MASTIN KIPP: Living Less Stressed

23:09So it's really Deb's thought, but we've been doing it for a long time. Basically, what we do is we're in a regulated state. We become dysregulated, but the goal is to re-regulate. So we don't want to feel shame for feeling dysregulated. We want to get the tools to re-regulate. and I think of the re-regulation part as like the bicep curl or the squat where you're like, that's the rep. So it's like, you're going to get dysregulated automatically. It's going to happen automatically. So let's re-regulate. And the re-regulation is the rep. And the thing about neuroception and the triggers that can happen is they're unconscious.

23:40So that's why maybe you're talking to your special someone and all of a sudden their face changes and then that triggers you. Why are you making that face? But they don't even know they're making that face. Or they have a certain tone, a voice, where they say your name in a specific tone and you're like, every bad memory comes back. Why are you saying this to me? Ah, right? They don't even maybe know that their tone changed, right? And it's amazing how just like when my mom would be like, William Maston Kipp III, and like the holding of that last part, I knew I was in trouble. So tone matters, facial expression matters, but the compassion comes in because we want to recognize these are automatic reflexes.

24:14They're not on purpose. They're adaptive based on our history. And we We want to become, to Michael, your point, more self-aware of what's happening and then be able to bring them into our conscious awareness. And then we have choice. And the super level up is when we can have shared context with somebody else about that too. So it's not just by ourselves. I think that makes so much sense. And anybody who's ever been around a toddler or parented a toddler, this concept of regulation and dysregulation is like in 4D, you know, because you see these little kids and they have to put the iPad down.

24:48or they have to leave grandma's house or they don't get to have a cookie before dinner or whatever, something that seems like so obviously, you know, not a good idea. And they just lose their mind. You know, if you escalate or dysregulate, you know, to use the language of a nervous system, if you dysregulate with your kid and you start yelling back at them, for example, I mean, it goes to hell in a handbasket in a hot minute. Like before long, everyone is melting down on the floor, you know, but if you as a parent, And I have five kids, Mastin, so I feel like I have a PhD in co-regulation with kids.

25:22Yes. You know, if you slow your voice down, if you make sure that your voice communicates, I'm safe. If you make sure your facial expressions don't look angry, if you just slow everything down and kind of, you basically become the external modem, so to speak, for that kid. That's exactly right. So they're able to then regulate. And I have children, all of whom come from traumatic backgrounds. So this is very relevant. I learned about trauma, not even knowing this whole nervous system thing, is that when you have the ability to regulate as a parent, you can help your kids regulate. But guess what?

25:59If you're a leader or if you have influence over anyone, which is 100 % all of us, it could be a coworker, it could be your boss, it could be the people who work for you. When you start to learn about how to regulate your own nervous system, how to move from a place of I'm dysregulated. I just got some kind of bad news. Someone just made me angry. That is like a superpower. That's right. To me, this unlocks a kind of performance, a kind of well-being and the ability to not feel like just knocked around by life that nothing else, no other strategy, no other tactic will. And that's why we're excited to talk to you guys about it.

26:38Yeah. I love what you're saying. And what's so interesting about what you're saying too is, you know, what's the best parenting style? First of all, not a parent. So I'd like to comment on that. But I can comment on neuroscience and biology, right? So basically, a toddler, they don't have much of a prefrontal cortex. They're limbic and brainstem. And we don't really start developing that until later in life. In fact, we don't really get our prefrontal cortex online until about 25. And what that basically means is that 25 is when adolescence ends, which I'm like, oh, that explains a lot. Okay. All the parents are like, wow, okay.

27:13Now it makes sense. right? Because it's like, literally the wiring is not available, right? So you don't have the V8 engine. You just have like a little bicycle or something like that, right? So you don't have the actual tool development yet. What that implies neurobiologically is as a parent who has a prefrontal cortex, you are the child's prefrontal cortex, which one of the jobs of the prefrontal cortex is to regulate the rest of the systems ideally. So when a parent gets triggered that like a kid doesn't think something or whatever, it's like, they're just running unconscious. It's just all unconscious reactions because they don't have the capacity to regulate.

27:47So, and ideally, the parent's job is to regulate the children and be there basically, to your point, you said externalized modem, externalized prefrontal cortex, right? That's the neuroscience behind it because they don't really have it. So, when you're expecting a child to think things through, it's like that's not really an appropriate expectation for them because they don't have the wiring. And then it helps people realize, oh, and there's a whole developmental trajectory. We can talk about what happens at what age and stuff like that because it's always changing. but there's different lessons that children are learning over the time.

28:16But you don't really get this thing on board until basically 25. And so that's an important thing to recognize. It has lots of implications around parenting, around many other things too. Now, I'm not saying that you don't have a prefrontal cortex until you're 25. I'm just saying it's not fully developed. Obviously, we have it. But the expectation that a toddler or a child is going to regulate the parent puts an undue burden on the child to do something they don't have the capacity to do, right? And so that's just how we're wired. That's just the neuroscience of it. What you said is 100 % backed up by the neuroscience.

28:51It seems to me that in the workplace, if you're in any position of leadership, and as a leader, if something happens and you get dysregulated, where you're in fight or flight, and you're not self-aware, that becomes contagious because now you've created an environment that's not safe for anybody. And so all of a sudden now everybody's hair's on fire. And I've felt like part of what I've learned in this process is that as a leader, it's imperative that I stay calm and confident, even when the worst news happens. Because people can't do their best thinking, which happens in the prefrontal cortex, the executive function, unless they're in that ventral vagal state, the green light.

29:32That's right. And so if I dysregulate them and I pull everybody down to yellow or worse, red, then nobody's going to be able to do the kind of creative thinking that's going to put out the fire or solve the problem. So this is a strategic imperative for leaders to learn this and learn how to regulate their own nervous systems. Is that right? It's completely right. And it's not dissimilar. The term would be relationship asymmetry. Basically, there's one person who kind of has more of a power dynamic in the relationship than somebody else, right? So in a romantic relationship, we do not want asymmetry.

30:05We want equal value, equal worth. Because if we have asymmetry, one person becomes the parent and one person becomes the child in a romantic relationship. In a parental relationship, we want asymmetry. That's developmentally appropriate. And in corporate hierarchy, there is a level of asymmetry based on the hierarchy of the owner versus maybe a C-level person versus an assistant of some kind. So there's also asymmetry there. When there's asymmetry, whoever has the power influences the other person in a major way, one way or another. Now, while you can have a whole company full of a grown adult who have prefrontal cortex online, there's a power dynamic at play here.

30:42And people's survival is based on their performance and based on maybe pleasing you or making sure you're happy or whatever it might be. So to recognize that and to make it, this is the whole idea of psychological safety in the corporate space. But I will say one thing. We want it to be safe enough because there is no such thing as perfect safety, right? We want it to be like 50.0001 % safe, right? Because especially if you're in a startup, there's not a lot of unsafety that's happening. So we need to be safe enough. And it is absolutely top down because if the founder, the leader, the CEO, the C-suite isn't creating that culture, then it will fall apart when there are challenges.

31:20And just like we need to have a flexible nervous system to be able to navigate the challenges of life, you can think about your culture as a nervous system. We need to have a flexible cultural nervous system to be able to manage the flexible challenges of business also. And that's only possible if there's top-down leadership. And that's literal in terms of the biology of it, but then also org chart also, right? And in that org chart, at the top of the org chart, I really hope that executive has executive function. Otherwise, what do you have? You know, so often they don't. Well, I think one of the things that I have learned with my kids and we have gone deep into Bessel van der Kolk's work, which led us to a woman named Seaburn Fisher, who is a pioneer of neurofeedback.

32:05I won't get into all that because that is a whole rabbit trail. But I love that rabbit trail, though. Yeah, it's a great rabbit trail. As I've learned about that, it's like trauma stunts the ability of the prefrontal cortex to fully come online, even when developmentally it's appropriate. It's not working like it used to because to your point about neuroception, people are so stuck in fear because of what's happened to them in the past that we have immaturity in the brain and all kinds of things that are happening. And I think that translates to the workplace. You know, I don't know who said that.

32:37You probably will know who said this. That idea of if it's hysterical, it's historical. You know, that kind of concept. Oftentimes, we will be sitting in a meeting. I mean, I can think about an employee situation that I had a few years ago where, I mean, I just sat there like, what is happening? Like you said, there was a mismatch between the response from a nervous system standpoint and what the stimulus was. It was like so out of whack to what had happened, but this person perceived so much threat in the situation, so much danger. And then because they didn't have the awareness about trauma, which I know is in play in that situation now, post the situation, I know enough of that story to go, okay, there was some real trauma in play that had not been dealt with.

33:25Because they didn't have that, they thought that what they were neurocepting was facts. Yeah. Actually, this was objectively dangerous. They were objectively being attacked by another person, et cetera. And in fact, I wasn't the person that they thought was doing the attacking. So I'm kind of like the observer. I'm like, that's not what's happening. You know, like I can see this because I'm not activated by the situation and the same way that they were. And so I think that when we're dealing with people, which whether you're dealing with clients or customers or co-workers or employees or, you know, a board or whatever, we're always dealing with people.

34:02And, you know, you and I were talking about this morning, Dad, how I think mental illness is so much more prevalent than we have thought because trauma is so prevalent. You know, it's like, oh, there's so much trauma that is driving the interactions that we have with each other. And I think when we start to become aware of this and then ultimately are able to get healing and have tools, then all of a sudden we can lead more effectively when we get in these situations where people are, to use my previous quote that I don't know how to attribute, you know, hysterical, like their nervous systems are really activated about something in a way that doesn't match the situation.

34:36We can handle it better, but we can also handle our own activation better and with more compassion because we're not dealing with like a work conflict. We're dealing with something that happened way back in the past, or we're not dealing with the financials that we just got that don't look good. We're dealing with something in the past. And I think it just gives us the capacity for compassion, self-understanding, and ultimately healing in a different way. I think that's so well said. I think the first person I heard say that was Dr. Frank Anderson, but I don't know if he was the one who said it originally.

35:07One thing that's interesting too, to your point, is it kind of gets back to the symmetry, asymmetry perspective, right? So for example, in the workplace, there's the ability to hold space for and create safety for someone's reaction. And that can turn into a role reversal sometimes because we can repeat our childhood conditioning in business 100%. Just like in romantic relationships, we can repeat it. And so there's this fine line between, I understand that you have a trauma response coming up and it's based on the past. It's happening now, but it's based on the past response. And at some point, it's not your job necessarily to do all that work for them.

35:42Absolutely. But if you're in a romantic relationship, there's a little bit more leniency and leeway, i think however it's still not your job to do it and i don't believe in unconditional love romantic partners i don't think based on neuroscience i believe in unconditional love from parents to children yeah and from god to humans that's about it but from like adult to adult secure functioning relationships where both parties are trying to regulate dysregulate and re-regulate it's like investing it's mutual investment because what happens is if you have asymmetry in like an adult relationship of any kind what happens is whoever is kind of the parent role, the other person's in a child role, what is the child supposed to do developmentally?

36:21The child is supposed to grow up and leave the parent. And I think I first heard that from Henry Cloud. So I was like, wow, this is really interesting because I really love caretaking people. But when it comes to the people I work with, I would like them to come with some work around this already done because my wounding is around, I got that, I'll take care of that for you. And then I ended up hiring people that I'm taking care of, which is a complete role reversal and repeat of my childhood conditioning. And so I sort of screen for levels of self-awareness also. So I do think there's a leadership role to be regulated, but also if you rupture to repair, and just like with parenting, if you fight in front of the kids, then you should repair in front of the kids.

37:00So they see the repair also, right? It's super important. So it's not that you're always regulated in front of your team, but when there is dysregulation to be able to re-regulate and go through that process and have them see that and to hire people who have some a level of awareness. And this is why I believe we actually haven't seen true exponential companies be born yet because the majority of the big exponential companies and people like Elon Musk, they're not creating cultures like this, right? So there's a rigidity to what they can accomplish, which is a tremendous amount. But when you add in what we're talking about, I think you want to talk about 10x, I think this is like 1000x in productivity if you can create a culture like this, right?

37:40And so I think that true exponential companies have yet to truly be born because things like this are not brought into focus yet. And you guys are leading the way in a very important way and bringing that to leadership. And there's only so much you can do for someone and they have to also pick themselves up at their bootstraps at some point in a performance context. One of the things I want to make sure that we cover, and by the way, I didn't mention the name of the book except in the intro, but it's Reclaim Your Nervous System, A Guide to Positive Change, Mental Wellness, and Post-Traumatic Growth.

38:09You guys need to buy this. I gave it to every member of my mastermind, two masterminds that I lead, and it was profound. Master met with one of my groups, and they were already primed because they'd read the book. So I'd really encourage you to read it. But one of the things I wanted to talk about is trauma. And if you had asked me, even just a year and a half ago, did you have any childhood trauma. Well, I knew I grew up in a home where my dad was an alcoholic, but that was kind of his issue. I didn't understand the impact on me. So can you kind of define trauma? Because the average person listening to this might think this is for somebody else.

38:47Just to add to that, one of the things, you know, when you talked about all the nervous system stuff and you gave Mastin's book to one of our masterminds, one of the things that we heard from, and this is predominantly men, not all men, but predominantly men in this group, the question that came up is, how do I know if I've had trauma or how do I know if I'm anxious? And it was like a very sincere question from a lot of people. Like, I legitimately do not know if I've had trauma or if I struggle with anxiety. Like, how would you know? Yeah. So the way that I define trauma, which I'm going to paraphrase, it's in the book.

39:22Basically, it's any experience of threat, disconnection, isolation, or immobilization that results in the long-term or chronic dysregulation of either your endocrine system, your immune system, your emotional body, your brain, your body, your spirit, your health, on any level, basically. So if you have chronic stress, chronic immune issues, chronic autoimmune issues, hard time thinking, like all these different things, metabolic issues, there's some type of trauma there. And if you look at like, for example, chronic illness and a lot of issues we're experiencing today, this idea of inflammation is pretty well known today.

39:55Well, inflammation in the body is a trauma response. That's what it is, right? So that's also a trauma response. So it can be biological, physiological. It can have lots of different areas, the endocrine system, hormones, all these things. There's definitely a medical component to it, but the leaders in functional medicine are getting hip to this work now, which is important, because some things they can't diagnose or explain. So what's that about, right? We can somaticize emotion, meaning we turn emotion into physical body sensations that we can't pay attention to. And so it's less important to ask yourself if you have trauma and more important to ask yourself, are you happy with your life?

40:28And then if you're not happy with your life, where are you not happy with your life? And then what are the symptoms that you're not happy with behaviorally or experientially? And that can guide you down the rabbit hole to finding things. So it's not important whether you think you have trauma. It's important to think about, do you love your life? Are you happy with the quality of your relationships? Are you happy with the quality of your financial life? Are you happy with your level of parenting? Are you happy with your health and well-being? Are you happy with your habits? And if you're not in any area, and you can be honest with yourself about that, we want to find where that thing originated and then do something about it so that we can help you move forward more efficiently.

41:06So this is not about revisiting the past and living there, but it is about understanding history so it's not repeated. And we think about that. We know that if we don't study history, we repeat history. So that's also true personally. And Freud called it a repetition compulsion. We repeat things until they release. The problem is with successful people and ambitious people is every time we level up, we add complexity and stress, and those pathways kind of get activated again. So it's kind of this level one Jumanji, and then now you're at level 700 Jumanji, right? So it's like there's a way in which we stop ourselves as relatively predictive once you get to know yourself.

41:39So it's not necessarily about do I have trauma? It's like, am I happy with my life? Do I feel healthy? Am I healthy in my body? and if I'm not, I want to take a holistic approach to understand why and then what to do about it like you would do with functional medicine but emotionally and somatically with body symptoms. So that's kind of what I would say about trauma and those things. I think sometimes we can go hunting for something and that may or may not be useful in the moment, right? What's useful right now is am I happy or not? And if the answer is no, let's go figure out why so that we can get you back to happiness.

42:10Because here's the thing, stoicism is great for growth. It's just not great for healing.

42:20I was surprised in my own therapy how quickly I began to see results. Yes. Now, I think healing is a lifelong journey, but I saw more progress in like three months of this kind of therapy that dealt with my nervous system than I had seen in the past in years of cognitive behavioral therapy or other kinds of therapy. And we didn't dwell on the past, but to identify that, where this was coming from, and to bring different modalities to it to heal it was pretty amazing. I'm not really a CBT fan because the model is actually biologically inaccurate. Because basically it says situation causes automatic thoughts, which is true.

43:01But what causes automatic thoughts is neuroception, which is body-based. So the CBT, it comes from the 60s is where it originated. And so we didn't have all this stuff. and we hear so much in the cognitive world about the situation causes the thought, the caught causes the feeling. And I'm like, actually, no, it's the other way around. Now, yes, your brain can cause you to feel a certain thing on purpose, but you need a lot of resources online and a lot of safety to cause yourself to feel something because it takes too much time to think about a feeling. Feelings are reflexive and automatic and also guide our behavior.

43:39So the entire cognitive model, whether it's the coaching cognitive model or the CBT model, is biologically inaccurate. It's just what you can notice first. We just didn't have the science for it. And also, I don't want to say that changing your mindset isn't important. It's radically important to change your mindset. However, there's a couple prerequisites that have to be on board to make it effective and long-lasting to understand how to change your mindset. Because it happens in the prefrontal. Changing your mindset, change your thoughts, change your life, happens in the dorsal anterior your cingulate cortex in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

44:13So if I'm in sympathetic or if I'm in dorsal, guess what? No resources are being diverted there. I can't change my thoughts and change my life because that part of my brain is not active or able to have the resources to do so. And so there's a time and place for reframing and for distortions of thinking and things like that. But we want to be able to have that somatic and body-based piece online so that our prefrontal cortex can actually do its job. And without that, you're basically gaslighting yourself. I don't know how else to say it. I think that's really helpful for people to hear because we've all had situations where we tried to reframe our thoughts.

44:49I mean, we have a whole book on mindset, so we've written a whole book on this. And I think this body-based approach helps to reframe reframing, if you will, in the sense that like, oh, I'm not broken if I tried to reframe a certain thought and it quote didn't work, it may be in my body is the access point first. And I think, you know, it's helpful. Obviously get Mastin's book, somatic experiencing therapy. You can look that up and find therapists who are trained in that modality of therapy. And it's great. It's increasingly popular. There's a lot of different things you can do, but I mean, I hope that this whole conversation has helped our listeners to go, oh, there's a whole toolbox that maybe I haven't even known existed.

45:37I don't have access to right now. I want to have access to. And there's a whole other explanation for why I experience life the way that I do that isn't just purely this kind of cause and effect thing. It is cause and effect, but it's not in the present, You know, so, okay, Mastin, we could talk to you for like three days and that would be so much fun. So let's do that sometime. But in the meantime, we have three questions that we ask all of our guests that I would love for you to answer. So the first one is, you know, here on the Double Win Show, we're all about the double win, winning at work and succeeding at life.

46:13We don't just want people to have this kind of one-dimensional success. So for you, what's the biggest obstacle in you getting the double win right now? This is going to sound relatively basic, but learning how to rely on people with things that are very important to me is very difficult. It's still very difficult for me to do. I'm learning. I'm learning how to do that. I'm used to doing it on my own, and eventually someone will prove to me they can't. So I'm learning how to not – how that be the case, and that's this thing called ask for help. I'm a recovering lone wolf. and my nervous system is constantly surprised that other people have capacity to do things for me that are very meaningful.

46:52But I think I'll probably have, I don't want to say the rest of my life, but it'll definitely be something that I work on consistently is really relying on people with the hard stuff. Yeah, that's a really good answer. I don't think anyone's ever given us that answer before. Yeah. Okay, next question. How do you personally know when you've gotten the double win, when you're winning at work and succeeding at life? I think I just experience a state of excitement without fear. Like it's just pure excitement. I have a, so over on my wall, I have Tigger, you know, like framed. I want to be like in my Tigger state bouncing around.

47:24And when I'm bouncing around and I'm not worried about other things, that for me is the double win because when I'm nurtured, when I get my needs met, which is both financially and in the business and also relationally, Tigger emerges and I just bounce around and I'm so excited. So for me, that's definitely the sign. Let's call that the Tigger test. Amazing. So like when the stripes appear, you're good. That's what we know. In our world, we call it GTE, which stands for gooey tigger energy. Okay. So it's just, it's like super excited, kind of loving, just, yeah, it's just like, it's like, let's go, you know?

47:56So yeah, you got the GTE going. I love that. Okay. Last question. What is one ritual or routine that helps you do what you do? I'm trying to think about the thing that's most simple. This is also very basic, but walking. When I get my steps in and when it's intentional steps, I am so much better. It used to be 10 ,000. I was with my buddy Adam Cobb a couple of days ago and he's a high performance coach. He goes, man, 12 ,000 is the new 10 ,000. Great. Step inflation. Step inflation. This is great. But that sounds so basic. And then an advanced thing that I do is hyperbaric oxygen. I try to be in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at least five or six times a week.

48:38Oh my gosh. Wow. But that's not accessible to everybody. Okay. But the combination of those two things, I feel like enables so many other things to happen in my life. The great thing about walking too is it's so rhythmic that it does have a regulator system very well too. Big time. Yeah. I love it so much. Well, buddy, thank you so much for sitting down with us for the last hour. This has been rich. And this has just opened a whole new world to me. and I've been kind of geeky about it, learning about it, but I get asked all the time, you know, when I talk to people, they get kind of excited about it.

49:09They say, where do I start? And I always recommend your book. Yep. So again, the book is Reclaim Your Nervous System. You guys definitely want to get this and read it cover to cover. Yep. Thanks, Mastin. Thanks, Mastin. Love you guys. Thanks so much. Thanks. Love you. Okay. Well, that was really fun and it went by so quickly. Well, part of it is we're just geeking out on this stuff anyway. I know. If this is a new concept for you, you got a real vocabulary lesson today because there are a lot of terms that we threw out in there. The most important thing for people to remember is just the upside down stoplight, the red, yellow, green, that there isn't just one color, that we're kind of like moving up and down that a lot, that we're going to be activated by stressors in our day-to-day life that are going to unconsciously push us into one of those different places.

50:02And I think what's cool is when you learn some of these tools that Mastin was talking about, you can move. You don't get stuck in the same way. It's not about not ever going to yellow or red. It's about not getting stuck there unconsciously. And that has a profound impact on our leadership, our self-leadership, but also whatever leadership we have with others in our ability to perform. Because anytime things are unconscious, you've got a problem. You know, I think that most people want happiness. That's their stated goal. If you ask them, what do you really want out of life? It's to be happy. And happiness comes when you're making progress.

50:40And it's not the destination, but it's the journey. It's we're making steady progress towards a meaningful goal. The problem is we get stuck in that progress because we have these unseen forces that are happening in our body and in our mind and in our nervous system that we don't understand. And we're being controlled almost by these subterranean forces that are holding us back. Yeah. And I think the thing that's gotten me so excited, not that I've learned all of this, I've learned a lot, but I've not learned everything there is to know for sure. But it's that I'm starting to feel progress in areas which before I didn't really understand the dynamics and why I couldn't get progress in those areas.

51:17So this has been like a key that's opened up a treasure trove of things for me. Okay. That made me think of your experience with exercise and the trauma connection with that. And I wish I would have remembered this when we were actually on with Mastin, but I think it would be a helpful illustration of where this shows up that you didn't used to have access to. Yeah, so I was really struggling with being consistent in my strength training. And some of you know that I had a heart attack about two years ago. I ended up having quadruple bypass surgery. It was a very traumatic thing, and it was based on basically my genetics.

51:52So it wasn't a lifestyle-related thing. I wasn't overweight, was eating well, exercising regularly, all that. But after that surgery, obviously I couldn't exercise for a while, but then I was struggling to be consistent even after I was healed from the surgery. and it was very frustrating because I teach about habits. Right. I've always considered myself a very self-disciplined person. Right. And you're like, I'm a fraud. Everything I teach must not work. Well, it's how I felt. Yeah. And so I'm reporting to my trainer and I feel like I'm constantly making excuses to her for why I can't be consistent, why I'm blowing off workouts.

52:29Well, then I realized, oh, I had my heart attack when I was exercising. Ding, ding, ding. And so what happened was that conditioned me at a level of the subconscious or at the nervous system that exercise is dangerous. Right. Like that's what your body felt like. That's right. And so I had this unconscious conflict in my body, between my body and my mind, that if I was to exercise, it would put me in a serious position of danger. It would be literally life-threatening. It could be life-threatening. Yeah. So it's no wonder I was resisting it. Yeah. But once I realized that, it was just like an aha moment.

53:04and I texted my therapist and I said, does this make sense? And she said, totally. Well, look, I just finished five weeks of exercise today and I haven't missed one time. And it's all because that got resolved because I confronted the thing that was holding me back. Yeah. And I think that came after a lengthy season of therapy and the somatic experiencing modality that we were talking about when we were on with Masten. But I think this is why it matters because if you have goals that you just cannot seem to accomplish despite the fact that you're very competent at achievement in other areas of your life or some other area of your life you're just really struggling with, there may be a trauma or nervous system regulation kind of undercurrent there that if you can unlock, all of a sudden, everything becomes easier.

53:53Like brute force is a very primitive strategy. Like, you know, it is a strategy that you can use. You can put that tool in your toolbox. but this is probably, you couldn't have just tried harder. You did try harder and it didn't work. And so I think that's exciting. I mean, I think it's just like, wow, there's a whole nother path to break through here. I think my other big takeaway from this interview is how important this is for leaders. Yes, me too. Because if you can't regulate yourself, you're gonna dysregulate your team and that's gonna impact their performance. They're not going to do their best work.

54:25If you're a parent, if you can't regulate yourself, you're gonna dysregulate your kids and they're not going to give you their best performance. They're not going to be able to develop in a healthy way. Yeah. And so, and I don't mean that to shame us or put us into anything other than to just say, this is something that's worth studying and something that's worth learning about so we can show up and be our best selves. Right. No matter what the context is. I mean, at minimum, we got to know when we are dysregulated. Right. Which I think many of us who have lived most of our lives kind of above the collarbone aren't even aware when we're becoming dysregulated and then are like, why is everyone acting so weird?

55:01It's like, because you're acting so weird. Well, just think of the holidays where, and this has happened in our family. Yeah. We have a holiday and somebody comes in, they're dysregulated or they get dysregulated in the holiday. Yeah. And then everything escalates. Right. Everybody gets dysregulated and it's just a mess. Right. Right. But now having this knowledge, it's a lot easier to go, oh, I need to regulate myself because I can co-regulate or have an influence on that other person and help them calm down. And the goal isn't not to ever get dysregulated. No, that's right. The goal is to be flexible so you don't get stuck there and you have the ability to come back to kind of that place of equilibrium.

55:36Anyway, I just thought it was a great conversation. And I think the practical applications are discussed in Mastin's book. And just again, you got to go get this book, Reclaim Your Nervous System. I think that is going to be key to understanding this at another level and starting to be able to access this toolkit. It's pretty powerful. Guys, thanks for listening. And I want to ask you to do us a favor. If you've gotten value out of this, go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this podcast, rate the show, give us a five star if you can do that honestly, and give us a quick review. That helps juice the algorithm so that our show rises higher in the rankings and more people can discover it.

56:15And we're on a mission here at Full Focus to make it nearly impossible for people not to get the double win and you can be part of that mission and help us create a movement we'll see you next week