The Psychology Of Parenting | Dr. Dan Siegel

25:45And are you mom enough to – and that is totally not scientific. Our human family is meant to live in a village. yes it's a few specific designated attachment figures but it's more than just the mother so a lot of moms i work with they're overwhelmed they're depressed they're anxious because they're getting this lie told to them that if they were strong enough as a parent figure they could just mother this child by themselves and no other adult should take care of the child that child was designed to have other adults in their life so that's very message number one message number two is, you know, we've had 220 million years of being mammals where attachment was our thing.

26:31You know, birds do it too, for sure. But we as mammals started it first, by the way, before birds branched off from reptiles later on. But we developed attachment. And what it means is our babies are born and they're really immature, you know, and they have to have an attachment figure or they're going to die. And so built in genetically is the wiring to get ready for attachment. So that's just innate. And there's something called experience expectant. The brain expects to have an attachment figure. So if you're raised in a closet or raised in an orphanage and you don't have an attachment figure, that becomes an attachment disorder because your experience expectant brain system for attachment never got the attachment figure at all.

27:15That's one issue. another issue is what is that circuitry if you don't mind me you know to the yeah so you're born with a pretty much fully developed brainstem but partially developed is if you do your hand model the brain you do your brain so be in your palm put your thumb in the middle this would be the limbic area and the cortex is here where your fingers are bent over so the brainstem is pretty much fully formed so you have things like temperament your inborn features that give rise to personality, but that's in the brainstem. The limbic area is getting ready for attachment, okay? And it's going to work with the specific experiences you do have.

27:53So for 55 to 65 % of us in the United States, at least, you're going to have secure attachment, which is basically getting these three S's. You're being seen, meaning your mental life beneath your behavior is respected by your parent. It's focused in on with attunement by your parent. It's responded to in a beautiful, timely way. That's called attunement. And when there are ruptures, which happen all the time, you make a repair. So there's no such thing as perfect parenting. It's just being present as a parent. Soothed. When a child is distressed, this parent can connect with the child and bring them from a state of distress to clarity and calm.

28:33Okay? Soothing. Third one is safe, both physically safe and keep them emotionally safe. So if you are the source of terror, you quickly make a repair, right? So those three S's, if they're there, when ruptures are there, it's reliably and, you know, rapidly repaired, then you get the fourth S, which is security. And this involves, I think, this is all the writing I've been doing on this, the limbic area in your thumb area, your thumbic area, and your fingers up here are the learning brains. The emotional learning brain is a name we give to the limbic area, the reflective learning brain, the cortex.

29:08This is where the networks of attachment are really based. So they're all outward facing. How is this parent interacting with me? Am I seen? Am I soothed? Am I safe? And if you get those, you get security, which basically means an integrated system that's flexible, can keep you in that river of integration, not going much to chaos, not going much to rigidity. But if you have what's called the non-secure, I call it non-secure instead of insecure because people hear the word insecure and they think, oh, the person's insecure. But no, this can be a very confident person with a suboptimal attachment history, for example, with avoidance, and you become absolutely convinced with confidence that relationships don't matter.

29:51And that's called avoidant attachment because they had to learn that because their parents weren't seeing them, weren't soothing them. And they said, I better do this on my own. It's a waste of energy to connect with this caregiver. and that's 20 % of the U.S. population, 20%, one out of five. And the classic finding you see in adults who've been through that is they don't remember their childhoods, not because they were abused, but just because there wasn't emotionally salient, relevant, activating their closeness to their parents. And then you see another 15 % has non-secure ambivalent, which is where they were inconsistent and intrusive, and that adult version of that goes on to be very preoccupied with their past.

30:31And then in another grouping, and it adds up to more than 100 % just because the way we do the numbers, is called disorganized attachment. And this is where you had terrifying experiences with your caregiver. And then you get a fragmented mind that has this thing called dissociation. So with avoidance, you get a kind of disconnected way of being. You minimize the attachment system. With ambivalence, you rev up the attachment system because it's intrusive and consistent. You try to get more attachment things going. and then with disorganization, your mind fragments and it's unresolved trauma. And luckily we can heal unresolved trauma and loss.

31:08And that's a very preventable situation and also treatable situation. So that's the quickest summary of attachment you'll ever hear in your life, but it involves these limbic and cortical areas.

31:19Dr. Michael Gervais:And what's important about that is you're conjoining the midbrain, which is the emotional center, and then the higher brain. What do you call it? You have a clever name for it. The cortex, the reflective learning brain? No, it's something even, it's very pedestrian. It's like the upstairs brain. Right. Right. So, yeah. Which is your thinking, you know. Exactly. Okay. So what happens when there is a rupture, when a parent is in their own way and they do not see their child because they are in real time working out a trauma experience in front of their child. When they've created an unsafe environment in that moment.

31:57Dr. Michael Gervais:An emotionally unsafe one or even a physically one. Let's go emotionally, you know, yelling, screaming, something like there's just, there's something happening. And there's a rupture of three of those S's, let's say. How, what has been your finding to help parents repair that? Just a few very helpful pre-statements before we get into the details. Number one, try to be kind to yourself because this happens to everyone. And the reason in my parenting books, I write about my own books. Yeah, you do a nice job with this. You know, to my kid's shock. Like they once said to me, I said, is this accurate what I wrote?

32:36They go, yeah, it's accurate. But what's wrong with you? You're showing people what a jerk you can be. I said, exactly. So even if you study this, even if you have your, you know, advanced research training in this, even if you write books on it, you can still be human and mess it up. So number one, you've got to be kind to yourself. Number two, and this relates to being kind to yourself, just realize there's no such thing as perfect parenting. There's just being present. So if you can be present with a goof up you made and why that's why I write about these, you can go, oh, wow, I did that three minutes ago.

33:09I wasn't seeing my kid. I wasn't soothing them. I wasn't keeping them safe. Oh, yeah, yeah. I heard on that wonderful podcast. There's the three aces that lead to security. I'm going to show up now and be present for my kid. And what I need to do is say, that was a way I was behaving when I was not integrated. And if I'm not integrated internally, literally, I mean, if you do the hand model of the brain, you know, the skull doesn't move, because I've had neuroscientists say, Dan, your model is ridiculous. You flip your lid, the skull doesn't move, you're implying the skull moves. I said, it's a metaphor.

33:43It's just a metaphor. I know that's hard to think in metaphors, but it is, you know. So So you flip your lid and what happens if you think about this area, the cortex especially in the middle, it's taking everything from the body, everything from the brainstem, everything from the cylindric area, everything from the cortex itself and even the relational world and bringing those five distinct differentiated energy flow sources together into one whole without them losing their essence. So it's exactly what we mean by differentiation and linkage. it's a profoundly integrated area in the five meaning self-organizing consciousness no no no five five meaning from the body number one okay from the brainstem number two from the limbic number three from the cortex number four and from the social world number five yeah and exactly then it takes these other things and brings them together yeah right yeah but i didn't know if you're going back to those yeah no but those are good to bring in too so that's great so now it's literally differentiating linking them.

34:44So when we do this metaphoric flipping of your lid, it's no longer able to integrate. And in those states, you're prone to chaos and rigidity. Any state of not integration goes to chaos and rigidity. So basically, when we do parenting flub ups, it's usually because internally, we become non-integrated. Now, here's the amazingly simple, and I beg my interns, whenever I revise a book, I have like 20 interns working me and i say i want you to prove this prior version was wrong and find one thing that shows it's wrong and they go didn't you mean right i said no no that's cherry picking find one thing that shows it's wrong and then we'll change it'll be so much fun we'll get rid of that old stuff make new stuff you know you can't be wedded to what we said before so they fight they try they try they try they try to find these things around they can't which is by the way just great science you know like here's an idea yeah like please let's find more this thing breaks down and then

35:40Dr. Michael Gervais:let's upgrade it. That's what we do. That's why I love science, not because it's rigid, just because it's trying to challenge itself. But it takes a great scientist that is open to exploring and really wants to understand something as opposed to really wants to be right. Exactly. Yeah. So nice job on that. And they can't. Over 20, 25 years, they haven't found the thing that is wrong about the model. I told them, look, here's the simple equation. Show me this is wrong. Integration within the parent, like me making sense in my life, my brain being integrated like we just pointed out, allows for relational integration.

36:11What does that mean? I honor the difference between what my child's experiencing and what my expectations of how they should be are. So I can actually see my child who she or he or they really are rather than what I wish they would be. And in that differentiation, I'm now reaching out and communicating, linking with my child with respect and compassion for who they actually are. So that would be an integrated relationship. When you have integration within you, like a coherent way of making sense of how you were raised, trying to be fully present, your communication then can be integrative with your child.

36:49You have an integrative relationship. Then amazingly, what that creates in the growing child's brain is integration in their brain. Okay.

36:59Dr. Michael Gervais:So that's the tuning, the attunement, the tuning. If you're integrated as a parent. Then your communication is integrative, and that stimulates the growth of integration of a child's brain. And integration of a child's brain is the base of resilience. And amazingly, this is what I also told the interns, every form of regulation depends on neural integration, brain integration, that is cultivated by relational integration, like regulating attention, emotion, thought, behavior, morality. All that stuff depends on integration in the brain. So integration is health. That's what we've said. So basically your job as a parent is to begin with where am I at in terms of what I call a window of tolerance?

37:42Are you flooded into chaos or flood into rigidity a lot? Then you've got some work to do.

37:46Dr. Michael Gervais:Red zone, blue zone, green zone. That's another way of talking about that. Those are your terms. Those are somebody else's terms, the colors. The window of tolerance. I'm color challenged. But I talk about the window of tolerance. Yeah, right. Are we talking about the same windows here? It's somewhat similar. Not really. I mean, it's interesting because people would always point out the color thing, and I am color challenged. So the way it's different is – but maybe you can tell me if it's the same. You know, we have this very simple model. Like a river would be across time, and the window of tolerance would be one slice of time.

38:19So outside of the window, on one side is chaos. The other side is rigidity. And you can widen that window. Let's say, for example, you know, in my childhood, you know, my father was a rageaholic. My mother was removed from my father emotionally because he was such a nut. So she was very distant from her two sons. I was one of them. I was never really seen by her. And if I was sort of seen by him, he would distort it and then attack me. So anyway, so not being seen, let's just use that phrase, would push me into chaos or push me into rigidity. And what was your attachment style? I had every kind of attachment stance, the word I use for it, which is, you know, I was avoidant with my mom because she was emotionally removed.

39:00I was ambivalent with my father because he was intrusive and inconsistent. And because he was terrifying, I was disorganized also with my father. And with my therapist, luckily, I earned and learned security. So I have all four stances still available to me to this day.

39:17Dr. Michael Gervais:Because he or she saw you. She, my therapist. Yeah, she did the three S's. She did the three S's with me. Right, okay. And so you can earn that. That's because it's not about your temperament. It's not about genetics. It's not about something permanent. it. Your stance is something you learn so you can unlearn it and learn security. So that's the beautiful thing about that. So with this situation then, the window of tolerance means, you know, if my kids, and they learned this early on, like they're in the bathtub and I say, okay, you know, we have dinner in 10 minutes, so let's get ready to go.

39:50All right, dinner's in five minutes, let's get out. You know, they're just ignoring me because they're playing with each other, the brother and sister. And then I would just flip out. They wouldn't, I wouldn't be being seen as a dad and I would just get chaotic or I'd get really grumpy and rigid. You know, I'd do something like this. Finally, I learned that to check in with my own signals. I would say, you guys, I've asked you three times now. And I like I'm about to flip my lid. And once I said that, they go, okay, we're getting out. Not that it was a threat, but I just could tell that for me, my hot button.

40:20And when Mary Hartzell and I wrote this book, Parenting from the Inside Out, We use these personal things. My hot button was not being seen. Now, because there was so much anger in my house, you'd think that would be my hot button. No, I mean, that was like just being at home. So if people were getting angry, I could stay fully with a wide window of tolerance for anger. I could be integrated, meaning I have flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. And there's lots of anger running around the house. No problem.

40:46Dr. Michael Gervais:You're familiar. The window of tolerance was wide. It was very wide. But not being seen? Not being seen. Tight. Oof. Yeah, right. Even with my wife, it was like that. So that was my hot – we all have these hot button issues. So to know that and to know if I did go into chaos, screaming and yelling or rigidity, I get grumpy and just remove myself, either of those, the kids are no longer being seen, soothed and safe. Maybe not so unsafe, but I have to make a repair. And that would be an example of me using my own inner awareness to see when I'm not integrated anymore, I'm flipping my lid around, not being seen.

41:22I don't go to them, you made me do that. No, it's my own issue. And so I have to work on that. And the good news is you can talk about it. So even now my kids are in their 30s. One just got her doctoral degree in environmental sciences and hiking the PCT. Huge congrats. Thank you, thank you. The other is a musician. So we have these fascinating art discussions of music and deep discussions of science and being out in nature and stuff. and it's just beautiful to see that if you develop you know these mind sight moments of looking into the mind and discussing it with your kids when they're young they get just used to it my our friends used to always say Dan you're talking to your kids too much just tell them what to do and maybe it's because my father always told me what to do which was nutty because he said nutty things to do but uh so I just never would maybe maybe too far to the other extreme so but it meant we were always discussing why are you doing that Why are you doing this?

42:18And what's your thought about that? And how are you feeling? And what's the meaning of that to you? But what that does is it creates an internal compass. So as your kids are navigating their world when they're no longer living with you, they have a lot of practice in fighting off social media things that go on or social pressure to conform. And neither of them are, obviously, you can hear from what they do, are conformists. but they have this internal compass that's super fascinating to get into and see how they literally travel their way through trails and all sorts of stuff.

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45:32Dr. Michael Gervais:Or the other way that you might want to take it is what are some ways that – or some questions that people – parents can ask to help their kid be more seen, to be more soothed? Like which do you find more powerful? Well, this is going to sound strange, but it actually relates to what we started with today. And so this may be wonky because, you know, I'm a scientist and a clinician and an educator and these are my kids. so I couldn't help just be myself. And I'll just outline some take-home points. Number one, inside of this body called Dan, I do feel like the mind is relational and it's embodied, and so that's just something I live, and you can live it too as a parent.

46:16So once you realize it's embodied and relational, you want your child to be aware of what's going on inside their whole body. So you can say, how's your body feeling? What is your heart telling you? What's your gut telling you? So that kind of stuff would be in our conversation. But the second thing is, no, the mind is fully relational. So when I'm interacting with my kid, I don't feel like, oh, I'm just telling him to do something. No, it's about this relational connection, almost like a relational field, like Michael Faraday talked about electromagnetic fields. You're literally in a field with your child that you can feel.

46:47You can almost palpate it. So that's the first thing. The second thing to say is, and this is where it gets super wonky, But if you say the mind emerges from energy flow and the physicists tell us that energy is what we said, the movement for possibility to actuality, what is possibility? They call it a formless source of all form. It's specifically called the quantum vacuum. It is this what one of my colleagues called, a physics professor at Amherst, calls the sea of potential. Now, that mathematical space, I have this thing called the wheel of awareness. Now we've done it with lots and lots of people, 77 ,000 people I've done it in person with.

47:25And when people take the microphone and say what they experience, they talk about the hub of the wheel, which is pure awareness, and the rim of the wheel being what you're aware of, like what I'm saying now with words, what you might see with your eyes, or what you're feeling in your body, or your thoughts and memories and emotions and stuff like that, and even the sense of relational connection. But the hub itself, those were all rim elements. The hub itself is something you can develop. Which is pure awareness. Pure awareness. What I think happens, this is kind of the wild hypothesis. This is from all these people we've studied.

48:01Pure awareness looks like it's when the energy position, so flow is like, where is it? On what's called a probability curve. When the energy position is in the plane of possibility on this graph we have, that is the quantum vacuum. That's the sea of potential. And it's a portal through which integration is allowed to arise. And so when you put that together with how you parent, then my job as a parent is actually to be present with my children, have a mindset conversation, that is talk about something beneath just surface behavior, which invites them to hold an awareness, whatever we're talking about, how they interact with their kids, why one kid came home drunk from a party, you know, and they helped them at the hospital or whatever, you know, all the different things in life that happen, lots of stuff happens.

48:56But what we're talking about is being held within awareness. So the way I see it with all this stuff we're talking about is that that kind of communication that I'm having with my child, whether they're five or 35, is allowing us to have the plane of possibility, the sea of potential come into the conversation and that I don't have to tell them what to do. This internal compass we're talking about is them holding whatever discomfort they may be experiencing with some interaction with kids or ideas of what they're going to do with their career or whatever. Like my son, Alex Siegel is a musician you can listen to his music, you'll see what happens as he takes his life and puts it out in the world in music, wherever you hear your music.

49:43And you'll hear these incredible songs of this journey of life. I feel, he might not phrase it this way, but that he's able to tap into the plane of possibility and let these gorgeous songs arise through him, right, that are based on stuff happening in life and the world, but you can feel it and the energy of the integrated song is there. Or when I see my daughter do the journey she's on academically and in her life, you know, it's all about tapping into the plane of possibilities. So as a parent, what does that mean? As a parent, what that means is, number one, we get in touch with making sense of our own life.

50:22Parenting from the inside out that I wrote with Mary Hartzell is a way to do that. The book Aware I wrote about this wheel of awareness and the companion book, Becoming Aware, is starting today you can do these things. So now you get in touch with that hub of the wheels, a metaphor, the plane of possibility. Now you start parenting from the plane, which is the hub. Now, whatever the challenge is, instead of seeing it, oh, my God, parenting is so hard, which it is. Oh, this is so terrible. No, you actually see these challenges as opportunities. And the chaos and virginity that's arising, okay, something's not integrated.

50:56it, you reach out to your kid, not as a, I'm going to tell you what to do, but let's join together in awareness, in this plane of possibility. And we're going to sit with that and we're going to co-construct in our conversation, an exploration of things. And here's the beautiful thing. The plane of possibility is where other options are sitting. It's the formless source of all form. So the formless source means all the potentialities are sitting there. So your kid may have chosen this to do with a group of friends or that to do. They didn't know, they feel hopeless, they have no other options.

51:31They tap into the plane in their conversation with you or reflective practice they may do on their own. Now other possibilities become available to you. And because it's the portal through which integration arises, they are health-based choices that arise. And you didn't tell them what to do. Together, you may have created the conditions where they got out of the blockages to differentiation linkage, which kept them stuck. but now you're opening to them they're literally resource re mean again and again and again source meaning the source of new possibilities and those possibilities that make sense a hundred

52:06Dr. Michael Gervais:percent it's it's um complex yeah you know um but humans are so we're not getting through this with the seven hacks well that's the thing like it's a my community here at finding mastery we we all recognize there's no shortcuts, there's no hacks, there's no tricks. I don't think there's any tips really. There are some foundational principles to work from. And I think what I hear, like, if I try to get to action here is my job as a parent is to understand how to be integrated, to not work from chaos or rigidity, to have an integrated sense of self. So I don't need someone outside of me to soothe me, to see me.

52:58Dr. Michael Gervais:It's nice if they do. That's wonderful. But my job is to be integrated as best to my abilities. And then from that place, tap into the mothership of awareness. I hear you saying we can develop awareness. I've always thought that awareness is there and my job is to tap into the slipstream of awareness. But you can develop the ability to tap more effectively. To awareness. Yeah, right. That is actually my best estimation. What psychological skill building really helps us to do is to be with awareness more often. Because once you're with awareness, all of the possibilities are available and you can And hopefully choose as opposed to just automatically, reflexively, reactively maybe is travel the path that you've always traveled that leads to the same destination.

53:52Now, yeah. Can I come back to one point you just made? Please. Because I'm just wondering if people hear us and hear that. So I have a feeling for what you're saying. We said, let me be integrated so I don't need to be seen and soothed by other people. I get that. I want to just ask you how you feel about this reflection on that. like when I think about my relationship with my wife, Caroline, you know, she's been meditating for 40 years way before I even thought that was something good to do, you know, before anyone was doing the science of it. She wrote this beautiful book called The Gift of Presence, you know, by Caroline Welsh, and she's taught me so much about that.

54:29I need to be seen by her as my partner in life, and I need to be soothed by her. Now, maybe I could use the word want, and maybe it's not desperate and maybe I'm not trying to have my child self do what my child, young Danny, needed from his mom and projecting that onto my wife, Caroline, for sure. So in that sense, I don't need it desperately like she's repairing my childhood, for sure. However, since the mind is relational, we have a few, maybe a handful of people close to us where it's okay and integrated to say, I'm a human being, and I do need these very few selected people, Caroline, Alex, Maddie, my kids, my wife, not to be attachment figures, me necessarily, Caroline, perhaps, not my kids, but close friends, where if I'm in a tough spot, I will call up a friend and say, hey, I need to talk.

55:24And they will provide me the being seen. Are you okay with that?

55:28Dr. Michael Gervais:Well, you did two things really nicely. One is you explored, which was cool, you know, and didn't come on top and say, no, no, no, no, wait, that's not what I said. You explored, which was. Wonderful. And the second is like you were clarifying the desperate, I was framing it without using the word that desperate need to be seen from your child. Earlier, hearkening back to your earlier kind of experience and mine as well. And so it was that neurotic, desperate kind of thing that how dare you bring this to my universe or whatever? Like you're not seeing my experience in it. And so you clarified the – there's lots of words we could use, the desperate or I introduced neurotic.

56:16Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. Like the leftover garbage stuff. The traumas, the unresolved stuff. But that idea, what I was working toward is this idea that when I feel integrated, then I can create a relational integration. I can create the space for relational integration to take place. And then in return, fostering the integration for the other. Yes. Right. And so I think the practical tools are you got to go do some internal work so that you can be present with your stuff. You can be with awareness. You can see another person. You can explore with them. If you need to soothe, cool. If you need to challenge, which gets tricky, that there's a place to challenge as well.

57:06But only once support, organic, authentic, deep support is had, do you earn the right to actually powerfully challenge somebody towards the standard or the way that

57:21Dr. Michael Gervais:they want to live their life? Meaning I say that I want to be kind and here I am acting a jerk to folks. So the kindness would be the standard. Yeah. And so if you just challenge somebody to be that standard more often without organic support, it becomes an anxious kind of broth of relationship as opposed to, you know, I really understand who you want to be and where you're coming from. I understand your scar tissue. I understand you. And I, but this is not what you, this is not, is this? Help me understand because this doesn't sound like that. And you put it as a question. Yeah, that's right.

58:00Dr. Michael Gervais:There's one question I want to go back to on parenting is that I know our community really cares about being their very best for their kids. Yeah. And it's akin to being a leader as well. Right? Not that you're parenting your directors or whatever, but there is a relational aspect here. If you zoom way out, what does healthy parenting look like and how can we be better at parenting? You know, I mean, it's showing up. Tina Payne-Brice and I wrote a book called Showing Up, and we have four books that kind of talk about what can you do ideally. And I don't think we would have written any of those if Mary Hartson and I hadn't written Parenting from the Inside Out.

58:42But the idea of showing up is how can you be present and tap into, from the inside-out point of view, tap into a deep understanding of where did your body, your inner self, come from in your own journey of being parented in your history? The research is really clear. Start with knowing your own inner story. Allow that to become coherent. If you say, how do I do that? Parenting from the inside-out will walk you step-by-step through how to do it. Brilliant. Once you started that journey, it's not like it's over. I'm still doing it. I mean, stuff happens with my kids now and their adult relationships.

59:19And I go, whoa, what did I do with them as a dad? And I've gone back to therapy to kind of figure out some things that were going on. So we're always on a journey. So it's not like, oh, I'm going to do it and finish it before I have a kid. No, start that journey so you can be present. Then with the showing up idea is these S's. you can if you just focus on those three s's how can i see the inner life of my child beneath their behavior how can i soothe them when they're distressed which means if it throws me out of my window of tolerance i'm in chaos or rigidity i'm no longer present so just being present is how i do that if even if i didn't have it myself and then safe if you do things that are scary like sometimes i'll get mad about things that scared my kids that was not good i need to make a repair when that happens.

1:00:03So those ways we can make a repair, repair, repair. Couldn't say it enough. And the repair isn't that, oh, there's a problem. It's more like, I think it's called kintsuji in Japanese. You get strength when you're putting these gold things to repair the broken vase or whatever it is. It's where the Leonard Cohen line of anthem goes something like, ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering there's a crack in everything that's where the light gets in so the light of your love of this relationship isn't going to come from you being thinking you're supposed to be perfect quite the opposite actually that you're present for these quote imperfections that you just embrace and if you have a growth mindset, Carol Dweck's term, you know, for let everything be your teacher.

1:00:56So when there are challenging moments in parenting, instead of thinking, oh, my God, this is such a pain. Yuck, yuck, yuck. No. Say, wow, this is challenging for sure. There was a rupture. I need to repair it. Let me use this as an invitation for further growth. Then that's a state of mind. And then we do the best we can. Listen, we're not talking about, well, we're talking about VUCA, but we're not talking about artificial intelligence, we're not talking about social media, all the other stuff. These are really, really challenging times for youth. We've never seen rates of anxiety, depression, suicide like we see now.

1:01:31There's a reason for that. You know, it isn't just social media. There's a lot of other reasons for alienation and stuff. This is a time when we haven't needed as much as we need now parents to really have their own inner life together so we can show up and be for our kids. And it's only to get more challenging. So instead of saying, oh, my God, this is terrible, this is challenging, yes. If you experience those difficult things as threats, your system will enter a threat brain state and you'll get exhausted and burnout. If instead, and I did this with Joanna before she passed, she said she was a mentor for a lot of activists supporting environmental activism.

1:02:11and she said, Dan, they're burning out in ways I've never seen. I said, Joanna, if they keep on interpreting this day's news as a threat, they're going to go and fight, flee, freeze, faint, or fawn, all those five Fs, and they're going to burn out. So you need to teach them how to go from a threat mindset to a challenge mindset. She goes, how do I do that? I said, they can have an attitude adjustment where when they hear the news, they think of it as a song. And this challenge, not the threat, the challenge, of course, it's dangerous. So in that sense, of course, they're getting a threat state out of it.

1:02:49But they see it as a challenge, and they see it as their dance partner. And so I pick her up from this chair in her kitchen. She was my mom's age. She was 95 at the time. So we started dancing around the kitchen. We're laughing our heads off. And I said, you can teach them to dance with the challenges and not feel collapsed in a burnout because they're in a threat state. Same thing with parenting. You know, these are challenging times. Sure, you could interpret them as threats and you're going to get burnt out because you're going to fight mode, et cetera. You don't need to do that. You've made the beautiful commitment to raising a kid.

1:03:25It is the most challenging job in the world, and what a privilege. And so you take it on and you say, how can I have this resilience? and taking on a challenge mindset and being very careful if you're getting in the threat mindset to switch it out and dance with these challenges. You say, bring it on. Let everything be my teacher. Everything's my dance partner. What's the music of today?

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1:06:10Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's keep pushing. Let's keep exploring. that aikido or that judo only happens when you're aware yeah i'm in a threat state i'm in a dysregulated whatever rigid chaos whatever and with that that's this is why i'm going to point back to what you're saying is just so paramount which is you've got a daily practice to be with the the sea of awareness yeah more often and then what the whole thing whether you're trying to be the best in the world at something or your very best, whatever your orientation is, does the seat of the whole thing is awareness. Exactly. Yeah, there you go. So when you're living with the kindness and compassion, you are letting integration flourish.

1:06:54Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, that's very cool. When my son was born, this is 17 years ago, my wife and I looked at each other like, what do we do? Let's just not repeat the same mistakes that our parents made with us. Let's kind of first order business, but what are we trying to cultivate? She wrote a couple of pages. And so we said, let's, let's get our first principles in line, you know, and then from that, what are the values? So we went first order principles. She wrote a bunch down, I wrote a bunch down. And then, then we kind of whittled that down to values that matter to us. We circled a bunch of values, but they're based on first principles.

1:07:28Dr. Michael Gervais:So first, again, first principle thinking, and then we shared them and we're looking for the commonalities for the first couple of years, you know like what would those commonalities as a bit of a north star and what made our list was kindness and strength wow so those two like we wanted to help support and nourish a child that was kind and strong we haven't changed them since yeah we're still doing what a thoughtful way to start parenting yeah it was a good one it was because we didn't know like we didn't really there's we didn't know so that's just kind of where we started but lucky boy yeah lucky lucky husband.

1:08:06Dr. Michael Gervais:Like I'm really lucky to be here. I was even talking about your son. I know. He's really lucky, but I'm more lucky. Yeah. I feel like, yeah. So all that being said is can you take us home in what you would hope folks would do to become more connected to awareness, to become more of who they want to be in this topsy-turvy world that we're in, whether it's to be a better parent or a better partner or a better athlete, whatever kind of the role that they're interested in right now. Well, you're right. I mean, it is a tough world. People sometimes use the acronym VUCA, volatile for V, uncertain, U, complex, meaning it's nonlinear, large outcomes can come from very small changes.

1:08:49And A is ambiguous. Even if you knew everything, you wouldn't know. So these VUCA times are challenging. When you look at all the science of resilience and how we're supposed to handle things, And I think adults are suffering a lot now, and especially kids and adolescents are too. So these are challenging times for everybody. Internal development of this compass, this internal compass, I think is crucial. And in many ways, for me, the way I would approach, respond to your question is, whatever the practice can be, I happen to do the Wheel of Awareness every day. And for me, that does it.

1:09:26Dr. Michael Gervais:They do it every day. Every day. Every day. And what are the eight characteristics that make your will awareness? The pie chart, if you will. Yeah, I mean, it's, well, first of all, it's a super simple visual. So it's a center hub with an outer rim. There's a singular spoke of attention. In this practice, you develop what the science shows are the three fundamental principles, the pillars of mind training that cultivates all these cool things I can mention in a moment. but you're going to train attention to be focused. And as you move the spoke around, you're doing that, especially in the first two segments, which bring in the different senses from the outside world and even inside the body.

1:10:10Number two, you're going to train awareness itself, which is different from attention, believe it or not, to be open. And that's a very important thing you do as you explore the hub itself and enter this kind of almost like shift in these states we can enter of just being aware without being aware of something in particular. It's amazing. So to do that every morning is like fantastic. So that's number two. Number three is you develop kind intention.

1:10:38Dr. Michael Gervais:Oh, see, I went to a different place. This is your meditation practice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, attention, awareness, and loving. Intention. And loving kindness. You're calling it intention. Yeah, because I think it really is an intention of positive regard. Beneficence is the one word you can use. Loving kindness would be one example of it. That's right. bigger that. Yeah, that's right. And how, so when you're doing beneficence or you're doing your, if you're setting, you're aligning with intention. Yes. Attention. Let me just go back and make sure I'm calibrating. This is your practice. And this practice is eight to 20 minutes.

1:11:13It's about 20 minutes. And these three principles are from all the research on other practices. Yeah. So the three pillars of mind training that basically make you physiologically healthier by reducing stress hormone, improving your immune function, improving heart function, reducing inflammation, and even optimizing an enzyme, telomerase, that repairs and maintains the ends of your chromosomes, slows the aging process, all those things, especially the last one.

1:11:40Dr. Michael Gervais:And I want to add, is involved with better parenting, emotional regulation, higher performance in high stress environments. And when you have these set of practices, you also increase the frequency of flow state, which would be considered an optimal state of performing. So the research around this mechanism is... Yeah, I call it three-pillar practice. Three-pillar practice is amazing. Amazing. And you even integrate the structure and function of the brain, which is the best predictor of well-being. So all those things are embedded in other studies. Now, it turns out the wheel has those three in it.

1:12:15What I find particularly exciting about it is it integrates consciousness. It differentiates the knowing on the rim from the knowns in the hub. It gives you the ability to link them through moving the spoke around. And then the added benefit, which I find specifically helpful, is you bend the spoke around into the hub and you leave the rim. So in terms of your question, all your worries about the VUCA world would be in the third segment of the rim. And so when you've learned the art of entering the hub of your wheel, this is the plane of possibility, then whatever all the junk is, it's kind of like being in the ocean.

1:12:56Whatever wild storms are in the ocean, if you can learn to swim 40, 50 feet beneath the surface, it's calm. So you've experienced now every morning, when I do it, I experience, I can get to the hub so if something happened we had a relative a young person in our family have a stroke in his early 30s so it's very agitating very worrisome what's going on oh my god I can quickly go to my hub I can get super clear I can then search the rim of what do I need to do to try to support him he's another part of the world this is the intention this is would be my intention to be kind and caring, but I can stay in a place of calm.

1:13:40I'm in my window of tolerance and make the phone calls I need to do to get an intervention for a young person having a stroke. I would totally get it if someone said, oh my God, I was so upset. I was so worried. I was crying. Totally get that too. But to be resilient and do what he needed would be for not just me, but his parents and everything, would be to have access to the hub of the wheel basically. So this for me is a super powerful aspect of it. In addition, as a parent, what it gives you is that clarity of, you know, this is where presence comes from, you know. And you wanted to talk about presence versus being present.

1:14:17So we could talk about that too. But this is where, you know, you can be present with what's happening as it's happening without going to chaos or rigidity. but presence you could almost argue is entering this larger field of this plane of possibility that we all share so you find a common ground with whoever you're dealing with you know and and when you live from this presence from this plane of possibility it gives you this incredible sense of connection and empowerment because it's no longer me versus them it's actually how do we let integration to arise in these different bodies? Sure, we have different bodies, but if I can channel that possibility, that kindness, that compassion that comes from that presence and just let it be there, I can learn to live from that.

1:15:09And it's going to activate, make it much more likely in another human being's body for them to start coming from there. And I can give you all sorts of examples of that, where when we live from that plane of possibility, from the hub of the wheel, this is why I do it every day, because I don't know what's going to happen today. But I know when I wake up, if I give myself that 20, 25 minutes, I do the wheel of awareness practice, I've grabbed the day. I've reminded myself, literally remind, bring back to my mind the resource of the plane of possibility, which is the hub, and I'm ready for the day.

1:15:45I don't think we really begin to understand

1:15:49Dr. Michael Gervais:and how to live anywhere close to our potential if we struggle with trusting that no matter what happens, we'll figure that out too. And trust comes from time under tension in challenging situations where you earn the right, be like, oh, I figured that out and that out and that out and that out and I adjusted to this. And boy, that one was really hard. It really tested me. But I figured some stuff out that I can adjust. I can be agile. I can be resourceful. I can develop that resilience that we spoke about before. And when you know, I'll bridge some metaphors here, when you can swim at 60 feet, did you say below the surface?

1:16:25Dr. Michael Gervais:When you know you can swim there in the cold, dark depths where you have to really be able to trust your ability to hold your breath and whatever, that you end up feeling more free in life. You end up being able to explore better. Exactly. Well, you want to hear something really wild, and this is where the consilience is so useful. So when I took the quantum physics view of energy's movement of possibility to actuarity and graft it out for the physicists and then mapped it on to these tens of thousands of people to the wheel, especially what they experienced in the hub. And again, the hub is awareness.

1:16:58Is awareness, pure awareness. It's just a metaphor of a thing you can visualize as a wheel, but the hub of that wheel is pure awareness as we've defined it. So on the mechanism side, you do a graph of what's called a probability curve. Certainty, you know, in actuality is 100 % at the top. The maximal uncertainty is the bottom where the plane of possibility is sitting. So here's to translate what you just said in this fun, conciliant way. When you embrace uncertainty, which is what pure awareness is, you realize its synonyms are freedom and possibility. Very cool.

1:17:37Dr. Michael Gervais:I mean, the attunement that we have there. Yeah, that's very cool. That to me, I think a Buddhist might say is, you know, there's an unbothered state of being, no matter what happens, I'm moving with it into the next moment. And in a world where people are truly committing to mastery is that they are artistically so agile with the unfolding moment that they are able to move with it again, and express themselves at that in an artistic way. Absolutely. And without awareness, without able to be with awareness, I don't know how it can work, but I see some great performers like grind and will their way, if you will.

1:18:25Dr. Michael Gervais:And I go, that's not what it actually is. That's not what's actually happening. That's what the language we've used for a long time. That's not what's actually happening. There's a giving to the unpredictable, unknown, unfolding moment. And when you can give yourself to that current and be okay and even excited with the unfolding unknown, which it can be, that is what anxiety is. I don't know how this is going to go. And you're gripping and holding and grasping and you're using your imagination in an undisciplined way of all the things that could go wrong. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And if it's okay, can I quote a friend of mine, a poet?

1:19:05John O'Donohue has this great, he always called it a partial poem, but anyway, it's published as a poem, called Fluid. So this was a guy who was a beautiful writer who wrote Anam Kar and To Bless the Space Between Us. He was an Irish Catholic priest and a philosopher and a poet and an Irish mystic. Anyway, he and I met after Caroline studied with him for a while. She's of Irish descent, so I sent her for a big birthday to be with him. Anyway, we got close. We used to teach together and sadly he died suddenly 18 years ago. One of his poems, Fluent, goes like this, something like this. I'd love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

1:19:53Thank you.

1:19:53Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. I mean, if I could have said it in less words, I would have tried to get that close but that's that's it and you know poets have a way to do this for us yeah you know i'll share one more poem with you because we're talking about parenting a lot and um i guess not just for me as a parent with adult kids now but there's a number of people in my life a long time in my life either family or friends where some people are dying and it's a quote from mary oliver that is i think very relevant to what we're saying but let me see how this lands with you, it goes something like, so there's a paraphrase, but it goes something like, there are three things we need to learn in life.

1:20:34Number one, you shouldn't say the numbers, but I'll say the numbers. Number one, we need to learn to love what is mortal. Number two. There's a risk in that, isn't there? Yeah. Number two, Two, we need to hold it close to our bones, knowing that our very life depends on it. And number three, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. It's terrifying.

1:21:08Dr. Michael Gervais:Terrifying. This is one of the hardest things to consider. Yeah. Isn't it? It's a thing now. Yeah. Right? when we think about mental health and we think about the conditions that are increasing that are difficult for people to manage loneliness anxiety depression addiction suicidality fill in the blank how do you deal with loneliness personally or do you mean professionally or academically yeah personally you know i i tend to be someone who has a very small tight circle of people close to me, my wife, my two kids, my mom before she passed, really close friends. And I really put energy into those connections in a big way, you know, try to keep in touch with how everyone's doing, try to make sure, you know, each morning I do actually a meditation where I include reflections on them and our relationship, our connections to each other.

1:22:10And so I don't actually feel myself personally lonely. Sometimes I feel alone and sometimes that's good just to have some downtime. So I feel like I kind of intentionally try to make a priority of those connections. and the academic side of that is that you know years ago when I was going to medical school and people said the mind was only what the brain and that your head did and then when I entered pediatrics and then psychiatry training and people were staying with that line from Hippocrates from 2 ,500 years ago it just seemed to me that that was like a partial truth that certainly the brain and your head had something to do with your mind including the feeling of loneliness but it seemed to me that the mind was something that was both fully embodied, including your brain, and also is fully relational.

1:23:02So when you say the word lonely, and I feel what that lonely means, it's almost like half of the mind is missing its emergence, where it's coming from. And I know people sometimes dismiss the word emergence like it's not scientific, but it's super scientific, comes from math, and it's from the relationality of components of a system. So I think the mind that we have, like you say, your mind, my mind, it actually is coming from inside the skin encased body. Great. It's fully embodied, not just up in your head. And the second thing is it comes from our relational connections. Even like what's happening now between me and you, we're creating a shared mind.

1:23:44And in that connection, when that's severed, you start to experience loneliness because you're experiencing a partial mind. I think that's what loneliness is.

1:23:55Dr. Michael Gervais:Let me do two things. One is emergent. I want to go back to that. And is your position that the mind emerges from the brain? Partially. Okay. I think, go ahead. Yeah. And then that's what I heard you tracking, right? And then you're also saying that the mind is a unique property in and of itself. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn. Earlier, I mentioned LinkedIn Hiring Pro, and I want to come back to something a little more personal. We talk a lot about the people who make extraordinary things possible, and I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of ours. Janelle, Taylor, Alex, Emma, and our newest teammate, Chelsea.

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1:26:56Dr. Michael Gervais:So go to findingmastery.com slash course code renew100 for$100 off today because your future is not shaped by what you intend. It's shaped by what you train. Yeah. I mean, take the term subjective experience. Like you have a feeling of what it's like to be you right now. Now the word you is really interesting, but let's just stay with subjective experience. You have the feeling what it's like to be existing, right? So that experience of subjectivity, the feeling of what it's like to be alive, to me, falls under the broad category of mental experience. When we talk about the brain, what the brain is, and I'm trained in this, is electrochemical energy flow.

1:27:47If we're talking about the head brain, because you have a brain around your heart and a brain around your gut, but if you're talking about the head brain, it's electrochemical energy flow inside the skull. So nowhere is there subjective experience. Now, it is true if you get an assault on the brain, if you don't eat, if you get a particular injury, whatever is going to happen to the brain, certain networks in the brain will create certain subjective experiences. So that's where Hippocrates, in this book called On the Sacred Disease, on epilepsy, said, hey, everything that is the mind, your joys, your sorrows, are only, underscore only, related to what happens in your head's brain.

1:28:28So when I was in training, that's what I was taught, and it just felt wrong. It felt like a partial bit of the story. So when you say to me, hey, Dan, do you mean mind emerges from the brain? And so that's why I say partially, sure, but it's emerging from the whole flow of energy. And I know people will push back on that and say it's not scientific, but it's super scientific, actually.

1:28:51Dr. Michael Gervais:Well, everything is energy. Exactly. The fact that I can hear you is an energetic exchange. Exactly. You know, and I'm not saying I don't think you are energy in a woo-woo type of way. Right. Like actual exchange of particles that we can't see. Well, not even just particles, but, and that's, we can get into energy because it's super interesting and helps you understand consciousness. But it is, from a quantum physics point of view, who really study energy in a deep way, it's the movement from possibility to actuality, which is a wild definition from physics. In Newtonian classical physics, it's called the capacity to do work, like the work of us speaking with each other or, you know, walking down the street.

1:29:32so two different ways of looking at energy either way it's about this motion either literally motion like we're speaking with each other generating communication or from a quantum physics point of view this really wild thing which is worth sitting with for a moment the movement from a pool of possibilities that are all potentials into actualization okay yeah so now that's wild and that can be 100 pages in some books I've written. I spend that long unpacking that one sentence. Energy is the movement for possibility to actuality. But once you grok it, once you start grasping it, then you realize it's not constrained to the skull, that energy is something we experience every day.

1:30:18And what the hypothesis is, it's a proposal from years and years ago, but it's that the mind, subjective experience, consciousness, information processing, and even something called self-organization, those four facets emerge from energy flow, where we're using the word emerge just like a mathematician use it for understanding, for example, the wetness of water. The only way to understand wetness is the interaction of the components of the system, water molecules. If you were to grab a single water molecule and say, I'm a scientist, I'm going to reduce this wetness to the component where it comes from.

1:30:56Here's a water molecule, H2O. Wetness would disappear. And you might say, like I've heard a very famous writer say the other day on a podcast, anyone who used the words emergence is just waving their hands and saying abracadabra, it's meaningless. And I'm going, oh my God, he's doing exactly what Buckminster Fuller said in the 70s about synergy. If you don't understand relationality, like he used the word synergetics or synergies where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He goes, if you don't understand that, you don't understand reality. So when this person said emergence is meaningless, I was so sad because I really love this guy.

1:31:34And I thought he just doesn't grasp it, that you have to look at the relationality of stuff to understand bigger issues like mind rather than just an H2O molecule. you know, you miss wetness. If we just look at the head's brain, we're going to lose that the mind is both fully embodied energy flow inside your skin encased body and fully relational. And then everything starts to become clear. It's absolutely amazing. What a treat.

1:32:02Dr. Michael Gervais:I would imagine people feel loved by you. I would imagine that people feel that you really care about their experience and that you're rooting for them to be their very best and that they feel invested by you in their wellness, in their ability to be the very best of themselves. Your work has demonstrated that over the 20 some years, 40 years, I should say, of of writing. And, um, I just want to get, thank you, you know, like your ability to come from a neurotic state, um, to something, to someone who is really open and conscientious and, um, you're not willing to just agree for pleasantry. Like you're really trying to get underneath of it and calibrate.

1:32:52Dr. Michael Gervais:Um, obviously you've got a commitment to being on the path of mastery for a long time. You're relational. You've got a sense of agency about you that you know that you're choosing a way. And when you apply your way, you feel like you're going to make a difference. You've got that efficacy about you that's like, if I choose to put my gaze there, I think I can do something pretty special. And you're obviously as competent as they become. And anyone that's, yeah. So like, you've got that broth. It is so apparent to me. This is why I wanted to sit with you so much. It's so apparent to me why you are a leader of leaders in the field of the invisible.

1:33:28Dr. Michael Gervais:And so you got that balance between what you can see and what you can't see, and you're fascinated by what you can't see, but you are grounded in a world-class way about the materiality, and you're less interested, I think, in that. You're more interested in the emergent piece than anything else. And so the last question I have for you. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. That means a lot to me. And if it's true, then I'm extremely grateful. Thank you. Well, it's true for this person in this moment, for sure. And then, you know, make sure that we clear the table to make sure that you're not actually walking in water.

1:34:03Dr. Michael Gervais:Don't worry, I have kids and a wife. They'll let you know. Relational. I don't think that there's a more important mindset. And I do think mindsets we can develop. And there's a handful of them that I'm really interested in. and a relational mindset is what I'm going after to understand. I want to help people become or train them to become more relational in their mindset. And so if you just kind of riff for a minute on when I say relational mindset, what do you think are the sub-capabilities to help people be more relational? Well, thanks again for those reflections. the first thing I think to consider is a relational mindset in the setting of someone being raised in an individualistic culture.

1:34:56In anthropology, there's a term master narrative. So there's a master story. Who are you? Why are you here? In individualistic cultures compared to collectivistic cultures that says who you are is your skin encased body. So the you is equated with your identity as a self in the body. And so self equals individual. So relationality in that is sometimes performative. I'm going to perform certain things so I get certain things, friendship, commitment, sex, money, whatever it is. It's all transactional. So the risk of individualism is to believe that master narrative. And I think it's not only an error, it's a mistaken identity that who we are is just our individual bodies, but it's actually a lethal lie.

1:35:54so your question about relational mindset you know how do you engage in that the first level of that is to say my fundamental belief which is embedded in something called implicit memory as something called a mental model a kind of a schema that says who i am is just dan and not dan is supposed to go out and uh what's he supposed to do oh yeah get stuff and i need um I guess 100 units of stuff to be happy. I get 100 units, not happy. I'll get 1 ,000, get 1 ,000 units, not happy. Get 10 ,000, a million, a billion, a trillion, whatever. You know, I'm still not happy. I've got to get more and more and more.

1:36:32So there's this infinite appetite because it's filling up, as they say, a hungry ghost. It's filling up this vessel with a hole in the bottom of it. So it doesn't work. It's called the hedonic treadmill. Once a person kind of wakes up to that and realizes something's fundamentally wrong, and it's not the answer, oh, I need more stuff, which is why our world is collapsing. We have plenty of resources. But people have bought into this individualistic master narrative. So they keep on trying to produce more stuff so people could buy more stuff so they themselves get more stuff in their bank account.

1:37:08Now, someone listening to this might say, that's absolutely true. In fact, I'm going to use this to give me more. So go have at it. But the research is really clear. Once you have a minimal amount of income, your happiness is not determined by your income. I mean, that's just the research is really – the science of it is really clear. So then you say, well, then what is relationality based on? So in many ways, relationality is based on integration. How can I retain the me but belong to a we where in the we I don't lose the me? So this is where the word we comes in. It's fun to remember. and people aren't given the art of that often because it's all basically transactional.

1:37:51You want to make sure this relationship gives you this because friendship is good because it helps you. No, you can become a part of a we, which is having synergy. It's this emergence of something greater than the individual parts. Well, here's the trick, point number two, when you've been told that master narrative and if in your family you've again been encouraged to do individual, individual, individual, individual then what can sometimes happen is you believe that if you let go of all this individual preoccupation you're going to lose your mojo you're going to lose your you know the the key drive to what makes you successful because that's the master narrative you believe from the culture and from maybe your parents then what happens here is that you don't really feel like you're part of a we.

1:38:40So when I do couples therapy, I'll see couples like this. And one member of the couple will have kind of woken up from this strange nightmare of the master narrative and go, I think I'm really lonely in this marriage. Did you feel that way before? No, no, because he was this and I'm that, blah, blah, blah. But somehow I realized there's no we here. And I talked to him, yeah, he's not interested in a we. He just wants her to do this or that or whatever, whatever the combos isn't always male female like that by any means so that's a journey to ironically letting go to let in relationality and it's really a in a way it's it's a letting go of this clinging to an individualistic identity by letting go of the me being the only thing but realizing me is important but there's also the we of who you are and you'll start hearing people, when they start to do this, start talking about, we were planning this and we were planning that.

1:39:41I wanted to do this, but then I realized it was better for us to do this, this kind of thing. It's beautiful. And it's like a whole new garden they're growing, right? So instead of just these individual plants, you now get the feeling of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that's synergy. That's this emergence. That's this letting go and letting in relationality.

1:40:03Dr. Michael Gervais:the image i i can't escape is like i grew up surfing but like a coral reef that's the we that's maybe the muy um piece of it is that there yes there's fish that are kind of swimming by themselves but like it doesn't really work unless there's a full ecosystem and the relationship with self and others and experience and mother nature this whole program is built on relations so that's why i'm i'm super interested in the relationality piece Totally. To mindset, which what I mean by that is like when you are entering into an engagement, into a room or a board meeting or a family talk or whatever it is, that you are holding the relational aspect as the core tenant of what you are working from.

1:40:50Dr. Michael Gervais:The mindset is like how you're, the lens that you're adopting for this particular engagement. And we could shift mindsets. We need an adjective to describe it. Yeah. I call it an identity lens. You do. Yeah. You literally, sometimes like getting near 70, you know, I have to have an identity lens that says, Hey, you've got a almost 70 year old body, buddy, get yourself to the gym. You know, your muscles are not going to maintain themselves. Your bones are not going to maintain themselves. You need to pay special attention to working out like you didn't have to do when you were in your 50s. Maybe I should have, but I didn't.

1:41:26Now you do. And if you do, it's going to make a difference on the quality and maybe even the length of your life. So I do that. And that requires a me, focus on me. And then if Caroline says, my wife says, oh, we need to do this. Let's do this together. And I go, absolutely. But I need to be a me at the gym this morning. And then let's have lunch together. And then let's go for a bike ride together. And then we'll do what together, which is great. And that's a we. So it's, it's balancing the two without feeling guilty. That's it. That I need, because she's not in charge of taking care of my body.

1:41:59That's right. You know?

1:42:00Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. And if you, if you, if you don't take care of the body, just to pull on this metaphor or the storyline a little further is that, um, and the body becomes painful or, um, fatigued easily. Like you can't do the we stuff very well because these signals coming from your brain or like my hip hurts, my back hurts. I need relief. I need comfort as opposed to what I want to do is attend to you. And I want to be part of your experience. But if my body is lit up with pain and discomfort, like this is why the pebble in the pond, like you got to take care of yourself first. And then the outward, you know, loving kindness for self, loving kindness towards others.

1:42:38Dr. Michael Gervais:I don't know if you can, I guess you could probably go the opposite direction to send loving kindness to others, but I don't know how to do that if I don't have a sense of love or kindness. Yeah. You know, it's interesting and maybe we'll do another podcast sometime, but there's this system of personality that I've been working with four colleagues for the last 20 years built on the Enneagram initially, but then it's developmental neuroscience and really exciting things. But for a third of the folks of the nine patterns, a third of them have this tendency to not be aware of what they personally need and they shirk them away for very specific strategic adaptive reasons so it's not like it's just out of nowhere but when you begin to understand that you understand yeah so basically what you're saying a third of folks will have this lack of kind of attending internally to what's going on and you know if in my personal life when my friends find out this model and i tell them about it they go oh my God, you've just explained my whole life.

1:43:42And it's been really liberating when people can understand the kind of the developmental neuroscience, the brain origins of this, then they're kind of able to see it and realize that's where their growth edge work is. That's where they can do the work. But that's a whole in-depth thing.

1:44:01Dr. Michael Gervais:Way to leave us on a cliffhanger. Wow. Dan, what a treat. Thank you so much for everything that I've experienced today and all that you've invested in the universe of humans to be a little bit better. Thank you. An honor. Great to be here. What a wonderful conversation. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by legendary rugby coach Eddie Jones. Known for demanding excellence and pushing teams to their limits, Eddie shares how great leaders help people thrive under pressure, learn through mistakes, and build lasting trust. It's also a surprisingly personal conversation about the coaches who shaped him and why making people feel important may be at the very heart of great leadership.

1:44:44Dr. Michael Gervais:Join us Wednesday, July 8th at 9am Pacific, only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday.

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1:45:56Dr. Michael Gervais:So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.