3:10Who am I? Am I this visionary leader that attracted all these people to me? Or am I this horrific leader nobody wants to work for? And how come I went from one to the other and what's going on inside of me who am I and how did I get here and how did I stop the pain and so that became a huge turning point for me in trying to figure out what's happening inside of me how to reclaim the positive part of me and quiet what had taken control and that was the beginning of a lot of research and the work that I did that led to this body of work that's an incredible story first of all I love that you didn't just stop with it but you dove into it even more I I think that fear is a green light that means go and go faster.

3:48And I live by that. And I'm so happy you clearly do as well. Sometimes the hardest thing to look at is the mirror, right? But you certainly did. So I did your saboteur assessment, which you've done so much research. I mean, there's obviously years before what you initially dealt with and faced and where you come to now. But I love to get into the saboteur assessment and how you've helped millions of people in business and in life, maybe not necessarily going through exactly what you went through, but going through situations where they're being held back by things that they're deeply unaware of.

4:25Yeah. As a matter of fact, Heather, when I stand in front of audiences, I say, you know what, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is every single day, you are actively sabotaging your own well-being, your own performance, and your own relationships. Every single day, you're actively sabotaging your well-being, performance, and relationships. How do I know that because we all do it. The question is not if you do it. The question is in which way do you do it? Because there are 10 different ways, depending on the saboteurs you have. And then what can you do about it, which is a lot of the tools, the neuroscience-based tools that we bring to shift this.

4:58So I think this is the human story. This is not just my story. It just happens that my story was a situation where my, what we call saboteurs, the agents of internal self-sabotage, which you call villains in your book. I mean, I know your book is also about the internal villains that we have. It's pretty much the concept of saboteurs. And so we all have these characters inside of us. How do we intercept them? And how do we shift to the inner sage instead of the inner saboteur? So the counterbalance with the saboteur is the inner sage. The Stanford students call this Jedi mind training. And they say, you know, this is inner Jedi versus inner Darth Vader.

5:35So whichever words you want to use is about a balance out of your head between different voices, different forces, and how do we empower one side and quiet the other. You know, it's so interesting. Thank you for explaining that. What's so interesting when you were just explaining all this reminded me when I first took the assessment, I thought to myself, oh gosh, you know, this poor guy, I actually have been doing so much work in my life on myself. I don't have any of these issues. This is what I was thinking. thinking I thought you know like I've transcended I know that sounds foolish but in my mind that's what I was thinking and even when I was taking it and I wonder how many people are like this I was taking the assessment I'm like strongly disagree strongly disagree strongly disagree and then I started thinking to myself am I am I faking like am I or is this real and then I had to kind of stop a few times and then I started thinking oh gosh I used to struggle with this a lot but then am I still maybe a little and so it's slowly I started going back over more to the middle and do you hear people describe taking the assessment similarly to that?

6:44Yeah we like to not not believe that there is still work we want to we need to be doing and one of the things that I reframe for people is that one way to look at saboteurs first of all why do we all have saboteurs? So savathurs are patterns, mental patterns that we develop when we are kids in order to survive mentally and physically, in order to fend for ourselves, in order to get more love, in order to get more acceptance, in order to get more security. We all do it. And one way savathurs develop is whatever your natural strength is. We are all born with different natural predispositions and strengths.

7:21Whatever your natural strength is, you overdo it. You go to it too often and that becomes your greatest natural strengths become your greatest weaknesses because we overuse strengths. So if you tell me what your saboteurs are, I can tell you immediately what your natural greatest strengths are and how by overusing it, you have converted into your self-sabotage mode. So there's a good news and bad news kind of combined in that. It's two sides of the same coin. You lost me. Okay. We all know that we have strength. And when we lean into those, that is also amplifying. When we overuse them. So the saboteurs are the ones in you that overuse or abuse some of your greatest strengths.

8:06And by overusing and abusing them, they backfire and actually cause sabotage. So one of the things we show you is how to use that strength in a positive mode of your brain rather than saboteurs, which take that strength into the negative territory and have it cause backfiring and self-sabotage. And we can use the examples of your specific saboteurs for us to talk about examples of this. Okay, let's dive into it and do that, please. So I said, well, you know, it's your option. If you want to share your saboteurs with me, and you said you're an open book, so you shared your saboteur assessment results with me.

8:40And the top one is the hyperachiever. So what does that mean? Tell me your saboteur is a hyperachiever, your top one. what I can immediately know is that one of your great strengths actually is that you're achievement oriented. The goals for yourself, you want this life to have real, you know, things that you accomplish and that be used toward the purpose and something that at the end you look back and say, you know what, I spend my time and my life towards good outcomes and I have achieved a lot. That is a wonderful thing. Being achievement oriented is absolutely wonderful. Now, a hyperachiever, when it's taken too far is the idea that you have attached your sense of self-worth and self-love to your achievement and you have made love for yourself conditional on what's your latest achievement what's your latest achievement like what's your latest achievement and what that results in is people who achieve and achieve and achieve and achieve but once you achieve something you work really really really hard to achieve the next thing and then when you get there You celebrate for a minute, for maybe an hour, for a day.

9:45But you very quickly say, oh, that's not enough. That's just the latest achievement. I need to achieve this in order to feel good about myself. So you spend so much of your time between major achievements, really striving to get to that achievement. And your love for yourself is conditioned on the achievement and the achievement. The problem is there is no end to that. So I know hyperachievers in their 60s and 70s who have achieved tremendous amounts, and they're still hungry for the next achievement so they can feel worthy. And so what we talk about in the shift regarding this saboteur is how can you keep the achievement orientation but make your self-love and self-acceptance completely unattached to the achievement so that you look yourself in the mirror at the end of even the toughest day when you have failed and made mistakes and all things have fallen apart.

10:38you look at yourself in the mirror and all you feel is unconditional unwavering love and adoration for the beautiful being that you are and just disconnected to and paradoxically that is going to result in you having greater achievement because as mistakes and failures happen on the way to the next achievement you don't freak out as much you don't stress out as much because your identity is not on the line it's like okay i failed what's the big deal i'm gonna brush the dust off myself and get up again because your identity is not under attack because your self-love and self-identity is unattached to the achievement.

11:15So paradoxically, you end up achieving even more when you let go of being a hyperachiever and just focus on just being achievement oriented. That's a wonderful thing. What are some of the strategies that you teach to help somebody do that? Well, you mentioned before this program started that somebody had told you and your team that they had done a program that we did. And one of the powerful things in that program is something we did with the childhood picture. So that's a week in the program where we talk about the power of empathy and love brought first and foremost towards yourself and then towards others.

11:50Love directed towards yourself. We spend that entire week talking about how really the conditional love that we feel for ourselves is no love at all. The way we treat ourselves is like rats running a maze and at the end, if you have been good and get to the end, we give you some cheese as a reward. Don't want to treat yourself like a rat. You know, you want your love for yourself to be unconditional, meaning that as you look yourself in the mirror, you want to see the unchanging, beautiful essence being that you are, that's unattached to anything. So that exercise is about how we want you to remember who you truly are.

12:28and they use the childhood picture as a way of remembering who you truly are. Before all these facades of who you think you are, you were born as a beautiful essence being and that essence being is as unique as your fingerprint. And that essence being is gorgeous and beautiful from the moment you are born and it's actually unchanging. That essence being never changes, just like your fingerprint never changes. Now that being is worthy of unconditional love. And so what we do during that whole week of practice is use the childhood picture as a way of remembering who you truly are and then falling in love with yourself.

13:05And I have people, you know, put that picture on their phone and on their desktop, and they're constantly looking at that picture and falling back in love with their essence, beautiful self. And because that essence being it never changes, at the end of the day, when you have made a lot of mistakes and failures have happened and achievement hasn't occurred, It doesn't do anything to you looking at yourself in the mirror and actually feeling absolute deep love for yourself. Nothing is wavered. So then in the middle of the day, when something I'm doing fails and goes wrong or whatever, I'm not threatened by anything.

13:37It's like that deep self-love is intact and I recover much faster and continue on towards my goal. But I have separated the two from each other. Wow, that's beautiful. And it sounds so good. It sounds so real. And I also didn't realize that if I would let go of the outcome, I would be able to achieve more, which makes a lot of sense because the more calm we can be, the more we can find solutions, the more creative we can be, and the more we can succeed. Yeah, we can use, I use a metaphor, I mean, the scenario of say in sports when, because we use these techniques at Stanford with a lot of athletes, world-class athletes.

14:14And the example I use is, you know, let's say you're a basketball player and it's the last three seconds of the game and they pass on the ball to you. And if you make it, you win the championship. And if you don't make it, you're the GOAT. You have lost the season for the team. Now, when the ball is passed on to you, the question is, what's going on inside your head? Let's say you have this hyperachiever thing. Oh, my God, my achievement is everything. My identity is on the line. If I don't make this, I'm going to be terrible. Everybody's going to hate me. And who am I? and my self-love and self-respect really suffers.

14:45If all of those things is what's happening, what's the likelihood of him actually making the basket? As opposed to the ball comes to you and you're completely present with the joy of the game. You want to make the basket not because, oh my God, I got a win. You want to make the basket because this is a joyful moment where you experience all of your practice and the mastery of playing the game. You're in the joy and completely present to the game. and what we describe it with athletes is that you're in the zone when you're in the zone all of the voices have quieted of all of these things that are happening in your head you're in the zone and experiencing joy everything is in slow motion and you're much more likely to make it so that's an example in sports where if you if you're too stressed about making the achievement you actually choke but that example also applies when you're sitting in a meeting that very critical meeting and the boss or the chairman of the board, whatever, are, you know, disagreeing with you and things are not going well, what's happening to you?

15:47Are you able to just completely breathe, not be attached to how this meeting is going to go? And I agree with you or not, and then you completely center yourself. And with that clarity, creative possibility comes in, you figure out exactly how to respond and you shift the meeting to where you want it to be. It applies just as much to daily interactions in business and personal life as it does say to sports. Wow. That makes total sense. Thank you for explaining that. Meet a different guest each week.

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19:00Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash confidence free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent at www.northwestregisteredagent.com slash confidence free. I ask you to try to find your passion. Okay, let's get to your saboteur, which I think from the story you shared is the controller. Well, I have a bunch of them if you want to know. So under stress, our saboteurs go on hyperdrive because that's what we have learned as a way of dealing with challenges. So what had happened to me is I had gone from this, my sage, my inner Jedi, the visionary leader during the time of attracting people to the company and all that to not under stress.

19:49The product was late. The customers were upset. And under stress, my saboteur, which had been controller, has gone on overdrive. And so the problem with the controller, which was one of my saboteurs, is that the harder you try to control people's action, the more they are forced to either reluctantly go along with you but feel resentful, or they actually reject you and fight back. And so as I was trying to drag my team towards the direction that I wanted, they were completely uninspired and eventually ended up causing a palace coup on me. So what do we do? So my daughter has the Contreras Abitur.

20:29So she has been growing up with some of this stuff, and she has been a great observer. So she is in third year of college, and I just a few months ago was recording a new video on the controller, and I reached out to her and said, Tisa, tell me what you have learned about your controller, and what are you doing about it, so I can maybe share this in the video. And she said, Dad, I just had a perfect reason example. I was in a class where the professor assigned us to a project team of five, and gave us what the project task was, and it was a pretty challenging thing. And the moment he gave us the task for the project team, I instantly knew exactly how to accomplish it.

21:07What are the things that needed to happen and what was the outcome and all that. And in my controller day, I would have come and instantly said, OK, I know exactly what to do. And here's what you need to do. And here's what you need to do. And all of that stuff. And caused all of the angst that controllers cause. And instead, what I realized is that what I needed to do is, first of all, calm myself down. let go of the needing to control things instantly. So I shifted my brain activation the way she has learned to do. And then she said, what I did is go around the table. And instead of sharing my idea and pushing my idea, I asked everybody what they were inspired to do, what were in the back of their minds about the ideas and what they wanted to accomplish.

21:46And made sure the quiet ones were heard so that everybody was equally heard. And as people were talking, I realized some of this is improving my initial idea. So by the time it came to me, my initial idea had been improved with all of these other things I had heard. I incorporated that into my initial idea and vision. Then when I brought it back to the group about what we could do, they were feeling their own peace in it. And then they each had figured a way to contribute. So by the time we said, let's take action, people were just so inspired to go take action rather than feeling forced into action through me.

22:17That was an example of controller leader versus an inspiring sage leader. And she was describing how powerful it worked. So that's what we show is instead of having a push strategy of the controller, create more of an inspiring pull so that people are inspired to co-create with you rather than be forced into your vision of things. So that's one particular recent example for me. And a beautiful example. So what was something that she did that helped her transition from a controlling leader to one who is instead attracting people and to be a part of the solution? Well, the most important thing was, again, with each of the saboteurs we talk about, so look at what strength it is that you're overusing here.

23:00So with my daughter, the strength, when somebody says I have a contral saboteur, I know one of their strengths is they are very driven and action-oriented and capable of marshalling resources and organizing resources into activities and actions more than others. those are all incredibly, and they have a confidence of personality that they can indeed, you know, exert influence and feel confident about marshalling resources like that. Those are incredibly important leadership abilities. So as my daughter was growing up, I was telling her, you know, that's an awesome thing. That's a great strength you bring now.

23:40When overused, People will feel, you go towards your goal with such blind focus that you cause a lot of casualties. You bulldoze over people. You bulldoze, you don't really hear them and include them. And so people feel controlled, resentful, or pushed back. How can you have this be more of a pull than a push? And first and foremost, I needed to help her feel into the moments where the controller is about to take over. so with all saboteurs what we talk about is the way you know you're in saboteur versus your sage is the emotion and energy you're experiencing all saboteurs generate negative emotions so the best way for me to know if i'm in the saboteur mode is i pay attention to my energy and emotion and if it is negative which includes stress anger frustration disappointment regret judgment all of these things that means I am in saboteur world.

24:39And that's the telltale sign that I am in that mode. So my daughter has learned that when she's in controller mode, she feels kind of rigid. She feels anxious for making sure control is exerted. She feels impatient and frustrated when other people aren't going around. So there's a lot of signals that says, hey, Tisa, you're in controller mode right now. And what she has learned to do, which is the technique we teach, are these 10-second techniques we call PQ-RAPs. that shift brain activation. So they quiet the saboteur region of the brain where all the saboteurs live and begin to energize the sage, the positive part of the brain so that a shift can begin to occur.

25:19So what she has learned, and I can show you and your audience some of these techniques. So, and they each take 10 seconds. So if we try this ourselves, if you take two fingertips and gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel your fingertip ridges on both fingers. That's an example of the 10-second technique we call a PQ-Rap. And what just happened, if you had your head under an fMRI machine, we ever so slightly quieted the saboteur region of the brain that produces all of the negativity and all the stress and upset, and ever so slightly energized the sage part of the brain where your positive inner Jedi lives.

26:00And so as you shift to that, and my daughter had done that, so she had shifted, then in that positive mode, you have deeper access to these sage superpowers. And one of those is true empathy. So in that mode, she actually felt empathetic towards this quiet member of the group who otherwise would not have felt heard. So she had a genuine empathy to really want to make sure she's brought out and is heard. in that part of the brain you are in touch with deeper curiosity and you're truly truly beginner's mind curious what what are the other ideas you have deeper access to your innovate mind there are five superpowers and innovate is one of them so you're more creative so as she shifted she shifted and had deeper access to her say superpowers which is how she orchestrated this this meeting with people in a very different way than the controller would have done wow i love that And immediately I felt so calm, like any sense of nervousness, just, and I'm nervous right now, but still it just made me feel incredibly, wow, that worked very quickly.

27:06So, so, so this, the, the neuroscience of this is really important. What we are really doing, we call it mental fitness. What we talk about is if you're serious about sustained change, you do really need to rewire your brain and rewire your reflexes. So all these saboteurs are my automatic way of reacting to life's challenges. I've done it for so many years. They're the automatic way, which means they have muscle power. In my brain, they have built neural pathways, which is the brain's muscle power. So my controller has muscle power. My avoider, my judge, my victim, they all have muscle power.