TRAIN YOUR MIND to Overwrite Your DNA | Dr. Michael Gervais EP 408

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatness Mindset, today.

0:53The idea is that we need to be more and let the doing flow from there. Be yourself. Be your authentic self. Be here now. Be grateful. Be present. and let the doing flow from those, that orientation is a completely different model. I'm spending my life efforts, I think, working to share that and to help some of the best doers and thinkers in the world to reorientate what got them good, but is slowing them down from being their absolute personal best. What's slowing them down? Fear and fatigue still? The psychological framework that I need to do more to be more. And that's born out of anxiety. And the trick though there is that that'll get people good.

1:33I need to do more. It's like just enough anxiety will get you good, but it will slow you down for being your absolute best at some point. Why do we fear so much about what could go wrong? What other people think about us? Who are going to let down? That we're not worthy enough, good enough. Why do we fear that? So there's some biological things we can take a look at. And then there's also psychological, right? And then so it's the interaction of those two. Biologically, our brain, as best as we think, and it's three pounds of silly putty that sits in our skull that's more complicated than, you know, like the brightest minds in neuroscience are still amazed by how our brain works.

2:10But we think that our brain is designed to scan the world and find what's dangerous, right? And so our ancestors passed that gift on to us. Your lineage passed that gift on to you that they were able to survive. And so how survive way back in ancient times that they could scan the world and find, what was dangerous or what was threatening so that they wouldn't be eaten. Then not only was nature dangerous and all the elements of nature, but other humans became dangerous to each other. So now what we've created is the ability, the heightened ability to read micro expressions. And micro expressions are the small squinting of the eyes, the frontalis muscles between the eyes.

2:50And when those squint or don't move, it's a sense of threat, right? Because we don't know what's happening to that from that person and so if you got this ancient brain that's programmed beautifully to find what's dangerous and we scanned in an undisciplined way our environment around us we're going to find dangerous things and in modern times we're not chased by saber-tooth anymore the new modern saber-tooth are other people's opinions and so we're well-conditioned from an early age and this next generation is going to be even more well-conditioned social you know with insta highlight reels for everything.

3:25My life is better than yours. I'm going to show you. So we've got this real challenge that to pursue a path of our personal best, we have to override our DNA. That's hard to do. That's really hard to do. It requires deep commitment to training. The optimal opportunities that psychology offers us is just that, how to train our minds to override our DNA and to use the smaller parts of our brain to scan the world and find opportunity. how can we train our minds every single day throughout the day to do that yeah overcome this fear what are the things that we could be doing i will rattle off as many as you want to hear like tactics and and then i also want to put a small little asterisk next to this is that the tactic alone is not enough right it's the stitching of the tactics it's the stitching of the mental skills training to each other and to one's personal philosophy so without a personal philosophy.

4:18We end up just trying all these different things to get better. But what are we getting better at? What other people want us to be? So there's a fundamental piece of work first. The greatest and the most influential people across the globe are very clear about their philosophy. The greatest movers and shakers and change makers are spiritual leaders and political leaders for the most part. And now we're starting to see business leaders, you know, to do that. what was Confucius philosophy? What was Buddha's philosophy? What was Jesus philosophy? They're really clear. Jesus was, and I want to oversimplify a beautiful set of traditions, but Jesus was more about love and service.

4:56Buddha was more about that all people are suffering. And then, so let's work through compassion to live with love and kindness. What was Martin Luther King Jr.'s? Dr. King Jr.'s was about equality, you know, Malcolm X equality, totally different tone, totally different approach. I'll share mine. It's every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece. There's optimism embedded in there. There's creative juices embedded in there. And then there's, you know, this idea of a living masterpiece.

5:36Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

6:26Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

6:41Thank you.