Pushing The Limits

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Gain insights on the dangers of being too immersed in a sports bubble.
Learn how you can deal with feeling pressured.
Understand the importance of adaptability in our fast-changing world.

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Episode Highlights

[02:59] Conrad’s Childhood

Conrad’s family used to move around until they settled at New Plymouth when he was six.
His family was very close, as his parents always made time for him and his siblings.
They were also supportive of both his academics and sports.
Conrad spent most of his childhood playing sports and helping out on their family farm.

[09:03] Conrad as a Young Sportsman

Conrad wasn’t initially an overachiever when it comes to sports.
During his time at school, rugby didn’t take up a huge portion of his life.
Conrad didn’t feel pressured to play, unlike most kids involved in sports today.
He’s very grateful that he was able to finish his law degree before he started playing professionally.

[11:44] The Dangers of the Sports System

Nowadays, there’s an obsession with finding talent and training them hard from a young age.
The rationale behind this is to give these kids the best chances of success. However, Conrad is sceptical about this approach.
He believes that balancing life and sports is crucial, especially because sports is a short-term career.
Many athletes end up going bankrupt or developing depression because they don't have a life outside of playing sports.

[16:26] Staying Grounded

When you’re in a sports bubble, it’s easy to lose touch with reality.
If you’re handling a high-paying sports career, you can forget how real people live.
Athletes need to stay grounded and not tie their identity with their sports. This way, they can land on their feet after the bubble bursts.
The challenge is to find other things that you enjoy and avoid the trap of coaching after your playing career ends.

[29:39] On Career Transitions

With the rapid changes in the world, we need to adapt to stay relevant.
It takes courage to change your career.
However, you can always find support when you open up to the people around you.

[33:06] Mental Health in Sports

All athletes feel pressured with their sports—what’s important is how they deal with it.
When you look at being pressured differently, you can see it as an opportunity.
There's no quick fix for handling high-pressure situations. It's essential to find what works for you.

[36:38] How to Deal with Feeling Pressured

Preparation is critical to help overcome feeling pressured.
If you have done the prep work, all that’s left for you to do is execute.
Don’t get overwhelmed by the bigger picture. Instead, focus on the minute details.
You need to be at the top of your game if you’re playing in the Rugby World Cup. Listen to the full episode to hear how Conrad overcomes being pressured!

[45:21] Conrad’s Experiences with the All Blacks

Conrad was playing for the Wellingtons when he was picked to play for the All Blacks.
His fellow players and coaches told him not to feel pressured and encouraged him to have fun.
For Conrad, being an All Black never lost its glow. He acknowledges what the team means for the country.
He believes that the All Blacks continues to perform well because the players uphold the team’s legacy.
In particular, their jersey means so much to Conrad. Find out why when you tune in to the full episode!

[52:51] The Future of Rugby

Now working as a lawyer in the player association, Conrad speculates that women’s rugby will see tremendous growth in the coming years.
The women’s rugby players are more motivated by the sport. They want to reach more women and girls through it.
Since this women's rugby is still a relatively small industry, there's not much effort to commercialise yet.
This can be an advantage. It's similar to how small but nimble companies can overtake big industries.

[59:56] Conrad’s Advice to Parents and Children

It is much more harmful to shelter your children from sports.
As you get serious about sports, remember to stay grounded and balanced. Connect with the real world as much as you can.
Lastly, be open to opportunities and changes.

7 Powerful Quotes

‘I think it's fine to keep a balance, and to play other sports, and to experience, just live a normal life. I think you can still excel.’

‘You have a crazy number of bankruptcy, crazy number of rates of depression because they haven't learned to live outside of their sport.’

‘You have a lot of retired players that feel like they have to coach because they think it's all they know. The challenge, I suppose is, then of being careful not to fall into that trap.’

‘Whatever you decide that you want to be, you can become.’

‘The bigger the moments and the bigger the pressure, it's the funny thing, it's the more important that you focus on the smaller, minute detail.’

‘If you break it down into one more step, just one more, and then you just keep going and keep going. Then, invariably, that mindset or that thing that's in your head passes and then you're back in the game.’

‘If it's a conversation you're just having in your own mind, you will never get anywhere. You just need to open up about it.’

About Conrad

Conrad Smith was a long-time player of New Zealand’s All Blacks and helped lead the team to the 2011 and 2015 Rugby World Cups. He is widely known as “The Snake” for his ability to slip through tackles. At 38, he captained the Wellington-based Hurricanes in the Southern Hemisphere’s Rugby league, then retired after the 2015 World Cup.

He now serves as legal counsel and project manager for International Rugby Players, the global representative body for the sport. He is also the high-performance manager for Pau, a French club that competes in the Top 14, the highest in the country’s domestic league.

Find out more about Conrad and his work at International Rugby Players.

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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends, so they can learn what to do when they feel pressured.

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To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Transcript Of The Podcast

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential, with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Lisa Tamati speaking. Welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have Conrad Smith, the famous, famous All Black, who many of you Kiwis at least will know, a superstar athlete. And we share information about his career, and what it's like to be in the World Cup, and lots of exciting stuff. Also, what it's like to be post-career now, retiring, some of the issues that he sees around young athletes. Really lovely and interesting conversation with the amazing Conrad Smith who's also a lawyer as well as an All Black. Talk about an overachiever.

Before we get on to the show, just want to remind you, we have our epigenetics flagship program that we're running constantly. So if anybody wants to find out what the genes are all about, and how to optimise your food, your exercise, your lifestyle, your chronobiology, your mood and behaviour, all these things to your specific genes, and get the blueprint and the user manual for your body, then please come and check out what we do. Head on over to lisatamati.com, hit the ‘Work with Us’ button, and then you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program. That will take you over to our site where you can find out all about that. Or you can always reach out to me, and I can send you a little bit of a video, and maybe jump on a call to explain how it all works. It's a really powerful and awesome program. We've taken hundreds and hundreds of people through this program, and it's really been life-changing for so many, including myself and my family. So if you're wanting to find out about that, just head on over to lisatamati.com and hit the work with us button.

Also, just wanted to let you know that I do a lot of motivational speaking, corporate speaking. I would love if anyone knows, or organising a conference, or team workshop, or anything like that, please reach out to me: lisa@lisatamati.com if you're interested in finding out about my speaking programs. Also, we do corporate wellness programs on that front as well. How can you upgrade your life and be the best version of you can be at work and at home? That's what we're all about. So thanks for that letting me do that little plug.

Now, we're going to be going over to Conrad Smith who's just been moved back to New Plymouth. I've had the privilege of meeting him a number of times and working on a couple of things. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. Now, over to Conrad.

Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits this week with Lisa Tamati. I am really excited for today's conversation. I've teamed up with another amazing superstar, a top athlete for you guys to enjoy learning from today. I have Conrad Smith. Conrad, welcome to the show.

Conrad Smith: Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for the introduction.

Lisa: You hardly need an introduction especially to people living in New Zealand. A legendary All Black. You played for how many years? I think it's 2004?

Conrad: 15 years.

Lisa: 15 as an All Black, as a winger. You've been a captain of the Hurricanes. You've been, I don't know, Player of the Year and Sportsman of the Year in Wellington. Your accolades are such a huge list, Conrad. You're blushing already, I can see. But really, an incredible athletic career and you were also talented as a cricketer, I understand.

Conrad: When I was a little fella, when I was little fella. I was too little for rugby so I played more cricket, but yeah.

Lisa: And then you grew.

Conrad: I was a New Zealander. New Zealand kid back then. Yeah, then I grew up. That's right.

Lisa: Yeah. Then you grew up and you were big enough to take on the big boys. Say, Conrad, give us a little bit of a feel like where you grew up. And how much of an influence did your childhood have on what you ended up doing with your rugby career?

Conrad: Yeah. So I was actually born down Hawera. My father was a policeman so we moved around with him a little bit in the early years, and then moved to New Plymouth when I was about six. We’re a very, very close family. He gave a lot of time. My mom and dad would always make time for the kids: a couple older brothers, younger sister. Yeah, it was a great childhood. A lot of sport was played but we all did pretty well academically, which my parents laughed at because both of them never made it. They did poorly in school. Really, really supportive parents in terms of... It's funny, I probably took it for granted then, but I don't ever remember my parents either not being there or having to work.

Everything we did, we always were supported. And they were there, whether it was just drive us there, or coach our teams, or try and help us with our homework. I think that was what I've, like I said, took for granted but now, being older, I realise how important that was and why we're still such a close family, and my brothers are my best mates, and my sister is. We still meet. Yeah we still, obviously. We're all sort of have moved around the world but we're sort of pretty close together again. I suppose I try to be now with my own family like my dad was to me. Yeah, so those were the luckiest break in my head, I suppose. I always say people talk about luck, especially in sport but for me, it was just the family I was born into and the sport I had as a young fella.

Lisa: Yeah. Now, that's brilliant. And you had a couple of kids yourself?

Conrad: Yeah, yeah. Now, we've got two of them, just about to go off to school. Luca is my seven, and we had him in New Zealand, and then our daughter was actually born over in France while I was over there for four or five years. She's come back with us.

Lisa: Growing up in the... You grew up in the 80s, I grew up in the 70s. Showing my age, yeah. But I think in the 80s, it was still very much like an outdoorsy lifestyle, like that good Kiwi kid upbringing, especially in Taranaki because we both come from here. Having that being outdoors in nature all day, as kids, we never came home before dark, sort of thing. Was it the same in your household?

Conrad: Yeah, for sure and like I say to all the brothers, they were pretty influential in what I did. I just sort of hung around, tail off them but very much, we were always out. I just think of my childhood, it was all about playing sport, finding areas to play sport. You'd sort of get pushed out, and as we try and play inside, then we'd get pushed out to the garden and we'd ruin the garden or ruin the lawn. We’re just constantly finding places to do what guys do with a ball and you can do anything. Then, the wider family were farming so my dad was on the farm. He sort of got kicked off by his older brother, but that was a family farm.

So we would eat out that way and that's that Douglas from Stratford on the way there with my mom in there. That's been in the family for three or four generations and that would be where we're kids. We'd help with haymaking, we'd help with carving, we'd help all sorts. That was pretty much my favourite holiday, and the same as all of us kids would be to go spend some time there and help on the farm. That was just a childhood, yeah. You just know what friends to do and always outside, didn't matter if it was raining and cold as it often is at most parts. We just put a coat on and carry on.

Lisa: Oh, man that just takes me back to my childhood, and I often think, 'Man, I want to go back.' What happened to that simple life that we had when we were kids? You're very lucky to have such wonderful parents, obviously. It's such a cool family. You also went off into university and became a lawyer, as you do, as an All Black. A slight overachiever there, Conrad. Did you always want to be a lawyer apart from wanting to be an All Black?

Conrad: As I sort of said before, I wasn't a huge overachiever on the sport front. Well, I went to Francis Douglas; it's not a huge sporting school. We had sporting teams, but that wasn’t very much. Part of it, you were there to study, you were there to get an education, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed school. I think it is a great school, and a lot of my mates now are still from the mates I made in my school years, and yeah. So I didn't mind class and I never had a... I suppose leaving high school as it was when I was going to go to university, my brothers had both done that. That was sort of a thing to do.

Law was, yeah. It was something. I enjoyed English history. Those sort of subjects at school in Wellington wasn't too far. I sort of wanted to go down to meet my brothers down there and that was the scarfie life was. But he sort of talked me out of it just because he... I think he'd done about four years by that stage, and flying down, and getting himself back and forth was pretty tough. They sort of said, 'Well, if you have to, go closer to home.' and that was when I ended up in Wellington and I really enjoyed law and rugby.

Yeah like I say, sport was great, but it was two nights a week. It wasn't taking over my life as I know it does to a lot of kids nowadays. They make academies, and whatnot, and maybe talk about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But yeah, I was able to finish a full law degree and luckily, that sort of perfectly dovetailed into when I started playing professionally. Yeah, it was just sort of fortunate for me in terms of the way it all worked out and the timing. That's something I was very grateful for, obviously.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Because right now, like your career, your playing career at least is over, you've got something to do. You've got a qualification. If we dive into that subject a little bit, so a lot of the young guys now are coming through and they're sort of getting picked out early along the way. What sort of dangers do you see with that system?

Conrad: Yeah, I do worry about it, and I've spoken about it before. Because it's not just in rugby. It's in all sports. There's sort of a real obsession towards identifying talent young. Then the excuses, are you giving them the best chance of success? So we're gonna do all the work with them, and specialise them, and make them concentrate on the sport. But firstly, I don't know if that actually helps them with their sport a whole lot. I think it's fine to keep a balance, and to play other sports, and to experience, just live a normal life. I think you can still excel. But the other thing is that if it doesn't work out or even if it works out, sports are short term industry. You know, I know that that's not forever, and when you get to the back end of that, if you’re purely invested in one sport when the time runs out, you got to rebuild a lot of the... Yeah and that's a real problem.

And you don't need to look far to find a lot of evidence about that. We've been afoot and looking at American sports because they’ve been professional a lot longer than we have. Some of the statistics is just shocking. And people would think that they paid so much money, the athletes in those sports in America that they should be able to live literally after... They could do whatever they want. Theoretically, they have enough money just to retire but the statistics are not that at all. You have a crazy number of bankruptcy, crazy number of rates of depression because they haven't learned to live outside of their sport. That's sort of been taken away from them because they’re placed into their sport so young, and then just cut, and there's no real assistance around that.

So yeah, that's an extreme example and we're nowhere near at that stage here with the way the academies and that are set up. I know most of the people involved are very mindful of the things I've just talked about.

Lisa: That's pretty...just open that conversation now.

Conrad: Yeah. I just think there's a lot to be said around leading young people. I look at myself and from that period of development where maybe nowadays, I'd been in an academy, I was lead to play multiple... I played cricket, I played basketball, I ran, I did, God knows, all these things, and who's to say what lessons I learned from those other sports that I actually used in rugby? Because there's so much that you can pick up and also being able to study.

For me to have a degree, the benefits that gave me to deal with injuries, to deal with all the downsides of sport because I had a background and the education. It's really helpful. You relax a lot more. You get a perspective on the sorts of things that if you're just wrapped up in a sport and you get an injury, man that's tough. You can't do what you would like to do. Where do you turn? But I think if you've had a bit of an education, and it doesn't have to be a law degree, but if you've got some other life or other opportunities and options that you can turn to in those times, and it gives you perspective and a sense of reality, and you don't get so caught up in that, so yeah. I know it is appreciated. I just think it may be still underrated by a lot of the people that are setting up these academies and things for the young sportsmen.

Lisa: Yeah, and that's a good conversation to have and just be open about. Because you're one injury away from ending your career at any time. And then, to build... that's like building a sort of a house on a foundation of saying if you haven't got something else and you haven't got the life skills, if I just look at the opposite extreme with my sport where you have... When I started, just a bunch of weirdos doing crazy stuff, right? There's no structure, and there was no support. There was no knowledge, but it taught me that I had to go and market myself. I had to go and push everything that... Even when I represented New Zealand, I had to buy my own singlet to wear at the thing. Get a little... I'm getting here and do all of the things. So you had to market yourself, present yourself, become a speaker, do all of this sort of stuff in order to... So through that, you learn a lot of life skills anyway and then it was never a professional sport, in a sense.

I managed to live off my sport for a number of years, but that was an exceptionally... That just because I found ways to do that but it wasn't a pathway that anybody could follow. But it taught me to fight. I remember having this conversation with my brother, Dawson, who I know was one of your heroes when you were a little feller. My brother, Dawson, was a Hurricanes player and Super Rugby in Taranaki and international as well. When I came back from Australia, and I came back to New Zealand, and I was raising money to go to Death Valley, which was a big race for me, he was like, 'Why are you in the media? Where you want to be? I used to hide from the damn media.’ And I'm like, 'Yeah, but you got everything given to you, mate. You got all your clothes, all your gear, you got stuff gifted to you left, right, and centre. You've actually got no idea what another sport is.’ That structure, that framework is not there. And that's good and it's bad.

When you have everything laid on for you, but you haven’t had to fight in society for your things... Because I've talked to a lot of rugby clubs actually around the country to all the younger guys. Everything is laid out for them. They have to fight. They've got a lot of pressure as far as performance and all that sort of stuff goes, but the rest of life is sort of taken care of. So it's something to be wary of. I think you got young ones and going up through this system is to just think about, 'What is the fallback option here? What else are they going to do when their career is over?' Because it can be very short, and not everybody reaches the stardom that you did. Not everyone gets to play for the All Blacks’ 94 games or...

Conrad: We talked about the bubble. They use that term a lot within sports. So you come into this bubble. When you stay in that bubble, you lose touch with reality. You're actually... I know because I've seen it, and I'd use that same terminology and say, 'Come on and talk to the guys. I've got to get out of the bubble.’ It was always a thing of because people would... And you'd see it with people that get drawn into a sporting career and if they're doing really well. And you're right. It's only in New Zealand that it's probably only really rugby. There are other sports now that get paid really well, but they have to head overseas so... You're thrown into a lifestyle where everything is laid on and you don't actually... You forget how the real people live and the real life is, and that the bubble bursts, and it all comes about, and this is what I'm saying: The more time you spend in that bubble, when it bursts, the harder it is. The fall can really take a lot of getting used to it and some people don't.

Unfortunately, even the guys I have played with, I’ve got as many stories of guys who are struggling, still struggling as the guys who fell on their feet. I don't think anyone does straight away, even myself. People will say ‘You handled it well.’ I've been retired just over three years and I knew. Everyone seemed to me it's at least two years before you even... There’s still things you struggle with it. And that was spot on. It just takes a lot of time to understand that you're never going to get up in the morning and have that same drive. You're very lucky that when you're as a sportsman or woman to have that drive. Just do the same thing. But you got to find something else, and it will never replace that and it's not meant to, but it's a challenge for everyone. Those life experiences during that sporting career are so important so that when the bubble bursts, when you come out of it, it's just a little bit easier to find your feet. Because otherwise, that is tough, and it's a bit of a worry.

Lisa: Yeah yeah exactly. Just on even from that identity of being this athlete and you had a singular purpose. Pretty much every day when you got up, it was to train and it was to be the best for the next game or the next whatever. And that gets taken away and then the complexity of life comes in. Yeah? I retired from doing ultramarathons at 48. It's a sport where you can go a lot longer, and I've got mates that are still in their 60s and 70s doing it. But what I do see often in the ultra running community is they don't know anything else so, 'I'm going to stick with what I know and I'm just going to beat the crap out of my body until it falls into the ground.' Rather than going, 'Hang on a minute. This is no longer conducive to what I really want for me.’ And reassessing. With rugby, you're forced to because physically, at 48, you wouldn't be able to keep up with a 20-year-old.

There's that whole, have you struggled? I know I've struggled with that whole identity. Like, 'Who the hell am I if I'm not that hardass athlete and I'm not able to do what I used to do?' Because I still get it in the running scene, 'Oh, a marathon must be... you must do that before breakfast.' I'm like, 'Yeah, no. That's not...' Now, a 5K’s quite long. You know what I mean? So your horizon comes back in. So I've spent decades pushing my horizon out to be able to go longer, longer, longer, bigger. Then, life happens. In my case it was mum and that was the end of the career. It was high time; it was overdue. But that whole, you just had the rug pulled out from under you, and your identity is tied up in that performance. Have you found that a struggle?

Conrad: Yeah. Yeah, I think. Like I say, everyone does. You're lying if you say people do it easy. Again, I think a lot of the work, hopefully, athletes that handle it better have thought about that work during their career and they don't... We were given some great support while I was playing, particularly, within the All Blacks, guys like Gilbert Enoka with the background. And the whole mental side of not just the game, but of life, in terms of keeping...being grounded, keeping perspective. Part of that was your identity and not letting rugby define you. We used to say that you're a person that plays rugby, you're not a rugby player. It has this other life. You're actually... I play rugby because I like playing. Maybe that's not who I am. That's what the public sees, and I think if you get a handle on that while you're playing, then you understand that when rugby is taken away but that's not part of... ‘That's what I used to do. Now, I'm not doing it anymore but I'm still the person I've been this whole way. Now, my journey carries on.’

Like I say, that's easier said than done. There’s people that become the rugby player. That's all they are, and so that's the real challenge. For me, it was about just finding other challenges. And I think anyone in terms of rugby or any sport yourself, you find other challenges, it gives you... You realise your own identity and you find other things to do that give you fulfilment. I think aligned with that is the whole... When I think of rugby players, a lot of them who find the identity in rugby, they then just go on to coaching, and this is a real problem, and it might... I don't think that's just with the sport of rugby, but you have a lot of retired players that feel like they have to coach because they think it's all they know.

The challenge, I suppose is, then of being careful not to fall into that trap. It was easier for me. I studied. I used to be a lawyer. I'm sure I could go back and do that. Maybe not as a lawyer, but there are other skills that I have. That's a really hard message, but it's a really important message to give all sportsmen. To rugby players, I'm always telling them, 'You don't have to stay in rugby, you know. You played, you finished, you don't have to coach.' There's going to be hundreds and thousands of players finishing career and they think they have to coach. But their skills are transferable to hundreds of different professions and things that will pay them well. You can keep being yourself.

Even for me, I've stayed within rugby but it's not coaching. I'm working with the Players Association, International Players Association and that suits me. That's my skill set: a bit of the law, the analytical side of me that I've always had. And I think that was important. It's sort of my process of moving away from that identity as just 'Conrad Smith, the rugby player.' It's important to find other things that challenge me and that I enjoy.

Lisa: Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody and we want to keep it that way. But to do that we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's patron.lisatamati.com.

We have two patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as 7 dollars a month, New Zealand, or 15 dollars a month if you really want to support us. We are grateful if you do.There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us: everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries, and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com. And thanks very much for joining us.

Lisa: That's awesome and thanks for sharing that because I think that's... Being able to openly have these conversations because there are a lot of athletes in lots of different sports struggling with this whole process of... Your career is so short, and you're not a has-been. I asked myself these conversations, and most especially in the beginning is, 'You’re nothing now. You’re a has-been now. You can’t do it.' And being embarrassed about that, instead of going, 'Hang on a minute. I'm still pretty fricking epic and I do other stuff.' Now, that's freed up a huge piece of my brain and my daily power and energy to then go and attack other massive projects.

There's so many things in the world that you can take on. It's all up to you to develop a certain passion. And I think it's not even just in the sports realm. I see people who are in careers that got friends and careers, they don't want to be there anymore but they studied it, they became it, they did it. whatever it was. Now, they're like, 'Is that it?' It doesn't have to be it, no. We live in a day and age where we can actually go and retrain. In fact, we have to be adaptable and flexible in this day and age if we want to keep up because the world is changing so fast. So many jobs are going to be gone and whole industries.

As a jeweller in a previous life, that industry got destroyed, really. If you weren't in the big game with big brands and Chinese mass production and stuff like that and you're an artisan, a person who made one-off pieces, you're struggling now unless you really got the top massive diamonds and God knows what. Everyone else is struggling, so you have to go, 'Okay, that industry’s change. I'm going to have to adapt, change, go with it, overcome it, improvise, and keep developing.' I think that's the message that we're getting here is you don't box yourself in. don't just be that one-trick pony. That's not, and Conrad is now an advocate, he's a father, he's a speaker.

Whatever you decide that you want to be, you can become. And you're not just Conrad, the All Black. I think that's a really important transition for everybody to go through. Even if you're a policeman or a teacher and you don't want to do that anymore or whatever the case is.

Conrad: Yeah, and it takes a bit of courage. Like I said before, it's easier said than done a lot of the time. And that's what people just need that encouragement. Especially with finances and people suddenly are, 'I've got a mortgage on a house. I don't want to change career because there might be a layer where I'm not earning money.' But yeah, I just think that's... You come back to some questions about who you are, who you want to be, and you've got to be... You'll be happy doing what you're doing. So I just think all the help you can get from people around you, that's where you'll draw the energy, I think. If it's a conversation you're just having in your own mind, you will never get anywhere. You just need to open up about it, speak to people close to you, and I think that's generally where the answers come from.

Lisa: Yeah. I think that's gold. On that point, how big is mental health in your work? Do you do a lot around supporting mental health, and that sort of thing, and helping people transition, and all that sort of jazz?

Conrad: Yeah, absolutely. More and more, it's a complex field. When you talk about players in the game, in the sport of rugby, it's really difficult. We were starting to appreciate the pressures I think that sportsmen and women are under in these fields. It's a lot of… it draws that back on what we were talking about before. You're in a bubble and you do lose perspective and so not as the... The challenge is to help these young, these kids that are in these bubbles to speak different, and keep living, and look at sport as this amazing opportunity, and not feel the pressure. Well, maybe saying not feeling the pressure is the wrong way to put it because it's natural, but to feel the pressure and find a way to deal with that, a healthy way to deal with it.

Again, I look back on my career and you're playing for the All Blacks, you're playing World Cups, it's easy to talk about pressure. There was never times that I didn't know how to deal with it, and that was from the sport I had, and maybe the background, and my upbringing. But it was easily... You just channel that and see and look at it differently and decide. Look at the opportunity that every time you feel pressure, you get it, it's as simple as just changing the perspective of things rather than the pressure of, ‘You have to win’. ‘I'm an All Black, I want to win because…’ Whatever. ‘I've got a country behind me,’ and suddenly, it's a burden that's lifted and yeah, you flipped it and you're puffing out your chest, and you want to do it. If it doesn't come off, it’s a game. There's more important things, absolutely, around. But yeah, like I keep saying, it's not easy for everyone and there’s people that understand that better. The challenge is getting through to people of different backgrounds, and different cultures, and different ages.

Lisa: Yeah with different problems.

Conrad: Yeah. I'm saying that because I know what works for me, but I know a 17-year-old young Samoan boy who's playing rugby, I don't know for the Highlanders, I might not be able to connect with him. The things that worked for me won't work for him. That's what I'm trying to say. Or the female swimmer who's doing, training for an Olympics. We're all different, and the challenge is finding a way for everyone to deal with that pressure and to be mentally healthy through a sports career.

Lisa: I love that approach and just coming off the back of the Olympics. It was just wonderful to watch our amazing athletes doing amazing things. Lisa Carrington just blows me away. She's mentally just insane. But I love that thing of the challenge versus threat. I think this is a really important thing to do. When you're feeling overwhelmed and overburdened and like the whole world of pressure is on me, you going out and something the World Cup, were you able, even in those extreme pressure moments, to turn that into an opportunity and not a threat? Because that does change the physiology. Like when you're running on the paddock on those days, those couple of times in your life where it's just been horrifically big pressure, how did you physically and mentally cope there?

Conrad: Yeah, I think we've spent a lot of time, and everyone did, preparing for that World Cup. Again, as All Blacks, you have to spend a lot of time because you know the pressure that comes with and the expectation that comes with being an All Black in New Zealand. But even more so a World Cup, a home World Cup, when we hadn't won, I think 2011. A lot of our preparation time wasn't just being on the field with how we're going to play but was how to deal with that pressure. For me, it was just constantly turning it around so that it was never a moment I even... I can look back and think of times in the game where the team was under pressure and it would be perceived as... Even in that final hour, the team struggled a bit with the pressure, but if I'm being honest, our preparation never let us feel that way. We were dealing with that all the time.

We just were focused on doing our job. We talked so much about whatever comes our way, we were going to adapt and deal with it and that's what you just had to keep doing. You never sort of stop, and you'll notice yourself, you just don't let yourself stop and think about that. I think if you've got to that stage, it's too late. If you're having to go through a process of. 'How do I deal with this?’ It's probably too late. You've already, hopefully, got a process in place where you're just, it's just instinctively, you're just channelling that, focusing on little details. Because you know whatever the pressure, that's not going to influence you unless you need it. You just focus on the small tasks and you get through 80 minutes of rugby like that, keep a smile on your face.

Lisa: Pull your focus into the job at hand instead of the: 'Oh my god. Everyone's watching me. Everyone's pressuring. Hang on a minute I've just got to pass this ball right now.' You're breaking it down into little tiny...

Conrad: We all have little trigger words and I know we've talked about this: ‘Be in the now.’ Be in the now, which is like just what you're talking about. It's not thinking about the mistake you might have just made, the ball you drop, the tackle you missed, and it's not worrying, and you're not thinking about the World Cup, you're going to win at the end of this game. Because you can't do anything. Right now. ‘Right now. Right now, I'm going to catch this next ball.’ Look up, keep looking, keep calling, whatever it is. It's as simple as a little thing like that that just keeps you in tune with the moment and not letting you get overwhelmed by the bigger picture. Yeah, massively important, obviously. The bigger the moments and the bigger the pressure, it's the funny thing, it's the more important that you focus on the smaller, minute detail.

Lisa: I love it. I said try to forget the consequences of what you're doing. You've done the preparation. You've done the work. You've done everything that you possibly can. You’re standing on the start line, in my case, a race, then letting go of the outcome because you've done what you can do. And now, it's up to the whatever happens in the next few hours or days, in my case. So this was no longer just in your hands then. Because the gods have a thing to say about it as well. Sometimes, if you try and control the uncontrollable, then you'll drive yourself to madness, whereas if you can go, 'I've done the stuff that I was responsible for. I've put the work and I've done the preparation. I know my strategies. I know my pacing. I know whatever it is I'm doing. I got that right. Okay. I'm going to keep my eye on the ball here. But I'm going to let go of the outcome now.' Because when you let go of the outcome, then that pressure goes and you're in that...

Being in that now is a really powerful message to people. Because when you're in the past or the future, you're either worrying about the future, or you're regretting what's happened in the past, or it's a load for you to carry. In the moment, when you're under pressure, all you can cope with is that second right now. The next minute. That's it. When I was running long distances, I would break it down into: 'What's the next power pole? I just got to get to the next power pole. If I can't even get that far, I'm just gonna take one more step.' You can always take one more step, right? If you break it down into one more step, just one more, and then you just keep going and keep going. Then, invariably, that mindset or that thing that's in your head passes, and then you're back in the game.

Conrad: That's funny, you sound... because someone I remember that came and spoke to the team when we were outside joined the team in 2004, and we had Amish Carter came and spoke with the team. It was before the 2007 World Cup and obviously, that World Cup didn't end well, but some of what he said, I still remember it. He was talking about his Olympic performances, and he said, and I think one of the questions from the players was about we're talking: the nerves and the pressure. And I remember him saying that he wasn't nervous. He wasn't nervous when he got to the start line just for the reasons you said. He said: ‘Because then, I'd backed on my prep, I'd done everything I needed to do. Now, it was just a matter of going out and doing that. You can't do anymore.’

It's funny that when I looked, especially towards into my career, the only times I would feel nervous normally, on the start of a week. So if we play the game on a Saturday, and that was because I'm nervous thinking of all the things I've got to do on the Monday, Tuesday. But by the Friday, I would have this real sense of calm. I'd have a smile and I'll be like, 'Right now, it's time to do it.' It's funny because people, it's the opposite. They're not thinking about a game on Monday, Tuesday, but they were getting nervous on before a game starts thinking, 'You must be even worse.' But yeah, that was the way I could explain it is that we're really... I was nervous thinking about the game but now, I've done all that. This is the path I've taken. This is the training I've done for this game. Now, I'm ready to... I'm going to go and do it and see if it works.

Lisa: Yeah, this is the reward phase. This is actually what you've been preparing for all along, so this is the time when you actually should be enjoying it. It wasn't always that easy especially when you're doing a couple hundred K's somewhere because sometimes it’s not that pleasant. But you've done the work to get to the start line and the times where I am being nervous is when I hadn't done the work.

Conrad: Exactly. I think of some... I don't like admitting it but normally, with All Blacks, you always have checked every box but there were games, I’d go back even the Hurricanes or Club Games and that's the ones where I'd be nervous because I'd be thinking... ‘I haven't really... now this week. I probably haven't done…’ Then, you get nervous but actually the bigger the occasion, the preparation is normally good.

Lisa: You took it seriously and yeah, yeah. I've come stuck on some short races where I've had my ass handed to me because I went in with the... That's just the short race, and oh my god. Had my ass handed to me. So yeah, always respect every distance or every game. I think it's key. What's it actually like, Conrad, to be... The first time that you put on that All Blacks jersey? Because it's every little boy and now, little girl's dream too. What's it actually like to put on that sort of thing for the first time? Can you remember?

Conrad: Yeah for sure. It's pretty special. I do think I was really lucky the way it panned out for me in terms of... It happened really quickly. I'd play. I hadn't even played the Super Rugby game. I hadn't played for the Hurricanes. When it started, I had a really... I was playing for the Wellington Lions. We made the final, and then I was picked, fortunately. So the coaching staff that had come in wanted to pick some new younger players and I was one of those. That was very much sort of out of the blue. Then, I was starting the following week. So I played a final. The team was picked. We assembled the end of that following week. We flew to Italy, and then I was playing.

But that was great in hindsight because it didn't let me overthink that. It was sort of okay, and I just was like, 'Right.' Little bit like what I said before, 'I'm just going to enjoy it.' Admittedly there were people around me. Graham Henry, Ryan Smith, Steve Hansen, great coaches, and Gilbert Enoka that were giving me those messages. Just telling me, 'We're picking you in the first game. Just go and enjoy it. Just keep doing what you're doing. We love what you're doing.' So those messages for a young guy were perfect. I didn’t actually question that. Yeah, I just took the jersey. I was still sort of pinching myself how quickly it happened. But yeah, then there I was playing and yeah, it was an amazing experience.

I'm glad to say it never really diminished. I was lucky to play for over a decade, and it was always special putting on the jersey. The team does a great job, I think, of respecting the jersey, acknowledging how important it is to their country, what we mean to everyone, and staying grounded, and all that good stuff about acknowledging the connection that you have with the young men and women who are dreaming to being All Black, wishing they were there, would give anything to be in your place. So you're always aware of that, and so it never loses its glow. Then I put my jersey on.

Brian Hoyer who was a big part of the team when I joined the team, he said ‘When you put the jersey on, you shouldn't be able to fit outside the doorway.’ You grow that big. I'm not using the words and I always... For me, I was normally marking someone bigger than me or normally not the biggest in the room but I always felt that. That I have to turn sideways to get out the door but that was the sort of feeling and you hear that even today: The way you sort of, you grow in the jersey.

Lisa: You're carrying the manner and the tradition of that, and the reputation of that, and the hopes of a nation, basically, on your shoulders, which can be either a load or it can be like, 'Wow, how lucky am I that I get to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before?' Basically and like you said, 'Yeah, I can't fit through the door because I'm just filled with all that.'

Okay, just a very quick anecdote. I was running through in the Gobi Desert at one point and we were running through these slot canyons. These really crazy. It was hot. One guy died out there that day which was really terrible. I was running through there and I was chasing down this American woman who was in front of me and I was second. I'm like, 'I've got to plan something here if I want to beat this person in front of me that I was chasing down through these canyons.'

So I started singing the Maori Battalion song to myself and I started to... like my ancestors, and my tradition there, my heritage like, 'I'm going to bloody beat you, American. Yeah. I'm gonna chase you down, and I'm singing away to myself running along through this canyon.' I beat her, right. It was awesome. I just went dashing past her, and I beat her. But it was just like, 'Wow.' It's just like you're pulling out stuff that you... It's not just you. You're like your ancestors and your heritage, and they're powering you. So I imagine it's a bit the same with the All Blacks jersey.

Conrad: Yeah. It's powerful stuff. Like, and it's all about creating something bigger than you. There's no doubt the history of things or like you say, in individual sports. As soon as you can create that connection to a greater cause. Actually, in the All Blacks, it's actually easy. I say this when I talk to other sports teams around how they create the identity. But the All Blacks had it handed to them because they have 130 years of whatever it is of this amazing performance, of this history, this black jersey that this country that's mad obsessed with them, great air of success and also, this idea that we do unite. We're the flagship of New Zealand. Rightly or wrongly, that's the way we're saying and you got to embrace that.

The fact that every time an All Black teams practice, it's a culture we have in New Zealand. This great collection of men who are representing the country. You capture that in the right way, and it counts as something. The field is 00 but I always felt... Yeah, when we got it right, we're straight away. That's worth some points at least on the board. It's something special that the All Blacks do have, and to the credit of the team, the whole time, I was involved. I know that it's carrying on that the way they connect and acknowledge that, it's really well done. It's the reason that the team continues to perform well.

Lisa: And it does it empower whole generations. Like I said to my brother Dawson, my dad wanted him to be an All Black, and he wanted him to meet all those milestones along the way. I remember like... We lost my dad last year, as people know, if they listened to my podcast. I said to my brother the other day, 'Dawson,' because he went to the game up at the park, at Pukekura Park and they had the 25-year anniversary for the Ranfurly Shield because he was on the Ranfurly Shield team. He was excited to go to the Ranfurly Shield thing, and I remember that being the proudest moment of my dad's life. Of all the things that my dad got to do and see, all of their kids, I said to Dawson, 'You gave him the highest point in his life was when you came home with that Ranfurly Shield, and you're a part of that Taranaki Team. That was, for him, the pinnacle.'

That's beautiful because that is just like... Especially when you've lost somebody... And Dawson’s like, to be able to go and celebrate that Ranfurly Shield with his old mates and reminisce on those times. That stays with you to the end: those special moments that you get, and that camaraderie that comes with it, and all of that sort of stuff. He gave my dad a precious gift really by being a part of that team. Dad was just so proud.

Dawson said to me once, 'Lisa, you could run across every fricking desert in the world and it would still not mean as much as that Ranfurly Shield.' And I said, 'You're damn right, and that's okay.' Because he was right in that. It's okay because he loved rugby, and he loved rugby teams, and the rugby world. My dad played, what do you call that? Fifth-grade rugby until he was 45 and he only quit because people were telling him he was too old, and then he played touch for another 10 years. He was a legend. A legend.

You're carrying all that on your shoulders. There are five and six-year-old kids looking at you on screen like you did with Daws back then. Like, 'Oh, these big Taranaki players and stuff.' That’s just beautiful. I had that just wanting to represent New Zealand in something because I couldn't be in All Blacks because back then, we didn't have women playing rugby, much to my dad's disappointment. Actually watching the girls at the sevens in the Olympics, oh, I just fell in love with that team. They were just epic. Ruby Tui is my new bloody hero. She's just amazing. I think she's just epic. But just to watch the camaraderie of those girls and the performance that they put on, I'm glad that women now have the chance to do that tough stuff too. Because that's pretty special as well: seeing girls going there and giving it everything, just going hard.

Conrad: You speak to the Black Ferns, the women's rugby, it's growing so much not just in New Zealand, but around the world and that's pretty exciting, especially for Fifteens and the opportunity it's giving so many young women. Yeah and so for myself, that's really refreshing now with international rugby and the Player Association and we deal with both men and women's. The joy I hear working in women's rugby, seriously, compared to men's, especially men's Fifteens, it's a lot of established... Careful with my words, but it's just so hard. To put it simply, it's so hard to get things done even if you agree there's so much.

Whereas in the women's game, it's so refreshing. There's just an openness and the enthusiasm. They just, 'Yep. Let's get that done and this.' You will see, women’s rugby going to go great in the next few years, and it's because of... In the men's game, I don't like to say it, but it might not have anywhere near the same growth or evolution just because it's...

Lisa: Stayed in the old ways. It obviously breaks everything, isn't it?

Conrad: The money, the money at that level is so big that there's so much at stake. That's just what grinds along, whereas the women's game, they're not... Obviously, they’re trying to commercialise on the game, but it's crumbs compared to the men's for things at the moment. But they'll catch up at a huge rate because they're just open about... Like at the moment, they're motivated by having fun, being patient, at getting the product out, getting more and more women and girls playing the game.

Lisa: That's amazing and isn't that though that's a really good analogy for everything in the world? Like that the big old institutions or big bureaucracies are going to be struggling in the future, I think. Completely off-topic but from the governments, to the big corporations, to the big institutions are going to be struggling against these young, nimble, small, exponentially powered technology-based companies and the rate of change that's coming that these big state, old bureaucratic, not just talking about rugby here, but governments and things are actually going to be on the backfoot shortly.

I always think of that Kodak, the company Kodak that used to be the biggest player in the world and photography, right? They didn't go with digital evolution, then they went under. Because they were too busy trying to protect what they already had, they actually discovered digital photography. They started it, but they didn't pursue it because they thought, 'Oh, that's going to be a threat to our current existing business.' That mindset is when you get overtaken by the young upstarts that come along with enthusiasm and they can, on a company-wide level, they're smaller. They're nimble. They can make decisions quicker. They can move faster. I see this in all areas happening. Hopefully, in the right way it'll brush off as well, but the girls certainly are next level.

Conrad: They're great. And I’ve got to know a few of them, a few of the Black Ferns.

Lisa: Can you help me out with Ruby? I want to get in with Ruby.

Conrad: That is such great Kiwi so yeah, more than happy. She'd love to chat.

Lisa: Woohoo. Okay. I know she's pretty busy right now. Everybody in the world wants to see her right now. And the other girls, they're just amazing. Conrad, as we wrap it up now in a minute because I know you got to go, but what is it that you want to get across? So if we highlighted a couple of points now, if you were talking to your children, you've got two kids, what do you want them to do in the future? Or what would you, if you were talking to some young kids out there that want to have a life in the sporting world? What’s some last parting wisdom or for the parents of those kids?

Conrad: Yeah, I think if you're speaking to parents, the first thing is the value of sport, I think. I just worry a little bit. I know I'm working in rugby, and there's some crazy things being said about the potential harms of playing a contact sport. But honestly, I've had the benefit of seeing, digging a lot deeper into that and that is not at all as clear as it's conveyed because of the sensationalism of journalism. Kids are kids. They love playing. If I leave my boy and his next-door neighbour, they're gonna wrestle; they're gonna fight. There's no harm in playing.

But on the flip side, the harm of not playing sport, of sheltering them, of thinking, of sitting in a lounge with a Coke and a bag of lolly is better for a kid than going and playing rugby because he might knock his head. That's so far from the truth. That would be my wish for parents' young kids. Just play sport but... And then, I suppose, if it's to reflect on what we've talked about, when the kid means getting serious about a sport, it would be to keep you balanced, to not lose sight. If you’re put in a bubble because it's a performance bubble, then that's all well and good but now, it's a bubble and you need to step out of that every chance you get and connect with the real world as much as you can.

Unfortunately, there are dangers and there are risks when you are totally invested into a sport. The crazy thing is sport is a great thing. It should be enjoyed and if you're even not enjoying it, it's not hard just to talk to someone and step outside your sport to reconnect with the people in the real world. Then, that should give you back your love of the game, and then you'll go well and be like Lisa and I and have a life where you've had a sport that you've loved, and it's given you amazing opportunities, and literally meet great people, and you still come out of it, and you're still happy, and still meet people but doing different things.

Lisa: This is gold. Conrad, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to doing our speaking gig together shortly and that's going to be exciting. I'm just really glad to have made your acquaintance and I think that you have such a level approach, level-headed approach to this whole thing and gave us some great insights today on what it is to be an All Black, but also what it is to come out the other side and gave us some really good perspective. So thanks for your time today, Conrad.

Conrad: Pleasure, Lisa.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

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Forming Good Habits to be Indistractable with Nir Eyal 0

Oct 7, 2021

If you want to work towards success, you need to start living a life that’s indistractable.

We know we need to be focused. Yet, how many times a day do you get distracted from doing your most important work? It's easy to get sucked into hours of scrolling through social media or mindlessly skipping channels. These external triggers often take the blame when we get distracted. However, did you know that a more dangerous form of distraction is one where we think we're being productive? The secret is that the opposite of distraction isn't focus: it's traction.

Behavioural designer Nir Eyal joins us to talk about how to form good habits and break bad ones. He discusses the four steps to becoming indistractable and staying on top of your goals. We also learn how to change our mindsets around self-limiting beliefs and pessimistic thoughts. Finally, Nir shares his expertise in creating effective habit-forming products and building an engaged community.

You have the power to become indistractable. Tune in if you want to know about how to create a distraction-free life!

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Discover the four steps you need to take to become indistractable.
Understand the true meaning of distractions and why we need to let go of limiting beliefs.
Learn how to make habit-forming products and services along with a strong community engagement.

Resources

Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!
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Listen to other Pushing the Limits episodes with Dr Elena Seranova:
- #183: Sirtuin and NAD Supplements for Longevity
- #189: Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity
Connect with Nir: Website I Twitter I LinkedIn
Books by Nir:
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
- Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
Steven Kotler and The Flow Collective
Mindset by Carol Dweck
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Peter Diamandis and his books

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Episode Highlights

[04:57] Nir’s Background

As a behavioural designer, Nir helps companies build products and services that encourage individuals to develop healthy habits.
The same strategy and technology addictive platforms like Facebook use can help people form good habits.
Nir has written Hooked to help people build good habits. Meanwhile, Indistractable teaches people how to break bad habits.
People often know what to do to create a better life but don't take action. As such, Nir believes that learning to be indistractable is the skill of the century.

[06:25] On ***Indistractable*: Understanding Distractions**

The opposite of distraction isn’t focus; it’s traction.
Traction is any action that will bring you closer to your goals and values.
Therefore, distraction is any action that will pull you away from your goals and values.
The most dangerous form of distraction is the one where we think we're being productive.
We often prioritise the urgent and easy work over the hard and important ones.

[10:40] Social Media and Addiction

There’s a widespread belief that social media will make you addicted. But in reality, this is learned helplessness.
When people believe that they’re addicted, they often don’t do anything about it.
There’s nothing wrong with social media. The problem is how we use it.
We are not powerless against technology.

[13:22] How to Gain Back Control

People don't accomplish a goal because they quit early and don't feel like doing the work.
We often blame our distractions on external forces. However, around 90% of these are due to internal triggers.
Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotions that we want to escape. We do this by distracting ourselves.
In reality, time management is about pain management.

[17:43] Letting Go of Limiting Beliefs

Nir warns against anchoring our autonomy on neurotransmitters. When we believe we have a specific nature, we limit our agency.
Before labelling yourself a certain way, do the work.
People find success when they act before they make excuses.
Believing in ego depletion is also harmful. Find out why in the full episode!

[24:49] The Indistractable Model: Steps One and Two

The first strategy to becoming indistractable is mastering your internal triggers through visualisation.
Don’t envision the outcome. Doing so can be harmful because it makes you feel like you’ve already done the work.
Visualise what you'll do when you're tempted to go off track.
The second step is to make time for traction. You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what you’re distracted from.
Having a to-do list can be harmful; plan daily schedules instead.

[27:44] The Indistractable Model: Steps Three and Four

The third step is to decrease external triggers.
Finally, prevent distractions with pacts or pre-commitments.

[30:40] What You Should Measure

We have a lot of self-limiting beliefs. You need to distinguish whether these are things you cannot do or just ones you don't want to do.
When doing something, the consistency of your actions contributes more to your success than the intensity.
Understand that accomplishing your goals takes time.
Instead of looking at your output, learn to measure your progress through your inputs, such as time and effort.

[37:57] Be Willing to Put in the Hard Work

There’s no magic pill for our problems and goals. Everything takes time and work.
Keep showing up and doing the hard work.
We now have access to so much information; you just need to get out there and learn.
Remember that if you’re looking for distraction, it will come.

[41:58] Adapting to Changes Around Us

All new things have consequences. The good thing is, we humans are highly adaptable.
In the same vein, you have the power to adapt and control how you consume ‘addictive’ social media. Not the other way around.
Nir believes that the world is getting better. However, good news does not get much media coverage.
Try to be more optimistic. Only then can you seek solutions to problems and not resign yourself to the situation.
You don't need to worry about everyone's problems. Your human capital is best directed toward issues where you can make the easiest and most significant impact.

[50:48] How to Make Habit-Forming Products

Use habit-forming products frequently and soon. It should be something that you use within a week or less.
First, tap into internal triggers and specify which uncomfortable emotion your product wants to solve.
Second, reduce friction. Make your product as easy as possible to use.
Third, create variable rewards. Uncertainty is what excites people and gets them hooked.
Finally, it helps to make people invest in the experience. Listen to the full episode to dive deeper into making habit-forming products!

[55:19] The 3 C’s of Engagement

Fostering engagement can be done through content, community, and conversation.
Curate content that will give value to others.
Empower people to help one another so you can create a strong-knit community.
Lastly, have conversations with people to share knowledge and wisdom.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

‘The opposite of distraction is not focus. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction. You'll notice that both traction and distraction end in the same six letters, a-c-t-i-o-n.’

‘Traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Things that you do with intent. Things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become.’

‘We have this model in our heads: traction, distraction, internal, external, right? Now we know that the four big parts of the Indistractable model. So now, we work our way around these four steps like the points on a compass.’

‘One of my life mantras is: “Consistency over intensity”. I think that's how we change.’

‘We want that instant relief. We want that instant solution. Look, the things that are worth having in life, they take time.’

‘What's going to lead us out of our problems is not running away from these problems, not throwing up our hands and giving up. But rather, engaging with these problems, right?’

‘[Habit-forming products] appreciate in value, meaning they get better and better the more we interact with them because of what I call stored value.’

About Nir

Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He helps companies create behaviours that benefit the users and educates people on building healthful habits in their lives.

Nir previously taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. He is the bestselling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. He also shares his insights with his newsletter at Nir and Far and has written for Psychology Today, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and the Harvard Business Review.

Nir is also an active investor in habit-forming technologies, such as Eventbrite, Kahoot!, and Anchor.fm.

Interested in learning more about Nir's work? You check out his website. You can also reach him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Enjoyed This Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so that they can learn what it takes to form good habits and become indistractable.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Download this Episode

How Sleep Affects Our Lives and Why It's Vital with Dr Kirk Parsley 0

Sep 2, 2021

We live in a fast-paced world, with more everyday demands. And we know that we need good health to keep up. Nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness are often hailed as important pillars. However, there is something even more fundamental for better health—sleep. Sleep ensures we can actually perform. With better sleep, we’ll be living better lives. But, how many of us actually prioritise sleep?

Dr Kirk Parsley joins us in this episode to explain how sleep affects our lives. Poor sleep can significantly change our bodies and performance. He also shares that we can achieve good sleep through lifestyle changes. A better life is not about taking more supplements or using gadgets and tools; it’s about creating new and better habits.

If you want to know more about the science of sleep and how sleep affects our lives, then this episode is for you.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Learn how sleep affects our lives and why it is so fundamental to our health.
Understand that it’s more important to change our behaviours and lifestyle rather than depending on supplements.
Discover the ways we can create the right conditions for better sleep.

Resources

Get Dr Kirk’s Sleep Remedy here!
Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!
A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!
Listen to my other Pushing the Limits episodes:
- Episode with Mark Divine
Connect with Dr Kirk: Website I LinkedIn I Instagram I Facebook I Email
You can also get the free downloadable resource on decreasing stress before sleep here.
The Unbeatable Mind Podcast with Mark Divine
- Dr. Kirk Parsley - How to Supercharge Your Sleep
- Dr. Kirk Parsley on Sleep And Longevity
Melatonin Supplementation with Dr John Lieurance in the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.
Melatonin: The Miracle Molecule by Dr John Lieurance
Dr Harch’s Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
America’s Frontline Doctors
How to save the world, in three easy steps. from Bret Weinstein’s DarkHorse Podcast

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Cardiovascular Health
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My ‘Fierce’ Sports Jewellery Collection

For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.

Episode Highlights

[03:28] How Dr Kirk Started Working on Sleep

Dr Kirk used to work for the SEALs. Later on, he enrolled in the military’s medical school.
After getting his degree, Dr Kirk became the manager of a sports medicine facility for the military. Here, he worked with other medical experts.
Those in the military will usually lie to healthcare providers so they won’t get excluded from work, but they tend to be more honest with Dr Kirk because they have worked with him before.
After testing for vitamin deficiencies and adrenal fatigue, Dr Kirk realised that many of his patients were taking Ambien, a sleeping drug.
After learning more about sleep, Dr Kirk realised that every symptom his patients were presenting could be explained by poor sleeping.

[17:31] Sleep’s Various Cycles

With a sleep drug, you are just unconscious and not sleeping.
Proper sleep needs to go through a repetitive pattern of deep sleep at the beginning of the night and then REM sleep by morning.
The different cycles are important since they affect our bodies in different ways.
Sleep can help boost your immunity and memory! Learn more benefits in the full episode.

[20:12] How Sleep Affects Our Lives

If you don’t give yourself time to recover, sleep pressure can accumulate and have progressively worse effects.
If you go to bed with high stress hormones, this can worsen your sleep. Poor sleep then leads to higher stress levels, and the cycle gets worse.
People who get poor sleep age faster, not just in appearance but also in their physiology.
Poor sleep can lead to protein structure breakdown, decreased blood supply, aged tissues, and more.
As we age, we also face the problem of not repairing as fast. This is how sleep affects our lives.

[23:56] The Foundation For Better Health

We are often taught the basics of health are sleep, nutrition, exercise, and stress management.
However, these pillars cannot function without sleep as their foundation, emphasising how sleep affects our lives.
For example, exercise becomes counterproductive when you’re sleep deprived because you’re not recovering.
Poor sleep can also change your insulin sensitivity and gut biome, which changes your nutrition levels. Because of how sleep affects our lives, it should be our priority.
Sleep deprivation is the fastest way to break someone down, this is why it’s used as an interrogation technique.

[28:35] How Do We Sleep?

We need eight hours of sleep a night.
Make your sleeping routine simple. The more complex it is, the more likely you will fail.
First, convince yourself that sleep is important.
We are all born to sleep, and we don’t need to learn how.
Before electricity, people used to fall asleep three hours after sunset. Tune in to the full episode to learn more about the neurochemical process of sleep.

[35:36] Creating the Right Conditions for Sleep

During sleep, our senses still work, but they don’t pay as much attention to external stimuli.
For our ancestors, the sunset will lead to decreased blue light, decreased temperature, decreased stimuli, and increased melatonin.
Better sleep is just creating these conditions in our environment.
If we take melatonin, we should be careful to take only small amounts.

[39:20] Melatonin Supplementation

Some have argued that melatonin supplementation does not downregulate our brain receptors, but there are no definitive studies on this yet.
In fact, measuring melatonin is difficult due to its quantity and concentration in each part of the brain.
It’s okay to take melatonin supplements but not in physiologic amounts.

[45:15] Can We Reverse Aging?

You need to understand your genetics and what ratios will work for you.
While good habits and supplements can improve your overall health, we don’t know if it undoubtedly reverses age.
Our bodies are more complex than we think. Shorting yourself two hours of sleep can change over 700 different epigenetic markers.
We can only describe biology. We don’t know how to manipulate it most of the time.
Dr Kirk also shares his experience with hyperbaric oxygen therapy in the full episode.

[1:03:36] Paradigm Shifts in the Medical Industry

There is a lot of dishonesty in both the media and the medical industry.
Many doctors and medical experts have been silenced on potentially better cures, especially during this pandemic.
Western medicine is effective in treating the sick, but it doesn’t keep people from getting severely sick in the first place.
A lifestyle change is more important than taking supplements.

[1:12:22] The Importance Of Behaviour Change

People often don’t want to work on their behaviour because taking medicine is easier.
We also need to be aware of how the food industry is tapping into our addictive mechanisms to keep us eating more.
Caffeine consumption can also ruin our sleep. More than 200 milligrams can give the opposite effect of staying awake and alert.
Learn exactly how sleep affects our lives, together with caffeine and sugar consumption, when you listen to the full episode.

[1:19:40] Widespread Impressions on Sleep and How It Affects Our Lives

People have grown to believe that sleep is for the weak and lazy.
This belief also impacts our children, especially since they are still developing.
Losing two hours of sleep can decrease testosterone and growth hormone by 30% and increase inflammation by 30%, among others.
Dr Kirk delved into researching how sleep affects kids after giving a lecture for American kids overseas to professionals in the school system.
Kids’ brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to simulate things, experiences a shift during adolescence.

[1:26:34] How Sleep Affects Our Lives as Kids

Dr Kirk delved into researching how sleep affects kids after giving a lecture for American kids overseas to professionals in the school system.
Kids’ brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to simulate things, is formed during adolescence.
Furthermore, adolescents also require more sleep because of a shift in their circadian rhythm.
Requiring kids to do more with less sleep interferes with their development.

[1:31:40] How Sleep Affects Our Lives When We are Sick

A new field in medicine called chronobiology is studying how sleep deprivation precedes any psychiatric disease or psychological flare-up.
An Ivy League hospital managed to get their patients off medication by regulating their circadian rhythm and chronobiology.

[1:34:34] It’s More Than Switching Things On and Off

Medications can be difficult to get off because they have too many side effects.
For example, most antidepressants are not just working on serotonin. Instead, they affect several neurotransmitters as well.
Physiological doses are artificial and can cause you more trouble.
Learn how sleep medication and affects GABA receptors that slow down the brain when you listen to the full episode.

[1:41:17] Dr Kirk’s Sleep Remedy

Dr Kirk discusses how cavemen took around three hours after the sun went down to fall asleep. In the present day, what can people do in those three hours?
To fall asleep, stress hormones need to come down due to lifestyle.
Dr Kirk’s Sleep Remedy involves getting the proper ratios of substances.
His product comes in the form of tea, stick pouches, and capsules.

[1:46:27] Dr Kirk’s Final Advice

Change your environment by decreasing blue light and stimulation.
Learn to slow everything down.
Just like how you slow everything down to get a kid to sleep, so should you do the same for an adult.

7 Powerful Quotes

‘You aren’t actually sleeping when you're on sleep drugs. You're just unconscious. Your brain is dissociated, but it's not sleep.’

‘Often, if you're sleep-deprived, more is worse for sure. You don't really need to do any exercises. You just stay active until you've recovered, and then you can exercise again.’

‘Insulin sensitivity is decreased by 30%, just by losing two hours of sleep. One night with two hours of sleep. So you go from sleeping eight hours of sleep to six. If you're pre-diabetic, you're waking up diabetic.’

‘Even though I'm known for sleep, the hardest thing for me to coach people to do is to sleep.’

‘The most sleep-deprived years are the most horrible years of the brain development.’

‘Get rid of the blue light. Decrease the stimulation. Lower your body temperature. That’s sleep hygiene.’

‘Part of lowering stress is just slowing down your thinking. You can't work on your computer until 9:59 and get in bed in 10 and think you're gonna be asleep.’

About Dr Kirk

Dr Kirk Parsley was a former Navy SEAL who went on to earn his medical degree from Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda in 2004. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an Undersea Medical Officer at the Naval Special Warfare Group One. He also served as the Naval Special Warfare’s expert on sleep medicine.

Dr Kirk has been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006 and consults for multiple corporations and professional athletes. He gives lectures worldwide on wellness, sleep, and hormonal optimisation. He believes that many diseases and disorders are unnecessary complications of poor sleeping habits. We can achieve the highest quality of life possible by changing this habit problem.

Interested in Dr Kirk’s work? Check out his website.

You can also reach him on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and email.

Enjoyed This Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn how sleep affects our lives and what we can do about it.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript of the Podcast

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Well, hey everyone! And welcome to Pushing The Limits. This week, I have another amazing guest for you. I managed to get some incredible people. I have Dr Kirk Parsley with me. He is an ex-Navy SEAL, and also a medical doctor. A little bit of an overachiever, this one. He spent many years in the SEALs, an incredible man. He also was involved with the first sports medicine rehabilitation centre that was working with the SEALs, an incredible expert on sleep. And that's what we do a deep dive into today. We also talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We also go into areas about the current state of the medical system, one of my favourite topics. And I hope you enjoy this episode. It’s really, the most important thing is around sleep.

Sleep is something that all of us, I think, are underestimating its importance. And that this is the biggest lever, not food, not exercise, not meditation, not mindfulness, not anything else. Number one of all leverage points is sleep. So how the heck do you get enough sleep? What is enough sleep, and how to get it is what this episode is about.

Before we head over, I just want to remind you we have Boost Camp coming up. This is our eight-week live online program. There, Neil Wagstaff and I, my business partner and longtime friend and coach are doing. And we're going to, if you want to come and hang out with us live every week and learn everything about upgrading your life, basically, your performance, how to optimise all areas of your life, then we would love you to check the information out, head over to peakwellnessco.nz/boostcamp.

On that point, if you're also interested, come and check out our flagship program, which is our epigenetics program, where we look at your genetics, and how to optimise those specifically, all the areas of your life: your food, your nutrition, your exercise, your mood, and behaviour, your hormones, all these important areas, specifically to your genetics. One-on-one time with us and help us to understand everything about your genetics. It's an incredible platform and amazing AI technology behind us. And we'd love you to check that out.

Go to peakwellnessco.nz/epigenetics. Or reach out to me if you didn't get that. We will also have the links down in the show notes, if you want to just click over to that. Or you can just head over to my website, www.lisatamati.com. And hit the work with us button for our programs listed on there as well. So without further ado, now over to Dr Kirk Parsley.

Well, hi, everybody! And welcome to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have a superstar, who is a good friend of Commander Mark Divine, you may have heard previous weeks on my podcast. We have Dr Kirk Parsley with us today. Welcome to the show.

Dr Kirk Parsley: Thank you. I feel very welcome and happy to be here. I'm still here. I’m happy to be sharing this airspace with you or whatever it is sharing.

Lisa: I’m really super excited. I've heard you a number of times on Mark’s show and just thought how hefty you're on because you're such an expert. We're gonna dive into a little bit into your background, but you're an absolute sleep expert. So I'm really keen to help my audience with their sleep, and their sleep patterns, and all of that good stuff. But before we get into that, we were just chatting about genetics and endurance. So, give us a little background. You've been a Navy SEAL. You've been in the military, in the naval military. So give us a bit of background on yourself, personally.

Dr Kirk: Yes. So ironically, I actually dropped out of high school. I was a terrible student my whole life, didn't have any interest in school. And after you don't do well for long enough, you just convince yourself that you can't do well. And so you're just, ‘I'm just done. I can’t do it’. I was always very physical, very athletic. Just fortunately, genetic lottery, I won, just be an athletic and strong guy. And it came pretty easy to me. But I worked hard at it because I didn't do school work. So when I dropped out of high school, to join the military and do the hardest training in the world. And that was what the SEAL training was supposed to be, as the toughest training in the world like, ‘Well, I'm gonna go do that.’ So I went to do that.

This was a way long time ago. This is 1988. So, it was long before anybody knew what SEALs were. They didn't have the notoriety they have now for sure. And when I would come home from the Navy and tell people as I was a Sealer, like, ‘What do you mean, you work for SeaWorld or something? What do you do?’ Kinda. So, I went through SEAL training, I would say I made it through SEAL training, I became a SEAL. That was pre-9/11, obviously. So we didn't have the combat that the SEALs of this generation do. So it's not really comparable. We were still mainly working in Southeast Asia doing police work and training other militaries.

I did three deployments. It was really the same thing over, and over, and over again because there was no combat. So you just did the same training, and then you deployed, and then came home, and you did the same training. And of course, I was like, ‘Maybe, I'll go do something else.’ And I thought I would be—I was dating a woman who would become my wife. She was getting a master's in physical therapy. And I was reading her textbooks on deployment to make myself a better athlete. And I thought, maybe I could be a physical therapist. And so I started working, I started volunteering in a physical therapy facility in San Diego, called San Diego Sports Medicine Center. And it had every kind of health care provider you could possibly imagine. And this building, it’s just this healthcare Mecca. It’s the most holistic thing I've ever seen to this day.

I decided pretty quickly, I didn't want to be a physical therapist, but I don’t know what else I wanted to do. But I got to follow the podiatrist around, and acupuncturist, and massage therapists, and athletic trainers, and conditioning coaches, and the orthopedist, and the family practice, and the sportsmen. I just got to follow them around and see how everybody worked. And a group of young doctors there, who were probably only five or six years older than me, and they were saying, ‘Well, you should go to medical school.’ And I was like, ‘Pump the brakes, kiddo. I didn't even graduate high school. I'm not getting into medical school.’ And then the senior doctor overhears the conversation. He comes out of the office. And he says, ‘Kirk, the question isn't, “Can you get in?” The question is, “Would you go if you've got in?”’ And I said, ‘Of course, I’d go.’ So, well, there you have it. So, he sort of shamed me into it/

I studied hard and got really good grades. And then when it came time to apply for medical school, this was pre-Internet, so you had to go to the bookstore and get your book review and look and see what schools are competitive for. And when I was going through one of those books, I found out that the military had their medical school. The military was a closed chapter in my mind. I'd done that. That’s something that I figured I'd always do in my life. But it was never meant to be my whole life. And so I had done that. I was, I figured I was done. But I was already married and had kids. And I was like, ‘Well, the military will pay me to go to medical school. Or I can pay someone else to go to medical school and my wife can work while we're in medical school.’

I made enough to support my family and go to medical school for free. And then to pay off in the military’s, they'll train you to do anything. You have to give them years of service and your job. So once you finish your medical training, you have to be a doctor for the military for eight years. And so I figured, ‘I'll get back to the SEAL teams, I'll go pay something back to the community that helped me, was hugely formidable in who I became in my life.’ And went back to the SEAL teams, really well-prepped to do sports medicine and orthopedics. And I knew quite a bit about nutrition, and performance, and strength and conditioning. I was pretty sure I had the exact pedigree.

When I got there, they had just gotten the money to build a sports medicine facility, which was actually their vision was exactly what I told you that I worked in in college. That's exactly what they wanted to build. I'm like, ‘I got this.’ So they put me in charge of building this out. And I was a significant part of us hiring everyone we hired. So we hired our first strength and conditioning coach, our first nutritionist, our first PT, our first everything.

We built our own sports medicine facility. And then orthopedics was coming through every week, and they had to do rounds there. And we'd have pain rounds, pain management rounds come through. We had an acupuncturist coming through. And we hired all these people from the Olympic Training Center, and professional sports teams, and the best colleges. And so, we had all these brilliant people who knew way more than I did about what they do.

Lisa: So you went from there to there.

Dr Kirk: Yeah. And so at that point, I was the dumbest person around, right? Because we had all these experts in every little niche that I knew this much about. We hired experts who knew that much about. And so in the military, when you're the dumbest guy, they put you in charge, right and say, ‘Well, you manage this,’ right? And so, I’m managing all these people who know more than I do, however that works. But my office was in this facility that we built.

The SEALs are a lot like professional athletes in that you put them on a bench, so to speak, right? Because they're injured, they need some help. So they can't work. It's the worst thing. Worst thing. So when they see a health care provider, they just lie because they don't want to be—

Lisa: They don’t wanna be taken out.

Dr Kirk Parsley: They will take money out of their pocket, and go into the city, and find a doctor to treat them so that the doctor at work doesn't know, so they don't get put on the sideline. But because I was a SEAL, and there were still a lot of SEALs at the SEAL team. It was close enough to my time. There are still a lot of SEALs at the team who I worked with, and I trained with, and deployed with. And so they knew me. And I had a good reputation. And so they trusted me, and they come in my office and they say, ‘Let me tell you what's going on with me.’

They reported this litany of symptoms that didn't have any pattern that I could recognise. And so they were saying that their motivation was low, that they're very moody, that they couldn't concentrate. They're super forgetful. Their energy was low. Their body composition was shifting. They felt slower, and dumber, and colder. None of them were sleeping very well. They're all taking sleep drugs. They had low sex drive. They had a lot of joint pain, a lot of inflammation. And I didn't have the slightest idea. I’m like, ‘And I know it sounds like you're obese and 65. But I’m looking at you and you’re not. So I don't know what's going on.’

I just started testing everything I could possibly test. I tested literally 98 blood markers. They were giving 17 vials of blood. Now just shotgun approaches, test everything, and see what's abnormal. And I started seeing some patterns. And they had really low anabolic hormones, so the DBTA, and testosterone, and dihydrotestosterone, pregnenolone. All of that was low. They really have high inflammatory markers. They really had poor insulin sensitivity for how healthy I knew they were, and how well they ate, and how much they exercised. But it's still within the normal range. But it wasn't. Everything was in the normal range. But everything that should be really high was just like barely in the normal range. And everything that should be really low, it's just barely inside of that range.

They didn't have a disease. And I was a medical doctor, so I had learned how to treat disease, then they didn't have disease. So I was like, ‘I don’t know. What am I going to do?’ So that led me to having to train with outside providers. And fortunately, at that time, the SEALs did have the reputation. They'd already done all these amazing things. This was in 2009. So, I think they'd already shot Bin Laden and at that point. So I could call anybody, right? I'd watch somebody’s TED Talk, read their book, I'd see them lecture. And I’ll just call them and say, ‘I’m a doctor for the West Coast SEAL team. Could I come train with you? Can I consult with you? Can I ask you some questions?’ And everybody was generous and said, ‘Absolutely’. So I get to learn a lot really quickly.

I take a lot of leave from work and just go sit in these guys’ clinics for four or five days. And just pick their brain, go see patients with them, and take notes, and learn. And then I just call them every time I have a question. And I just got to learn really quickly. It’s like this team of experts who knew everything about the alternative world.

I was trying to treat people for adrenal fatigue. And I was trying to treat people for vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which are obvious from what was going on. And I couldn't quite figure out what it was. And about 100 patients into it, and probably after 30 guys came in, I could have told everybody, they could just sit down. I'll tell you what you're going to tell me. I could have just just route it off; it's so similar. And about 100 guys into it, embarrassing that it took so long, but I remember this guy telling me that he took Ambien every night. What do you guys call it? Stilnox, I think, right?

I was married to an Aussie, so I know a lot. I mean, I know you're not an Aussie, but I know a little bit about your world, as in your language. And I remember putting a note in the margin, ‘Seems like a lot of guys take an Ambien.’ Then I go back through everybody's records, 100% of the guys who had been in my office were taking Ambien. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe that's an issue, right?’ So, let me go look at the side effects of Ambien. And it was a fairly new drug. And the pharmaceutical industry, they get to cherry-pick their data. So they were like, ‘Oh, it's the safest drug ever. There's nothing, no problems.’ And I'm like, ‘I don’t quite believe that.’

Unfortunately, like every other doctor in America, I didn't know anything about sleep. I never had a single class on sleep in medical school, didn't have the foggiest idea what should be happening. I knew what you called a mechanism of action on this drug, which means molecularly what does it do. Well, it binds GABA receptors and has an effect called GABA analog, and benzodiazepines are the same, things like Valium. And so that's about as much as I knew, Well, what is GABA doing? What is GABA supposed to do? And then you can't really understand that without understanding what's actually going on in sleep.

Then, I had to learn about sleep physiology. And what's supposed to happen during sleep? And what are the normal shifts and changes? And what does that do? And if that doesn't happen, what effects do you get? So after studying quite a bit, I figured out the general Occam's razor principle of the thing with the least assumptions is, literally, every single symptom that these men told me about, could be explained by poor sleep.

Now, I didn't think that it would be, right? I wasn't naive, but it could have, then, right? So if this was definitely the most powerful thing, because being a Western doctor I wanted to give them Cortef and raise their cortisol. I wanted to give them testosterone and raise their testosterone. I wanted to get like, I wanted to give them medication to improve their insulin sensitivity. I wanted to just go in there and do it. But I couldn't do that, right? Because you can't give SEALs medication that they're dependent upon. Because then, what if they go out on the field, and they don't have their medication, they can't do their job and it’s a waste. So that puts people on the bench, that disqualifies people. So I couldn't do that.

I had to figure out, well, what else can I do? So like I said, sleep seemed like the unifying theory. So let me see about that. And this was right around the time that everybody was catching on to the important vitamin B3. And that was associated with poor sleep. So, I tested all my guys. Every one of them had low vitamin B3. So I'm like, ‘Yeah, I'm going to give them vitamin B3. I'm going to be a hero. Everyone is gonna love me. I'm the best doctor ever.’ And it helped a little bit. But it wasn't everything.

Like I said, I had this epiphany with this sleep drug. And once I learned enough about the sleep drug, you aren't actually sleeping when you're on sleep drugs. You're just unconscious. Your brain is dissociated, but it's not sleep. Because sleep has to have, as one of its criteria, you have to have this predictable sleep architecture. You have to be going through these sleep cycles that take you through these different stages. And a particular pattern is repetitive, and it's primarily deep sleep in the beginning of the night, and almost exclusively REM sleep by morning, and you have to do that transition.

If you don't do that, then it's not sleep. It can be partially sleep, if you're just getting poor sleep. But I was having these guys do sleep studies. And they were coming back with 99.9% of their sleep study being stage 2 sleep, which is just the transition. It’s what we call a transitional sleep phase. So it's not deep sleep or REM. So they weren't really getting any of the benefits of sleep. And of course, that's an oversimplification. They're obviously getting something, or they'd be dead. But we don't know what they're getting.

That’s all we know is that healthy sleep does this, and when you go through these cycles, we know these things happen. Like when you're in deep sleep, we know that's when you're the most anabolic, and you're secreting your anabolic hormones like growth hormone, and testosterone, and DHEA is being ramped up, your immune system’s being ramped up. We know this happens. And then we know in REM sleep, what's going on in the brain: the physiological changes, forming more durable neural tracks, that neurological memories, shifting things from working memory into long term memory, pruning off useless information, these little buttons that grow on the side of your nerves that are starting to bud new information. You're like, ‘I don't need that.’ You clean up all that. You get rid of weak products and you get the brain working better.

The whole purpose of going to sleep tonight is to prepare myself for tomorrow, right? Whatever I do today, that's what my brain and body are gonna think it needs to do tomorrow. It's gonna use today as a template to try to make me better tomorrow at doing what I did today. And if I don't get enough sleep, if I don't get to restore, I still have to do tomorrow. And how do I do that? Well, I do it the same way you do anything. I’m stressed out. I use Marinol and a bunch of cortisol and DHEA. And I start robbing all my nutrients for my cells. My blood glucose is going up, I'm getting fuel sources that way, epinephrine and norepinephrine stimulate my brain and my tissues to be able to get energy where there’s really no energy there. And then I'm going to bed with these really high stress hormones, which are supposed to be low when I sleep, and then I'm trying to sleep with high stress hormones. Then, I get worse sleep. Then, I need more stress hormones tomorrow. And that's what breaks people.

In fact, when you see somebody who doesn't sleep well for even six months, they look so much older. ‘Why does he look old? That doesn't make sense. Is it just because they're tired? Is it tired old?’ But if you think about it, you're born into this contract. You're born into this contract; you can't get around. It's just like you're born knowing you're going to die, 100% certain you're going to die. There's also this other contract that certainly is your body ideally worked for about 16 hours, and it needs eight hours to recover. That's the way it works. That's what you're born into. There's small variations there. But obviously, you can't get around that.

If you don't get those 8 hours, you didn't recover from those 16 hours. And so if you think about it logically, obviously, when you're a kid, you need more sleep. So it's not a great example, when you're really young. Kids actually sleep a lot more than eight hours by and large, but you see them actually getting better every day, right? They're growing. They're getting smarter. They're getting more coordinated. You can see that every day. But if you think about, say, like, once you hit 25, and your brain’s fully formed, and everything's static. If you could recover 100% every night, and wake up the next morning as good as you were that other morning, you wouldn't age, right? There would be no aging because you would have recovered 100%.

Lisa: It’s very important, yep.

Dr Kirk: Everything that you're deficient in, if you're missing 10%, you're going to age that 10%. And if you're missing a little more, you're going to age faster. So when you see people who haven't been sleeping well for a year, they are literally older because they've been recovering less and less every night. So yeah, there's a breakdown in their protein structure. There's decrease in their blood supply, their peripheral vascularisation. Their tissues are aging. There’s a buildup of waste products that aren't getting out, and that's toxic. And that’s damaging the mitochondria and forming more senescent cells, and all these other things, they're building up. And every marker that we have, even genetic marker, when you look at your children and linked methylation on the genes. Every marker, they look older. And then when you look at them, they look older. That’s why.

That's really what aging is. It's really just the absence of being able to recover 100% every night. And as we get older, we just don't repair as fast. And that's, unfortunately, when most people quit sleeping as much. And now that's double whammy there. You're getting twice the aging effects that way. And there's no reason to sleep less when you’re old. It’s typical, but it's not something you have to do. I've had 84-year-old women who haven't slept more than 4 or 5 hours in 20 years, and I get them to sleep eight hours a night.

Lisa: I've got one over there who's rustling around, walking around behind me. She’s 80 years old, nearly. Hey, mum. And she's struggling with sleep in the early morning hours. And therefore, you know her memory and things. So I want to pick your brain on that. Can I just slow you down a little bit because we just covered a ton of ground here.

Dr Kirk: You just asked me about myself, and I just couldn't stop.

Lisa: No, but you were on an absolute roll. So I didn't want to interrupt you because there was so many things, but my brain’s just going like, ‘There's so many questions!’

Dr Kirk: That was just meant to be an overview.

Lisa: That was an overview. Now can we dive deeper into some of the weeds because now I understand why you've become, classically, the sleep expert because obviously that was the biggest leverage. In other words, this is the biggest leverage point that you see. When we think of the SEALs, we think of the SEALs as being these gods of amazingness that can do everything. But what you're saying is like these guys are pushing their limits: endurance, and in fatigue, and all things like that. And so they're going to be the Canaries in the Gold Mines in a way because they're going to be coming up against the limits of everything.

For you to say, as an ultra marathon, so I’ve come up against the limits in certain ways, like with sleep deprivation. And I sort of understand some of the things now that you were talking about. So you've ended up finding out that this is probably the biggest leverage point in anybody's life, basically, for their health is their sleep. So people, take a bit of a grip on that one. It's not necessarily the food or nutrition, it's the sleep. Would you agree?

Dr Kirk: When I first started lecturing, I used to say there were four pillars of health: sleep, nutrition, exercise. And then the fourth pillar is audience dependent. It could be mindfulness, stress medication, it could be community, whatever it is that controls your stress hormones, and your emotions, and your mood, and all that stuff. Then after a while, I shift to there's three pillars sitting on the foundation of sleep. Because if you take the sleep away, none of those are going to work. There’s nothing you can do. In fact, if you exercise when you're sleep deprived, it's counterproductive because you're not recovering. And we all know that you don't actually get better when you exercise. You damage yourself when you exercise.

Then when you sleep, you recover, and you come back stronger. When you deprive yourself of sleep, you change your entire gut biome, you change your insulin sensitivity. You change everything here. And now your nutritional status doesn't work anymore. And when you don't sleep well, as I said, you increase your stress hormones. So you can do the mindfulness training and all of that stuff, meditate and all that, but you're just going to bring yourself down maybe to where you would have been if you just slept well and didn't do any kind of training.

It's really the foundation for everything. And I say that all the time. It sounds hyperbolic, but I'm 100% convinced it’s true. There's nothing that you can do that will, nothing that will break you faster than poor sleep, and poor and insufficient sleep. There's a reason we use it as an interrogation technique.

Lisa: Exactly. Yeah.

Dr Kirk: There's a reason we break people down, intentionally, this way because it depletes all your resources. It interferes with your brain function, your willpower, your problem solving, your speech, your ability to formulate plans, your motivation, your mood. Everything goes almost instantaneously with one night of lack of asleep. Never mind keeping somebody up for three or four days in a row. They're just a mess. They’re just in input mode. They just want you to just, ‘Tell me whatever I have to do. I’d do it. Then I'll sleep. Anything I can do to get sleep, I'll do it.’ You don't have to rip people's fingernails out of stuff. You just deprive them from sleep.

Conversely, there's nothing that will improve the quality of your life and your performance faster than sleeping. Well, if you're an inadequate sleeper, which most people are. They don't even know they are. Everybody has these 30-day challenges and 60-day challenges. I'm like, ‘I only need seven days.’ Again, one week where sleep is your number one priority. And you do everything right, and you get eight hours of sleep, at least eight and a half hours in bed every night, and you're sleeping approximately eight hours a night. And give me that for a week. And then, if you're not convinced this the most powerful thing, go back to wherever you're going. But nobody's ever gone back.

Lisa: A lot of us, I can hear people saying, ‘Yeah, but I go to bed, and I can't sleep. And I wake up at 2 am. And my brain is racing and I've been told to do some meditation. And maybe it's my cortisol.’ Let's look now because if we haven't got the message across now that sleep is the number one thing that you should be prioritising about everything that you do, we haven't done very well for the last half an hour.

How do we sleep? What foods do we need to eat before we go to bed or not eat? What supplements can we take? You've got your sleep remedy that we'll get into a little bit. What routine can I do to optimise? What light-dark cycles? All of these things that can be leveraged points for us in optimising our sleep. And how do we test that we're actually in that deep-sleep phase? What are one of the best tools that you've found to work that out? So that was a mouthful, but yeah.

Dr Kirk: So the first thing we need to do is get away from that phonetic question right there, which is what everybody's going through in their heads up like, ‘What about this? What about that?’ And so my job is to make this really simple. Because simple things we can do, and the more nuanced your plan is around sleep, the more likely it is to fail. And we're doing big, macro movements here. So the very first thing is, what you said, I think we've already covered. The very first thing is to convince yourself that sleep is the most important thing. And to make it your priority for at least one week to get everything going.

Now, when I say your priority, I mean the true meaning of that word. There's only one thing there's nothing else, that’s the one, including raising your kids, and your dog, and your exercise routine, and everything else. The most important thing is to sleep. The most important thing for winning. If you aren't quite convinced yet go to PubMed, or go to Google Scholar, or something like this, then put in sleep and anything else you care about: being a parent, mood, dating, sex drive, athleticism, strength, endurance, concentration, memory, I don't care. Whatever it is you care about—strength and this, strength and business, strength and I don't care. Anything you want.

Read to your heart's content. It will convince you that the one good thing about sleep, in the sleep sciences, it’s not actually controversial. There's no one out there saying, ‘Oh, you don't really need to sleep.’ Everybody agrees. There's nuances and people are different. Everybody agrees you need about eight hours of sleep a night. And just convince yourself that is the most important thing. Once you're there, that's the most important thing.

After that, recognise, ‘Okay. I'm going to make this my number one priority.’ Recognise that you're born to sleep. You don't need to learn; you need to unlearn some stuff, right? You're designed to do this. And this should feel good. You should enjoy sleeping. You should usually look forward to going to bed and waking up in the morning, like, ‘Man, I feel so much better. I'm ready to go do my day.’ This should be as easy as selling sex but it's not. People resist this forever. I have no idea why. It's great. Why don't you like sleep? I’ve always liked sleep. So then you just think, ‘Okay, when did sleep go bad for humankind?’ Probably in the last seventy years.

Lisa: Yeah, when we got electric light.

Dr Kirk: That's about it, right? It's only been, really since rural electrification, right? Since they got electricity out to everybody. That's really when it started. When you look back in America just 100 years ago, look at people's journals in the winter, they spent like 14 hours a day in bed. That’s a certain thing they do. So if you think about it, and just say, ‘I know this is simple. I'm going to let myself fall into it.’ And then I'll tell you, there's all the sleep hygiene. You can get on the Internet, and you can find, ‘Oh, do this. Drink a hot cup of tea. Drink milk. Do this. Make your room really cold. Make your room really dark. Make your bed really soft. Make your bed really hard. And get a white noise machine. Get rid of all the EMF.’ A million people are going to tell you all sorts of different things to do. And I'll cut through all the BS, and then you can pick and choose.

The real answer is all of that stuff works, to some extent. All of that's important to some extent. The way I work with clients is at least 95% of all the successes is from lifestyle. And then all these little gadgets, and your mitigation tools, and supplements, and all this stuff back, that’s the other 5. It’s 95% behavioural. So you just look back, how did we evolve to sleep? Nobody teaches people how to sleep, right? You're born as a baby; you sleep. So how did we sleep as adults in cultures 100 years ago? Well, when the sun went down, we fell asleep about three hours later, and we woke up around the time the sun came up. It was pretty much that easy.

Okay, so let's reverse engineer that a little bit. I think most people know that blue light is a stimulus for being awake. We don't truly have a sleeping program. If you think of it like software, we don't have any sleeping software. We just have lack of awakening software. So we have things that go on in our brain and body that make us still awake and make us interact with our environment. And then when you take those things away, we're in what we call sleep.

The blue light, actually, has nothing to do with the vision. There's nerve cells in the back of your eyes. It senses blue light. That's all they do. And then they fire pathways back to the circadian pathway membrane, essentially. And then the pineal gland secretes melatonin. The melatonin is a hormone, the starter pistol. It initiates all these cascades. And then one of the cascades that it initiates is the production of this peptide called GABA, capital G-A-B-A, gamma-Aminobutyric acid. And what that does is it slows down the neocortex.

When you think of the human brain, the picture of the human brain, we all have that big, wrinkly, massive crescent shape. That's what we call the neocortex. And that is how we interact with the world, right? All of our senses get processed in that, and then all of our movement is processed from that, right? So when we're asleep, all that's really different with our sleep, about in a general sense, right? There's nuances in every neuron and every molecule. And then, in the neural sense, there's a barrier between us and our environment is how it's phrased. What it means is we aren't paying attention to our environment anymore. Our eyes obviously still work, right? You can turn the light and you can wake somebody up. Our ears still work, you can make your noise and wake somebody up. Our sense of touch still works. You can shake somebody. They can roll into something sharp, and their pain receptors will wake them up. Heat will wake them up. Cold will wake them. So we still work. Everything still works. We start processing it. We’re not paying attention to it.

What helps us do that is GABA. So GABA involves neurons. A neuron has what’s called a resting potential. So there's like an electrical current in here. And when you put in enough electrical current, it goes like this. And that neuron fires. And then, does whatever it does and forms pathways. Well, GABA lowers that. Now, it takes more energy to make that thing fire. And you can overcome this by just putting a lot of energy into the cells. So if you've ever been exhausted, woken up exhausted, didn't get enough sleep for whatever reason. Like, ‘I'm going to go to work. I’m gonna come home. I’m going straight to bed. I'm gonna sleep 12 hours a day.’ And then your friends talk you into going out or you get a cup of a drink. You stay up ‘til midnight, ‘I feel fine.’ And then you suffer again the next day, right? Because you just overcame that.

You can actually read about this because this still exists, believe it or not, they're still I think 35 or 45 pretty large communities around the globe that have never experienced electricity. And they just lived like hunters and gatherers. They go out. And the men go out and hunt. And the women pick, and nurture their kids, and weave. And just when you think of your caveman doing, they still live like that today. And we study these people. And we did actigraphy. So it's not true sleep, say. It's just movement to know when they're likely to be asleep. And what we find is, the sun goes down. Again, the blue light goes out of their eyes. It fires, the brain starts secreting melatonin that leads to a cascade of 365 billion other chemical changes in the brain, right? But that initiation has to happen. Once that initiation is going, one of the things it does is secrete GABA, increase GABA production in lots of regions of the brain that starts slowing the brain down.

The sun goes down. They don't have electricity, right? The best they have is a fire. So what else happens? Their body temperature goes down. So when the sun goes down and it is dark, we can't see well at night, we can't see very far. So there's way less stimulus, right? They don't have flashing lights. They don't have loud music. So there's not much to stimulate them. So they sit around a fire. Maybe if they're lucky, if not, they just stare around the dark, and they have some quiet, calm conversations, and then they drift off to sleep.

That's all sleep hygiene is. That's it. Those three things: decrease the blue light, decrease the stimulation to your brain, and drop your body temperature. You need a cool place to sleep. One of the things that you can do to speed these things up is to concentrate the right nutrients in your brain. If you are going to take melatonin and just take a very, very, very, very small amount. You just want to initiate. You don't want to put so much melatonin in your brain that your brain doesn't need to make melatonin because then you start running insensitivity to melatonin, and now when you take it away, you don't have, you're essentially melatonin deficient because you've downregulated the receptors, and your brain is not sensitive to melatonin anymore.

Lisa: Can I just stop in the first, one second. Dr John Lieurance is his name and he was on the Ben Greenfield podcast, and he's written a book about melatonin. And he argued that melatonin, interesting work, doesn't downregulate when you take melatonin, and doesn't cause that downregulation. All the other hormones do. If we take testosterone, we're going to downregulate our own testosterone, if we take right whatever. He said that they didn't. And he was advocating in his book for actually, super-physiological doses of melatonin. Certainly when you're doing things like jetlag, or whatever you're trying to reset, but also for a raft of other ailments to help with many diseases. Have you heard of his work or?

Dr Kirk: I’m familiar with him and his work.

Lisa: Yeah. What's your take on that? Because I was like, ‘I don’t know.’

Dr Kirk: So, I disagree, obviously.

Lisa: Yeah. That’s what I want to know.

Dr Kirk: But specifically, so what he's talking about, 90% of his work is about the antioxidant.

Lisa: Yes. Is it an antioxidant? Yep.

Dr Kirk: The studies that he's quoting are saying that melatonin doesn't downregulate. We don't know for sure. It's like, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. The only way we would know is if we could actually drop a catheter into somebody's brain and sample their fluid in their brain 24 hours a day and study this over months. And so we can't say for sure. We can do animal models. Again, it's hard to quantify because from the time the sun goes down, which is about three hours before you'll fall asleep, to the entire time you slept, until the sun comes up, you're looking at somewhere between 11 and 12 hours. That entire time your brain will only produce five to six micrograms of melatonin.

Lisa: Tiny amount.

Dr Kirk: So how do we study, right? It's really hard to study, and you think of it in a mouse model, how much smaller the quantities are we're looking at that point. And the concentration of melatonin in each region of the brain is not the same, it depends on some cells in the brain can actually be stimulated by melatonin. It's somewhere. It’s different. And same with GABA. GABA doesn't go to every region of the brain because it can stimulate regions of the brain. But what we do know, so first, I always go with, we don’t know anything. We have research that makes us believe certain things are likely to be true based on the best science we have right now. So we don't know anything. And I believe that to be true about everything in science. Just wait a week, it might change. But what we do know is that every other hormone does this.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Kirk: But if it doesn't do this, it's the only hormone in the body that doesn't. Pretty unlikely. But what we do know with 100% certainty is that it does downregulate melatonin receptors.

Lisa: Right.

Dr Kirk: It can take away melatonin receptors. If I normally have 10 melatonin receptors, and I go down to just having one, now even if I'm sprayed with melatonin, I only have one. And I have to have this supersaturation for this one receptor to do all this work. And if I go down to normal physiologic levels of melatonin and this one receptor, there's just getting an occasional melatonin coming by, I'm going to be, it's no different. It doesn't matter whether I'm not producing enough, or I don't have enough receptors, it's the same end result. You have to have melatonin binders stuffing pulled into the cell to have it function.

Lisa: So can I ask one question there like, so for elderly, who, from what I understand, in my basic research on melatonin, is that their melatonin production goes down with age, and, therefore, they could benefit from melatonin supplementation. Is that a thing or?

Dr Kirk: Yeah, I agree. And so what happens is that the pineal gland calcifies just like our arteries. And every vessel, everything in our body calcifies, right. That's sort of aging.

Lisa: One of the majors.

Dr Kirk: And so it calcifies, and you do almost certainly secrete less melatonin, right? And again, the only way we would know is to drop a catheter into somebody's brain. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't take melatonin at all. I'm just saying you shouldn't take super physiologic. So his example of when you're speaking about the melatonin work earlier, right? His example is, well, this is a great antioxidant. Now, if I do these super physiologic amounts, there's all these benefits to it. Well, if I give you 10 times the amount of testosterone that your body ordinarily has, you're gonna feel fantastic. If I give you something that secretes a bunch of epinephrine and norepinephrine, like cocaine. And you have this huge rush of norepinephrine; you feel fantastic. And you're super productive, and your brain’s really sharp. Does that make that a good idea? I don't think so. I don't deal with anything super physiologic.

Again, I'm the behaviourist, and 95% of all your health is going to come from re-approximating the way you revolt. This body takes hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to this planet. And now we're just like, ‘No, we're smarter. Like I’m a 35-year-old biohacker. I read a bunch of books. I know I can do it better than–” We know nothing about the body.

Lisa: Can we all mean for people–we also know that people tend to die. If we wanted to extend our healthspan and their lifespan, but healthspan mainly, can we, with hormone replacement therapy, there's a raging argument: should you be on hormone replacement therapy, should you not? If you’re wanting to optimise. Now, there's downsides. And you need to understand your genetics, and you need to understand all of those aspects.

There is benefits for us to taking testosterone or DHEA or all these things in the right physiological doses of, say, a 30-year-old, like, I'm 50 or 52, I want to be at the level that I was, say at 30–35. I understand my genetics, I know where my risk factors are. I can keep an eye on all of that sort of stuff. Can I all meet that so that I live and function longer? Because I think the core question here is how do we optimise? Yes, we've developed like cavemen but then they die at 70–80, as well. Can we extend that with the knowledge that we currently have?

Dr Kirk: Well, so I don't ever promise anybody that I can make them live longer. I say, ‘You might live longer from this.’ If you think about it, think about it this way: at first, we talk about what sleep does, right? And if we could catch up every night, we wouldn't age. So what are we doing when we're doing things like hormone-replacement therapy? We're doing metabolomics. And we're doing all sorts of supplementation around that, or we're doing artificial things like hyperbaric, and near-far IR sauna, and ice baths, and doing all these steps to stimulate the production of the thing.

Of course, now we have antibiotics, and we have all sorts of treatments to keep people from dying as young from certain diseases. So certainly, we should be able to either, probably add years to your life. But if not, definitely we can add life to your years, right? If you're going to die at 80 either way, one version of this, you could die hiking Mount Kilimanjaro, another one you're dying in a little chair in a nursing home. So I don't know.

The question is, even with the longevity work that people are doing, really smart guys like Sinclair and all these guys are doing all these things, and they're doing all these things with clearing senescent cells, we're doing all these things with peptides. And now I give my patients peptides for certain things. I don't know nearly as much about the longevity stuff as I’d like to. And we and we're reversing aging genetically, right? We're going in there and saying, ‘Actually, over the course of a year, with a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of tries, a lot of modalities, really focusing on your lifestyle and doing everything. Ideally, we can actually, probably, reverse your genetic age a little bit.’ Are we actually reversing age? I don't know, we made your telomeres longer. The increased the methylation on your genes, and those are markers for age, does that reverse it? We don't really know, right?

Lisa: We haven’t been around long enough to work it out.

Dr Kirk: Right. It's like with omega-3s. If your omega-3s are this, then we know that certain things go this way. Well, but if we supplement your omega-3s, is that the same as you having that nutritionally. Or vitamin B3? Is that the same? We don't know. We're thinking that it probably is. And we're thinking if we're reversing the markers we know for genetic aging that's making you genetically younger. But maybe there's some totally different information in there on aging that we don't know anything about yet. That's possible, too.

I think from what I know about you, you probably agree with me. I think epigenetics is more important than genetics, anyway. You have certain genetics and you change half a dozen things about your day, and your epigenetics are totally different. If you short yourself 2 hours of sleep, you change 735 different epigenetic markers from just 2 hours. All your pro-inflammatory ones are the ones turning on, and all of your anabolic ones are the ones turning off. And again–

Lisa: That's still the biggest leverage point, isn't it?

Dr Kirk: It’s still a crazy complex to think that you can decipher what 735 changes in epigenetics mean. We have some ideas of what certain things, how does all that work in synchronicity, but even though we're the smartest animal on this planet, we still have a very feeble mind.

Lisa: We’re still dumb.

Dr Kirk: When it comes to understanding the complexity of our bodies, we can't understand the complexity of the planet, much less our bodies. And life is just this amazingly complex thing. We don't have systems in our body. We divide the body up in systems as a way to learn it so that we can systematically learn and we can test about the learning, but the body doesn't work in systems.

Lisa: I have such an issue with it, too. It's nothing like the way that the medical model breaks us all down.

Dr Kirk: The reductionist model doesn't work for life. And if you think about it, most of biology is purely descriptive. All of it is, we've come up with better and better ways to test things and look at things, and then we can describe what's going on. We don't know how to manipulate it most of the time. If we do, it's really clumsy. And it's causing 500 other changes because we wanted to flip this one switch this way. Then what are the downstream effects? We don't know. We'll find out in like 30 years after 100,000 people go through this. It's really clumsy.

I don't know if can I make somebody live longer. I'd never make that claim. But can I make people look, feel, and perform better? Absolutely. I can do it all the time. And me, personally, like you're saying, I just approximate use. Their arguments, there are people out there saying, ‘Well, these hormones will cause this or that.’ I’m like, ‘Okay. If high estrogen levels cause breast cancer, why don’t young women get breast cancer? Older women, they're the ones who are getting breast cancer, why?’ That thing with men and prostate cancer, giving them testosterone is gonna cause prostate. No, it's not. If that were true, then a 20-year-old would have prostate cancer, and a 60-year-old wouldn’t, right? It's a lack of this. And I think breast cancer is a lot like prostate cancer. What we know with prostate cancer now is that if you give somebody testosterone, and they already have prostate cancer, they’re sensitive to androgen, then you can expose them.

Lisa: You can ignite it.

Dr Kirk: Or women have found for 5 or 10 more years, maybe. I think breast cancer is the same way. And it just makes sense. And so–

Lisa: And how you clearing out your liver and all that strain, all of those things that those changes that happen, but yeah, totally.

Dr Kirk: And also, every single mechanism that I just talked about that is reversing aging, or slowing aging, or whatever the phrase you want to use. Every single one of those things is improving mitochondrial density, improving mitochondrial function, and doing– There’s a thing that’s called neovascularisation and angiogenesis. So it's improving blood supply. It's improving lymphatic flow, and it's improving mitochondrial density and mitochondrial functioning. That's pretty much health, right? I'm sorry, what was your question on—

Lisa: The mitochondrial aspect of it. I truly believe that's the core of so many of these diseases. If we can get our mitochondria, and it’s just not easy than that. And if we can get those working properly, and we can– that's the downstroke, the most lowest level where we can and again, sleep and things become the leverage point.

Dr Kirk: Right. And if you think about what all of the health crazes are moving towards, all those things are doing that, right? So the ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, both of these things are increasing mitochondrial density. Both are increasing mitochondrial function. They’re both really anti-inflammatory. Anti-inflammatory leads to higher blood supply, better immune function. Immune function is anabolic, right? So that’s what’s repairing and building things back up. The near-far IR sauna’s doing same thing: mitochondrial density, mitochondrial functioning, hyperbaric oxygenation, decreasing cytokines, inflammatory cytokines, increasing the oxygen saturation throughout all the cells, causing new blood vessels to form, carrying more. And it's all mitochondrial density.

What else are we doing? Cold ice baths. I suppose it is trying to increase, they're going to increase your blood flow to save you from freezing, right? And how you're going to do that? It has to grow new blood vessels, and how's it got to do that? It's got to get more energy. Well, how's it going to do that? It’s got to make more mitochondria. All of this stuff. And the other thing that does is it increases things like BDNF, so it’s helping to repair and restore our brains and then that's leading to better hormone functions because our brain is the hormone master; it’s the orchestra leaders, the maestro. Your pineal gland, and pituitary, that's where everything's coming from.

Lisa: Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years, and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody. And we want to keep it that way. But to do that, we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits Podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's p-a-t-r-o-n dot Lisa Tamati dot com. We have two patron levels to choose from, you can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us; everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power divider, and future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much, much more. So check out all the details, patron.lisatamati.com. And thanks very much for joining us.

Can I ask you a little bit, because I know that you have done hyperbaric work in your naval days. And I've got a hyperbaric right behind me, there in the corner. And I'm very big on it. And it was a cornerstone of my mother's rehabilitation after a massive aneurysm and brain injury. What's your take on it in regards to brain injuries in regards to concussions, which is in epidemic levels in our world? And also for things like dementia and Alzheimer's? Without obviously, being your absolute area of expertise. But what is your take on hyperbaric for all of these things?

Dr Kirk: So I think hyperbarics is actually going to turn out to be the most effective tool in the toolbox. I think you have to use all the tools. And I have all the tools at my house. Right? I don't have hyperbarics. So I just actually came back from doing a couple of months of hyperbarics in Tampa, and I have a great recommendation for guests if you want to talk to somebody who really knows hyperbarics, and he's a longtime friend of mine. I was in the Navy with him, who's a Navy master diver, and he's just got his PhD in biomedical engineering, and he has a hyperbarics facility. He did the first research paper on the long haulers for COVID, reversing all the long hauling syndromes. He's done a paper on Lyme disease. He's doing a paper right now on dysarthria from strokes and others, and he and I were investigating brain injuries, TBI.

Lisa: Wow. I definitely want to meet this guy.

Dr Kirk: Yeah, so I was the guinea pig. And then another SEAL friend of mine. Because SEALs my age have the most problems, right? They usually are at this age. But I have my best friend from SEAL training. So he’s just my best friend overall. He was in the SEAL teams for 26 years, nearly 26,27,28 combat deployments. So he’s been blown up with a grenade, he's been blind in one eye, he’s been, in the head, 20 plus surgeries. And that's the norm. That's the norm of how guys come out when they're my age, and they stay the whole time. I don't obviously have nearly the trauma that he does. So I wanted to bring him in, too.

Much like I do with the SEALs I just said, ‘We're just going to test everything, and we're just gonna test everything we can think of.’ So I did pre- and post-EEGs, I did pre- and post-PET scans for consumption. I did–what’s it called–psycho learning batteries of tests, testing to problem solve. I did a bunch of hormone stuff. I did genetic aging before. I did all this stuff. Then I just went and did a standard protocol, which is essentially one hour at depth. So one hour bottom time at 280, at 100% oxygen, five days a week. Take Saturday and Sunday off. I did that for eight weeks.

Lisa: Yep. That’s 40-odd or 50-odd sessions, yep.

Dr Kirk: Yeah, so 40 sessions. And it’s a big commitment. It’s a big time commitment. It's expensive. But I just want to see if we can use it for the SEALs because I still do a lot of work with guys who are getting out of the SEAL teams or are out of the SEAL teams. And they break down when things are– really, really hard life. And they can’t put it in the end, they don't have their community, and they don’t have their compensatory techniques anymore. They're going to new jobs where they don't know their way around as much in there. And plus, they've been gone most of their career. Now, they're home with their wives and their kids. And it's a new thing. It's hard for them, it's super stressful. And so I do everything I can to help these guys out. And anytime there's a new modality, anybody tells me, not that hyperbarics is new, but the partial results with TBI is that we're 5, 10, 15 years old. That's a new postulate. And so we're doing our best to test that, and we're about to do it again. I'm going to go to–

Lisa: I so wanna hear the results of that, please. Because I think it's the most underrated thing that I've ever come across. And you know, and I've been studying it or a couple of years.

Dr Kirk: Absolutely.

Lisa: I know what it did to my mum. My uom went from being like a baby. No, hardly any brain function to being full driver's license, full life, full everything. She's walking and training at the gym every day. And that thing there in the corner was the catalyst for it. It gave me that stuff to do. And I've got a family member with brain injuries, I can't give him the repeated brain injuries from sport. And can't you see what this is? How powerful this is? But it's a big time commitment. Even when it's sitting in your sister's house. But it's really important that people do this and get access to this.

We just had a Sunday program, which is our current affairs, a big current affairs program on TBIs. It’s from rugby players over here, professional rugby players and how many TBIs they get in a career. And they're coming out, ending up with dementia and Alzheimer's and brain injuries and mood changes, tossed around down the toilet, and all these sorts of things. And not once did anybody say hyperbaric. And I'm just like, ‘Oh, for God's sake.’ But what do we have to do?

Dr Kirk: I don't know why we're so bad at that. And under all of the royal colonies. The Israelis and the Russians–

Lisa: The Israelis are onto it. The Russians are onto it. The Russians, the Germans are onto it

Dr Kirk: The Russians, I think of, I say they have 180-some odd approved uses. Israelis are like 116. We’re 14, and then we just added one a few months ago. And half of ours are really the same thing. It's just nuances of the same thing. It's just we don't get to use it very much. And when I was in the SEAL teams, it was super hard for me to get it for wound healing, although it's the most obvious use for it. And I would want to put guys in there after surgery. And it was like pulling teeth every single time. I had to fight them. I had to fight the machine to get guys in there. And it's a huge difference, obviously.

Lisa: Are you aware of the work of Dr Paul Harch? hbot.com is his website. He's done a hell of a lot in the hyperbaric space. Check him out. H-a-r-c-h, Dr Paul Harch, real expert in this area. And just on that point on about the machine, the medical machinery that we have, in our Western world, in New Zealand, it’s very similar to the States. What the hell are they doing? Why are we still in this preventive, in this disease-based system? Where we are only, like you were talking about, ranges before and these guys are still in the normal ranges, but they were having symptoms. Thyroid is another classic example of people that have not been picked up.

I've just been through a journey, which my listeners know, with my father who developed sepsis after a massive operation, and I won't go into the details. But I was trying to get intravenous vitamin C, and he was dying. And I couldn't. They had no other options where I've got this. I've got scientist friends, doctors who have given me the clinical evidence to proceed these to the ethics committees and all these things while I'm fighting for his life, and he's dying in front of my eyes. And I'm not allowed to give him intravenous vitamin C, which has been shown in a number of clinical studies to drop the mortality rate by 40%–50%, and I wasn't allowed to do it.

I'm just like, ‘What the heck is going wrong with our system?’ I wonder, right? But it took me 15 days. And by the way, my dad had multiple organ failure, and I lost the battle for him. The system is just– I'm getting, I'll get off my soapbox in a minute. But why is somebody who's been through the medical, the standard medical, and then gone out and done your own? Where are they going wrong? And is there a paradigm shift coming? Can you see a change coming?

Dr Kirk: Now, I really wish I could say yes to that. But I’ve become so disheartened after COVID. I don't know the politics there. But the politics here, it’s just mind-boggling to me. I’m sitting here going– First of all, hydroxychloroquine has been around for like 100 years. It's been around forever. It's over the counter in 80% of the countries in the world. It's a very safe drug. There's almost no chance it's going to cause anybody harm. So whether anybody believes that it was helpful at the beginning or not, you had teams of doctors who are actually doing the work, the clinician saying, ‘This works.’ And then you have these researchers and politicians saying, ‘There's not enough evidence of that. Use this, and don't use that.’

Lisa: And the vaccine, it’s been on trial.

Dr Kirk: There is a doctor out here, she's a doctor and a lawyer. She got thrown in jail for giving somebody hydroxychloroquine.

Lisa: You kidding me?

Dr Kirk: For prescribing somebody hydroxychloroquine, she spent four days in jail. They kicked in her house. They kicked in the door of her house with a SWAT team, with body armor and other weapons and rushed her and arrested this little 100-pound woman and put her in jail, didn't let her call a lawyer or anything.

Lisa: That’s just evil. That’s unbelievable.

Dr Kirk: There's never been anything in the news. And the news cycle that carry the news cycle to the extent of COVID period, but any really big event that I had any expertise in. So COVID was the first time that the big nation focus was on something I knew about, right? I'm not a virologist, but I know how the immune system works, right? I know what viruses are. I know their life cycle. I know how this works. I know how the medicines work. I have some expertise. And I can read what's out there. And I can learn it really quickly. And I'm just amazed at how dishonest and inaccurate the media was, and it’s probably that way for everything. I don't have enough expertise to realise that when everything else is going on. And so I've just become really disheartened.

That woman who got arrested, she was in, she was running something called the Frontline Doctors, and her and a bunch of other doctors went to the Capitol. And they held this press conference, and they told them, ‘Here's the evidence. Here's the evidence of the medicine. Here's the safety of the medicine. Here's what we've been finding clinically. We want to urge all doctors to do this.’ And the FDA cracked down and told people they couldn't do it. Why isn't a medical doctor could not call a pharmacist and tell them to prescribe hydroxychloroquine to my patients? A pharmacist could tell me, ‘No.’ A pharmacist said, ‘No, that's against the law.’

Lisa: To a doctor. And ivermectin is the other one. Have you—

Dr Kirk: Ivermectin is exactly in the same way.

Lisa: What the hell?

Dr Kirk: And then these doctors have had a website where they've been making videos, they've been posting, with their videos, all of their references, all the clinical— they’re only using peer-reviewed studies. They're going through mechanism, historical stuff. They're going through new stuff. And they're posting on there. Amazon just shut their website down.

Lisa: Have you seen Dr Robert Malone? He’s the founder of mRNA. And he was on the DarkHorse Podcast with Bret Weinstein. It was a really long interview and really in-depth. But the thing was, this was censored. I watched them take it down. And I watch other people keep putting it back up. And then now they've gone over to a platform called, obviously, which they can't be censored because it's on the crypto saying which is like— But why, when this aside, I know why. But the science is there. The clinical evidence is there. This is a safe— Ivermectin has been on the market for 40 something years? 30 to 40 years. I don't know exactly. But it's off-patent. Nobody can make money out of it. And then if they have a therapeutic, they can't do the vaccine under the emergency law.

Dr Kirk: I've heard that partial, and I think that's very realistic. Because— but the other side of it is that if there's one thing that's been proven in the last year and a half, the two years in America, is that the powers that be can do whatever the hell they want to do. So, they could have approved emergency use, even if they were 10 treatments because they just wanted to. They just do whatever they want to do right now. ‘You know, what? that's against the law.’ ‘No. Tough. We're gonna do it anyway.”

Lisa: We want to make some billions out of something, so we’re going to put it anyway.

Dr Kirk: I don't know. I'm very disturbed by it. But I would say 10 years ago, I was really excited that there was going to be a paradigm shift. I've been waiting for it to happen. I don't know why it doesn't happen. You know, like I said, I started studying all this stuff around 2009. And going well. And this makes a lot more sense. And, and now— But I'm not saying that Western medicine is all bad. Because if you're talking about somebody who's on death's door, somebody just got run over by a bus, or somebody who's severely sick, yes, Western medicine is great. But to keep people from getting severely sick, and to keep people aging well, and to perform well, that's a total different ballgame. And that's not what the medical professionals are trained to do. And the ones that are trained to do that get marginalised. They aren’t the real doctors. They’re not the natural. Pass. And a real doctor over here. It's like, ‘You're kind of like a doctor, but we're gonna put you in this little box.’

Lisa: A second-class citizen.

Dr Kirk: Yeah, you’re a second-class citizen.

Lisa: You’re not the real thing.

Dr Kirk: If there's one thing that I've proven to myself over the decade I've been doing this now is that most of my values as being a coach. I'm a doctor, but I pretty much coach people in lifestyle change. 90% of what I do is I get people to change their behaviours.

Lisa: And no one can make money out of that.

Dr Kirk: And then I give hormones. And then I give peptides. And then I give nucleo supplementations. And then we do little gadgets that you want to monitor everything about yourself and learn. You monitor your heart rate variability, your sleep, and all that. And you want to get every piece of data and continuous blood glucose. Do whatever you want. All that stuff. Let's get you sleeping well. Let's get you eating whole foods and no junk. Let's get you exercising to the level that is appropriate for your fitness level currently. Let's get your stress hormones down, and get your mood and thinking all in line with some mindfulness training, or whatever you do with that. And that takes, honestly, it takes nine months.

Lisa: Yep, exactly. That takes time. It takes massive effort. And it takes behavioural change, which people just don't want to do behavioural change because it's much easier to take a pill. It's much easier to take something simple and that's just the way humans are; we want it easy. Give me a pill of those.

Dr Kirk: And this great salesman telling them that they just eat this superfood, or like whatever this, ‘Oh, weird bacteria, we found this on K under the Amazon, like this is the key.’ Not really. Nobody's ever been able to use it before. And that's the key. Now I see. That makes sense. And people want that magic bullet. And it's hard. It's hard for some people. Unfortunately, there's never really been that hard for me. I'm just not somebody who's had a lot of hunger cravings. I don't really crave bad food, it's easy for me to eat a good diet.

Lisa: And there's a lot of genetic factors and all of these things. When you look at our evolution, it makes sense that we go after fat, and sugar, and salt because that's what we don’t have enough of and so–

Dr Kirk: –That’s what protects you from famine.

Lisa: But we need to understand how the big food industry then is tapping into those addictive mechanisms in our brain to make us want more. You can't eat one chip. Anybody knows, who’s eaten a pack, opened a pack of chips, you can't eat one chip; you're gonna eat the whole packet.

Dr Kirk: You don’t call them crisps? I thought you called them crisps over there.

Lisa: No, we call them chips.

Dr Kirk: So I actually have this postulate of where doughnuts and coffee came from in here. So what I was saying earlier, if I don't get enough sleep tonight, so I don't recover, I don't get the right deep sleep, my anabolic hormones don't change around, my insulin sensitivity shifts, my appetite regulation, ghrelin and leptin regulators, my fat metabolism regulators, all of that off because I didn't sleep well, right? So I wake up the next morning, and I have a high-stress hormone because I didn't get enough sleep, and I'm using stress hormones to get through the day.

Another thing that happens when you're asleep is you flush the toxins out of your brain. Yeah, the lymphatic glow, right? And I use that word sparingly. And part of the dual partitioning and regeneration tool source. One of the things that we're doing is we're replenishing ATP, right? So ATP is triphosphate adenosine with three phosphates on it, and it goes down to ADP and AMP and then just an adenosine binds to areas of your brain and tells your brain where to start it. We burn all this out. We need to sleep.

That's what we call sleep pressure. That’s the drive that just makes you want to crash. And you know this well from being an athlete and pushing yourself to the extent that you can lay down on cactus and fall asleep. You’re just so damn tired, and you got to sleep. And then it only takes a few hours to flush that adenosine out, right? And then if you have enough stress hormones, epinephrine, norepinephrine, all that, you can get up and go again.

Our insulin sensitivity goes down, especially in our fat cells, and then our leptin sensitivity goes down. And so we're convinced we need to actually store more fat. And then we still have adenosine. And the way caffeine works, caffeine blocks the adenosine, right? So your body now believes that it's starving. The only reason that—so we're the only animal on the planet, that sleep deprives ourselves on purpose. Every other mammal, the only time they will ever sleep deprive themselves is if they're being pursued, if they're being preyed upon. Or if they're starving to death. If they're starving to death, they need to go further for food. And it shuts off the prefrontal cortex and makes you take more risks. You'll eat novel foods; you might try some things that might keep you alive that you wouldn't have otherwise try.

You wake up, essentially, with your body convinced that you're starving. One, you deprive yourself of sleep. So every day you wake up without enough sleep, there's some trigger in your brain that’s saying, ‘Are we starving? Are we being preyed upon? What's the threat? There's a threat on us, right?’ And now you have all this appetite regulation and fat metabolism, all these regulators are off, and your body's convinced that you're starving. And what do you need when you're starving? You need glucose, right now. And then you need much of that. Right? And what is a doughnut? It’s tri glucose, right? So it’s like glucose for body fat.

Lisa: Sugar and fat.

Dr Kirk: And then you drink coffee to displace the adenosine.

Lisa: It makes sense. Why would it?

Dr Kirk: I think that’s where coffee neurals come from. It’s very theory 101. Do with it what you want. Never been published.

Lisa: But that is brilliant work. It's a brilliant deduction. And it's so true. And then we take more coffee to keep ourselves going. And then we cause these adenosines to come and then we can’t go to sleep.

Dr Kirk: This is one of the most beautiful things. So I was actually doing a sleep lecture with three other sleep experts of all different fields. There's some psychiatrists there and some sleep practitioners that do CPAP sleep disease, specialists. And we were all going to do a series of lectures during the day. And we're waiting around for our car to come get us. And we’re sitting in the lobby, and the lobby had a Starbucks. And they just happened to have propped up in one of those little poles with a new slider menu, and it was just sitting right next to the bench we’re sitting on. And it had all the nutritional information of their drinks.

I'm sitting there looking at it. I go, ‘Oh, my gosh, they have a point. I'm getting a— Look at this.’ And they're looking at it. I'm like, ‘Oh my gosh, that explains a lot.’ So when you look at caffeine intake or the effects, the beneficial effects of caffeine intake, or what we call a hormetic curve, right? So more is better until more is worse, right? And when it starts getting worse is about 200 milligrams.

Lisa: Which is what, two cups of coffee?

Dr Kirk: It's not even two full cups of drip coffee, right? So after that, though, you actually get the exact opposite effect. So caffeine actually makes you start feeling more tired.

Lisa: Wow. And wired.

Dr Kirk: And Starbucks has these 800-calorie coffees, a 100% of the calories are from sugar, right? Because they have syrups and whatever in them and cream, and then with 600 milligrams of caffeine. So what happens when you drink 600 milligrams of caffeine, you say, ‘I'm feeling better. I'm drinking this over time.’ And then I finish my coffee. A couple of hours later, I feel awful. And what do I think I need?

Lisa: Coffee.

Dr Kirk: Coffee. Go back and get another, more.

Lisa: And people go and get it. And then they don't understand how long it takes for the caffeine to be processed out of the body. And then 12 hours later, they're not going to sleep, and they're thinking they haven't equated it to the third cup of coffee that they had today.

Dr Kirk: Yeah, they have no sleep pressure like we're talking about, blocking your adenosine receptors. Plus, it’s led to some stimulation of stress hormones and their stress hormones to hide their sleep.

Lisa: And on that point, you know, I was talking about my dad before and I was in the hospital with him for 16 days. We were fighting for his life. And that time, I had maximum two hours sleep a day because I was just there at the hospital, advocating, protecting him, wasn't leaving his side. If I could stand up, I was there. At 16 days, I was diabetic. My blood sugar levels were through the roof. And all of my— so and that led to a whole lot of downstream effects that I'm still unpacking now. And it's now a year later. This is how quickly it can happen. I'm in a time like that, you want to push.

It’s the same when you're doing ultra-marathons. I ran ultra-marathons, 25 years doing crazy long distance stuff. When I ran through New Zealand, and I was running 500 kilometres a week, I got fatter. I figured that one out. Because there was over, I don't know how many calories I was burning; it was an excess of 10,000 calories a day or more. And I wasn't getting anywhere near that calories in and yet my body got fed, and my composition changed, my hormones were down, my sugar, all of these things. We think that the more we train, because this is another argument that I have a lot of my athletes that I train, is that more is always better when it comes to exercise. And that's not true.

Dr Kirk: Sometimes, more is just more. And often, if you're sleep-deprived, more is worse for sure. You don't really need to do any exercises. You just stay active until you've recovered, and then you can exercise again. But I know exactly what you're talking about. When we were talking before we started recording, I tampered with endurance marathons and things like this. It just wasn't well-suited for it. But definitely the fattest I've ever been in my life. I just wasn't suited for it. And it was too much stress. It was causing my body to put on everything.

Lisa: And it was causing your body to put on fat.

Dr Kirk: So I was just broken down. I was losing my hair. And the first time in my life that I ever had a belly. I've had plenty of times where I have like a six-pack. Where did this come from? Never had this before. And I was still pretty young, 35 at the time.

And I know for a fact that if you, there's research, it's not all tissues, but some of your tissues, the insulin sensitivity is decreased by 30% just by losing two hours of sleep. One night with two hours of sleep. So you go from sleeping eight hours of sleep to six. If you're pre-diabetic, you're waking up diabetic. If you're normal, you're waking up pre-diabetic. And then if you do that for several nights in a row, you might actually be driving yourself into diabetes within a week or two, and you don't really know.

There's not a lot of people who tracked themselves that much for us to know that certainly. But again, it's super complex because there's all sorts of hormonal regulations, and genetics, and vascular flow, and activities, and diet. But there's a lot of things going into that. But as a general rule, you can say if you lose two hours of sleep, testosterone is 30% lower, growth hormone is 30% lower, inflammation is 30% higher, leptin sensitivity is down 30%, insulin sensitivity is down 30%. This is in one night, you've only lost 25% of your sleep. And you're losing 25% to 30% of the benefit of sleep. No big surprise there. Right?

Lisa: But is a six and a half hours a day, the average scenario? And I can probably get six and a half. I don't know what the steps are. But six and a half to seven hours a day. How many people–

Dr Kirk: Americans just dropped under six the last year. But when I started this in 2009, it was 6.5, 6.45 I think.

Lisa: And we think that's enough. It's not close enough.

Dr Kirk: No. It's like saying, ‘Well, I need only need 2800 calories a day. So 35 is close enough. I'll stay lean, right?’ No. It doesn't make any sense. So it's best to get as much as you can possibly get. And if six and a half is all you can get, and I understand that some people's life in that way. This isn't to bash the individual. That's a cultural problem. It's not an individual problem.

In some cases it is, but in most cases, it's a cultural problem. They've grown up believing that sleep is for the weak, and lazy people sleep more, and really productive people get up early, get both ends, and get all the work done. And they're the high achievers, and that's who you want to be, and they're going to make the money. They're the sexy ones. They're going to marry the good spouse, and they're going to have the beautiful kids, and because they're getting after it, and you're lazy, just sleeping eight hours a day. People buy into that, especially.

I chose probably the worst two professions in the world. ‘That’s a luxury man. That's for weak people. And you get all the sleep you need when you're dead.’ Right? Now it’s a thing in medical school saying things, you're in the hospital like, ‘Sleep. Yeah, you're not getting here to sleep. There's people's lives in the line here, go make some bad decisions.’

It's a crazy, crazy world. And I tell you, people pay a lot of money to work with me. And I'm not saying that to be braggadocious. I'm saying for the point being, it's hard to get to work with me, right? There's a waiting list. I test. I seriously screen people because I don't want to work with somebody who's gonna be a pain in my ass. And I'm not working with anybody who's not super motivated. And you have to pay a lot of money because I don't work with very many people. I spend a lot of time with each person. Even though I'm known for sleep, the hardest thing for me to coach people to do is to sleep. And I could tell them, ‘We'll do anything.’ They're willing to do anything. And when I say, ‘Sleep eight hours a night,’ that's like, ‘Whoa, whoa, hold up.’ I'm like, ‘I want you to do yoga two hours a day. Exercise two hours a day. Eat nothing but kale.’ They go like, ‘Okay.’ ‘I want you to sleep eight hours a day.’ Like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. I can’t do that.’

Lisa: And you’re known for the sleep stuff.

Dr Kirk: That's the most important part. But it's hard. There's a lot of social conditioning around that. Most people know they don't eat well. Most people know they don't exercise enough. Most people know that they're too stressed. It's hard to convince people they aren’t sleeping well.

Lisa: And what about kids? Kids are going to school early. What sort of damage are we doing to our kids by making them— and adolescents are even worse because you never listen to your body clock changes. Can you just speak briefly to that? And then we will wrap up because I am taking up a lot of your time.

Dr Kirk: I actually did a five-hour lecture, eight hours a day for five days in a row in Germany. I was lecturing the student, the faculty, the counsellors, the coaches, and the teachers of the school systems for the American kids that were in, overseas, military kids that are, you know. And so I was lecturing all of this. And that's when I really dove into the research. I didn't know a lot of this before, and this was probably six or seven years ago.

What we're doing to our kids is tragic. It's way worse than what we're doing to ourselves as adults. It’s way worse. The really concerning thing is that, obviously a kid's brain isn't fully developed, right? That's primarily what those 18 years are about. It's not nearly as much about the physical as it is about the mental. And one of the last things to form is the prefrontal cortex. And that's the part right from my temples forward over my eyes like that little way.

That is the part that makes us the smartest animal on the planet. That is called, what Robert Sapolsky calls the simulator. It allows us to simulate things. We don't actually have to do them to figure out if they're a good idea, right? I don't need to jump off my roof to know if it's a good idea or not. I've never jumped off the roof of my house before. And I can guarantee you it's a bad idea. It's like 30 feet to the ground. I'm gonna get hurt. There's no way I'm going to do it. I don't have to do it to know that's a bad idea. I don't have to flip my boss off to know that I'm going to get fired if I flip my boss off, right? All of these behavioural gates, that’s all prefrontal cortex. Also all of our willpower is prefrontal cortex. So your ability to have a plan and stick on your plan relies on you going, ‘I want the future. I want what my plan will get me in the future more than I want the immediate gratification right now.’ That's all willpower, that's 100% prefrontal cortex.

As soon as your prefrontal cortex goes away, you start negotiating that other way. ‘It's not that big of a deal. It's only one piece of cake, and I can still lose that 15 pounds for my wedding.’ Whatever people's goals are, right? And our problem-solving ability, our verbal fluency, our ability to recognise other people's emotions when we're talking to them, our ability to actually communicate and listen and understand what they're saying, our ability to regulate our own emotions and our own speech and communicate effectively, all of that is prefrontal cortex. This is the social part of our brain. Well, guess when that part's forming? Adolescence. And this happens in adolescence. What else happens in adolescence? There's a phase shift in the circadian rhythm, and the kids need to stay up later and wake up later. That's just the way their circadian rhythm is shifted.

Lisa: They’re not being lazy. They just...

Dr Kirk: And instead, we're waking them up earlier as they get older. And these kids are having to get to school at 7:15 in the morning, which means they're getting up at 6:15. They’re probably not falling asleep until 1 a.m. And it's worse because they don't just need eight hours of sleep. They need about 10 hours of sleep. So they're getting half as much sleep as they need. And then we're shoving them off to school. And we're saying, ‘Why are you misbehaving in school? Why aren't you paying attention?’ Will it be the same thing?

Lisa: You are going to get ADHD.

Dr Kirk: Yeah, you are going to have ADHD. It would be the same as if you and I had to get up at 2:30 in the morning and go be at work at 3:30 in the morning. And we're expected to learn. We’re expected to be able to communicate effectively, and behave well, and pay attention, and be energetic, but we couldn't do it. No, kids can’t do it either. And we're interfering with the development of their brain.

The prefrontal cortex isn't fully formed until you're at the earliest, maybe 20. For women, women's brains formed a little faster. But it’s up to 25 years old. And a lot of men are right at that mark, 23 to 25. And about a quarter of the women are still 23 to 25. So the most formidable years are high school, and college, and early employment. And what do people do on early employment? They go hang out with their friends. They go to the bar. They drink. They have fun. They watch movies. They go to bed. They get up early. They go to work. They do the same thing every day. So the most sleep-deprived years are the most horrible years of the brain.

Lisa: And then we wonder why depression, and suicides, and accidents, and all of these things happen to our youth? And disproportionately is that part of it, at least because of–

Dr Kirk: There's this fascinating new field in medicine called chronobiology. And what they've discovered is that probably, we don't know for sure, but it's probably every psychiatric disease, and probably every psychological, severe flare-up or whatever you want to call that. So it's a cycle that's always preceded by sleep deprivation. Everybody who's depressed didn't sleep well before they became depressed. And now that depression’s, about half of them, it's making them sleep a lot more. But half of them is preventing them from being able to sleep. So now they feel sleepy all day. Any time anybody has a schizophrenic break, there's a period right there. People with bipolar, before they go into their frenetic phase, they have a period of sleep deprivation. And then after their manic phase, they go into their depressive phase. And that can actually lead again, half of them are going to sleep less and half of them are going to sleep more. But there's always sleep regulation around it.

They're the first book I read on chronobiology at some Ivy League hospitals, I think it was Harvard, or one those Harvard, Yale, Cornell, something like that. And in their attached hospital, they took their psychiatric inpatients, and all they did is get them out in the morning and get them to walk around the yard and do this. And it was amazing. I think it was at least 50%, it might have been 75% of their patients completely came off their medications. These are people who are inpatient. They've been on hardcore anti-psychotic medication for years and maybe decades. And they get them, not just decreased, 100% off of medications by getting their circadian rhythm and chronobiology as well.

It's deeper than I know. I haven't studied it really deep. We have the ultradian rhythms as well as the circadian rhythms. And so, how all that aligns, I can't say what the neurophysiology going on to break people out of that. But again, does it really matter? It’s lifestyle.

Lisa: It’s easy if you want to try it.

Dr Kirk: It's the same damn thing. Actually, if they lived as hunter-gatherers today, they would get up when the sun came on. And they’d have to go out and do things, right? And they'd be in the sunlight, and then it would get dark, and they would get cold, and they would fall asleep. So again, lifestyle handles 95% of this.

Lisa: Yep. And we just, our ancient DNA. We just cannot escape our ancient DNA. And when we try to when we put people on drugs, and we do all these interventions, why don't we try this stuff first? Why don't we try this basic stuff? When you look at hospitals with 24-hour lights and their beeping, and they're waking people up all through the night and all of these things in our sickest populations, just mind-blowing to me.

Dr Kirk: This is the whole philosophy of how pharmaceuticals come about that's wrong. So take sleep jokes for instance. We talked earlier about Stilnox, right? So what that does, it acts like GABA. Okay, so I told you that GABA is slowing down the brain. So when I get stressed out, when I started living in artificial light, and air conditioning and heating, and I've taken myself completely off the planet. I make it hot when it's cold, cold when it's hot, dark when it’s light, light when it's dark. I do whatever the hell they want to do. Eat stuff that's not even related to food. Like, ‘I can do whatever I want. I can totally take myself off of this planet.’ Like mankind's got it all figured out. Then, of course, I now have sleep problems. Well, and then maybe I'm overstimulating myself. I'm watching movies, or playing video games, or going out to a nightclub or whatever it is, I'm over stimulating my brain. And I can't get to sleep at night, or I'm in bed and I'm going through a divorce or bankruptcy or whatever. My brain is just racing, and I can't slow down my brain.

GABA’s job is to slow down my brain. Well, my GABA is not doing it. So what does the pharmaceutical industry do, right? So they have a receptor that binds GABA, I have GABA floating around my blood, grabs it, pulls it in the cell, and it does what GABA does in that cell. So we'll say that's a one. One GABA does an action of 1, on a scale from 1 to 10, 1. So now they come out with benzodiazepines, also act like GABA analogs. And what did they do? They bind the GABA. They bind that GABA receptor, it gets pulled in. Instead of doing 1 out of 10, it does 100 out of 10.

Lisa: Oh my gosh, yeah.

Dr Kirk: And then they came out with the Z-drugs and like, ‘Hey, we got this even better.’ Now this Z-drug binds in here, this still not binds in there, pulls it in there, on a scale of 1to 10, it does 1000. Now, I have this super physiologic effect because in the pharmaceutical world, well, all we got to do is flip this switch. And if we flip this switch harder, people are going to sleep faster, and we're going to win, and we're going to sell our medication. That’s the way they think about it.

Instead of going, ‘Well, what if we relieve all the stress hormones that are keeping the GABA from working? Then we just use this GABA? And the one does its job?’ Because we were talking about the downregulated receptor, right? Well, if the Z-drug is 1000 times more powerful than GABA, how many receptors are you gonna have at the end of six months of using that? Over 100,000, right? It's pretty simple math.

Lisa: Can you have half of it? Can you up-regulate those receptors again? When you bug it for a long time.

Dr Kirk: It takes a while. So what I did with the SEALs, now obviously, I couldn't just take away their sleep medicine and say, ‘Suck it up, buttercup.’ Right? I had to give them something. And so we came up with this concoction of these things to give them various reasons. And all the guys helped me figure out what works the best, but it kept them on their sleep drug. So what I did is I had the pharmacy make their Stilnox into a serum. So 10 drops was a full dose. So they did 10 drops for a week. And then they do nine drops for a week. And then eight drops a week, all the while undertaking the sleep supplement as well. And they're getting good sleep every night. They’ve cut down alcohol. And they've done their sleep hygiene. And they're doing everything to optimise their sleep. And over the course of about six to eight weeks, they're completely off of it. And then all the receptor density’s obviously back, and then they can just sleep fine and after that.

Lisa: Does it work for everything? Getting someone off antidepressants. And you were trying to cut like tablets down this, but this much is really hard because you don't, you can’t—

Dr Kirk: It is really hard. And it's really time-consuming. And sometimes you have to bounce back because the side effects become too much. And it's really hard to titrate off, especially antidepressants. Because especially, most antidepressants now aren't just working on one system. So they aren't working on say, like, just serotonin. They're doing a lot of things. We're working on multiple neurotransmitters. So you're down-regulating receptors for lots of things. And the ratio of neurotransmitters matters just as much as the presence of them. And not everybody's the same and so not everybody's receptors are coming back at the same speed. And not everybody's just sensitive to the same drugs. So it's hard to know how to get off of things.

I've actually had two patients over my career who just failed to come off of antidepressants. They just couldn't. We tried for the better part of a year. And it was too traumatic for them. They would have such bad side effects from getting off the medications, and they're like, ‘I'm just gonna stay on it.’ And I did my best to coach ‘em out of it. But at the end of the day, I’m there as an advocate and a coach. So I don't demand anything of my clients other than, basically, I'm dogmatic about but everything else is, we're going to work with what you want to do. And we're going to build resilience and performance in whatever areas you want to. And you're going to eat, like, if you want to be a vegetarian, be a vegetarian. You may want to be a carnivore, you be a carnivore.

I don't care what you want to do, we're just going to figure out how to get the right ratios for you of everything and get the best performance out of you. And maybe if your genetics are such that you would do better without meat, but you really love meat, you're like, you're willing to take a little bit of less performance, and I'd rather have meat than be 5% better, right? It’s up to you. I’m just really here as a guide.

Lisa: But you have developed a sleep remedy, which I've heard you say on another podcast is not a miracle. It doesn't contain some of the things that won’t actually help us without damaging us. Can you just talk a little bit about that?

Dr Kirk: It's not a physiologic trick, right. It's not something like there’s these drugs. There's not–

Lisa: It’s not magic–

Dr Kirk: It's not overdosing you on melatonin so that we're just washing out all of your weight, promoting neurotransmitters, and you’re just falling asleep anyway. So, we're talking about the hunter-gatherers, the caveman, where ancestors lived. I said, it takes about three to three and a half hours after the sun goes down before people feel like falling asleep. Well, who in America spends three hours or New Zealand spends three hours getting ready for bed? One in one in a million maybe? Right? So all I tried to do with my product is say, what would ordinarily concentrate over those three hours? What would happen? Well, as we said, the primary point would be we have [inaudible]. It's not just like a fire once and it goes. It's like this, this is flowing around the blank brain and continually made changes overnight.

Then the other thing is GABA. As I said, that slows the brain down. And that's the other part. The body temperature, not something I supplement with, do anything with. But the stress hormones, we need those to come down. Those should be coming down due to lifestyle, but maybe they're a little high. So phosphatidylserine is the only not straightforward thing that from your ultra-marathons and so forth, I'm sure you know, that decreases cortisol levels by taking phosphatidylserine. And so if you look at the pathway for producing melatonin, it’s amino acid tryptophan that becomes 5-hydroxy-tryptophan. Then with the help of magnesium and vitamin B3, that becomes serotonin. Serotonin becomes melatonin.

Lisa: Yep. And then you got your pathway without–

Dr Kirk: That's all that’s in my supplement. There's no serotonin. Now, there's tryptophan-5-hydroxy to present magnesium, vitamin B3, and a little bit of melatonin. There's some GABA in there. And then there's some phosphatidylserine, certainly, to bring your cortisol down. It's just ratios that I worked out with the SEALs over. They were great patients to have because they're super motivated, and really diligent and taking notes, they come and report to me every day. And we just figured out the ratios like, ‘Okay, seems like we need a little more of this and a little less of that.’ I had no intention to making a product out of it. I was just helping them get off in their sleep drugs, and then they just harangued me into making a product out of it.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Kirk: Because this is a pain in their ass. They're having to go to three different stores. This was before Amazon, you can just order everything, they're having to go to three different health food stores. And this came in a 30-day supply. And that came in 90 days. And that was natural. And that was a powder. And this is a liquid. They couldn't travel with it. And so they’re like, ‘Just make it something simple.’ That's why I made the stick pouches. One, because I want to make a tea because I want to create some sort of bedtime routine and ritual to help you perform something like that, and not just sit in bed and pop some pills. So that's why I made it. That's one of the reasons. And then the other thing is there's little stick pouches. These things last forever like it–

Lisa: You can take it–

Dr Kirk: And they can just you need five days of sleep, you just throw five of those in your pocket and you're done. Right? You don't need to pack a bunch of different pills and all that. So it really just made it out for those guys. And then it surprisingly turned into a little side business that I never really intended. But yeah.

Lisa: This is fantastic though because— and we'll put the links in the show notes, people do to get this and I— Because I have all those things and I have to take all the pills currently. And I don't know the ratios, whether I'm getting the ratios right and I'm doing it right. And I need extra support because I sort of love it full-bore like you probably do. So we can do with some extra help. So we will put the links in the show notes to the Sleep Remedy.

There's nothing physiological, over-physiological doses, there’s nothing artificial in there that's going to cause you trouble. And that's the main thing when people, because they will just grab Ambien, or Valium, or those types of things. Because they’re desperate and I get that. But we can help ourselves with all the sleep routine things that we've mentioned that. A dark, cold, having a hot shower or cold shower, something changing the temperature, slowing your brain down, chamomile tea, all these things that we can do that are simple behavioural things. But adding that into the mix, I think, is a really key thing.

Dr Parsley, I've taken up so much of your bloody time. But I could honestly, we'd love to have you back at some stage because there was just more that I wanted to–

Dr Kirk: Yeah. There’s a lot we didn’t really get to talk about. I’m always happy to do it. I don't know how long it took to schedule this one. But I think I can get them done in a couple of weeks, usually. I'm only doing maybe two a week right now. It used to be five a week, somebody always wanted me to do it, but I don't get as many requests now. I'm not as popular. So I can do about two a week so...

Lisa: I think, and I've worked with– I've done this podcast for nearly six years. I've talked to experts in so many, many, many fields. And your wide-ranging experience, both in the SEALs and as a doctor is pretty extensive. So I think we're getting a lot more. And I think I just really enjoyed this conversation because it helps clarify a lot of things for me. And it's really put, I think the number one thing that I've also come to the conclusion of, in a roundabout way, that sleep is our biggest leverage point, not exercise, not food, not anything else but sleep. And it is not an easy one for us to just click and do. But we can help ourselves. So I think that the work you're doing is absolutely marvellous. And I would love to get your friend on who's in the hyperbaric because this is definitely one of my things that I'm good on promoting as well, big on it.

Any final things that you would like to share with the audience to just– any last bits of wisdom from Dr Parsley?

Dr Kirk: With you, specifically, with sleep since that’s what we talked the most about. And that's what people mostly want to hear me talk about. But, specifically, with sleep. But again, I just like to reiterate that it is a really simple process. And the thing that gets in the way the most is all of these fears and concerns about doing everything perfectly when you're designed to do it. All you need to do is convince yourself it's really important. And then just start with a bedtime ritual, right? The sleep hygiene stuff, you can look up. But again, all you're doing with it, to decreasing the blue light in your eyes. You can get glasses. You can do it by changing your light bulbs. You can do that by getting rid of the light, bring candles. You can put computers, programs that get rid of blue light. There's all sorts of things you can do. Get rid of the blue light. Decrease the stimulation. Lower your body temperature. That’s sleep hygiene, there's a million ways to do that.

Then of course, part of lowering stress is just slowing down your thinking. You can't work on your computer until 9:59 and get in bed in 10 and think you're gonna be asleep. It doesn't work that way. You have to slow everything down just like you do with a little kid. The other metaphor is like, if you've ever been a kid, you'll remember this 45-minute protracted period of getting a kid ready for sleep. We still need that as adults; we just don't think we need that. And it doesn't need to be as elaborate but it's the same thing. What were you doing with a kid?

Lisa: Put them in the bathtub.

Dr Kirk: Right? You're slowing him down. You don't let your kid bang trucks together and then throw him in a bed, turn off the light and walk out and think it's gonna work, right? Not gonna work. So stop roughhousing, slow down the activity, maybe watch a television show, or do a puzzle, or whatever it is. And then after you do that, you put them in the bath. Why are you putting them in the bath? You’re relaxing them, and you're lowering their body temperature, right? You don't give them a 98° bath. You might give them an 85° bath, right? Or I don't know Celsius. Now, so you're not giving a body temperature that is something below, so you're lowering the body temperature.

Then what do you do? You get them out of the bath, and you put them in really comfy jammies and put powder all over them. Decreases sensation, right? Now they're not feeling labels, not feeling zippers, not feeling anything touching them. So now they're calm, and that's one less sensation. Now you put them in a room, you make sure they're safe, they’re in a soft bed. There's nothing sharp poking them. They feel comfortable. They’re feeling comfortable next to you. You start reading them a story. What's the best kind of story? The story they already know: something rhythmic, something predictable, like Dr Seuss. It has the cadence. They know everything that's coming. And then they just sit there, and they're relaxing, you're slowing down their brain, their body temperature’s lower. There's no sensation. The lights are low. You're not putting on loud music. They're not moving around a bunch. And now they start feeling like they're going to sleep, and you convince them they're gonna be safe, and you walk out. It's the same. We need the same.

Lisa: We need to turn the lights off.

Dr Kirk: You don’t have to put on onesies but yeah, but everything else, it’s all the same. We need all the same stuff.

Lisa: Yeah, and I think, one of the things that, trying to get your kids asleep and obviously, psychologically safe, but having them in a dark room without a nightlight, if possible. I don't know if you know Professor Andrew Huberman. He was talking about the other day, the light getting to the eyes of the child, the night lights and things that we have on for kids are actually causing myopia, short-sightedness in children as well. That's another thing besides the whole sleep rhythm thing. But that was an interesting one as well.

Dr Kirk: But one final thought: if anyone in your audience is specifically having problems with stress, they know they're having problems with stress or they suspect they’re having problems with stress, I'm sure you'll post it in your show notes. But my website, docparsley.com. There's a downloadable PDF in there. I think it's a docparsley.com/stress/ And there's a downloadable PDF that gives you a whole program for how do you decrease stress around sleep.

Lisa: Okay, all right. I’ll download it myself.

Dr Kirk: You're taking an hour to describe it. So I just point people towards the PDF.

Lisa: Okay, people get on Dr Parsley’s website and get that stress download, that free download. Check out Doc Parsley’s Sleep Remedy. Make sure you start to implement all of these things and give us some feedback. Let Dr Parsley know what you think about all of this. Because I'm sure you'll be interested in feedback from people as well. Dr Parsley, thank you so much for your time. I really thank you for all the work you're doing and the amazing research and everything. This is absolutely amazing.

Dr Kirk: And well, appreciate you having me on. Anyone who doesn't know anything about it but I get to share it with people, and I'm too lazy to have my podcast.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

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The Benefits of Meditation and EFT Tapping with Dr Dawson Church 0

Jun 17, 2021

It’s common to hear that a good diet and exercise can significantly improve our health. But health is more than that. Your thoughts and beliefs can change your genes and brain structure! 85% of our genes are malleable, and you can change them for the better with good practices.

In this episode, Dr Dawson Church joins us to talk about the benefits of meditation and EFT tapping. He shares that changing our mental states can significantly impact our bodies and even our environment. The key to happiness and calm is in our hands; we just need to invest time to achieve it.

If you want to know more about the benefits of meditation and the science behind EFT tapping, then this episode is for you.

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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Discover the ways you can influence and change your genes and body.
Understand the benefits of meditation and achieving a flow state.
Learn how to become a force of good in the world by being an emotional contagion.

Resources

Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!
Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-ageing and longevity with NMN Bio.
More Pushing the Limits Episodes:
- 183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Elena Seranova
- 189: Increasing Your Longevity with Elena Seranova
- Pushing the Limits Episode with Dr Don Wood
Connect with Dr Dawson: Website | Twitter | Facebook
Check out these amazing books and resources from Dr Dawson Church

The Genie In Your Genes

Mind To Matter. Get it for free here!

Bliss Brain. Get it for free here! You’ll also get eight meditations that accompany each chapter of the book.

- The EFT Manual
- The Immunity Meditation: Receive Your Complimentary EFT Mini-Manual and BONUS Immunity EcoMeditation!
EFT Universe
Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler
Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
ABC’s Catalyst - Meditation
The Muscle Intelligence Podcast with Ben Pakulski: Using energy therapy to heal trauma and illness, increase productivity, up-regulate gene expression and build character traits with Dr Dawson Church

Episode Highlights

[05:52] The Benefits of Meditation and Alternative Practices

Dr Dawson shares how his research shows that our minds can turn thoughts and ideas into reality.
People who practice meditation become really happy.
Dr Dawson shares that he studied meditation, energy healing, and psychology.
Through this, he transformed from a miserable teen to the happy character he is today.
Dr Dawson believes that his purpose is to give the gift of happiness to others.

[10:18] Quantifying Ancient Traditions with Science

Dr Dawson shares how he was able to measure acupressure points using the galvanometer.
His findings proved the integrity of the Chinese practice of energy flows.
Energy treatments have shown astronomical results. Listen to the full episode to hear the breakthroughs in these treatments.

[13:55] How to Influence Your Genes

While we can influence our genes with diet, recent research shows that you can also change it with your beliefs and attitudes.
15% of our genomes are fixed, while the remaining 85% are malleable.
In his practice, Dr Dawson learned how anxiety spikes cortisol levels, depletes the immune system, produces calcification in the brain and more.
This finding shows that it’s important to manage our thoughts and beliefs.
Through this, we’re able to influence our physical bodies positively.

[16:36] How EFT Tapping Addresses Trauma

EFT tapping has shown its effectiveness in resetting your emotions, especially when you’re feeling stressed, anxious, or angry.
Normally, your stress response creates re-traumatisation by sending high levels of signals in your body. Over time, this can shrink the brain.
When you remember a traumatic event while tapping, you can reduce the signals and break traumatic associations.
Once you break the association between your traumatic memories and fight or flight response, it stays broken.
EFT Tapping is a powerful tool. Learn how Dr Dawson uses this to help war veterans in the full episode!

[25:44] Break the Trauma Loop and Calm Down

When traumatic memories and experiences haunt you, you fall into a trauma loop.
We have evolved to become highly attuned to potential dangers, even if they’re just possibilities.
Our modern world doesn’t help with this condition, where people say that it’s hard to find time to meditate and calm down.
Dr Dawson shares that a few minutes of mediation will pay off. Not only will you be calmer physically and physiologically, but you will also perform better.
You cannot afford not to meditate.

[31:55] How to Get into the Flow State

Scientists found that when someone is in flow, they have a characteristic brainwave state.
They sought to re-engineer this and train ordinary people to achieve the same state.
We can achieve the flow state through mediation like the mystics do or through peak performance.
Once you hit this state repeatedly, your brain will be naturally addicted to the boost in anandamide. You get into the same state of bliss that you achieve through drugs.
There are several other benefits of meditation. Listen to the full episode to hear what it can do.

[37:10] Letting Go of Local Reality

Dr Dawson shares that great figures throughout history have let go of ordinary states to achieve the extraordinary.
In meditation, you have the opportunity to let go of local reality and go to a field of consciousness.
This place is where we can deliberately change our belief systems and then affect our local reality.
When you enter the non-local reality, you can change the hardware of the brain.
Immerse yourself in meditation, and it will change your mind and brain. Then it starts to change your whole life.

[44:18] Mindset Changes on Sports and Exercise

Athletes often get injured when they’re not in the flow state. Athletes who have a long career tend to know how to pace themselves.
For people looking to lose weight, it’s important to associate exercise with pleasure rather than pain. This strategy helps to stretch people’s limits without burning out.
Learn to listen to your body and stop when it tells you to do so.
Athletes are typically expected to push themselves. It’s the same principle: they need to learn to listen to their body and understand their limits.
The way we build strength and endurance is through recovery. Don’t forget this part of the training.

[56:11] Be an Agent of Positive Emotional Contagion

People can affect their environment. Our emotions and moods are contagious.
We don’t know how far our positivity can reach. It can affect hundreds and even thousands. It can even save lives.
Become an agent of compassion and love. Not only will you help others, but you also help yourself.
Listen to the full episodes to learn about the research on spreading positivity and happiness.

[1:05:36] Living Longer

On average, optimists live ten years longer than pessimists.
Negative emotions are like corrosive acids that will damage your body.
You need to work on being optimistic and healing your trauma simultaneously.
Note that this is a continuous process.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

‘I just said, “You know, universe, what is your purpose for me in the coming year?” And the universe, I heard these words, they said, “We've given you the gift of happiness. Now, go give it to everyone else, too.” So that's really what I see myself doing now and where I came from originally and where I am today.’

‘It's [EFT] like pushing the reset button for your emotions. So you're upset, you're angry or you're stressed whatever way, then you simply tap on these points very, very quickly.’

‘You cannot afford not to meditate. The gains in productivity, problem solving ability, and creativity is so enormous that if you don't spend that hour or that half hour, you are missing out on your biggest single leverage point for success in your life.’

‘In meditation for a little while, you let go of local reality, and you simply identify with the field of consciousness that is the cosmos. There's this huge information field in which we swim in it. We're like fish looking for water when we're looking for God or spirituality.’

‘I wrote in my journal, “My heart is just burning with love and bursting with gratitude”. Because you come down in the states of such ecstasy and the rest of the world in your life, and it is a world of magic. You then create that magic all around you.’

‘Athletes, first of all, when they're in the zone, when they're in flow, they injure themselves less and their performance goes up. It's that old Yerkes-Dodson law, currently referred to a little bit of stress is fine.’

‘Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” to go to them that hate you. Yeah, very good advice, even though it's 2,000 years old. And when you do this, you're producing emotional contagion around you. You have no idea how far it's going.’

About Dr Dawson Church

Dr Dawson Church is a leading health writer and researcher whose principal work includes The Genie In Your Genes, Mind To Matter and Bliss Brain. His research linked the connection of consciousness, emotion and gene expression. Moreover, he has looked into the science of peak mental states, flow states and happiness.

With his research, Dr Dawson conducted clinical trials and founded The Institute for Integrative Healthcare to promote groundbreaking new treatments. To date, his largest program is the Veterans Stress Projects which has offered free treatment to over 20,000 veterans with PTSD.

Dr Dawson further shares his research through EFT Universe, one of the largest alternative medicine websites. In addition, he is the science columnist for Unity magazine and has written blog posts for the Huffington Post.

In his undergraduate and graduate courses at Baylor University, Dr Dawson was the first student to graduate from the University Scholar’s program in 1979. He earned his doctorate from the Integrative Healthcare at Holos University under the famed neurosurgeon Norman Shealy, MD, PhD, the American Holistic Medical Association founder.

Are you interested to know more about Dr Dawson’s work? Check out his website and EFT Universe.

You can also reach Dr Dawson on Twitter and Facebook.

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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they learn the benefits of meditation and the science behind EFT tapping.

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To pushing the limits,

Lisa.

Full Transcript Of The Podcast

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Your host, Lisa Tamati, here with you and today I have another very, very special guest for you that is perhaps going to change your life. A really very interesting man. Dr Dawson Church, PhD, who is an award winning science writer with three bestselling books to his credit. The Genie in Your Genes was the first book to demonstrate that emotions drive gene expression. So that's all-around epigenetics, epigenetics and how your emotions can actually change the way your genes are expressing. The second book Mind to Matter, which is really something that you must read, shows that the brain creates much of what we think of as objective reality. And his third book, Bliss Brain demonstrates that peak mental states rapidly remodel the brain for happiness.

Now, Dawson has conducted dozens of clinical trials and founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare to promote ground-breaking new treatments. Its largest program, the Veteran Stress Project has offered over free treatment to over 20,000 veterans who are suffering from PTSD. All for love, no money involved, an absolute amazing project. Dawson now shares how to apply these health and performance breakthroughs through his EFT universe. It was just an absolutely fascinating conversation with him. I'm very, very interested always in neuroplasticity because I was told, with my mum story, as you all know, that there was no hope that her brain would not be able to remodel and not be able to learn again and that is so far from the truth. In his new book, A Bliss Brain, award winning science writer Dawson Church focuses on the positive and negative mood and negative thinking and how it's associated with activation of brain regions like the prefrontal cortex - the state of yourself, and positive emotions such as altruism and compassion.

He blends cutting edge neuroscience with the stories of people who've had first-hand experience or brain change. And Bliss Brain really examines the effects of emotional states on brain structure. Suffice to say, you have to listen to this episode. I think if you're struggling with anxiety, struggling with stress, feeling the effects of ongoing long-term stress on your body and with illnesses and sicknesses and depression and all of these things that hamper just so many of us, so many of the people that I work with, and certainly I struggle with it on occasion, as well, then this is a book for you.

Dr. Dawson really emanates happiness and joy. But that wasn't always the case, he was someone who had suffered from depression quite badly in his early years. And this is what sent him down this great path. He manages to marry the science with the traditional things like Chinese medicine and Meridians and energy medicine. He's been able to quantify it so that people like me who love science in general open minded sceptics, I like to call myself, can actually understand why these things work. And that's really, really important.

Before we head over to Dr. Dawson. I just like to remind you, we have now our Patron membership for the podcast. If you'd like to get involved with the podcast, if you'd like to support what we do here at Pushing the Limits. We've been doing it now for five and a half years, and near on 200 episodes. I can tell you, into each episode goes a heck of a lot of work and a lot of research, and a lot of book reading, a lot of time. And we really need — to keep this on air — we really need your help. So if you'd like to come and support us and get a whole lot of extra member benefits, then head on over to patron.lisatamati.com, that's patron.lisatamati.com. You can join us in our tribe there. I would really, really appreciate you doing that. And as always, please give us a rating and review for the show because that really does help us as well and share it with your family and friends if you get benefit from us. I'd also love to hear from you, if you've got a question about one of the guests. If you want to dive deeper into one of the topics, please reach out to me, support@lisatamati.com.

I'd like to remind you too, that we also have our epigenetics program, which is our flagship program that we have that looks at your genes and how to optimise your genes, and how to understand the nuance of what foods, what times of the day, what types of exercise, what are your dominant hormones, what are your dominant neurotransmitters and how that plays out in your life. So if you'd like to join us for that, please head over to lisatamati.com and go under the Work With Us button and you'll see all the information there.

Now over to Dr. Dawson Church.

Lisa: Hi everyone, and welcome to Pushing the Limits. I'm super excited to have you here with me today. I have an absolute legend, a man who has done so much research and so much good in the world, Dr. Dawson Church with me. Welcome to the show. Dawson, it's really, really exciting to have you with us today. Thanks for taking the time.

Dr. Dawson Church: For me, too, Lisa. We have had such fun now and the next hour. We just had off the air, this would be a fabulous time for you and me and everyone else combined.

Lisa: Exactly. We already had a couple of really good connections. That’s fantastic.

So, Dawson, well, you are an incredible man with a number of books. You have your research, you're an expert on the brain and the mind and body connection. Can you give us a little bit of background about how did you get into the space and what you've been studying? I mean, it's a big question, but we'll start there anyway.

Dr. Dawson: Well, let’s start right in the middle. I worked at a book about five years ago called Mind to Matter. It was really off the cuff project — I was interviewing scientists, I was trying to trace all of the scientific pieces, the links, the chain between having a thought and a thing. And I thought, “Well, I'll find some links to the chain, not others.” But I found all of them. It was so interesting to see how our thoughts literally become things, how our brains function like transducers, from the universal field of information and we then manifest those things all around us. While I was doing that I got into — so I've been meditating everyday for like 20 years plus — but I own some really esoteric forums, our meditation practice by masters who've done it like 10,000 hours. By the end, I find myself getting really, really, really, really happy. I was already a really happy person. But at the end, I had to find myself getting super happy, no matter what the circumstances. But we had to look at all why people who do certain styles of meditation gets so happy. That's why I wrote the book, Bliss Brain. I began the process, 50 years before that, as a teenager, when I was so toxically depressed and anxious and miserable. I was suicidal, I mean, I want to just kill myself when I was 12, 13, 14 years old. And I looked into my own eyes, walked past a full-length mirror one day when I was 15, looked into my own eyes, and I said to myself, those are the saddest eyes I've ever seen. I realised I was so messed up inside. So, I went to live on a spiritual community for many years. I learned meditation, learned energy healing, studied psychology. Wanted to figure out how I could make myself happier, and got a little bit happier over the years. And then when I began to meditate every single day, I didn't have to use energy therapies like EFT tapping, suddenly I got a lot happier. After Mind to Matter, doing these esoteric meditations, got super happy, I want to then just tell it to the world. So I had this epiphany. But I don't want to retreat every New Year's Eve and spend about two, three weeks just really getting quiet meditating, asking the universe, “What are my marching orders for the coming year?”

I was walking the labyrinth with a group of about 40 people at a meditation centre in New Year's, couple of years ago. I stood at the centre of the labyrinth at the stroke of midnight. And I just said, “Universe, what is your purpose for me in the coming year?” And the universe, I heard these words, they said, “We've given you the gift of happiness. Now, go give it to everyone else, too.” So that's really what I see myself doing now and where I came from originally and where I am today.

Lisa: Oh, wow, that is beautifully put in. So, Bliss Brain because you’ve written a number of books. Mind to Matter was the last one and then Bliss Brain is this one. And when people are listening to this, a lot of people will think, “Well, yes.” But is this, especially a lot of the people that are scientifically, believe in the science and they want evidence. What I found so interesting with your work is that you've met managed to marry the science, the quantified effects of energy medicine, of meditation, of pressure points, of EFT, all of these things is energy, things and actually quantified those with science in very rigorous-based, evidence-based, which for me is always a fascinating thing. Because I'm very much an open minded person, but I like to have that rigor, that sceptical mind, that prefrontal cortex that often jumps in and goes, “But is this real?” And you said, on the cusp between, being open minded and being scientific and you've seem to marry these two, just beautifully in your work and being able to quantify some of the ancient traditions the Chinese medicine, the Meridians, these types of things that have been known for thousands of years, but are now actually being shown to be correct and with science. Can you tell us about that?

Dr. Dawson: What's amazing is if you're taking a pedal instrument, handheld instrument, called the galvanometer. It's battery powered, it picks up the electrical resistance on your skin. And so, at my live workshops, I will run this over people's skin, and the little muscle device makes beeping sound whenever it hits an acupuncture point. And it's because those points are very, very high conductance, low resistance. You'll run this little deal over the person's face, nothing's happening, it'll hit an acupuncture point like this over here is on the bladder meridian, this point over here, and suddenly the machine goes crazy and starts beeping and flashing only in this tiny point about a millimetre in diameter, and no other surrounding skin. That's the exact point shown in a 2400-year-old Chinese scroll.

These ancients knew about all these points, energy flows, the chakras, the meridians, and so on. Now, we have instrumentation to measure them. At least the cool thing about the measurement process is, as we're measuring the effects of energy therapies, energy treatments, we're finding that as we quantify them, the effects aren't tiny. They aren't 3%, 5%. Sometimes they're astronomical. Like for example, the EFT. So in meta-analysis, meta-analys-s gathered together 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 studies into a bundle. And then, they extract all the information on a scale of how effective a therapy is. An effective therapy gets a score of two. A really effective therapy gets a score of five, and an extremely effective therapy is a score of eight. So two, five, eight, those are the three points in a meta-analysis that tells you whether a therapy has some effect or a huge effect.

In studies in meta-analysis of EFT tapping for anxiety on that 2-5-8 scale, the effect of EFT is 12. It’s off the odds, off the scale, off the chart. Same thing for depression, same thing for PTSD. So now that we're quantifying these therapies, meditation, EFT, other kinds of therapies, we're applying some of them, have incredible results at the level of the genome, proteins, proteins expression, enzymes, all kinds of processes in our bodies.

Lisa: Wow, that is, okay, because you've written a book called The Genie in Your Genes. It was a marvellous title because I studied epigenetics and genetics. I know that you collaborated on the book with Dr. Bruce Lipton. I was like that’s one of my favourite books of all time, and actually got me down this rabbit hole of epigenetics. And so, I've looked at epigenetics in relation to the food and the nutrition and the social environment and your neurotransmitters and these sorts of things. But when I heard you talking about how it affects, like meditation — you're able to see, I think it was 72 genes or something, where it actually changes the expression of those genes in real time, when you're doing these meditations. And these were areas, I mean you know the areas better than me, perhaps you can talk about it. Because I think a lot of people don't understand that we have a DNA that we've inherited from mum and dad, that's our code if you like. But all throughout life and throughout every day and with everything that we do, we're turning genes on and off for the want of a better description, up regulating or down regulating certain genes with our environment. So what sort of things can we influence through meditation and through EFT, and so on?

Dr. Dawson: That is the key question to ask me, Lisa. We can influence our gene expression with things like diet. You eat certain foods and eat really healthy foods is to turn on certain genes and result and certain processes in your body. And so, the early after they studied and study, 1999, 2002, were all about introducing dietary factors usually in experimental subjects of rats, mice, and then seeing how that affected their gene expression. But what I am much more interested in than things like drugs and external factors like food, is I am super interested in what we can do with this thing behind our bars over here and our beliefs and our attitudes and our energy. It turns out, I mean, that's funny you just mentioned, by done by remarkable, insight-filled therapist called Beth Maharaj. And she found that in an EFT session, a one hour EFT session of psychotherapy using EFT acupuncture tapping, all those acupuncture points, 72 genes were changed. And again, about 15% of our genome is fixed, like I am two metres tall, I have grey eyes and brown hair, not very much of that anymore, and I just have certain physical characteristics that are what they are. Those are fixed genes, but those are only about 15% of the genome. The other 85% is changed. When I have a negative thought, I start producing cortisol, I send a signal down to the medulla on my adrenal glands, my adrenal gland starts producing cortisol, and adrenaline. Adrenaline is your fast-acting, stress hormone; cortisol is your slow acting, but still, it hasn't two minutes and two minutes is turning everything on and off all kinds of other processes off in your body.

And so I'm doing that with my mind alone. If I'm having high cortisol day after day because I'm worried, because I'm stressed, because I’m anxious. Now, what I'm doing is I'm driving my body into this fight or flight state over and over and over again, chronic stress. It's depleting everything else, my body, my immune system, it results in muscular wasting. It literally, over time, produces calcification of the brain's learning memory centres. And you want a lot of calcium in your teeth, a lot of calcium in your bones. You do not want calcium in your brain, but it does. It literally deposits calcium in your brain's memory centres. So that is the effect epigenetically of our thoughts and our beliefs. So, it's so important that we take control of this, like there's a saying in the biology of belief that has positively positive thoughts releasing the ones going our way as having a dramatic effect on our physical bodies.

Lisa: And this is like, because I've seen those scans where you have the shrunken brain that's been exposed to a lot of stress. The hippocampus shrinks and the prefrontal cortex and then you have the healthy brain that's nice and plump on the other side, if you like. It is a very good visual because this is very much like we tend to think, ‘Well, yes, I'm stressed and but that's neither here nor there, toughen up and get on with it’ type of attitude. I think that this, I think we need to distinguish between short term hermetic stressors, which are good for us - the things like going in the sauna, or going into cold water or going for a run and exercise and things like that, that are slightly outside the comfort zone. But not these long-term or even medium-term stressors that are going on day for day and week upon week, and month upon month. Those are the ones that really, when you are affecting the genes on a daily basis and your cortisol, and your adrenaline are just pumping all the time.

And this is something like with my genetic makeup, I have a deficiency in receptors of dopamine, so I'm constantly after dopamine. I'm always chasing the source that I can never reach, right? And I have a lot of adrenaline and I was exposed to a lot of testosterone in the womb. So I have that personality that take action, risk taking, jumping, still playing, no strategy, that type of a personality. And these things really affect us.

However, I can take control of that through practice. I can do things that can actually help me control my innate biology if you like. So, how can people, I wanted to ask, because I think a lot of people won't know what EFT is, per se. Would you explain what that particular type of energy work is?

Dr. Dawson: EFT is very popular. It's used by over 20 million people worldwide. It's grown purely by word of mouth, there is no drug company, there is no advertising campaign, people study each other on EFT. It is often called tapping because you simply tap like this on acupuncture points. There are about 13 W's, commonly they're linked to the 13 meridians of the body. It's amazing. I'm working on a video now where I have to describe EFT in two minutes. And it's like the body's reset switch. A therapist used that in a paper, in a peer-reviewed journal recently. It's like pushing the reset button for your emotions. So if you're upset, you're angry or you're stressed whatever way, then you simply tap on these points very, very quickly and it resets you.

So, there are several of these points. While you are thinking about the bad stuff in your life, you combine that reflection of ruminating on the stuff that bothers you with the tapping. And if you ruminate on the bad stuff, what happens normally, if you're just thinking about the bad stuff, is you're sending a signal through those neural bundles and they're getting bigger and bigger and faster. That's what we call re-traumatisation. That's when you re-traumatise yourself and we find over time, that shrinks the brain; the brains of people who are traumatised as children are on average 8% smaller than those who weren't traumatised as children. Traumatic stress is, it isn't psychological, it's physiological. So that's what you're doing if you're retraumatising yourself.

If you remember that bad thing at the same time you tap, then what we see in MRI EFT studies is that the emotional midbrain gets all upset, it's all aroused as a result of thinking about the bad things. When you start tapping, all that arousal just goes down. For example, one veteran I was working with, because we work with over 20,000 veterans, giving them free treatment free of charge. What one veteran was really bothered by a memory when he was in Iraq, he was a medic. And right in the beginning of his tour of duty, one of his friends was shot. And so, he had to deal with all the gruesomeness of that friend's death. One of the things he had to do was he had to clean the uniform of his dead friend to send back to his mum and dad back in the US. Cleaning the human remains and tissue out of the uniform was tremendously triggering for him. He remembers this event, he was cleaning them out in the medic’s hut. And then he'd have to run outside to take a breath of fresh air because the smell was so bad that he'd run back in a little more cleaning, run back out again. We tapped on this terrible traumatic memory. He just then had this complete sense of relaxation. He said, ‘I'm so glad I was the person who got to clean that uniform because it was my way of honouring my friend’. And as his emotional midbrain calmed down, his story changed to where it was no longer one of tragedy, but one of honouring and one of love and one affection with his friend, and you do this act of service. So if he shifts brains function that way, and it shifts it in just a few seconds like that. There's no therapy, there's no elaborate attempt to understand how you are the way you are, you just tap while you're remembering the bad stuff, while all of those new neural pathways are fully engaged, that then calms the brain down immediately. And then I met this young man again, I saw him again, about three months later, talked about the uniform, talked about his dead friend, he was still totally calm about it. And we find in long-term studies, that once you break the association in the brain between that traumatic memory and going into fight or flight, the association stays broken, and people find later on down the road.

Lisa: That is absolutely amazing because I think, the longer we all live, we all end up with traumatic, hopefully not as horrific experiences as that. Are you aware I had last week on the show Dr. Don Wood, who I'd love to introduce you actually to. He is also a trauma expert who works with vets and PTSD and everything, addiction and so on. He has a four-hour program that he takes people into the, out of beta into alpha brainwave states and takes that high definition sort of movie that's playing in people's heads around this event or events. And he says, as a description, puts it into black and white, and it's no longer triggering. So probably a different direction to get to a similar result. But you think we can do this actually, in minutes with EFT, where you can actually take away the power of that memory. Because I mean, I've been through, unfortunately, my listeners know, I lost my dad, just seven months ago, eight months ago. It was a very traumatic event and process that we went through. The intruding memories, the recurrent nightmares, all of the horror that surrounds that event is very powerful, how much it drains your daily life and your energy. I've found, since that event, I've been doing various things, but it's still very, very raw and very real to me. You are triggered a hundred times a day, and it's just draining your power to be able to work fully in the world, and to be the best version of you that you can be. I sort of know that and I'm trying to work out ways. So this is definitely one that I'm going to jump into.

Dr. Dawson: Sorry, you lost your dad and what you'll find is that you don't have to let go at the normal sense. In fact, we encourage people to really grieve, really get into their feelings, that and then do the tapping as well. What happens is you process them very quickly. So we aren’t telling these veteran, ‘Don't think about the bad thing. Don't think about the death. Don't think about all the trauma’. We say, ‘Do think about it, but tap while you're doing it’. And then that breaks the association in the brain between that traumatic memory and going into that stress response.

So I really encourage you to do that because we've seen so many people do this now. We work with examples, with kids who lost their parents in the Rwandan genocide. Many of them, still 25 years later, have severe PTSD. We work with victims of school shootings in the US and various places. And again, mothers and fathers who've lost their kids in school shootings. We work with them successfully with EFT. So it's not like we're just working on superficial stuff, but it is that we're trying to work on what you’re being worried about in the report you have to turn it into your boss next week, and it also works on severe psychological trauma.

Lisa: This is so exciting. And it is like resetting the brain. I mean, Dr. Woods mentions that it's sort of like a error glitch, and you're just going round and round and you can't get out of this sort of pattern of things.

Dr. Dawson: Yes. The trauma loop, we call it the trauma loop. The trauma loop, it's literally a loop between the thymus, thalamus, hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala in the centre of the brain. What's supposed to be happening is that input associated be referred to the prefrontal cortex and other regions to moderate emotions. And it isn't; it's stuck in an emotional midbrain, looping and looping and looping. Here’s the thing is, you can't talk yourself out of it. Like I was worried about a situation at work a few weeks ago, and I would say to myself, ‘It's time to meditate now. It’s 6am in the morning, I'm meditating. I will not think about that thing at work’. Well, of course, within nervous sighs, obsessed with a theory, I say that ‘Dawson, I'm going to let that go. It's meditation time now. I'm not thinking about thing at work, I’m going to return my mind to the meditative state’. Now, the thing at work, we cannot talk ourselves out of it, our conscious minds hard, because our brains didn't evolve that way. Our brains evolved to be extremely attuned to the tiger in the grass, or the remotest possibility, the tiger in the grass. And if you had an ancestor who took her mind off the potential threat to focus on smelling the flowers —

Lisa: You wouldn't be here.

So it makes sense that we have this hyper vigilance. When you've got a PTSD situation going on, you're really hyper vigilant, and you're in this constant state. But it is even all the little things, like in preparation for this interview yesterday, I was just so into researching and stuff. And then all night, my brains just going about Dr. Dawson and what he's doing. Like at three o'clock in the morning, I had to get up and read, keep reading one of your books because it was just, it's not leaving my brain. And then I did my breathing exercises, I did my meditation and eventually went back to sleep. So, you gave me a bit of a sleepless night last night.

Dr. Dawson: I’m so sorry about that.

Lisa: But in a good way.

Dr. Dawson: At least you’re reading something good.

Lisa: Yeah, well in a good way, because I was excited about all this stuff. I think it's very powerful. As a health coach, and I work with people on a daily basis. Probably the first thing that people come to me with is depression and anxiety. And then all the health problems and in follow on from that, and that seems to be what so many people are dealing with on an absolute day to day basis. In our modern world, I think that a lot of these things, not that our ancestors didn't have stressors, because they obviously did. But we have perhaps, a hundred tigers coming at us a day in the form of grumpy emails from our bosses or whatever. The amount we have to process in a day for many of us, especially people working on computers and all that sort of stuff with a thousand things coming at you all the time. And it can feel like and so, often, I say when I say to people, ‘You need to do some meditation, and you need to calm the mind. You need to get out in nature’. But they go, ‘I haven't got time. I haven't got time. I'm working 17 hours a day, and I’m a mom of three, how the hell am I going to find time to meditate?’ What's your answer to that?

Dr. Dawson: Actually, you don't have time to meditate. In one piece of research, I talked about several of these in my book, Bliss Brain. One piece of research done by really forward thinking US agency called the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, they've been at the forefront of all kinds of parts of the human potential movement for the last 50 years. They did a study of complex decision-making. Now, this isn't whether I should have grilled cheese or macaroni for lunch, this is when you have to do a scenario that’s meant to solve global warming, or reduce the deficit or solve racial violence in a city. It's the really complicated problems. What they found was that when you're in a kind of flow state, generated by meditation, that people are 490 times better, percent better at solving complex problems; five times is good. Another study by the McKinsey Consulting Group found a 10 year study of high performance executives found that they are five times as productive when they're in these flow states. We're measuring flow now as people meditate, we're finding the same thing. So that even 15 minutes, 20 minutes spent at the end of the day will literally pay dividends. Another series of studies done by Harvard University found that if you do that for only an hour, meditate for an hour, you are more productive and more creative for 48 hours in the future. So you cannot afford not to meditate. The gains in productivity, problem solving ability and creativity are so enormous that if you don't spend that hour or that half hour, you are missing out on your biggest single leverage point for success in your life.

Lisa: Well, that's a really good argument for it. Have you read the book, we’re talking about Steven Kotler, have you read Stealing Fire?

Dr. Dawson: I love Stealing Fire, I’ve seen Steven Kotler several times on that and I use — and I have five books, in Bliss Brain and the acknowledgments say, ‘This book, Bliss Brain, was based, there five people really influenced me’. As Steven Kotler’s Stealing Fire was one of those five.

Lisa: His book really influenced me, too. It was like, ‘Wow, this is incredible stuff, understanding how to get into the flow state’. As an athlete and my background as a ultra-endurance athlete, we did stupid distances. I would sometimes get into that flow state, and I still can't do it at will, unfortunately. Maybe I need to meditate more. But the performance that you could bring when you were in that state was far beyond what you normally could bring, and understanding how to tap into that on an actual day to day basis. I find it, too, in a previous life, I was a jeweller as well, so I was a goldsmith in head shops, retail shops. And that I would get into the flow state making jewellery when I was creative, now in painting. So when I get time, do those types of things like painting and making something, do they qualify as meditation? I mean, what actually qualifies as meditation because a lot of people seem to think you have to be sitting on your floor or with your legs crossed and humming or something, doing a chant. Is that the only way to meditate?

Dr. Dawson: After World War II, there was a British engineer who worked on the radar system in the defence of Britain and his name is Maxwell Cade. And he put together a simple EG, and they had hook up spiritual masters. This EG, he was reading the five basic brainwaves — now, we know there are more than that — but he was reading the simple brainwaves. What he discovered is that he took up a Pentecostal faith healer, or a Taoist healer from China, or he hooked up a Confucian or in like a Buddhist or a Hindu or kabbalistic Jewish mystic. What he found was that even though their religious backgrounds and religious practices were totally different, they all have the same brainwave pattern. So that was the pattern of the mystics, we now knew what it was.

I talked about this in Bliss Brain, this void of discovery, as Maxwell Cade was doing this in the 50s and 60s. And then he had a student, at a wise he had hooked out. They said, ‘Well, let's hook up other people. Let's hook up Louie Armstrong. Let's look up jazz musicians in flow’. And they found same bliss brain pattern in them. They said, ‘Well, let's hook up some high performing executives and business people who are at their peaks and scientists’. So they found that regardless of the profession, whether in flow, they all have this characteristic brainwave state. The next thing that we had to realise over the last 20 years of MRI research is, now this is crucial, we used to think that it was just one of those happy accidents. There are only a few Louis Armstrong's. There are only a few Hussein Bolts. There only are a few Swami Vivekananda’s. We used to think these were special people. Once we discovered the brainwave state, some smart scientists then said, ‘Let's reverse engineer this. Let's train ordinary people to attain the same brainwave state’. And lo and behold, bliss brain, they could. We now like — I do seven, eight retreats sometimes. I'm doing virtual retreats now, but we do live retreats, usually once or twice a year. And the first day, it's going to take people, maybe we can induce that state, usually within 30 minutes. By the end of the retreat, start four minutes, they have learned to hit the state of a 10,000-hour meditation master. And they're doing it in under four minutes at the end by the end of the retreat.

So they're trainable now that we're reverse engineering them. And so one state, one way into the flow state is through meditation like the mystics do. The second way is through peak performance. Either way, you can get to that same state and be ignited by flow triggers that put you into that state, and they're reliable. They put you in that state every single time. And once you hit that state, Lisa, over and over and over again, the cool thing in bliss brain is all about addiction. For example, the one molecule that you generate in your brain in these deep states is called anandamide. It has the same chemical structure as THC, the active molecule in marijuana, docks the same receptor sites in your brain.

So you're flooding what are called your endocannabinoid receptors in your body and your brain, with natural THC, just generated by your own brain. It's a very big boost of serotonin. You're mentioning dopamine earlier, and I'm going to send you a meditation that, I've just been playing with this recently. This isn't available to the public and won’t be for about two years. But Mind Valley is working on a huge new program, and we're training people in this one meditation. They literally feel the rush of dopamine they get because dopamine is the same reward system as engaged by cocaine and heroin. So they're sitting there doing this meditation. They're getting serotonin, which is the same as suicide and magic mushrooms. Same Lego structure, they're getting anandamide, THC. They're getting the same molecules that are getting in ayahuasca cocaine and heroin and alcohol, all in one meditation. And so what we're now having to do, it's so crazy, we're bringing people to these ecstatic states, when you read Rumi and St. Catherine of Sienna. I mean, these people were in absolute bliss. Essentially their brains were full of these endogenous drugs. And so, we’re actually learning to generate these in people's brains. What we now have to do at the end of my meditations is you have to spend a few minutes, talk people down, talking them down off this high. They are so spaced out, they can't drive a car, they open their eyes off meditation, they don't know what planet we’re on. So we spend some time doing some orienting. ‘By the way, your name is what's the name again? What time of day, is it? Which country do you live in? What's your job?’ So we have to help them back into reality because they get so far out there, in just a few minutes of meditation. We’re now able to do that.

Lisa: Without any extraneous sort of, chemicals and things that can damage your impulse?

Dr. Dawson: No, none whatsoever.

Lisa: I have to ask this — because and this maybe outside the wheelhouse a little bit — when you're in those sorts of states, do you think you can connect? Is there a spiritual, wouldn’t you know? Do you believe that there's a spiritual dimension to what's on the other side, when people pass away, when we die? Is that what the mystics and some of the spiritual healers are tapping into something higher? I mean, I know we probably can't measure this, although I've just read some books on NDEs like near death experiences and the scientific rigor that a couple of these amazing scientists have spent years studying. What's your take, just your personal take on these higher states and being able to connect perhaps, to something beyond us?

Dr. Dawson: Albert Einstein wrote in the 1930s, he wrote that also the big discoveries have been made in that altered state of oneness with the universe. In chapter 15 of his book Think and Grow Rich, people think that Napoleon Hill's book from the 1930s Think and Grow Rich is about money, but it's actually about spirituality. It's about letting go. Napoleon Hill says, ‘I let go of my ordinary states, I enter an altered reality. And there I commune with St. Francis of Assisi, and Thomas Edison, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and all these great figures from the past. And that's where I download all of my answers, these questions from’.

So throughout history, people have been letting go of — what I call, now in my books, I call this local reality and non-local reality. And so in meditation, for a little while, you let go of local reality, and you simply identify with the field of consciousness that is the cosmos. There's this huge information field in which we swim in it. We're like fish looking for water. When we're looking for God or spirituality, we're like the fish looking for water. We're swimming in consciousness, and our brains are not generating consciousness. Our brains are transceivers of consciousness from this universal field. They then translate this universal appeal information into what we think of as local reality. But we're making up or making it up and we change our minds. When we shift our belief systems, when we orient ourselves deliberately to non-local reality, our local reality shifts dramatically and super quickly. Our brain shift, Lisa, in one of the examples I give in Mind to Matter, I talk about a TV reporter called Graham Phillips, who has a show called Catalyst. He went on an eight-week meditation retreat. They took his whole TV crew into a lab. They did a whole work up on his brain, his body. They use the high resolution MRI to measure the volume of neurons in each part of his brain. He then learned to meditate over the next eight weeks, and they brought him back to the lab after eight weeks ran the MRI scans again and the piece of his brain that is responsible for coordinating emotional regulation across different brain regions called the dentate gyrus — it's really tiny, it's about the size of a little fingernail, but it's right in the centre of your brain. It has tentacles going all over the brain and helps regulate being upset, being irritable, being angry, being annoyed, being stressed. That, the hardware of his dentate gyrus grew 22.8% in eight weeks. When you enter a non-local reality, it's changing the hardware of your brain, and it's not taking 10,000 hours, it's doing it in just a few hours. And he then started to see very different as your transceiver, transducer changes, then it is very different results outside of yourself.

So we are pure consciousness, we happen to be the body for a little while. We won't have a body forever. What you can do is every morning meditation. You can simply let go of local reality, you become one with non-local reality. The other cool thing there is when you come down from that space, Lisa, you are so full of love. I mean, I just cry when I come down. I walked on the beach the other day after meditation, I was just weeping with gratitude. I wrote in my journal, ‘My heart is just burning with love and bursting with gratitude’. Because you come down in the states of such ecstasy and the rest of the world in your life, and it is a world of magic. You then create that magic all around you. That's how I write my books. That's how I live my life, how I do my marriage and children and friends and everything. Well, I just can’t tell you how let's call this brain. It isn't like I'm feeling a little bit of hay brain, it is an ecstatic brain. I mean, in this exciting state, and becomes your new normal. Every day, it starts to change your physical brain. It starts to change the hardware of your brain, and then that starts to change your entire life.

Lisa: That sounds like a piece of something that I want. And I think, everybody who is listening will be like, ‘I want what that guy's got’. Because you emanate this. I've listened to many of your lectures and your talks and your podcasts and stuff, and you emanate this beautifulness — for want of a better description — it just seems to pour out of you. That is obviously the work that you've done. What I find, I was listening on Ben Pakulski, my amazing man. You're on his podcast, that was one of the ones that I listened to. He was talking about, as an athlete, and I've had an athletic background. As a young athlete, especially, and he said he was the same, we're actually running from stuff and we were fighting and we were forcing and actually probably brutalising our bodies in order to deal with something that was going on in our brains and trying to prove things. I think a lot of athletes live in that state and it's actually encouraged to live in that state, if you have a burning and I've even propagated the state and others. Where you're using the fire of anger, of being put down, of being let down to fuel your performance. And into a certain degree that works. I mean, being obviously, an incredible bodybuilder in my life that turned into running ridiculous kilometres and across deserts and so on. I don't run any more though stupidly long distances. One of the reasons is, I don't have the massive issues in my brain anymore. I have not needing to run away from something, prove something. I'm not saying that all athletes are doing this. But I do think that there is a large number of people who are handling things through expression of this sports, and how do you change that mindset? Because I still very much have that mindset. When I go to the gym, I'm there to smash myself, I'm going to punish myself, I'm going to work hard. I'm going to push through the pain barriers because that is the culture we've grown up as athletes. You work hard. If it's not hurting, then you're probably not doing it enough. How do we change that conversation and reach still these very elite levels without having that type of a mentality? Sorry for that.

Dr. Dawson: If you aren't in flow, you will injure yourself. I remember interviewing members of American football players and these are usually very large men. They’re very large men and they're very athletic, and they can jump like a metre share, vertical jump, and they reach remarkable speeds. They can start running and running really, really, really quickly, the catching. I remember this one young man said, ‘This is my million-dollar hand’. He was going to pay a lot of money as an American football star and he said ‘I've broken my fingers, at least one sometimes two or three times every season. And I can't afford to have this happen to my million-dollar hand’. After he learned EFT, after he learned to meditate, after he learned centring, getting into flow each game, he never broke another finger. He had one injury when he was just learning to meditate and do EFT. And they said, ‘Oh, it's the Achilles tendon injuries. You'll be out of the game for at least 12 weeks or maybe 16 weeks.’ Three weeks later, he was fine. And so, athletes, first of all, when they're in the zone, when they're in flow, they injure themselves less and their performance goes up. It's that old Yerkes-Dodson law, currently referred to a little bit of stress is fine. Anyone has a little bit of stress. Now what I'm what I'm getting at right now, I mean, to you and me, if I didn't have a fair amount of cortisol and adrenaline, I'd be a really boring guest.

Lisa: To some degree, we want that when we’re ready.

Dr. Dawson: We want that. Absolutely, but not too much of it.

Lisa: And like we're in a flow state, I'm in a flow state right now. Because I feel like I am because I just love learning from people like you. I'm just, give me more, all the heroes and stuff, because I'm learning and that is for me, one of my flow states studying and science. That really helps me. But how do we change that conversation for athletes? So that they're not going out to deliberately hurt themselves, but still able to reach those. I remember one story if you don't mind sharing, I think it was with your niece? Was it Jessica or something?

Dr. Dawson: Yes, Jessica.

Lisa: Do you mind sharing that story?

Dr. Dawson: Yeah, she is the national champion at rhythmic gymnastics. She meets me out there after the rank every year. So four years in a row, she was the US national champion. But again, she was pushing herself, she was collapsing inside. She was not doing it all well. On the outside, her performances look great. On the inside, she was just suffering and she eventually just couldn't go anymore, and just had withdrawn from the sport and collapsed. So that's not sustainable. What you find for the athletes who have a long-term career usually is they've learned to pace themselves. They've learned to reach that state of flow and stay there over time, they aren’t pushing themselves.

The other cool thing that happens, I've done a lot of work with women who are overweight or obese. They are often at war with their bodies, they have been ignoring their bodies, turning their bodies out, hating their bodies for over four decades. They don't like exercise on the whole. And it's hard for them to exercise. Like if you're heavy, there’s strain on your joints and your muscles. It's difficult to exercise, there's no great reward for exercising. So what we try to do, we don't even call that module of our program exercise, we call it joyful movement. Joyful movement. And so I say, ‘Go to the gym. Grab that maybe a 10-pound weight. And if you're just doing dumbbells and doing 10-pound weight, that's fine. If you have a goal of doing 10 reps, do as many reps as you feel good doing. Wait for the endorphin rush to kick in when you feel good. And the moment you feel bad, stop’. Now what they do is they then do eight and then they start to feel bad or stray, they stop at eight. Now they’re feeling an endorphin rush today. And maybe in the next week they feel the endorphin rush, and they're doing 11. But what has then happened is that they are associating going to the gym with pleasure neurochemicals, not with pain. And then you can't keep away from exercise. I mean, once you've learned to rejig your neurochemistry, to re-associate those exercise bands, or that piece of exercise equipment, or your kayak or your mountain bike with pleasure, rather than with compulsion and pain, then you find people are highly motivated to exercise. So we retrain them to do this. It also has the effect of listening and listening to their bodies. No longer is your body a threat and a problem. It's now something to listen to. It's a signal, ‘Hey, this doesn't feel good’. You stopped right away. So in my own workouts, if I decided to do 20 reps or something, and after 17, I'm no longer feeling good. I stopped at 17, then my body is saying, ‘Wow, 17 feels wonderful’. And then you completely change your conditioning to make that exercise a joy and a pleasure. After a while, you can't stop people going to the gym, if you use your own neurochemistry in an intelligent way like that.

Lisa: Well and you don't limit your performance when you do that? Because like, as an athlete you know that you have to endure a certain amount of pain to reach the next level, or that's what we've been told at least. You have to high intensity interval training and better back in CrossFit and rah, rah rah. The gentle approach, I can see being super good for somebody who's never exercised and just wants to break into this field, does the same apply for elite athletes wanting to get to the best that they can be? Because you're up against the competition that are training in this way of brute force training type of way. Is that as well?

Dr. Dawson: Yeah that too is a way of training, one way of training is the brute way of training. The other way is the supported way of training. That's a very good question. So that way works great for people who are getting into exercise for the first time. But what about people who are at that elite level?

There is a time to push yourself and there’s a time to back off. Only you know that. No one else can really tell you what that point is. But you know yourself. Like me, for example, I do a lot of mountain biking. There are sometimes where there's a long, steep hill. I’m exhausted and I think, ‘I'm exhausted, there's a steep hill ahead. I am just kind of go for it’. And it feels so exciting to do that. But if I had a coach saying, ‘Go for it’. If I was riding with somebody, and they would say, ‘Go for it’. I was trying to keep up with them. And I wasn't listening to my body, then probably I'd injured myself. That's what I have injured myself actually, in the past. So, you tune into yourself, and no one else is something no coach knew for you.

Are you meant to just put in that extra burst of effort? And then transcend yourself. We don't know for another person, we only know for ourselves. So it's really an interesting meditation. And again, it means being sensitive to yourself to know when to do that. The other thing is, it's not the same every day, we have by rhythm. Sometimes, we are just so in rhythm. That's the time to say, ‘I was planning on this 35-minute routine, I need to do the 55 minute routine instead.’ And you just know that day, ‘I’m so in-sync, my body wants to do that.’ You get good at reading your body and you know. I think the best lead athletes and how are some football players, the average football player in the National Football League in the US has about a 4-year career. How does someone like Tom Brady have a career that spans decades? You want these great athletes often, or great musicians or great scientists. They aren't a flash in the pan, they’re sustaining peak performance over time. I think they're the ones who are pacing themselves.

Lisa: Yeah. And are the ones that are listening to the body. I think, with training athletes, I often say, ‘If you start, you have to sort of look at how has your day been? How much sleep did you get? Did you hydrate? Have you had a lot of stress?’ Before you decide what your training is today. Even if we've put it on your plan to do a big, hard long training session, but you had a very bad night or something went wrong yesterday, then maybe today, we want to shift that out. And it's learning to be that sort of intuitive and rather than rigid, ‘This is what coaches said, and this is what I'm doing because I have to do that.’ The give and take means that you will eventually have more performance. I think, while others also, is in the recovery phase is where you actually get the benefit, not on the training phase. Contrary to people think that when we’re actually doing the weights is when we’re getting the strength. No, it's actually in recovery. So if you're not recovering properly, and you're just smashing yourself again the next day, then you're not going to get there with those wins anyway.

That’s just a new perspective for me to take on and maybe I'll be a little bit more gentler on mum in the gym today. She might be thanking you later, Dawson. I had her yesterday in the gym and we were doing weights. She doesn't like weight. She doesn't mind the treadmill and the bike and so on but when it comes to weights, I'm pushing her quite hard, “Come on, mom. You can do it.” Maybe I need to be a little bit more, how shall we say, sensitive.

Dr. Dawson: Yeah, also, if somebody you trust, like for example, a teacher will challenge you. A teacher will, we mentor people, we train people in EFT, in meditation and we train trainers, we train practitioners and that certified what's called clinical EFT, using EFT with other people. We push them. We definitely say that that's a challenge and we recommend you go for it. And sometimes your coach will see a possibility in you, you don’t see in yourself. Well very often we see that this person could be a brilliant healer, they might be a bus driver or a hairdresser, and we’ll say, ‘You can do this’. And we’re experts, we know that they can. So it does take an extra lie sometimes.

Also on the spiritual journey, take somebody that you talk to. I train thousands of EFT practitioners. I wrote the book EFT Manual, the most recent edition of the book. I've written about EFT and have done more research than anybody else in EFT and I have my own practitioner who may say to me, ‘Dawson, you need to sharpen up in this area. I think you can make a shift over here’. So we are living past the point of needing a trainer, of needing a coach, of needing extra eyes to look at us and to guide us, very, very useful at every stage of our development. We require even people who've been doing this for 50 years, they'd love to have their own therapist and do their own inner work. Because if you think you're past needing a therapist or doing your own inner work and alluded, there's always stuff to work on.

Lisa: That's a brilliant way of looking at it, and a very humbling approach to life. Now, I wanted to just shift gears a little bit, if I may, and talk about the bigger ramifications of changing our brain. Because when we change ourselves personally, we are also affecting our environment, our family, and then our community, and then our country, and then the world. If we're looking at the bigger picture, our world has some big major problems in it that we, and I think, we're not always focusing on the positives that are happening in our society because our media very much concentrates on just the negative. But if we all started to meditate today, and we all really adopted Dawson's approach and these other great researchers and scientists, and these people’s approach, to changing our own brains and how they're functioning in our own lives, and we're happy and nicer people, what sort of effect can we have on the environment do you think?

Dr. Dawson: I have a whole chapter in my book Mind to Matter on this. This is a phenomenon that's been studied over the past since the 1970s, called emotional contagion. And it began when one person noticed that in her workspace, in her office environment, there are good days and bad days. There are generally days when everything seemed to flow, people were nice to each other, the work flows smoothly. And then there were a lot of bad days as well. When people were grumpy and things didn't work. She realised that the good days were when one particular person was sick and took a day off. That one person was removed to the equation, everyone functioned better. And she realised that this was a phenomenon and she named it emotional contagion. We’ve now, have applied the — epidemiology is the study of infectious disease — we've now applied this in various research studies, to emotions, and we find that emotions are contagious.

So in one long-running studies, from guys since the 1950s called the Framingham Heart Study in Framingham, Massachusetts. And now includes five generations of inhabitants at Framingham. The researchers have found that a happy person is highly contagious, and actually produces contagion in her neighbour, and her neighbour’s neighbour, and her neighbour’s neighbour’s neighbour, who she's never even met. So when we are happy, you will literally — there’s this old saying Frank Sinatra in 1950 saying — ‘When you smile, the whole world smiles with you’. And it does, happiness is contagious. So when we do that, we're going to see a therapist, use EFT, take care of our physical bodies, love ourselves, tune into the infinite, tune into a non-local mind. It floods our hearts and our bodies, we feel so much better and we're just nicer to everyone around us. And they're nice people around them, that effect travels a long way.

In one study, I talked about in Mind to Matter, the researchers tweak the feeds of Facebook users, just a few dozen Facebook users, for a few days to make them either a little more positive or a little more negative. Just a tiny touch, more positive, more negative. And those people then pass those certain stories along in their feeds, and others and passed further stories along in their feeds. Within two weeks, they produce emotional contagion in 600,000 other people. So we are highly contagious, our positive energy.

I'll give you one example. Donald Trump is the previous president of the US and a tremendously polarising a triggering figure. And so, people talk about Donald Trump and I've been told so that we just lie or done something really harmful to other people, they get so offended. And so I really counsel people to stay in your heart and just hold Donald Trump and everyone in his party, in compassion, just hold. Take the people who offend you the most and hold them in compassion. Tune into their suffering and hold them in that way. When we do this, when we are as Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies,’ to go to them that hate you. Very good advice, even though it's 2,000 years old. When you do this, you're producing emotional contagion around you. You have no idea how far it's going. But as the Facebook study found, just a few people could produce emotional contagion in hundreds of thousands. So by becoming happy yourself, you walk around happy.

During the pandemic, we all like to wear masks all the time. One study found that when I talk behind the mask, so no one can see whether I’m smiling or frowning. People can hear by the tone of your voice, if you're smiling or frowning. They can tell with a very thin slice of information, what it is. So you're just talking to somebody kindly and nicely, that's using emotional contagion. There’s one story I tell in one of my books, Lisa, that just touched me was this guy who was having a really difficult time. His wife had left him taking with him, their two kids, he couldn't see the kids and missed the kids terribly. And then he lost his job. He just spiralled downward and decided to commit suicide. He’d been suicidal for a few months, but that was the day he decided he was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. He literally drove to the Golden Gate Bridge. There's a parking lot there, he parked his car, that he had to cross the serious bester and crossings to get to the bridge. And as he was having chills, I tell the story because such an emotional impact. But I just think of this guy. And so he was stopped at a light waiting for the traffic light to change. He looked at the car next to him. There was a woman, an elderly woman with long grey hair in the car, also stopped at the light. As he looked at her, she happened to look at him. And she smiled, she smiled at him. Suddenly he realised life was worth living. He turned around went back to stop with suicide. You have no idea of the effect you're having on other people. We're reducing emotional contagion and other people all the time. It might be your smile that stops somebody from doing something harmful, or gives them a sense of hope about their lives. So, we support each other, we love each other. And after a while you just live in this world where there is so much love, your sensitised love. You attract loving people into your life, you attract time people into your life, compassionate people. And so now suddenly, you're in this environment that is beautiful.

Are you struggling to deal with people who are homicidal and suicidal and nasty and mean and angry and stressed? Absolutely. And when I drive down the road, sometimes they'll be, maybe a young man and a pickup truck. And he'll be weaving in and out of traffic. They'll be angry. It'll be having episodes of road rage, and maybe have a finger. And that used to really trigger me. And now I say, ‘That guy is probably having a terrible day. He probably does not have a very good life. And I need to just love it.’ So I will just drive in my car in the slow lane. I shower him with love. Now, is that affecting him? Who knows? Is it bringing my cortisols down? Oh, yeah, absolutely. My cortisol is going down. I am now a better driver. I am now making waves to the people around me. So, we are agents of emotional contagion. I urge people in my books, go out and be an agent of conscious, positive emotional contagion with every thought you have, every word you say, you have no idea who might be affecting, and you will certainly be lowering your cortisol. But the other cool thing is, in one study I did recently, we show that when you lower your cortisol, this is people tapping and meditating for a week, they were doing this and they lower the cortisol. The cortisol went down by a huge amount, 37% drop in stat and baseline cortisol in only one week. Their immunoglobulins, which are these molecules are antibodies that attack coronaviruses, emitted lobules globulin is a y-shaped molecule that attach to the spike protein on the coronavirus and neutralise it. Those molecules in those people's mucous membranes went up 113%, more than double, in one week of tapping and meditation intensity in the retreat center. So we now know that, am I affecting the young man? I have no idea. Am I driving my own cortisol down and my own immunoglobulins up? Absolutely. I'm much healthier and I'm able to exert that influence on the world around me. So it is powerful to practice these things and be the agent of positive emotional contagion.

Lisa: That is so powerful. I've been guilty of this in the past when someone's cut me off in traffic, before I've even thought, before my prefrontal cortex is actually turned on the amygdala has gone, roar. And you're doing the bird out the window at this person, swearing at them. And then you can like now. When I was younger, I was a lot more volatile, and I come from a family of very strong people and a warrior background, if you like, from my native population. We tend to be quite, warrior-orientated. And now I am very much like that, I'm like, ‘I'm going to damage myself, if I react to this situation then I'm just hitting my cortisol up’. And one of the things, when I was studying our blood sugars and what happens with the blood sugars, how the cortisol sends your blood sugar's up and you actually put on weight — well, that was a very good deterrent from getting angry.

Dr. Dawson: Absolutely, weight gain.

Lisa: Weight gain because I got angry in traffic.

Dr. Dawson: One study found that optimists live on average, 10 years longer than pessimists. This was a 30-year study, both men and women over the course of three decades. The optimists live 10 years longer than the pessimists. So negative emotion, its battery acid inside your body, it's corrosive, it's really damaging your organs, gives you a much shorter and much more disease-filled life than optimism. So be optimistic, be altruistic. I mean, you feel good doing all those things, you feel much better. And of course, your health is dramatically better. Your longevity is at least a decade more than otherwise.

Lisa: And you do this through not just through positive thinking, because we all know I think that just, ‘I'm going to be positive today and the network's for five minutes’. The Positive Psychology thing. What he says, right? But through meditation, through connection, through being out in nature, and through all these things, that we've just talked about the last event is the way to get us more positive responses. That's what I'm hearing. And that's where it becomes more seen.

Dr. Dawson: Yes. Well, yes and no. There are two kinds of focuses that I've found are necessary. And I'm just putting a level playing field on the surface plane over here. One of those is being into the subconscious healing trauma. If you try and go for positive thinking, without healing trauma, it becomes the dark side, becomes repressed anger, repressed rage, and it actually will surface the subway and make itself known often as self-sabotaging behaviour, or repetitive negative thinking. So you have to do both. My initial — all my initial research for more than 10 years was with veterans with people who are traumatised, dealing with trauma. And that's great. So you need to go and deal with all that's holding you back. Then you want to go not just be at a neutral point where you don't have trauma, you’d want to explore peak states. Like imagine being in ecstasy every day, having those need and that serotonin that anonymise, that oxytocin, all these wonderful neuro chemicals flowing through your brain. And now you're hitting a peak state, you're starting your day in flow, and then you just go on from there and have a wonderful creative day. So you want to be doing both of those things simultaneously. This isn't the work of a week. This is the work of a lifetime, but it is so worth doing. Both the trauma, healing through EFT, EMDR, all these other wonderful energy therapies, and then cultivating these elevated states, bliss brain. And again, people reach these states, and they feel wonderful, as well as they're incredibly creative. And of course, their health improves as well. So both of those things.

Lisa: Yeah. Dawson, we’re going to have to wrap it up in a moment and I want to be respectful of your time. But I would love to have you back on because I don't think we've really covered everything.

Would you do me the honour of coming back in a month or two months, whenever your schedule, your crazy schedule allows. But I think we need to dig deeper. And I would like to actually put into practice some of these things that I've learned today and to go a little bit deeper into these things and see. And then be able to have that discussion with you and how our progress. So I think that would be a nice way to come back and actually look at a case study if you like.

Dr. Dawson: Yes, absolutely. Love to do it.

Lisa: Oh, so Dawson, how can people reach you? How can they find out more about your work? Obviously, your books, Mind to Matter, Genie —

Dr. Dawson: Genie in Your Genes.

Lisa: Genie in Your Genes and Bliss Brain, your main books that you have. Where can people find you online, find out about EFT, maybe start training with you, all that sort of stuff?

Dr. Dawson: Yeah, there are three places that you can go to. To get Bliss Brain, you can go to blissbrain.com and you get the book there, you'll see eight meditations that accompany each of the chapters of the book. And these are brief, they're under 20 minutes each, but they really help you get to those elevated emotional states. Mind to Matter is all about manifestation, about the link between thoughts and things, that’s mindtomatter.com. Then the Immunity Meditation I mentioned earlier is at dawsongift.com. So that's worth doing. We actually once, we got the results of two studies in showing these big rises in immunoglobulins and a special meditation to actually help people hit those peak states. And those are at dawsongift.com. So the two books mindtomatter.com and blissbrain.com and then the meditation is at dawsongift.com, those are the three best places. You also get a portal there for example, because we have practitioners who work with people 24/7 live video sessions in real time. We do a lot of workshops. I do Bliss Brain workshops, we have a big one coming up that's going to be in German, French, Spanish, as well as English. Lisa, I'm just obsessed with getting people this material. And also I'm so moved by people suffering. When I see people suffering, and I realise wow, if only they had this little piece of information, their lives would be so much better. So I just,

Lisa: You're beautiful. You’re amazing.

Dr. Dawson: Everyday obsessed with how to do that.

Lisa: Thank you so much for your service to everybody. I think this is incredibly important work. This is changing lives and I really thank you for digging really deep into the sciences and bringing this all to us. Because I'm seeing everyday people who are just completely – and in my own life. I've experienced my own traumas and so on, who have so much anxiety, so much trauma, so much PTSD, and being able to elevate a few people in your environment and change the way that you're living your life would just be absolutely fantastic. So thank you very much for your time today, Dawson.

Dr. Dawson: Oh, it's been a joy. Thank you. I look forward to our next get together.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

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Learn How to Prioritise and Achieve Your Goals with Dr John Demartini 0

Jun 3, 2021

Do you feel like you're nowhere near your goals?

Do you want something so badly but think that it's impossible to achieve?

Having goals in life gives us a sense of purpose. Whether they're for our career or relationships, goals push us to give our best. However, we sometimes set too many goals and find ourselves stuck. We can also feel discouraged from pursuing our dreams because we subject ourselves to other people’s standards. But while our plans may sometimes seem impossible, we have everything we need. If you can stay determined and learn how to prioritise, we can have our breakthrough.

In this episode, Dr John Demartini joins us to talk about living your best life by structuring it. Learn how to prioritise and you can achieve anything. He shares the philosophy of the Breakthrough Experience, which has miraculously helped thousands of people reach their goals. John also discusses how to make decisions based on priorities, not emotions and instincts.

If you want to learn how to prioritise and stick to your top priorities, then this episode is for you.

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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Learn about the Breakthrough Experience and how it has changed thousands of lives.
Discover how to prioritise and determine your top priorities.
John shares his secret to retaining Information in the quickest way possible.

Episode Highlights

[05:00] About John

Dr John is an educator, researcher and writer. He has spent over 48 years helping people maximise their potential.
John wanted to know what allows people to do extraordinary things. That's why he distilled information from great minds throughout history. He made them into practical things that people today can use.
John had speech and learning challenges as a kid. At a doctor’s recommendation, his parents took him out of school and put him into sports.
After having a near-death experience at 17, Paul Bragg inspired John to overcome his learning problems. With the help of his mom, he eventually learned how to read.
Listen to the full episode to learn more about John's inspiring story!

[15:42] How Surfing Changed John’s Mindset

Surfing has taught John that people are not going to excel without perseverance and commitment.
John converted his determination for surfing into persistence in reading.

[17:57] The Breakthrough Experience

The Breakthrough Experience is a philosophy and program changing lives globally.
This system teaches you how to prioritise and structures life by priority. It breaks through limitations and helps achieve life goals.
John teaches people to use any experience, even challenges. These are catalysts for transformation and progress.
John has helped people learn how to prioritise to get their breakthrough experience in different areas of life. These include businesses, careers, health, relationships, among others.
Lisa relates the Breakthrough Experience philosophy to when her mom had a severe aneurysm.

[24:14] John Shares a Miraculous Experience

At 27 years old, John handled a family with a son in a three-year coma.
The family went to different hospitals in Mexico and the United States. However, they found none to help their son.
They then went to John, and he thought of a maneuver to help the child. However, the treatment also came with significant risk.
Listen to the full episode to find out how John helped a child get out of a three-year coma.

[33:34] Jesse Billauer’s Breakthrough Experience

Jesse Billauer, a surfer, decided to go to the Breakthrough Experience after a surfing accident.
At the time, he was depressed because he was physically unable to surf.
After the Breakthrough Experience, he learned how to prioritise and what his top priority was. Jesse became determined not to let anything stop him from surfing.
Jesse developed a way to surf as a quadriplegic person. He taught others how to do the same.

[38:58] Herd Mentality in the Sciences

New ideas are violently opposed and ridiculed. That's why people fear going against the norm.
People who aim to survive follow the multitude. People who want to thrive create a new paradigm.
Each person can excel at anything if they focus on that, not on others' opinions.

[41:37] How to Prioritise

John made a list of every single thing he does in a day over three months.
He then placed multiple columns next to that list. The first column contains how much money each task produces per hour. The second column contains how much a job inspires him on a scale of 1-10. He also considered the cost and the time spent on each activity.
After doing that, he prioritised the activities that made thousands of dollars. He also focused on ones that scored ten on the inspiration scale.
John hired people for the low-priority tasks. This choice allowed him to be more productive in his top priorities. Within 18 months, his business increased tenfold.
Listen to the full episode to learn how to prioritise and about investing in your top priority.

[56:19] How John Stays Looking Young

John is almost 67 years old. However, Lisa describes him as someone who looks like a teenager.
John doesn't eat junk. He drinks a lot of water, has never had coffee in his life and hasn't had alcohol in over 48 years.
Doing what you love every day also slows down the aging process.

[58:03] Some Lessons from the Breakthrough Experience

Nothing is missing in you. When you compare yourself to others, you'll try to live by their values or get them to live by yours. Both of these are futile.
Sticking to your values and priorities is key to resilience and success.
People are different from each other, but no one is better than the other.
If you don't empower your own life, others will overpower you.
Your mission is something that you're willing to get through any means necessary.

[1:06:38] How to Get Your Amygdala Under Control

The amygdala is associated with emotions and the "fight-or-flight" response.
Because we have neuroplasticity, we can remodel our internal system.
Perceiving challenges and feeling shame and guilt trigger an autoimmune reaction that attacks your body.
Every time we choose to live by the highest priority, the amygdala calms down. The prefrontal cortex is reinforced.

[1:12:03] The Mind-Body Connection

Our psychological processes also affect our physiological processes.
People are used to blaming external factors. They don't take accountability for the things they experience.
John uses the example of when people get symptoms after eating unhealthy food. They don't face the fact that they brought it upon themselves.
Our bodies do an excellent job of guiding us. That's why we should learn how to listen to them.

[1:18:13] The Journey to Financial Independence

There is nothing evil about having money.
John believes that you can be a slave to money, or you can be a master of it.
Nothing is stopping you from doing what you love to do.

[1:21:28] How to Retain Information

Teaching what you've learned is the key to retention.
Teaching compels your mind to organise ideas and reinforce them.
Teach the concepts as soon as you've discovered them. Don't wait until you're an expert on the subject.

Resources

Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! You can choose between being an official or VIP patron for $7 and $15 NZD per month, respectively.
Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-ageing and longevity with NMN Bio.
Related Pushing the Limits Episodes
Connect with John: Website | Facebook | Linkedin | YouTube | Instagram
‎The Demartini Show
Demartini Value Determination Process
The Breakthrough Experience program
Join John's The Mind-Body Connection course
Learn more about Jesse Billauer and his story.
High Surf: The World's Most Inspiring Surfers by Tim Baker
The Time Trap: The Classic Book on Time Management by Alec Mackenzie and Pat Nickerson
Brain Wash: Detox Your Mind for Clearer Thinking, Deeper Relationships, and Lasting Happiness by David and Austin Perlmutter
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing by Bronnie Ware

7 Powerful Quotes

‘I'm an educator, a researcher, a writer. I do a lot of interviews and filming for documentaries. I've been spending 48 years now on doing anything I can to help human beings maximise their potential.’

‘I love studying and learning anything I can from those people that have done extraordinary things and then passing that on.”

“I love anybody who's done something extraordinary on the planet in any field. I love devouring their journey.’

‘No matter what the teacher was trying to do, I just couldn't read. And my teacher and my parents come to the school and said, ‘You know, your son's not able to read. He's not going to be able to write effectively’ because I wrote kind of backwards.’

‘Well, I'm surfing the cosmic waves now. And in surfing big cosmic waves, radio waves that are big waves. Yes, that's the move from water waves into electromagnetic waves.’

‘And so the Breakthrough Experience is about accessing that state. And breaking through the limitations that we make up in our mind and transforming whatever experiences you have into “on the way” not “in the way”.’

‘She said that there was something that took over me, I can't describe it. It was like a very powerful feeling — like I had a power of a Mack truck. And me? I don't know how to describe it.’

About Dr John

Dr John Demartini is an author, researcher, global educator and world-renowned human behaviour specialist. Making self-development programs and relationship solutions is part of his job. Among his most popular programs is the Breakthrough Experience. It is a personal development course that aims to help individuals achieve whatever goal they have.

As a child, Dr John had learning challenges and could not read and write well until 18 years old. He has now distilled information from over 30,000 books across all academic disciplines and shares them online and on stage in over 100 countries.

Interested in knowing more about Dr John and his work? You may visit his website or follow him on Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and Instagram.

Enjoyed This Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can achieve their life goals by learning how to prioritise.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript Of The Podcast

Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have Dr John Demartini. He is a world renowned speaker, teacher, educator, researcher, medical doctor. He's written I don't know how many books, countless, countless books. He's an incredible, incredible man who teaches literally thousands and thousands of people every year in his breakthrough experience. The information that you're going to get in this podcast could change your life. So I've given you a fair warning. He's an amazing, incredible man that, and I've talked to a lot of incredible people but this one is really next level, he started out as a big wave surfer in Hawaii, way back in the day. Even knew Laird Hamilton and people like that. Had learning disabilities and could hardly read or write, and yet managed to overcome all these things to become one of the greatest scholars that there is. He's read over 30,000 books. He has distilled the knowledge from people right through the ages, through leaders and philosophers and stoics and scientists. He's an expert in so many different areas. He teaches people in business, he teaches people how to overcome massive challenges in their life. So I really hope that you enjoy this episode. It is going to get uncomfortable in places because we’ll talk about really being accountable, really understanding our own physiology, and just so much more. An absolutely amazing interview. So I hope you enjoy it.

Before we head over to the show, just reminder, we have our patron membership for the podcast Pushing the Limits. If you want to join our VIP tribe, we would love you to come and do that. It's about the price of a cup of coffee a month or two. If you want to join on the premium level, we would love you to come and join us. Support the show. Help us get this work out there. We are passionate about what we do. We want to change lives, we want to improve your life, we want to improve the lives of others. And we need your help to do that to keep the show going. So please, head over to patron.lisatamati.com. Check out all the premium VIP member benefits here, and support the show. Be a part of this community, be a part of this tribe. Help support us and reach out to me or the team.

If you have any questions around any of the topics or any of the guests that have come up. We would love to hear from you. Any feedback is always welcome. Please always give a rating and review to the show as well on iTunes or whatever platform that you listen to. That is really, really helpful as well. We do appreciate you doing that.

And as a reminder, please also check out our epigenetics program. We have a system now that can personalise and optimise your entire life to your genetics. So check out our program, what it's all about. This is based on the work of hundreds of scientists, not our work. It has been developed over the last 20 years, from 15 different science disciplines all working in collaborating together on this one technology platform that will help you understand your genes and apply the information to your life. So check that out. Go to lisatamati.com and hit the Work With Us button and you'll see their Peak Epigenetics, check out that program. And while you're there, if you're a runner, check out our Running Hot Coaching program as well. Customised, personalised training plans made specifically for you, for your goals. You get a video analysis, you get a consultation with me and it's all in a very well-priced package. So check that out at runninghotcoaching.com.

Now over to the show with Dr John Demartini. Well, Hi everyone and welcome to Pushing The Limits. Today, I am super excited for my guest. My guest is an absolute superstar. Welcome to the show. Firstly and foremostly, thank you very much for taking the time out today. Dr John, I'm just really excited to have you. Whereabouts are you sitting in the world?

Dr John: I am in Houston, Texas. I'm in a hotel room in Houston, Texas, even though it shows that I've got a library.

Lisa: Yeah,I love that background. That is a fantastic background. Really great. Well, greetings to Texas and I hope that everything is going well over there for you. Today, I wanted to talk about you, your work, the breakthrough experience. Some of the learnings and the exciting mission that you've been on for now. For 47 years, I believe. Something crazy like that. So Dr John, can you just give us a little bit of a background on you and your life and what you do on a day to day basis? Big question.

Dr John: I'm an educator, a researcher, a writer. I do a lot of interviews and filming for documentaries. I've been spending 48 years now, over 48 years, on doing anything I can to help human beings maximise their potential, their awareness potential, and achieve whatever it is that they're inspired to achieve. So that could be raising a beautiful family to building a massive business to becoming fortunate or celebrity, doesn't matter. It's whatever it is that inspires them. I've been studying human behaviour and anything and everything I can get my hands on for the last 48 years to assist people in mastering a lot. That's what I love doing. I do it every day. I can't think of any else I'd rather be doing. So I just do it.

Lisa: It's a bit of a role model for me, Dr John, because I think what you have achieved in this time, the way you've distilled information, I mean, you've studied, last time I looked on one of your podcasts, that was over 30,000 books, probably more now. And you've distilled the information from great masters throughout history into practical things that humans today can actually benefit from. Is that a good assessment of what you basically have done?

Dr John: I'm writing right now a 1200 page textbook on philosophers and great minds through the ages. I summarise it. I love studying and learning anything I can from those people that have done extraordinary things, and then passing that on. So yes. Right now, I'm actually, I just finished, I’m just finishing up Albert Einstein, which is one of my heroes. I had a dream when I was young. When I saw that E = mc² drawn on that board, I wanted to find out where that board was. I went to Princeton, and met with Freeman Dyson, who took over his position at Princeton in 1955. Spent part of the day with him and we're talking on cosmology. I wrote my formula on that same board, exactly the same place, because that was a dream that I had since I was probably 18, 19.

Lisa: Wow, and you got to fulfill it and actually love it.

Dr John: Yeah. Took me a bit of time. So what? But yeah, I love anybody who's done something extraordinary on the planet in any field. I love devouring their journey and their thinking. That's every Nobel Prize winner I've gone through and every great philosopher and thinker and business leader and financially or spiritually, to try to find out and distill out what is the very essence that drives human beings? And what is it that allows them to do extraordinary things? So I wanted to do that with my life. Most of the people I get in front of want to feel like they want to make a massive difference. They want to make a difference in the world. They want to do something that’s deeply meaningful, inspiring. And so yeah, we're not 'put your head in the product glue and let the glue stick' and then pass it on.

Lisa: Instead of having to reinvent the world, why not? So Dr John, can you give us a little bit of history though, because you're obviously an incredible scholar,have an incredible mind. But as a child, you struggled with learning and with reading and writing.Can you give us a little, how the heck did you go from being this kid that struggled with all of that to where you are today? One of the greatest minds out there.

Dr John: Yeah, I definitely had some learning challenges. I had a speech challenge when I was a year and a half old to four, I had to wear buttons in my mouth and put strings in my mouth and practice using all kinds of muscles. Went to a speech pathologist. When I was in first grade. No matter what the teacher was trying to do, I just couldn't read. My teacher, and my parents would come to the school and said, 'You know, your son's not able to read. He's not going to be able to write effectively,' because I wrote kind of backwards. 'I don't think he's going to mountain and go very far in life, put him into sport.' Because I like to run. And I did sports there for a while. But then I went from baseball to surfing. I hitchhiked out to California and down Mexico and then made it over to Hawaii so I could ride big waves and I was doing big wave and stuff when I was a teenager. So I didn't have academics. I dropped out of school. I was a street kid from 13 to 18. But then right before 18 I nearly died. That's when I met Paul Bragg, who inspired me one night in a presentation. That night I got so inspired that I thought, 'Maybe I could overcome my learning problems by applying what this man just taught me. And maybe someday I could learn to read and write and speak properly.' That was such an inspiration, such a moment of inspiration that it changed the course of my life. I had to go back. And with the help of my mum, I went and got a dictionary out, started to read a dictionary and memorise 30 words a day until my vocabulary. I had to spell the word, pronounce the word, use it with a meaningful sentence, and develop a vocabulary. Eventually doing that 30 we would, we wouldn't go to bed. I didn't go to bed until I had 30 new words, really inculcated. My vocabulary grew. And I started to learn how to do the reading. It was not an easy project. But, man, once I got a hold of it, I never stopped.

Lisa: And once you started to read, you didn’t stop.

Dr John: I've never stopped. I've been a voluminous reader now. You know, 48 years.

Lisa: That’s just incredible.

Dr John: I can’t complain.

Lisa: So was it a dyslexia or learning disability? I just asked because my mum was a teacher of children with dyslexia and things like that. Was there specific ways that you were able to overcome the disability so to speak?

Dr John: Yeah, I just, sheer persistence and determination to want to read and learn. I remember, I took my first, I took a GED test, a general education high school equivalency test. And I guessed, literally guessed, I close my eyes. I said this little affirmation that Paul Bragg gave me that, 'I'm a genius, and I apply my wisdom.' And some miraculous thing made me pass that test. I didn't know how to read half the stuff that was on it. I just went with my intuition and guessed. And I tried to go to college, after taking that test and had the test. I failed. And I remember driving home crying because I had this idea that I was going to learn how to teach and become intelligent. Then when I got a 27, everybody else got 75 and above. I got a 27 and I thought, 'Well, there's no way it's going to work.' But then I sat there and I cried and my mum came home from shopping, and she saw me crying on the living room floor. She said, ‘Son, what happened? What's wrong?’ I said, ‘Mum, I failed the test. I guess I don't have what it takes.’ And I repeated what the first grade teacher said, 'I guess I'll never read or write or communicate effectively, or amount too much. I guess I'll go back to Hawaii and make surfboards and surf. Because I was pretty good at that.' And she said to me something that was a real mind bender. She put her hand on me and she said, ‘Son, whether you become a great teacher, philosopher and travel the world like your dream, whether return to Hawaii and ride giant waves like you've done, return to the streets and panhandle like you've done. I just want to let you know that your father and I are going to love you no matter what you do.’

Lisa: Wow, what a mum.

Dr John: That was an amazing moment. When she said that, my hand went into a fist of determination. And I said to myself, ‘I'm gonna match this thing called reading and studying and learning. I'm gonna match this thing called teaching and philosophy. And I'm going to do whatever it takes, I'm going to travel whatever distance, I'm gonna pay whatever price, to give my source of love across this planet.’ I got up and I hugged her. And I said to myself, ‘I'm not gonna let any human being on the face of the earth stop me, not even myself.’ I got out of my room. And that's when I decided with her help to do the dictionary. That was an amazing turning point.

Lisa: And I can feel it, the emotion and what a wonderful mum you had. I mean, what a perfect thing to say when someone's down.

Dr John: It was the most. If she hadn't said that, I might’ve come back to surfing. I might be a surfer today.

Lisa: Which would have been a good thing as well, probably because surfing is great.

Dr John: It didn’t make money in those days. I'm in the mid 60s and 70s, early 70s. But,, now, the guys I served with, Laird Hamilton and-

Lisa: Wow. He's a hero is amazing.

Dr John: Both Ben Aipa, Gerry Lopez, and these guys, those are the guys I served with. And so those guys went on to be incredible.

Lisa: I wasn't aware of that.

Dr John: I lived at the same beach park in Haleiwa, where Ehukai Beach Park is, near Pipeline, between Rocky Point and Pipeline. Laird Hamilton was dropped off by his mother there and lived there on the beach. I lived up on where the park bench was. We lived right there and I saw him on the beach each morning. He was seven, I was 16. He was going on seven, I was almost 17. We live there at the same place and Bill Hamilton saw him out there and grabbed him and took him in and trained them on surfing and found his mum and then married the mum. That's how I became. I hung out with those characters.

Lisa: Legends. You became a legend in this direction and they have become a legend in a different direction.

Dr John: Well, there's a book out called The High Surf by Tim Baker. That’s from Australia. He wrote a book on people that rode big waves. And he said, 'I'd like to put you in there.' I said, 'Well, I didn't go on to be the superstar in that area like these other guys.' He said, 'But I want you in there because you became a legend.

Lisa: Became a superstar.

Dr John: Yeah

Lisa: Do you think that there's, you know, I come from a surfing family. My brother's a big wave surfer in New Zealand. I've tried and failed miserably, stuck to running. I was better at it. But do you think there's a correlation between the mindset that you developed as a surfer? Because going in those big waves is scary. It's daunting. It's frightening. It's challenging. It's teaching you a lot. Is there a lot that you took from that for this journey that you've been on?

Dr John: Yeah, I didn't surf anything more than 40-foot waves. So I think that was about as good as about as big as you get back in the 70s. At 70s is when I was-

Lisa: Oh, just a mere 40, it’s okay.

Dr John: Well, 40-foot waves was the biggest thing out in outer reef pipeline was the big thing. They hadn't had tow-in surfing yet. That was just, that wasn't begun yet. So there was that idea, we had to catch those waves. That was not easy because they're too big to catch. you got to have big long boards, and you got to really paddle to get into those waves, and it's usually too late. But I think some of those, I used to surf 11 hours a day sometimes. When you're really, really committed to doing something, that's... Einstein said perseverance is the key to making things happen and if you just stay with something. So, if you're not inspired to do something, enough to put in the hours and put in the effort, and you don't have somebody that you can bounce ideas off of, kind of mentoring you, you probably are not going to excel as much. But I did that. And then I just converted that over into breeding 18 to 20 hours a day, feeding once I learned to read, so I just and I still voluminously read I mean, I read every single day.

Lisa: That is incredible. And so you've taken that big wave mindset a little bit over into something else. So obviously, everything you, do you do to the nth degree, we can probably agree on that one.

Dr John: I'm surfing the cosmic waves now. And in surfing big cosmic waves, radio waves that are big waves. I move from water waves into electromagnetic waves.

Lisa: Wow. Now, you run something called The Breakthrough Experience, which you've been doing now for 40 something years. This is a philosophy and a system and a program that really changes lives and has changed lives all over the planet. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've distilled from all this information that you have in your incredible mind? And what you teach in this course, and how this can actually help people? Today, right now listening to this?

Dr John: Well, the breakthrough experiences, sort of my attempt to do with what that gentleman did to me when I was 17. I've done it 1121 times into that course. I keep records, and I'm a metric freak. Every human being lives by a set of priorities, a set of values, things that are most important.

Lisa: Podcast life.

Dr John: Welcome to it. I thought that was off, but I didn't quite get it off. But whatever is highest on the person's values, priorities, whatever is truly deeply meaningful to them, the thing that is spontaneously inspiring for them to that they can't wait to get up the morning and do.If they identify that and structure their life by priority, delegating the lower priority things and getting on with doing that, they will build momentum, incremental momentum and start to excel and build what we could say is a legacy in the world. And so, the breakthrough experience is about accessing that state, and breaking through the limitations that we make up in our mind, transforming whatever experiences you have into 'on the way' not 'in the way.' So no matter what goes on in your life, you can use it to catalyse a transformation and movement towards what it is that you're committed to. And if you're not clear about it, we'll show you how to do it because many people subordinate to people around them. Cloud the clarity of what's really really inspiring from within them, and they let the herd instinct stop them from being heard.

I think that The Breakthrough Experiences is my attempt to do whatever I can, with all the tools that I've been blessed to gather to assist people in creating a life that is extraordinary, inspiring and amazing for them. And if I don't do whatever it takes in the program, I don't know when it's going to be. I've seen six year olds in there write books afterwards. I've seen nine year olds go on to get a deal with Disney for $2.2 million dollars. I've seen people in business break through plateaus. I’ve people have major issues with relationships break, too. I don't know what's gonna be. I've seen celebrities go to new levels. I've seen people that have health issues that heal. I mean, every imaginable thing, I’ve breaking through. I've seen it in that course. And it's the same principles applied now into different areas of life. In any other area of our life, if we don't empower, the world's going to overpower something. And I'm showing I want to show people how to not let anything on the outside world interfere with what's inside.

Lisa: And you talk about, it's on the way, the challenges that we have to look at the challenges that we have and ask how is this going to actually help me get wherever I am. And this is something that I've managed to do a couple of times in my life really well, other times not so good. But where I've taken a really massive challenge, I had my own listeners, I had a mum who had a massive aneurysm five years ago, and we were told she would never have any quality of life again, massive brain damage. We know that's not happening on my watch. I'm going to, there is somebody in something in the world that can help with her. And this became my mantra that I was going to get back or die trying. That was that total dedication that I brought to her because of love. When you love someone, you're able to mobilise for the last resources that you have. And that nearly bloody killed me as far as the whole effort that went on to it, and the cost and the emotional costs, and the physical and the health and all the rest of it. It took me three years to get it back to health, full health. She's now got a full driver's license back and a full independent life back and as my wonderful mum again. And that was coming from a state of being in a vegetative state, not much over a vegetative state at least. Hardly any higher function, no speech, no move, be able to move anything.

Dr John: That’s a book there. That's a book or a movie.

Lisa: It's the book.

Dr John: That's a book and a movie for sure.

Lisa: Exactly. And this is very powerful. Because I saw this and when you're in the darkness, everybody is telling you there is no hope, there is no chance. And these are medical professionals who have been to medical school, who have a hell of a lot more authority than you. You just go, ‘No, I am not accepting it because that alternative means death, basically, decline and death in being in an institution. And that is not what I'm going to answer. I'm going to find somebody who can help me’ and I did. I found hundreds of people, actually, and this is what tipped me into doing what I'm doing now, is finding world leading experts to give me the next piece of the puzzle for her and for the people now that are following me so that I can help empower people, not to be limited by the people who tell us we can't do something. It's because that means basically they don't have the answer. Not that there is no answer, is my understanding. And they were right. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. But I did it and my mum is alive and she's well, and that book. I really want to empower people with a story. I see that same like they're obviously your passion. What you went through with your learning problems when you were young and your mum standing beside you has actually propelled you into this lifelong journey that I find absolutely fascinating because that passion, and I can see that passion in you, is still very much alive 48 years later because you're doing what your priority is.

Dr John: I'm definitely doing what I love doing. It's interesting that your story reminded me of something that happened to me when I was 27. If you don't mind, I'd like to share this. So I graduated from my professional school. I had a bit of a reputation there of being kind of the taking the cream of the crop clients, patients that were turned down everywhere else. I just tackled it, see what we can do with it. And I got a family from Mexico, with a son that fell three stories off an apartment complex onto the ground on his head. He went into a coma, been in a coma for three and a half years. And the mother, they assumed he was dead a few times, but there was still a breath. There were still something. It wasn't a strong breath. You couldn't see it but you could put a mirror in front of you and get a little bit of breath out there. So he wasn't dead. And he had decerebrate rigidity. So his whole body was so rigid that when I saw him, you could lift up his feet and his whole body would rock. It was so stiff. His hands are like this. A classical decerebrate rigidity. And he had gone to, throughout different hospitals in Mexico, where he was from, and nobody checked them. They came to America, they went to the Medical Center in Houston, which is the largest Medical Center America. And they got rejected. No one would accept it. There's nothing we can do. They went out to the professional school that I'd gone to. And they said, ‘We can't do anything.’ But we know this interesting character. West Houston, if there's anybody that would try something this guy might try, who knows? And they sent him to my office. I remember when they came in, they carried him wrapped up in a white sheet, and laid him on the armrest of the chairs on my office. I looked out there and I saw this Mexican man and woman and seven or eight other kids in a family. I'm in this. At first, I didn't know what this was, this thing wrapped up in this sheet. They came down my hallway and I saw him going down the hallway. And like, ‘What on earth is this?’ Then they unveiled him in my exam room. And there was this 58 pound tube in his nose, coma case that was so stiff. It was ridiculous. I mean, he had gauze on his chin and his hand was rubbing on it and to protect the chin from having an ulcer. It had an odor to him in the head. It was just nothing. Just stare. He just sat there. But the mother and father said, ‘No, he's still alive. Please help.’ So I didn't really have much to do an exam with. So I got him, we took him in and did a film of his spine and his skull from the history. We found his foramen magnum, his skull was jammed down on a spinal cord and his spinal cord is up in his foramen magnum. This opening in the bottom of the skull. And I thought that night, when I was developing those films, and I looked at that I thought, 'I wonder what happened if I lifted that skull? If I've got that off? It could? Could something happen?' And I was scared because you just don't do that. He could die just instantly. I sent them over to this health food store to get him some liquid vitamins and minerals and amino acids to try to get nutrients in him because they're feeding him beans and rice with liquid. It was just crazy. So the next day came in. We had four doctors on a preceptorship visiting my office, one doctor that was working for me, one assistant, the seven or eight kids plus him and the mother and father in this little room. It was packed. And I said to him that I saw that on the film something that might have make him, help. I don't know, I can't guarantee it. But if we, if I did a particular manoeuvre, it might open up the brain function. And the little woman held on to her husband and she said, 'If he dies, he dies. If he lives, we rejoice. But please help us. We have nowhere else to go.'

Lisa: Yeah. Wow.

Dr John: She said that there was something that took over me, I can't describe it. It was like a very powerful feeling, like I had a power of a Mack truck in me. I don't know how to describe it. And I had this manoeuvre that we could do this, what they call the Chrane Condyle Lift, that can actually lift the skull up the spine. And I said to myself, if I'm not willing to have him die in my hands, I can't raise the dead with my hands as a little quote that I learned from an ancient healing philosopher. And I thought, 'Okay, we're, I'm going to take the risk, and just see what happens.' Because, I mean, I don't know what to do. I'm just gonna do it. Because I mean, they've got no place to go and I only took a rip. As I lifted that skull with this powerful movement. He came out of his coma. He came right out of the coma. He screamed, and this whining noise you couldn't. It was not coherent. It was just this whining sound.

The whole family went on their knees, they were Catholic. They just went to their knees and prayed. I was blown away. I saw the four doctors one of them ran down the hallway and vomited, couldn't handle it. The other just stared. And here's this boy squirming on the table. I walked out to let the family be with the child for a minute and just sat with one of my doctors. We sat there and just cried. Because we knew that the spinal cord expressed life in the body. But we didn't know what would happen if we took the spinal cord, it just scanned off. Theoretically, it could kill you. But there was some still life in the spinal cord. Anyway, this boy went on to gain 20 pounds up to 78 pounds. We took him off the tube, we got him to move, we had everybody in the family take a joint in his body and move his joints to remobilise him. Sometimes I think we probably tore some ligaments doing it. But we got mobility. And this boy came out of it. And I have a picture here with me of the boy actually graduating from high school.

Lisa: You’re kidding me? Why is this not an? What is not? Why have I never heard the story?

Dr John: I don’t get to share it too often. I didn't many years ago. I haven't practised in a long time. But all I know is that that was a moment that you just, it's probably like you had with your mum when you saw incremental progress.

Lisa: Yeah. Just grind.

Dr John: And I think that that's a metaphor. That's a metaphor. It doesn't matter where you've come from, doesn't matter what you're going through, doesn't matter what you've been through. What matters is you have something that you're striving for. And are you willing to do some incremental movement towards that? What else just said is, he's got a diagnosis. Diagnosis means through knowledge, supposedly, but it could also mean die to an agnosis. You don't know. Even the doctors don't know. But the reality is, he came out of the coma. And I had over the next few months, I had some amazing cases of a boy that was blind and couldn't walk, and all of a sudden see and walked again. I had a boy that was paralysed quadriplegic, was able to walk. I mean, I had some amazing stuff happen. When you're willing to do what other people aren't willing to do, you're willing to experience when other people don't get to experience.

Lisa: Yep, it is just so powerful. And I'm just absolutely blown away from that story. Because, I mean, I know with my mum who was only in a coma for three weeks, and had stroke and so on, and in the specificity and the things that I've had to deal with. The whole vestibular system being completely offline, she has like a rag doll, having to read, programming her from being a baby, basically, to being an adult, within that three year period with a body that is now like 79 years old. And the doctors going like, your brain can't change that much. And in just going, I'm going to keep going. I'm only listening to people who tell me I can do something, I'm not listening to anybody who tells me I can't do something. And this is something that I've really integrated into my entire life like as an athlete, doing stupidly long ultramarathon distances. I was always told you can't do this, and you can't do that. It's impossible. And I was like, 'We'll see.' I'm going to throw everything in it. And that was my passion at the time have now retired from doing the stupid distances because I've got other missions on in life. But whatever it is, is always the big mission. And then everybody comes up against people who tell you, you can't do it. This is one of the biggest limiting things that I see.

Dr John: That's what Einstein said, greatness is automatically pounded by mediocre minds.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr John: I had a boy, a boy attend my breakthrough experience, who had a surfing accident and became arms and legs not working, He could move his neck. He got a little bit of function slowly into the hand that was about it, just a tiny bit. And I remember a man wheeling him in and having them kind of strapped to a wheelchair. I knew the father and I knew his brother. There were doctors who were colleagues of mine. And they brought him, they flew him literally from Los Angeles over to Texas to come to the breakthrough experience. I remember him looking straight down really depressed, suicidal, because he was a surfer and he was on his way to being a great surfer. If he couldn't surf, he didn't want to live kind of. I remember getting on my knees and looking up at him at this chair, and I said, 'It all determines inside you what you decide. I don't know what the limit you have in your body. I don't know what you can repair. I don't know what you can do. I don't want to say you can't. But all I know is that if you're going to, you're going to have to put everything into it. You're gonna have to have no turning back kind of attitude. There's got to be a relentless pursuit of your master plan to serve.'

His name is Jesse Billauer. He made a decision at the Breakthrough Experience that nothing was going to stop him from surfing again, nothing. He is really, in the room was absolutely applauding him. The before and after in that weekend was so astonishing that it was tear jerking. Well, about 17 years ago, 16 half years ago, I had the opportunity to get, I was living on the Gold Coast of Australia. I had many homes in New York and different places. But I had one in the Gold Coast of Australia in Aria, lived in the penthouse of Aria. And all of a sudden, I found in my entrance of my penthouse, which you only can get into with my key somebody from downstairs, put it in there like mail, a DVD video of a surfing movie, called Stepping Into Liquid. And when I pulled that up and put that in there, there was Jesse Billauer, surfing.

He found a way of using his head muscles, and designing a special vehicle, a transport system, a surfboard. He had to have somebody take them out into the water and push him. But once he got on a wave his head movements were able to ride and he was riding like 12 foot waves, which is 20 foot face waves. He was doing that. And he was an inspiration. He became friends with Superman who had quadriplegia and they became friends and he created a foundation to do something but he taught people how to go surfing as a quadriplegic. So when the wise big enough to house take care of themselves, you've proven that in your book. What little I've done in my life compared to some of these kind of stories is just astonishing what I see sometimes people do. I mean, mind blowing stuff that people, that determination to overcome that are absolute inspirations. Inspiration is a byproduct of pursuing something that's deeply inspiring and deeply meaningful, through a challenge that people believe is not possible. That's inspiration.

Lisa: That's how we grow as a human race. We have these amazing people that do incredible things. And these stories, I mean, these are stories that aren't even out there in the world, in a huge way. There are hundreds of these stories and thousands of these stories and miraculous stories. These are the things that we should be talking about. Because why are we not studying the outliers? Why are we not? When I look at my book, or my story, which I share publicly and not a single doctor that had anything to do with my mum ever asked me, 'Well, how did you do it?' Nobody is interested in why she has not taken the normal path as long gone. Nobody has asked me what did you do? People do. My audience want to know why. The people that follow me, etc. But nobody that was involved in that case. And I see that over and over again.

Dr John: It's forcing him to face their own, you might say, belief systems about what they've been taught. There's an educated awareness by the herd and then there's an innate yearning by the master. The master transcends the herd, if you will. You can be a sheep or a shepherd. The shepherd is the one that goes out and does things that the sheep are not willing to do. But then once they do it, they'll rally around it. They are there watching you to be the hero instead of becoming the hero.

Lisa: Wow. And why is it in the medical fraternity that there seems to be a very big herd mentality, like no one is scared to step outside of their norms, and they get slammed. I see this in academia and in science as well, where people who have brilliant ideas and hypotheses and studies and so on, they just get slammed because it's outside of the current paradigm.

Dr John: William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, said 'To be great…' And Emerson followed in suit, 'To be greatest, to be misunderstood.’ William James basically said that the majority of people fear rejection from the multitudes because that was survival. People that are into survival follow the multitude. People that are in thrival create a new paradigm. At first they're going to be ridiculed. They're going to be violently opposed to Schopenhauer and Gandhi said, but eventually becomes self-evident. And you're either following a culture or building one. The people that do that build a new culture. They build a new culture of idea. Emerson said in his essays on circles, 'We rise up and we create a new circle of possibility. And then that becomes the new norm until somebody comes up and breaks through that concentric sphere with another circle.' It's like the four minute mile. I had a gentleman on my program the other day who is striving to be the fastest runner in the world. He's got bronze and silver medals, but he hadn't got the fastest running. And he's not stopping. He's working sometimes eight to 13 hours a day on this project. I believe that the way he's so determined to do it, and how he works on it, and he doesn't need a coach telling him what to do. He just does it. He's inspired to do it. He'll be the fastest runner, he won't stop till he's the fastest runner in the world. And that’s determination, that to be great at that one thing, find that one thing that you really target like a magnifying glass, on that you become the greatest at that thing.

Mine was human development, human behaviour. I want to have the broadest and greatest width of information about that. That's my one thing. But each individual has something that they can excel in, if they just define it, and give themselves permission at it, and say, thank you but no thank you to the opinions. The opinions are the cheapest commodities on Earth that would circulate the most as a use value. There’s ton of those. But those opinions aren’t what matter. It's not you comparing yourself to other people, it's you comparing your daily actions to what's deeply meaningful to you, and the highest priority actions daily, that’s what it is.

Lisa: How do you, this is a problem that I face, get to a certain level of success and achievement, and then you start getting lots of offers and opportunities and so on, and you start to lose the focus. You get distracted from the things that are happening in this day and age where the internet and everything that ends up like I get the shiny object syndrome. And say, 'Oh, this is an extremely interesting area of study, and I should go down that path. And then I go down that path, and then I go down that path.' It is adding to the whole picture of a general education. as someone who studied as much as you have, you've obviously encompassed all of these areas. But I think what I'm asking is, how do you find out what your highest priority is? And how do you get a team around you, so that you're not limited? I think there's a lot of business people that are listening to this, me included in this, who has struggling to get past a certain ceiling because the area of genius is one thing that they love and excelling at, and you'd like to spend all of your time doing that. But you're stuck in the groundhog day of admin and technology in the stuff that you hate. And not busting through because financially, you can't delegate to people. You also got to find people that are a good fit for you who can do the jobs, and then also have the finances to be able to break through to that near next level. Can you talk to that about?

Dr John: Yes, absolutely. When I was 27 years old, I was just starting my practice. I was doing a little of everything, anything and everything, just to get the thing cranking. I had one assistant that I hired. But I realised I was doing way too many trivial things. And that'll burn you out after a while if you're doing stuff that's not really what your specialty is. I went to the bookstore and I got a book by Alec McKinsey called The Time Trap. I read this book. As I read it, I underlined it and extracted notes like I do. I decided to put together a little sheet for it. I'll share that because it was a goldmine. I made a list of every single thing that I do in a day, over a three month period, because each day I had sometimes different things to do. But I wrote down everything I might be doing in those three months in a day. I just wrote them all down. And I don't mean broad generalities like marketing or this type of thing or radiographs or whatever. I mean, the actual actions. The actual moment by moment actions I do in those categories. I made a list of those and it was a big list. And I looked at it. Then right next that list, every single thing I did from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, everything — home, personal, professional. I wanted to know what my day looked. I want to be an honest, objective view of what am I actually doing with my day. Because if I want to create my life the way I want, I've got to take a look at what I'm actually doing because if I'm not doing things that give me the results, no wonder I'm not getting there.

I made that list, and right next to it, in column number two of six columns is how much does it produce per hour. Which is a measure of actually meeting somebody's need as a service and people willing to pay. How much is that produced per hour? And that was humbling because there are whole lot of stuff that I will do without pay. I was minoring in majors and majoring in minors. I was doing all kinds of stuff that was just cost, no return. I stopped and I looked at that, and that was humbling, and frustrating, and a bunch of stuff went through my mind. I mean, I just, but I had to be honest to myself, what does it actually produce? I extrapolate. If I spent two hours on it, what is it per hour? Cut it in half. If I spent 30 minutes, I’d double the number to get an idea what it is per hour. There's a lot of stuff that was not making anything and there was a few things that were making a lot.

The third column I wrote down, how much meaning does it have? How much is it that makes me inspired to get up and do it? I can't wait to do what people can't wait to get. Those are the things I want to target. So I looked at it on a one to ten scale, how much meaning it was. I made a list on a one to ten scale of every one of those items, how inspired am I to do that? And there's a lot of stuff on there that was not inspiring, that I didn't want to do. I thought, 'Hell. I went to ten years of college for this?' I made this list and I put this one to ten thing. And then I prioritised the tens down to the ones. I prioritise productivity down from the ones that made thousands of dollars an hour to nothing an hour. I just prioritise them. And then I looked. There were some that were overlapped, where the thing that was most meaningful and inspiring match where it’s most productive. I prioritise that based on the two together. And that was really eye opening. Then I went to the next one because I realised that if I don't delegate, I'm trapped. Then I put what does it cost? Every cost. Not just salary, but training costs, no hiring costs, parking costs, insurance costs, everything. What is the cost of somebody excelling at doing what it is I'm doing at a greater job than me? What would it cost? On every one of those items? The best I could do? I had to just guess on something, but I definitely did the best I could.

And then I prioritise that based on spread, how much it produced versus how much it cost. Then I put another column. How much time am I actually spending on average? The final column, I wrote down, what are my final priorities with all these variables? I did a very thorough prioritisation system there. I sliced those into ten layers. I put a job description, I put a job description on that bottom layer, and hired somebody to do that but bottom layer. It took me three people to get the right person because I had to learn about hiring. I didn't know how about, hiring. I finally got the first person there, and that was free. That allowed me to go up a notch. And then I hired the next layer. What I did is it allowed me to go and put more time into the thing to produce the most, which was actually sharing a message of what I was doing publicly, with speaking. Public speaking was my door opener. I just kept knocking out layers.In the next 18 months, my business tenfold in increase in income and business. I had 12 staff members and five doctors working for me in a 5000 square foot office from under 1000 square foot original office in 18 months. Because I said goodbye to anything that weighed me down. Anytime you do something that's lower on your values, and anytime something hone your value value yourself and the world values you when you value. It's waiting for you just to get authentic and live by the highest values, which is your ideological identity. The thing you really revolve around you. Mine was teaching, so I call myself a teacher, right? So whatever that highest value is, if you prioritise your day and fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it doesn't fill up with low party distractions that don't, because it's now you're allowing yourself to be authentic. And it doesn't cost to properly delegate if you get the right people, and you go on and do what produces more per hour, it doesn't cost it makes sense.

Lisa: That's the hard part, isn't it? As is growing.

Dr John: You do your responsibilities. Go do the thing that knocks down the doors and goes and does the deals and then go and let them do all the crazy work. Like when I was 27, that's the last time I ever wrote a check or did payroll or looked at bills. I never looked at that again. Because that's a $20 an hour job and I could make way more speaking and doing my doctrine. So I thought, 'I'm not doing anything that's going to devalue me ever again in my life.' I've never gone back. 38 years, I've never gone back.

Lisa: So systematise. This is a thing here, where I have a bit of a problem, a bit of a chaos, right?

Dr John: I'm an ignoramus when it comes to anything other than research, write, travel, and teach. I'm useless. I'm not. I do jokes and say when I'm having I want to make love with my girlfriend. I tell her. I put my arms around I said, 'If I was to organise and have Hugh Jackman or Brad Pitt take care of lovemaking for you on my behalf and things like that, would you still love me?' One time if she said, 'No, I will still love you more.' I'm joking. That’s a joke. But the point is that if you're not delegating lower priority things, you're trapped.

Lisa: And this is the dilemma, I think, of small businesses is giving that mix right and not taking on people before you can go to that next level.

Dr John: But you go. You go to the next level by taking them on if it's done properly.

Lisa: If it's done properly, because I've-

Dr John: You want to make sure. That's why I have a value determination process on my website to determine the values of people I hire because if they're not inspired to do what I need to delegate, that's not the right person.You gotta have the right people on the bus, this column says. I have to be clear about what I can produce if I go and do these other things. And me speaking it, and doing the doctoring on the highest priority patients was way more productive financially than me doing those other things. So once I got on to that, I put somebody in place just to book speeches, and just to make sure that I was scheduled and filled my day with schedules with patients, it was a updated day and night. I've never gone back to that. I only research, write, travel, teach. That's it.

Lisa: That's my dream. I'm gonna get there.

Dr John: I don't do it. What's interesting is I became financially independent doing that because of that. I learned that if I don't value myself, and I don't pay myself, other people aren't going to pay me. If they're waiting for you to value you add when you value you, the world values you. You pay yourself first, other people pay you first. It's a reflection, economically, there. And that's what allowed me to do it. Because financial independence isn't for debauchery and for the fun life, in my opinion. It's for making sure that you get to do what you love because you love it not because you have to do it.

Lisa: And having an impact on the world. But if you're stuck doing the admin and the technical, logical stuff, and the crap that goes along with the business. You're not impacting the world like you want to be impacting.

Dr John: Weel, the individual that does the administration is impacting the world through the ripple effect by giving you the freedom to do it.

Lisa: Exactly.

Dr John: If that's what they love doing. That’s not what I love doing. But there are people that love administration, they love that stuff and love behind the scenes, I love doing that. Finding those people. That's the key.

Lisa: Finding those people. I's given me a bit of encouragement because I've been in that sort of groundhog days I had to get through the ceiling and get to the next level of reach.

Dr John: I finally realised that the cost of hiring somebody is insignificant compared to the freedom that it provides if you do your priority.

Lisa: If you get your stuff right, and know what you…

Dr John: Because the energy, your energy goes up the second you're doing what you love doing. And that draws business to you.

Lisa: Absolutely. I mean, like doing what we're doing. Now, this is my happy place.

Dr John: We’re both in our element. This is why we're probably going to slow down. The point is, when you're doing something you love to do, when you're on fire, with kind of an enthusiasm, people come around to watch you burn. They want to see you on fire.

Lisa: I mean, they do, they do. And I've seen that in times in my life where I've been preparing for a big race or something, and I need sponsors. I just go out there. At the start, I didn't know how to do a sponsored proposal, I didn't know how to do any of that fancy stuff. I just went out there and told the story. And by sharing the story, people were like, 'I want to get on board with this. That's exciting.' People would come on in and and when you don't know, one of the things that I've found in life is the less you know, sometimes the more audacious you are. When you actually have too much knowledge sometimes about the implications of what you're doing is when you can actually limit yourself.

Dr John: Yeah. Because you get in the herd instinct running on all the limitations. When you're inspired by something and there's no turning back. Everybody deep inside wants to be like that. So when they see something like that they want to engage. But you want to invest in inspiration, not rescue desperation. That's a basic law. Invest in inspiration, not rescue desperation. Nobody wants to rescue desperation unless they're compassionately in desperation and they're feeling hurt themselves. But if you take somebody and you show them what's possible, when Elon Musk goes out there and he has three explosions in a month on the way to Mars, they don't make any. He doesn't give up, he just goes, 'We're going to build another one.' There's no, 'Okay. It's a billion dollars. Let's spin 5 billion if we have to, but we're going to Mars.' Setbacks are nothing more feedback. That's the person who's inspired.

Lisa: Yeah. And that perseverance. I’m thinking that. You know the title of my book there is Relentless for a reason because you have to be like, no matter what, in that journey, there were months without progress. There would be months when we would see absolute nothing. And that was with all day every day working on it then seeing nothing. People would come to me and they'd say, 'Why are you putting her through this torturous regime every day? Why don't you just leave her be? Make her comfortable.' I don't do comfortable. Comfortable is not part of my vocabulary. Comfortable is 'We're going to die.' We can be comfortable for an hour in the evening, while I'm watching Netflix. That's the rest of the day.

Dr John: That's what I say about breaks. I say my job is to make you feel comfortable being uncomfortable.

Lisa: That's comfortable being uncomfortable.

Dr John: I’m gonna make you comfortable being uncomfortable. Because unless you are outside your comfort zone, it's not gonna, there's no stretch. there's no stretch. Just like in bodybuilding, if you don't push yourself a little further. I started out doing this year. The last year I started out doing 25 push ups, I went to 50 push ups, went to 75 push ups, went 200 broke 100. And I just kept adding another one. Just doing, trying to go and get my push ups up.

Lisa: And on that point, how have you stayed looking still like a teenager? What is it that? Is this the knowledge that you have that you just don't seem to age for a while?

Dr John: I was 17 when I started, I'm almost 67 now. All I did is that, means I only added 5. 1-2-3-4-5. So every decade was just one number. So I've only added five, five numbers to my age, since I was 17. That's the way I look at it.

Lisa: Well it looks like that. Are there some secrets to that? What is it that keeps you looking in?

Dr John: I don't live to eat. I eat to live. I don't pig out, I don't binge. I don't eat junk, I make sure that I'm eating performance. If you have something deeply meaningful that you want to do on a daily basis, you refine your diet into something that gives you performance. That's that's it, and I drink a lot of water. I haven't had coffee my whole life. I don't, I haven't had alcohol in 48 plus years. I've got a pretty simple life.

Lisa: Pretty simple life.

Dr John: And I’m doing what I love every day, I love what I'm doing. And that makes a difference. You don't age as much. Your cytokines, your inflammatory responses are down. You don't have distress. You have your stress, you have armies, and you move forward when you're doing something you really love to do every day.

Lisa: Wow. So no stress, good diet, none of the bad stuff.

Dr John: I’ve delegated all my stress to other people. You know, Hugh Jackman, they got the stress. They're the ones that gonna have to go through all that gyration and make love. I'm joking. I delegate stress to other people who would love to take it.

Lisa: Yep. And that's, oh, man, there's just so much gold in that. So what are some of the stuff as that you do, you talk about in the breakthrough experience? Talk me through a little bit of the process that you get people to take and so in a way, how can help people can join the breakthrough?

Dr John: One of those is owning the traits of the greats. I always say at the level, the essence of the soul, which is the real authentic self, you might think. Nothing's missing in you. But the level of your senses, things appear to be missing in you. And sometimes we compare ourselves to others. We put them on pedestals, we put them in pits, we put them above us or below is greater or lesser than us. We don't have an equal sign. So there's no equanimity and equity in there. Well, and as long as we do, we're going to inject their values and try to live in their values, which is futile, or project our values and try to get them to live in our values, which is futile. And all that futility, energy is what drains people. When you actually start to do something that is authentic to you, and are more objective, filling your day with high priorities. Think about when you really got, really knocked it out of the ballpark, and you stuck to priorities in the day you come home, you're resilient, you can handle anything. But if you put out fire and just had nothing but low priority stuff during the day, and you felt like 'Man, I never got to what was important today. What a day.' You're a bear when you come home, and that runs your immune system down. So,owning the traits of the greats finding out what it is around you, the heroes and villains around you own them. So you're not thinking, 'Oh, I need to be like them, or they need to be like me.' Just own it all. Give yourself to realise that if you're admiring somebody it's because you're too humble to admit what you see in them inside you, it's not missing, it's there. You haven't seen it. Become aware of it in your own form in your own value system. Don't compare yourself to them. Compare your daily actions to what you value most and stick to priority.

Lisa: And so when you start to think that someone else, because we do this all the time. We're comparing ourselves, you meet someone on the street and you're like, 'Oh, they're better looking than me either. They're richer than me. This or that.' Doing that act actually diminishes what you feel.

Dr John: But they don’t have a better life than you. That's what's so funny. I've met a lot of celebrities, a lot of impacting people, probably three or four thousand of them now. They're just human beings. And we think, 'Oh, my God. They got this great glitzy life.' No, they don't. I know some celebrities that can go outside without the paparazzi. They have to go flying into an island to hide somewhere. They have challenges that you probably don't want. But the reality is, they're not better. They're just different. And that's the realisation. They have a different set of values. They have a different set of 'successes and failures.' And if you compare yourself to them, you're going to minimise yourself. But if you actually go and find out what you see in them inside you in your own form. Otherwise, you're going to do what Einstein said. You're going to be a cat trying to swim like a fish and beating yourself up or a fish trying to climb a tree like a cat beating yourself up. Honour that you're a cat. I'm a professional speaker, I honour that I don't try to waver from what I know I'm here for.

Lisa: Yes, I love that. It's like understanding your genetics. I teach genetics and epigenetics, and that's a part of it. Understanding who you are owning who you are, instead of trying to be someone that you're not. Looking at the bad and the good, and the ugly, it is what it is, and how do we make the best of us.

Dr John: No matter what, no matter how ugly you are in the world, there's somebody out there that is going to love to look at you. That’s what’s funny. I was in Antarctica, I live on a ship as you know. We sailed down to Antarctica. There were penguins along I mean, as far as you can see is penguins. And I've watched the penguins. There were some really gimpy looking penguins that weren't that attractive. But I found if I waited there and watch long enough, another gimpy penguin found them and they made it with them. It was lovely. And then there was this really flaring debonair penguin, right? There's that perfect tuxedo on. There's this beautiful penguin, there was a penguin for everybody. I could see all my friends and their personalities in these penguins. It was quite interesting. So it's in the eye of the beholder, beauty. The same thing, we tend to think, 'Well, they've got a better deal.' No, they don't, they have a different deal.

Lisa: They have a different deal. Yeah. It's about you finding your priority, living your best life, living your optimal performance, and not getting yourself in the way and not letting other people control.

Dr John: What that is. If you don't empower your own life, people overpower you. Rose Kennedy had a mission statement. I actually was given a book by a woman who was a patient that her father gave her the book and her father got that book from the Kennedy family. So this was handed down from the Kennedy family to a father to a daughter to me. And in there, I was going through this book, and it was on magnetism. It's amazing book. In there was a handwritten note by Rose Kennedy. It was our mission statement. And it said, 'I dedicate my life to raising a family of world leaders.' That's her mission.There's a mother. And I've had mothers come up to me and said, 'Well, is that enough?' And I go, I read that to them. Anytime I have a mother that's thinking, 'Oh, I should be a businesswoman. I should be this. I should be that.' They really, really want to raise kids. But they're comparing themselves, and think that's not enough. I read that to them. Because she created world leaders as a mother.

Lisa: And that’s a ripple effect, isn’t it? That's the ripple effect that…

Dr John: Because her heart was there. Her heart was a way to be a mother. And we sometimes go, 'Oh, well, they're doing this so I should be doing this.' Anytime you hear yourself saying I should, I ought to, I'm supposed to, I got to, I have to, I must, or I need to, you're living under the imperatives of other people that you've subordinated to. You're injecting values, which is clouding the clarity of your own mission. Giving yourself permission to get your mission back and saying thank you, but no, thank you to options, who you are, and give you no truth to who you are. That's what’s liberating. Being unborrowed visionary, not a borrowed visionary.

Lisa: One valuable bomb after the other I think and this conversation, and it's just so empowering. Because you as human beings, we have this imposter in the head that's telling us we're not good enough. We aren't this, we aren't that. And we also have the subconscious that's running the ship. So we downloaded a whole lot of stuff when we were young that we didn't. When did you choose your beliefs? When did you choose your value system? When did you choose that you are going to be limited in this way or that way? Was probably before you even were able to understand how the people get into that subconscious and start to reprogram. Because a lot of people listen to this guy, 'Yes, yes, yes, I want to be like that.' And then …

Dr John: The thing is they set up a fantasy. Saying that as long as you have a fantasy your life becomes a nightmare. You got to set a real objective, something you're willing to embrace pain and pleasure in the pursuit of. If you're not willing to embrace both pain and pleasure, support and challenge, ease and difficulty in the pursuit of it, it isn't your mission because that's the sign of the mission. You're willing to do whatever it takes. Travel whatever distance, pay whatever price is, as that happened to me. So if you're looking, if you're in your amygdala, you're going to want to avoid predator and seek prey. Avoid pain, seek pleasure in the hedonistic pursuit, which is immediate gratification and short term outcomes. Person attend the executive centre has an executive vision. And they have a strategic planning, they want to think it through. When you go and run massive marathons, you sit down and go, 'Okay, what's the diet? What am I? What's my workout? What are the obstacles? What happens if I get too hot? What happens?' You think of everything and prepare. You have foresight and people with foresight get ahead. And people that live in hindsight, are always reacting. Number one thing to stops that is giving power to other people that you put on pedestals. We're not here to put people on pedestals, we're not here to live in their shadows. We're here to stand on their shoulders, as Newton did. So our job is to whatever we see, and other people own the traits of great. That's what I do in the breakthrough experience. What is it I admire about them? And where do I have it until it's quantitatively and qualitatively equal. So they're no longer up on this pedestal, and I'm no longer minimising because if I set a goal that matches their values, I'm going to beat myself up. You have self critical statements inside your head. That's not a bad thing. That's letting you know you're pursuing something that's not you. That's a feedback. The second you get on to what the navigation you, you don't have that. I've demonstrated that on thousands of people, the second they get on to them, they get tears of gratitude, they know what it is, that disappears. That's a homing device to try to get you to set real goals with real objectives that are deeply meaningful and quit trying to be somebody you’re not.

Lisa: Wow. So what about things like your amygdala you talked about the amygdala and your prefrontal cortex and your view executive function. What happens with people who have, I had Dr Austin Perlmutter on the show, Dr David Perlmutter. He's written a book called Brainwash. He talks about the separation between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex of the connection that the conversation isn't going backwards and forwards. And in people with brain injuries, for example, or with a lot of inflammation because they've been eating wrong foods are exposed to toxins. So there's an actual physical thing. How can people get their amygdala under control? Because we have so many people, whether it's from a brain injury or from bad foods, or whatever, living in this amygdala state where they're in a reactive, immediate gratification, make the short term decisions not looking at. This is affecting us worldwide. This is not only on the individual level, but also…

Dr John: Even some leadership levels. People are doing it. We have neuroplasticity, you know that. Neuroplasticity allows neurogenesis. They can reactivate neurogenesis and we can remyelinate with our oligodendrocytes, we can remyelinate that internal system. They ask them sites and oligodendrocytes are sitting there building and destroying he seems remodelling his house. Yeah, yeah. Now, every time we live by the highest priority, the highest value, the prefrontal cortex starts getting mileage and the neurogenesis and the neurons going from the prefrontal cortex with glutamate and GABA, the regulators of the amygdala, calm down the impulses and instincts, the amygdala they cause us to have these fantasies and nightmare states, these distractions.

So the second we start to go back to priority, the blood glucose and oxygen starts going up in the forebrain and starts myelinating that air, the brain, and we can neuro plastic to do if we stick to priority. But what we do is we're subordinating and fearing rejection and holding on to fantasies as a result of that, that aren't matching what we really are committed to. And we think we know ourselves, but we don't. Getting clear about that's why I have on my website, the value determination process to get clear about what you really value. Because most people, if I ask people, how many want to be financially independent, every hand goes up. And then I say, Well, how many are financially dependent? All the hands go down. I said, you really don't have a desire for financial empowerment you think you do, you have a desire to spend money on immediate gratifying, you know, consumables that depreciate in value, that's what your life's demonstrating.

You need to face the fact about what your values are, and know what those values are, if you want to really achieve what you say you're going to achieve. So a lot of people don't really have that they say they want something, but that's not really what their life's demonstrating. I want to know what their life's demonstrating they're committed to and structure their life around that. That's what upgrades the myelinisation on the forebrain.

Lisa: Wow. And so it's not just the foods that we’re eating.

Dr John: Food’s part of it! Inflammatory responses, but a lot of the inflammatory responses are associations made in the brain on things that are supportive or challenging of your body. So if you perceive something challenging you, you'll have a kind of an anti effect on it you'll have a you know, I always say that if you've got shame and guilt or whatever you're going to literally have an autoimmune response attacking parts of your body. Your body And brain is doing that it has this capacity to do that and, and the little microglial cells are actually part of the immune system, they're actually doing that to help apotosis to destroy cells in the brain that are being used if you don't usually lose it. And if you're looking for immediate gratification, you get a quick fix, because you're unfulfilled, you'll, you're not going to spend the energy on glucose and oxygen, and blood up in the forebrain, because you don't need it. That's why you have to set the priority, fill your day with the highest priority actions on a daily basis and rebuild your brain.

Lisa: Well, and that filters down onto all of these other levels, the physical levels, the order of many systems.

Dr John: Self-image changes. your momentum starts to build up, your confidence goes up, your self worth goes up your space and time horizons expand, you automatically start walking your talk instead of limping your life and your amygdala calms down. It's myelinisation and the forebrain pick it up. Welcome to the executive.

Lisa: Welcome to the executive the one that the adults back in the room and the kids.

Dr John: The adults are not the wild animal. Yeah, what's interesting is, is the executive function that forebrain has fibres ago to V-5, V-6 in the visual cortex and activate vision. And he goes down into the decision makings for strategic planning, and it goes to the associative motor functions to get spontaneous action. And it calms down the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens and the palate, and that calms them down and gets them ready for an inspired action.

Lisa: Wow, I'm not I'm just absolutely mind blowing and your knowledge of the brain and how that all that all works. Because this is the I mean, I've been, you know, deep in the study, obviously, with brain injuries and repair and in the short term thinking problem that we have in society in general. And in my own life, I've seen it, you know, I see, you know, when I go and do things that I don't want to be doing, because I'm looking at it out of balance state, I’m stressed for some reason, and so you go and do something that you go, ‘Why did I do this?’ You know, and it's understanding this whole interplay of the body and the mind, that is just so powerful. And for people who have diseases or autoimmune diseases, or, you know, cancers, and what is your take on how much the mind actually affects your bodily systems in given what we've just talked about?

Dr John: I wrote 1000 page text on the mind body connection, which is a, you know, what the messages of the body kind of thing. And through perception, the ratios of perception, impact through perception going into autonomics, the autonomic nervous system, if you have a perception, you've got more support and challenge your parasympathetic comes online, you get more challenges where your synthetic comes online. Yeah, those create neurotransmitter ratios, those create epigenetic impacts, because they literally cause kinase and phosphatase, responses and acetylation and methylation. Yep. And these, these are basically changing our physiology creating symptoms in our body. And most people don't take the time to look at applied physiology. I've been focusing on applied physiology since I was 23. Wow, and studying exactly what exactly is that cell? Do? Yeah. So I take a cell and I look at every receptor, and I look at every neurotransmitter and every modulator and hormone and and you know, and I look at those neuro regulators. And I look at what triggers those what parts of the brain what what autonomic component, what hypothalamus component, you know, what, what transmitters are involved in that. And I look at that, and I look at what are the symptoms that are coming out of that. And then I look at the combination of symptoms that we call a condition. And there's no doubt in my mind, there's psychology sitting inside there, no doubt in my mind, watching that and paying close attention that I wrote this big textbook on that just for that reason. And then what happens is people are so used to not wanting to take accountability for their own thing. They want to blame some outside source, and they want to look for some sort of solution, the bug and the antibiotic, right? The evil spirit and the Saviour kind of thing. And they're all dissociated, they're not taking accountability for their perception, decisions and actions in life. And I'm more about educating people on what their physiology is doing. Yeah, for instance, if a person goes in binges and pigs out which most everybody's done at least once. When they do, they wake up with kind of puffy eyes, nasal congestion, a little bit of a headache, a little nausea, stomach cramps, maybe some diarrhea the next day. Well, you go to the the allopathic physician, and he's gonna say, Well, you've got an antacid, you need. They give you six pills, and I and all your body was doing is creating the normal physiological response when you pigged out.

Lisa: And then you're going to add all of these problems to it.

Dr John: But the thing is that those symptoms are health. That's a healthy response to a pig. If you're a pig, you're gonna get that response. Yeah, if you don't eat that way, you don't have those symptoms. So the symptoms are feedback mechanisms. guiding us to an authentic life where we have self governance. That's the mission.

Lisa: And when we get when people get into this downward spiral of eating the wrong stuff, and then they have more cravings for the wrong stuff and you know becomes a mess. And they don't, when you don't understand the whole how the physiology works, and they don't even link together that the headache today was the headache last night.

Dr John: They're looking for the immediate gratification pill, wherever you're at, and the pharmaceutical industry loves to make the cash. Their medical reps are out there selling it. And you know what, I it's not bad or good. It's just that if you educate yourself, and you have options, and you're aware, you now realise you have the power to make a difference in your own life. That's the last resort. I haven't had a medication in my body for 49 years. Wow. No aspirin, no drugs, nothing. I don't take anything. I drink water. I haven't needed it. I don't have a headache. The only time I ever had a headache when I was doing bark mulch one day spreading bark mulch and I then got inhaled all this dust, and I got a headache. But my body let me know that. But if you listen to your body, it's guiding you very wisely. Eat wisely and fill it with wise things. And think about how you want to feel your life. If you feel it prioritise your life and do something you really love doing with the people you love doing it and make a career doing it and get paid for it. And eat wisely to live, not live to eat. You'd be surprised what your body is capable of doing.

Lisa: Yeah, and how long it can live and how well it can live and you're living proof of that.

Dr John: I’m still cranking. When it happened to me tomorrow, but I'm still cranking it out. I still got more energy than most people and 30 year olds that can't keep up with me.

Lisa: No. In the brain power is not diminished. You know, because this is what a lot of us fear. I don't fear it because I know what to do with it.

Dr John: The purpose of losing the purpose of losing your mind with Alzheimer's is just to be able to say that I don't know my kids anymore because you want them to move out.

Lisa: That might be a good point. You got it. You got it. You gotta laugh.

Dr John: That's a strategy to go. I don't remember my kids. No, no, no, no.

Lisa: Unfortunately, it's not. And we can see this coming 20 years out and you still talk to people on a daily basis who are facing this and their family and they don't think they have any power except the drugs.

Dr John: I was contacted by Bronnie Ware, who's out there in Australia, on the Byron Bay Area. And she wrote a beautiful book on you know, the five regrets that people have as they're getting ready to die. And most of them are because people weren't authentic. They did a job they didn't want to do with people they didn't want to do. And were afraid of people rejecting them. And their whole life was basically living and learning and excelling. And that's what that's what kills people. And then what happens? They got Monday morning blues, Wednesday, hump days, Thank-God-it's-Fridays and week friggin ends. And then they go in and they do and then blow it on some vacation to escape. And then they're in poverty. And then they're distressed and then their life went by. If you're not doing something you love doing and getting remunerated and handsomely paid doing what you love you missed out on your life.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. And there is nothing evil about having money. I think this is another thing that we subconsciously think people who are wealthy must be bad. They must have done it in a way. And we think that on a subconscious level.

Dr John: I've been a bad person my whole life.

Lisa: You must be terrible.

Dr John: I was 27. I'm a bad person. No, what I found is that I made a commitment that I was going to master finance just like any other field. And I, you know, I read about 1400 books on that topic. And so I'd learned how to do it. And I started to save and invest and started doing things. And then I worked my butt off, I got a little ass because I worked. Yeah, and I've been serving and serving and serving and serving seven days a week. So I have no problem doing that. And I'm a believer that, you know, if you can be a slave to money, or you can be a master of it. If you're slave to you're gonna work your whole life for it. The people that say, well, all you I don't want money, it's bad and evil. They work their whole life for it. Yeah, I want it working for me, I make more money off my investments, than I do working doing anything else. I'd rather have it working for me. And so I can then decide what philanthropic thing I can do with that. I can do a lot with that.

Lisa: This is the power of having financial independence. Not that I've got there yet. But it's been able to have a bigger impact. You've been able to do more with your life. And this is the frustrating thing that so much talent in the world and so much people with big visions and skills are limited because they didn't have the resources to do it. And that’s it.

Dr John: Are any of you like, 'You don't empower somebody to overpower you.' I made a commitment to empower. I'm working on ideas that serve people and wake up genius. Yeah, I wanted to create a new national business globally, which I've done. I wanted to be able to have financial independence, which I've achieved. I want to have a global family. My partner lives in Turkey. Yeah. Wow. Right now. She just left. Just the other day just left. She's on her way to Turkey right now flying. Yeah. And she's magnificent. She's one of the top singers, actresses and models in the world. So I mean, you can have exactly what you set your mind to do. And I'm a believer that you can have influence and you can have a vital body and you can be inspired and create an inspiring movement for people. There's nothing stopping us from doing what it is that we would really love to do, except us not willing to do the actions to get there.

Lisa: Yeah. And getting the knowledge and getting the teachers and getting the books and getting the mentors and, and we have access to it all now. We have the damn internet. Like, why? Well, we just have access to anybody who says to me, 'Well, I can't go and how did you do that with your mother, you're not a doctor? I don't need a doctor, I don't need to be in here.'

Dr John: Mere onlining. You start digging and start researching.

Lisa: Exactly. And you can become an expert on your particular field pretty quickly. If you're really dedicated to doing that.

Dr John: I learned a long time ago when I was in my 20s that if you spend 30 minutes a day on a particular field, studying it intensely, at the end of seven years, you can be at the cutting edge. Wow. If you do an hour, no, an hour a day, you could do it in four years. If you did it two hours a day, two and a half years if you did three hours a day and do it under two years. Wow. And I did I demonstrated that in astronomy. I demonstrated that in dentistry in my field of neurology. I demonstrate I prove that. And so I'm absolutely certain you can intensify time sometimes intensity gives results.If you intensify your actions in a shorter period of time, you can get the same results quicker than most people think

Lisa: How do you retain that information? Because that was one of the problems that I've been you know dealing with I'm processing so many books, so much information, so many podcasts, so many things all the time then in a lot of it keeps falling out the other side of my I like to say it goes in on ear and comes out the other.

Dr John: I give it out as fast as I could. The sooner you give it out, the moment you get it, give it out, teach it the faster the faster output with input, the more the retention. It’s a basic law. So if I'm reading something I, I used to get up at two o'clock in the morning, do yoga up till two thirty speed read four to seven books by six thirty. I used to just read, read, read. And then I would go to jog and I go and clean up and I go to class and I go to clinic. And then I come back home at seven and I taught from 7 to 10 PM. 10 PM I went to bed and got up at two and I did it again. Wow. Each night. Each night that night, I would teach what I read that morning. And I planned out like what I was going to read I planned out my teaching. And I had classes every night people came to there and paid me. You know, while I was a student I was 23 years old made over $100,000 a year just teaching every night. And now that is a result of just the faster I get it, the faster I give it out. And that catalysed a retention and an integration of information. And so keep using it, you use it you don’t lose it.

Lisa: Don't wait till you're an expert. And you know, don't wait two years before you start teaching. Just get an idea right now.

Dr John: Teaching is the fastest way to learn it. It organises your mind and present in order to present it to you. You have an accountability, like put a deadline on it and teach it that's that's how you learned.

Lisa: Yeah. And that's forcing yourself to retain it.

Dr John: It's like saying, if you just saved money, you'll get ahead if you wait until you have extra money you won't. You never wait for you just you always pay yourself first I learned a long time ago. Don't wait until you have extra money. Just pay it. And watch how more money comes to you. When you manage money wisely you get more money to manage. That's the law.

Lisa: Dr John Demartini, you are a legend. I've learned so much today. And in this one hour session with you. It went to places that I wasn't expecting because you know I've studied your work. I know what you do. And yet this absolutely blew me away, actually meeting you face to face to feel your energy, your passion, your compassion for humanity is just next level, it's really made my day. In fact, I'm gonna go and change some things up I think because you spoke to me with some of my frustrations that I'm dealing with in my personal life. And I know that people that are listening to this will be like putting this on repeat. So thank you so much for your dedication to, to the work that you do. I know you could just sit back and relax now and not do anything, but you haven't. And then you never will, I don't think because you just have a passion for humanity in helping with their suffering in changing people's lives. So thank you so much for doing all that.

Dr John: Thank you for but some people think I caused the suffering.

Lisa: Well, I do I agree you probably do in the short term while we're getting the change.

Dr John: I have people they go, 'You’re going to make me accountable?' I said, 'Yeah, you want me to punish you, I'm making you accountable. Let's go, that's the suffering.'

Lisa: You haven't done a little one pill for me?

Dr John: If you feel that your life was suffering that you love, it's inspiring

Lisa: It is absolutely. Strength comes from struggle that's on my boxing club wall. You know and that is the more you have to fight against something the more challenged you are by something the more you are forcing yourself to learn, to grow, to develop, get stronger. That is one of the roles of the world, so you better be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Dr John: That's it. Thank you.

Lisa: Brilliant.

That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

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How to Overcome Challenges with Self-Love with Kim Morrison 0

Apr 15, 2021

When people think about today’s guest, tenacity is probably the first word that comes to mind. Everything she accomplished today stems from her unwavering self-belief and deep understanding that you must also take care of yourself. Through this perspective, she has taught herself and countless others how to overcome challenges. And like her, we’ve encountered countless adversities. We’ve all been in a place of anger, frustration, guilt or sadness.

How do we begin to accept and love ourselves and learn to grow from it?

In this week’s episode, Kim Morrison joins us to teach us all about self-love. She shares how she questioned human existence and purpose after a life-changing event and what we should be asking ourselves whenever we go through intense emotions. Kim also tells us how to overcome challenges and trauma, and discusses different helpful processes like hypnosis.

If you want to find out how to overcome challenges, achieve self-love and accomplish your goals, then tune in to this episode!

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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Find out how to overcome challenges.
Discover the things you need to work on and achieve self-love.
Learn about goal setting and the importance of aligning it with your values.

Episode Highlights

[05:57] A Little Bit About Kim

Kim grew up in New Zealand. She’s married to Danny Morrison, a former cricketer and fast-paced bowler.

Their world turned upside down when they lost a sister to suicide. They then lost their house and a lot of money that they had invested.

Seeing her husband go through a world of emotions made Kim question what makes humans tick and why we struggle and go through such tough times.

This led her to write several books around essential oils and started her passion for plants, aromatherapy, and connection to nature.
Lately, she has been interested in mind work like neuro-linguistic programming and hypnosis.

[10:09] What She’s Learned in the Past Years

You are the result of the five people with whom you spend the most time.

We can have a significant event happen in our lives that causes us emotional trauma. Depending on our filter system and body physiology, it then affects our behaviour.

A fascinating thing Kim found out is that the meaning we put into our early childhood can then affect what our lives become.
When you have awareness around it, you can undo this.

What happens to you does not matter. What matters is your reaction and perception of it.

[18:44] How Trauma Affects Us

Humans are made up of 50 trillion cells, and every one of those cells is communicating.

Unconsciously, so much is happening in our body because of homeostasis.

It takes time, effort, energy and real work on how to overcome challenges presented by trauma.

You must seek professional help. There’s also a lot of free services out there.
You need to take the time to take care of yourself.

[24:02] How to Overcome Challenges

Most people’s excuses for why they do not work on themselves are time and money, but those are not true. In truth, it is about whether or not you make yourself a priority.

Own up to your emotions with power instead of having a victim mentality.

To have a friend who is a good listener, or to be that friend, is one of the best fast-track pathways to self-care.

Lastly, to learn how to overcome challenges, you need discipline.

Life has its highs and lows, and if we can come to accept that, then that is self-love. To heal, we have to truly feel our emotions.

[33:35] The Reticular Activating System and Goal Setting

The reticular activating system is a part of our brain that stores memories. It has filters and a whole belief system.

We receive 2 million bits of information every day, but we only have access to 136 bits.

Sometimes, your goal does not match your value.

You have to have your goal aligned with your top three values. To do this, you need to do some work.

What we believe, perceive and focus on is where our energy goes. If our goals aren’t aligned, we look for excuses to not accomplish them.

[43:23] The Hypnosis Process

Hypnosis is about tapping directly into the unconscious mind.

When someone uses hypnotic language, it puts us into a subconscious trance.

Your mind can then go on a journey, and we can tap into the heart space. It allows us to bypass the critical factor and create change.

When you come out to the other side, you see possibility and opportunity instead of negativity.

Breath is the essence of life. When we go into a state of hypnosis, we are letting go of the breath and accessing our energy.

[50:37] Our Perception of the World

Everything we have ever experienced is just a belief or a perception; it is never the truth.

If we imagine the world from someone else’s perspective, we gain more understanding.

Every time you feel yourself going into a place of anger, frustration, guilt, or sadness, ask yourself, ‘For what purpose am I feeling this?’ or simply ask, ‘Why?’

[56:47] On Negative Thoughts

As negative thoughts enter your mind, ask seven whys.
We often have two characters in our head, one who is positive and another who is negative.
If you ask the seven why’s to those characters, you will find out that both have the same purpose – to protect you.

Resources

Gain exclusive access to premium podcast content and bonuses! Become a Pushing the Limits Patron now!
The Art of Self Love by Kim Morrison
Self Love Podcast with Kim Morrison
Learn with Kim on Kim Morrison Training
Join Kim’s Self-Love & Wellness Mentorship program with this special offer!
Twenty8 Essentials: Website | Facebook
Connect with Kim: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton
The Wim Hof Method
Breath by James Nestor
The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown
Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Dr Daniel G. Amen
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
Pushing the Limits Episode 180 - Breathing as the Key to Better Health with James Nestor
Pushing the Limits Episode 182 - Science Behind Nasal Breathing and How to Breathe Better with Patrick McKeown
Pushing the Limits Episode 190 - How to Build Resilience and Get Control of Your Biology with Paul Taylor

7 Powerful Quotes from this Episode

‘And the thing I love about it is that when you realise it and have an awareness around who you are and what you've been doing, the world becomes your oyster, and we stop blaming; we stop becoming the victim, we stop being in denial, we stop making excuses for our life. And we actually take accountability, responsibility and ownership for every single thing.’

‘And I say that with a disclaimer, that it's really important that in these times of worry and fear and stress and overwhelm, that you seek help. If you're feeling like your world is closing in, you're not your own coach; you’re not your own best coach; your partner's not necessarily the best coach or mentor for you through these times, neither are your parents. So sometimes we need professional help.’

‘Often, as we talk it to someone that's listening, truly listening without trying to fix us. When you're listening, we often talk through the process out loud because I believe all humans have all traits. And all humans have all resources within them to help heal themselves. But sometimes we just need to hear it.’

‘And if we could just understand that it's at our darkest times, we actually are revealed. Your strength comes through your courage, your determination, your tenacity, your resilience is what shows up.’

‘So we know that life is ebb and flow, high and low, in and out, dark and light. If we can come to accept that, then that is self-love.’

‘So the important thing to realise is that you have to have your goal aligned with your top three values. And if it's not aligned with any of your top three values, you're going to need some integration work to bring it up there if it's something you really want. Because otherwise, that's where the excuses come in.’

‘Just keep your mind stimulated with possibility. Because it's through the possibility we have grown, and through the growth we become way more powerful individuals. And with that, we start to then look at our higher purpose, and what legacy are we going to leave in this life.’

About Kim

Kim Morrison is a speaker, author, facilitator, health and lifestyle educator, self-love expert and entrepreneur. She set the world record as the youngest female to run 100 miles in less than 24 hours in 1983.

Kim has been an Aromatherapist for 27 years. She has diplomas in Holistic Aromatherapy, Sport and Remedial Therapies, Fitness Leadership and Homeobotanical Therapies in Melbourne and New Zealand. She is also a qualified Personality Trainer and completed studies in nutrition, reflexology and counselling. In 2009, Kim launched her company, Twenty8 Essentials.

To learn more about Kim, visit her website. Check out her podcast and connect with her on Instagram as well!

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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn more about how to overcome challenges through self-love.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript Of The Podcast

Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential, with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Pushing The Limits with your host Lisa Tamati. Today I have the lovely, dear friend, Kim Morrison, to guest. Kim is an absolute sweetheart. She's a speaker. She's a six-times author, a facilitator, health and lifestyle educator, podcaster herself. She is a self-love expert. And there's so much more to come than meets the eye. She's an absolute gorgeous woman inside and out. Tenacity is probably the first word that comes to mind. In her journey and all she’s accomplished today have all stemmed from her unwavering self-belief and her deep understanding that you must also take care of yourself first and foremost. She recently wrote a book called The Art of Self-Love, which I encourage you to check out after you've listened to this podcast. Kim is also, she’s an entrepreneur, she owns the company Twenty8 Essentials with essential oils. She does a lot of mentoring, especially with women's empowerment. She has her own podcast. She's also a world record holder as the youngest female to run 100 miles in less than, in 24 hours. So she's a very amazing athlete and mother. She's also the wife of Danny Morrison, the famous cricketer, and she's just an absolute legend. She's been through a lot in her life, and she shares in this episode a lot of her learnings along the way so I do hope you enjoy the episode with Kim.

Before I head over to the show, just want to let you guys know we've just launched our premium membership for the podcast. If you love Pushing the Limits, if you love what we stand for, if you'd like to support the show and get a whole lot of extra benefits as premium members, and the list is long on the extra benefits, then I would love you to hop on over to patron.lisatamati.com. That's patron.lisatamati.com and become one of our VIP members. One of our premium members that supports the podcast and the work that we do, and helps us keep getting this great content out there and get a whole lot of benefits, as you know to be a part of this exclusive club. So we're really, really stoked to get that up off the ground and we really appreciate your support. Of course, if you give us a rating and review for the shows too, that would be absolutely fabulous, and share it with your family and friends. We put a lot of effort into this. Sometimes some of the guests we have, top scientists, top doctors and researchers. It takes often many weeks to prepare for an interview and a lot of study, a lot of reading, a lot of books and also chasing celebrity guests and people that are of note that are hard to get hold of. So if you want me to be able to keep doing this work, I’d really appreciate your support over at patron.lisatamati.com.

And while we're on that note, if you're into interesting reads, please check out my three books I have Running Hot, Running To Extremes which both chronicle my adventures running around the world doing lots of crazy stuff, succeeding, failing, having lots of fun and experiences and disasters along the way. So if you like a good novel, well, not a novel, they're actually autobiographies. But if you'd like good running stories and adventures then please check those out. And my latest book, Relentless: How a Mother and Daughter Defied the Odds is available on my website as well as on Amazon and IngramSpark and all the audiobooks and all of those sorts of places as well as Book Depository. You name it, it's out there. That one’s called Relentless and it's the story of bringing my mum back after a massive aneurysm left her with hardly any higher brain function, in a diagnosis where the medical professionals were telling me there was no way back for her at the age of 74, the brain damage was just too massive. They were wrong. This book is about empowering people. This is what this whole podcast is about. And what my whole life is about is taking control of your health, being preventative, educating yourself, and looking outside the square and connecting with the right people and, doing all that sort of stuff. So I'd love you to go and grab that book. And please share it too with your friends. If you like the book, get them to buy a copy too and help support the book. Getting it out there, and reviews and ratings for the book are really helpful too on either goodreads.com or you can just email me. I'd also love to hear from you if you are enjoying the podcast. Reach out to us if you've got any questions around any of the topics that we've brought up. We'd love to engage with you on support@lisatamati.com. Right well, now we'll go over to the lovely Kim who I absolutely treasure. She's a wonderful woman. I do hope You enjoy this podcast with Kim Morrison.

Lisa: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to pushing the limits. Today I have one of my very dear friends Kim Morrison back on the show. Kim, welcome to Pushing the Limits again.

Kim Morrison: Such a treat to be with you, my friend.

Lisa: We're just being ravishing. We couldn't stop talking to actually get the recording done, because we just got so much to like, (blah blah noise).

Kim: We almost should have recorded what we just created.

Lisa: All the cool people we've got to meet. I've got to introduce you to this person and this person. So yeah, we love swapping and collaborating and doing lots of crazy things.

So Kim, for those of you who don't know, you and most people should because you're world-famous and you're the author of six books. You're a mum, you're—you have your own amazing company. But tell us a little bit about Kim Morrison. Who’s Kim Morrison? Where are you sitting at the moment?

Kim: On the Sunshine Coast. World-famous and world tellers is what I’d say. I'm here on the Sunshine Coast. Obviously a kiwi, grew up in New Zealand, married Danny Morrison, a former New Zealand cricketer, fast-paced bowler and we had an incredible life. Then our world got turned upside down when sadly we lost a sister to suicide. And then Danny went through his own world of emotions. And as you can imagine being a top international athlete, to now a father of two, a mortgage, losing a sister, and then we lost our house. Then we lost a whole lot of money that we'd invested. All of a sudden, I think Danny started to question who the frick he was.

To watch that as a wife, a partner and someone that you love kept pushing me further down the rabbit hole and understanding what makes us tick. Why do people struggle? Why do people go through tough times? What is the meaning of it? So that took me on a journey after writing a number of books around essential oils. My passion was plants and aromatherapy and our connection to nature. And I've really, I've dabbled in a whole lot of things like nutrition and home-botanical therapy. And then lately, in the last few years, probably since writing my book, The Art of Self-Love, it's really been a quest, the last, six to ten years on, again, why do we have to go through tough times? And what does it actually mean?

So lately, I've been doing a whole lot of mind work around things like neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis, and really getting to understand how we tick and what makes us put meaning into life situations which then can calibrate into our physiology, which then calibrates into our immunology, which then calibrates into our health and wellness.

It's been a really cool journey. Lots of ups, lots of downs. I'm not sitting here saying my life's been easy. I've been through a lot of downs myself. And knowing that often hitting the rock bottom parts of life, whilst you're in it, the worst thing is to think that there's a lesson in this. ‘Oh, my gosh, I'm going to be coming out so amazing’ when you're in the throes of it. If someone even suggests that you're going to have come out of–

Lisa: Both!

Kim: Yeah, exactly. But we all know when we look back on our lives, dear Lisa, there is always a learning, there is always an opportunity for growth. But you can take it one of two ways you can turn it into a power part of your life or a petty part of your life. You can become the victor or the victim. And that's where I love working with people who choose the victor strategy. How do I learn from this?

Lisa: Wow, the victor strategy. You either become a victim or a victor. I love it. It's just so beautifully put. We've both been through rocky roads and most people have, if you get to our age. You've had some shit thrown at you. Some of your own doing some not your own doing. And okay, what can we learn out of this? And how can we grow from this so that we just are able to carry on and we were talking before about the journey I've been on with losing my dad six months ago or seven months ago and how, trying to stand back up from that. Trying to make something positive out of the horrific situation which is still too fresh to fully have that formed. But it will be his legacy. He will have a legacy because of this. And I believe that he's helping me on the other side. I'm pretty damn sure of that. That he's making things happen and the good time. But we all go through these things and we all go through times where we think ‘I can't get up again'.

So you've written a book called The Art of Self-Love. You do a heck of a lot. You have a podcast all around the space of loving yourself. And this isn't just whoo-whoo stuff. This is real stuff. This is like, how do I accept myself? Love myself? Learn from this? Grow from this? You've had some amazing people on your show, some amazing guests. What are some of the things that you've learned just in the last year working on your podcasts and so on?

Kim: It's been phenomenal. I think the biggest thing that I love is you are the result of the five people you spend your most time with. So that includes family, and sometimes that can be tough. Therefore, the most important thing of all is—look, we can have a significant event happen in our lives that can bring us to our knees, which causes a whole lot of emotional trauma. Then we perceive that event. Then depending on our upbringing, our circumstances, our values, our beliefs, our meta-programs. How we generalize, distort and delete things. How we actually filter for what we're thinking of that meaning. Then creates a physiology within the body, which then creates a state, and then our emotions come out, which then drives our behaviour.

So it's fascinating, and the way I can explain this is if you grew up with siblings, and you had the privilege of having, say, the same mom and dad the whole way through. If you asked each of the siblings what they thought of their childhood, you may find a very different perception or meaning of what they've put onto that. And that's based on the filter system.

We all know that between the ages of naught and seven is pretty much the imprinting stage. So whatever happens usually in those naught to seven years, we create meaning. We're an absorber of information. So if you grew up with a mom that was frantic and full-on and was doing the best she could. Let's face it, everybody's done the best they could with the resources they have or don't have. But let's say that you heard, as a little four-year-old girl, your mom and dad fighting one night. They were having an argument, and let's say it was about money. Maybe your dad just lost his job. But as a four-year-old, you don't understand all of this. But you come to the door because you're worried you can hear and it doesn't feel real. And then your dad says to you, ‘Go away. This is not to do with you’. Or says something that you've heard it in a way that now means you'd now go into your room, you calibrate that into your physiology, that the next time a male or a man shouts, you've taken it to mean, perhaps you're not good enough, or it's your fault.

Now you can imagine throughout your life now, you start building scenarios. Your reticular activation system is now on alert. That now every time you hear a man or a male, argue, or fight, or scream, or yell or have anger, you’re now drawn to it. So you're now filtering for it. Because on the other side of that, because to have a problem, you also have to not have a problem. Or to have heat, you also have to have cold to understand the polarities of that. You now also know that to look for love in your life, you're now going to look for the polarity opposite of that, which is mean yelling. Or maybe it could be in the form of your boss. It could be in the form of a teacher. It could be in the form of a friend.

Lisa: You're going to be a travel expert.

Kim: So it fascinates me, Lisa, that the meaning we put into our early childhood can then become what our life becomes or doesn't become. Now the cool thing about that is when you have awareness around it, you can also undo this. If you've had the physiology or a life of not having great relationships, and you've never. If we could take you back through hypnosis or through different timeline strategies, and we can get you back to the place where you first put meaning and had a limiting belief around that, then we can easily take the lessons from it, learn it, and undo everything. And it's not about unwinding or stopping those memories. It's not about that. It's just realizing why you've created a certain behaviour to have that result. And the thing I love about it is that when you realize it and have an awareness around who you are and what you've been doing, the world becomes your oyster. And we stop blaming, we stop becoming the victim, we stop being in denial, we stop making excuses for our life. And we actually take accountability, responsibility and ownership for every single thing.

Now that means we're things that happened to us like you just said. So again, it doesn't matter what happens to you. It's your reaction to it that matters. It's how you perceive it that matters. Because we can't control their outside world as much as we've tried to change partners and kids and parents and families and friends. As much as we've tried to change people, do any of us want to be changed or told we're doing it wrong? Probably not. So it actually teaches you a way on how to perceive it in a way that you do it with love. And as far as I'm concerned, I can speak to the biggest scientists on the planet. I can speak to the most intelligent humans on this planet. And ultimately it all comes back to us desiring the ability to love and be loved.

Lisa: There is a whole purpose of us being here, I'm pretty damn sure of it. But if, without getting into the whole spiritual silence, what I've been looking at—wWhen you lose a loved one, you start looking at what's on the other side, and what is the reason of life. And I do think it is all connected to love. That is so fascinating.

I just met a Dr Don Ward, who I'm going to introduce you to, who works with trauma, and people who have been through trauma. And he said we have this like—talks about the reticular activating system and how we filter for things. I can so relate to that analogy that you gave there. And he gave a story in his life with his wife who'd had a difficult childhood and a dad who would do a lot of yelling. So then he said his wife was hyper-vigilant to that in his voice, even if he just said, ‘Oh, I don't like that’, and she would immediately be filtering for that. ‘What have I doing wrong’? because of that fear response that was already programmed into her.

He talks about taking these memories. It could be a minor trauma, but it ends up being a big thing that you frame yourself for and limit your beliefs. And I think, like, when you're a child, you don't have that understanding of, mum might have been just a bit stressed and told you ‘you're just a naughty little girl', And then you've just taken that away, and I'm a bad person. Forever and a day, now it's in my life. It can be that simple. And yet it was just mum having a bad day and was a bit stressed and yelled at you, which really shouldn't have had that impact. And as an adult, you wouldn't have taken that. But as a child, you've not been able to filter that.

So what he does, and also with big trauma, he's worked with lots of vets and people that have been blown up and bombs and lost legs and horrible things. He says, you have this memory that is in High Definition movie. And it's trauma, right? And it’s so real and vivid in your memory banks. And anything can trigger it. So it might be a song or smell, a person, an event, and it will just, you're immediately back there in that trauma, and you're reliving it. That creates an emotional response in the body. And what he does through his program is similar to what the hypnosis, I imagine, is take that high definition movie and turn it into a black-and-white picture that's still in your brain, but no longer causes a physiological response because we get stuck in this loop. We're looping around those thoughts and that experience and experiencing it in real-time because your brain doesn't differentiate if this was 20 years ago or it's now. If you think back to a horrible event in your life, that was really traumatic feeling for you, you will have all of those physiological responses in real-time right now because the brain doesn't know. You're actually bringing it out into your body.

And this is where the whole thing about psycho-neuro-immunology comes into it. Where everything that's going on in our brain is fixed and is stuck in our biology and expresses through our biology. And you've obviously been deeper into this world than I have of late. I'm really just scratching the surface. But how do you think that affects us from a health perspective?

Kim: If you think we are made up of 50 trillion cells, and every one of those cells is communicating and it's got a whole incredible unconscious way of sustaining life. And when we think about it consciously, I mean, you're not thinking about your left finger now growing right now, although you might be now because I brought attention to it. But unconsciously so much is happening because of the programming, because of the ability of the body to do what it does and create what we call homeostasis.

So if you have a traumatic experience, and you get triggered by that, let's say, well, I've got a girlfriend who was in—sadly, her story's amazing, I'll get you to get her on your podcast. But basically, she lost her fiance to suicide. She was so traumatized, but within a year, she just couldn't get over it so she decided, on his one year anniversary, she'd go to Bali to take her life.

She had two girl friends who knew that she wasn't right so they went with her. That night, they went out to the Sari Club, and we all may be aware of the Bali bombings that went off. Now, one minute Karen's thinking of going to Bali to take her life. The next minute she is pushed through a burning wall and running for her life. So her physiology—and by the way, she lost her two friends out of that experience so now she feels responsible for three people stiff.

So you can imagine for her what that meant, and her story is phenomenal as she goes into a world of six years of depression. Now what brings her out of it is obviously a lot of self-work. But her dad talking about, his nickname for her as Buffy. And he says to her, he had her on his knee, she's a woman in her late 30s at this point, and he has her sitting on her knee and says ‘Buffy, we've all got to—some time, the caterpillar has got to go through a transformational process to come out the other side and become the butterfly’. And, for some reason, maybe he’s been saying it for those six years, but for some reason, on that day, she heard it. And she has gone on this exploratory path of what is it that has us physiologically turned into this thing called depression. And these are her words, not mine. She believes depression is a choice. So she says you go to sleep every night, you fall asleep, you might be depressed as you fall asleep but as you go to sleep into the unconscious part of sleep, you are no longer depressed. But the minute, not the minute, the moment you wake up, you're not depressed, until the memory kicks in, of who you are, your story in your life, and now all of a sudden, you're living depression.

I'm not undermining depression for anyone listening. And I'm certainly not an expert in that field. But I found it interesting that she feels depression is a choice. So when you think about that, your biology, and what's happening at a physiological level like you say, at a cell level, if you are believing—and by the way, the reason why I said that is if a balloon popped, or champagne cork went off, the explosion of that triggered her exactly into that time and place. So it takes time, effort and energy and real work on self to overcome these traumas.

Now we're not born with a rulebook or a guide book. And our parents aren’t born with a book on how to help us psychologically. We're all traversing this pathway with the best that we possibly can. And so I share that in the hope and realisation that for many of us, suicide is not the answer. And I say that with a disclaimer, that it's really important that in these times of worry and fear and stress and overwhelm, that you seek help if you're feeling like your world is closing in. You're not your own coach. You're not your own best coach. Your partner's not necessarily the best coach or mentor for you through these times. Neither are your parents. So sometimes we need professional help.

And what I love about these days is, if you're seeing a psychologist, in my mom's day, you're seen as a little bit weak. Whereas today, I think you're seen as profoundly intelligent, emotionally intelligent to get that support. So whether it's hypnosis, aroma-therapy, psychology, NLP, getting a coach, getting a mentor, it doesn't matter what it is. And there's a lot of free help out there. If you search it in podcasts like this, that really dive into one realm if you go down the science link, but my real passion sits in the heart space. And if you love who you are, then I believe you have awareness when you're not in love with yourself. And if you take care of yourself, then we know that that helps you one step, one moment, one breath at a time. You're better off, doing something nice for yourself making a green smoothie than you are drinking a bottle of wine. I'm not saying that a bottle of wine with a girl friend and pouring your heart out and having a good cry isn't healthy. But it’s not your crutch. Anything can become a crutch too.

Lisa: It’s not to become your crutch, right? Anything can become an addiction.

Kim: An addiction is not a great place to be either. So we know that if you can find a way one step, one breath at a time. Whether it's free, or if you have the money to invest. And let's face it, most people's biggest excuses for why they don't work on themselves is time and money. And I'm here to tell you that I think it's absolute bullshit, that it's not time and money. It's about whether or not you make yourself a priority because we all know if you, let me say this to your listeners. If someone that you loved was hanging off a cliff, and that means that in order to save them you had to have a weekly message until the end of this year. To save them you would find the time and the money to do it. Now that might seem a bit extreme. But I promise you when you are faced like you have been with your mum and your dad, everything goes aside until you put that at the forefront. So it's about prioritization and the moment you–.

Lisa: And I’m not even feeling guilty for it.

Kim: Except when we look at guilt, sometimes that, even that emotion of guilt is an interesting one. So we feel guilt because we're doing something for ourselves, which is taking away from something else perhaps. And even that's interesting.

So when I look at the emotion of guilt, it's because we're doing something maybe selfishly. Well, what if we could reframe that into investing in ourselves. As a mum, putting a child into daycare, or having a babysitter every now and again so that you can go out or going for a weekly massage? If we look at that as guilt, if you really look at this—this is something interesting and I just want you to think about this. That lot of guilt is it that we're using that as a frame to hide the fact that some days being a mother is fricking hard work. And some days, we actually may hate it. And some days, maybe we are so exhausted, so mentally, physically, emotionally exhausted that we hate it so much. That we then feel bad because we've yelled, we've screamed, we've not been the best version of ourselves. And then we put it into mother guilt. We frame it in that where some days, we just fricking—we don't like it.

I think if we could own those emotions more and own the fact that it doesn't feel great some days, own up but with power, not victim mentality, then I think we would actually be more honest. And we would actually say, that's when I always say, have a bestie that you can call who's not going to go into the gossip-victim mentality, but the ‘I'm hearing you girlfriend’. And then at the end of that, you say, ‘What do you want to do about it? And what's your purpose for this belief, or this feeling right now? And what can you learn from it’? To have a girlfriend or a mate or partner or a friend who says ‘What can we learn from this’? is one of the best friends you could have in your corner. That is psychotherapy and psychology at its best.

What can you learn from this? And sometimes it's very hard to look at the lessons when you're in the throes of it and when emotions are high, intelligence is very low. So that might not be the question that we ask when someone's highly volatile and emotional. But to be a good listener, to hear someone pour their heart out. Often as we talk it to someone that's listening, truly listening without trying to fix us. When you're listening, we often talk through the process out loud, because I believe all humans have all traits and all humans have all resources within them to help heal themselves. But sometimes we just need to hear it. And I don't know about you, Lisa, but sometimes as I'm talking through my problem, I realize how stupid it is, or how benign it sounds. Or how relatively benign it is compared to what someone else is going through. So to have a good listening friend, or to be that listening friend, is sometimes one of the best fast track pathways into self-care which motorizes you right into the heart of self-love.

Here's my third thing. I'm gonna put a caveat on that. That takes discipline. Without discipline, you can care for yourself and go on to the airy fairy land of woe and spirituality, and, oh, my gosh, this is all teaching me lots without responsibility, then that is not serving you. The discipline of waking up every day and physically doing something with that beautiful vehicle of yours with 50 trillion cells. Whether it's five minutes of tricep dips and push-ups just in your bedroom before you get dressed. Whether it's going for a 30-minute walk. Whether it's push and pushing yourself. We know the physiology of pushing the body actually puts you out of your comfort zone, which changes your cell structure. And when you change that, you get more clarity. And when you have more clarity, you make better decisions.

As you get to know yourself more and understand the triggers in your life, your responses, the victim mentality, you start to realize that you don't stop having problems, you just have bigger problems, Lisa. So you might be having a problem that's, ‘I'm not sure whether I should run in the Gold Coast hinterland this weekend because I've got the weekend off’ or whether your problem is trying to emotionally deal with the fact that your father never told you he loved you. Well, they're both problems. But I can tell you which problem I'd rather be traversing and working out. Because I've worked out the fact that maybe, and this isn't me personally, but my dad didn't tell me he loved me or maybe I experienced a very significant abuse. Or maybe I had a traumatic experience that now I'm working on to understand what it means to me.

I think you'd agree with me. Every person you've had on your podcast or every person you've ever met, the ones we admire and love the most are the ones that have actually gone to hell and back. But they've found a way out. It's the comeback story. Google and The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell. It's a six minute video to watch. We all go through The Hero's Journey where we want adventure, we want to go out on a limb, we want to do things. But then we find dragons and people putting us down or pulling us out. And then we traverse through that hardship, and we come out battered and beaten and torn and spat out.

But as we come through that we realize the adventure becomes amazing treasure. And through the treasures we find, we expand and evolve. And as we expand and evolve, we become a better human. And we then go on a new adventure. There’s more dragons. There's more people spitting on us and things. But that is the circle of life, right. If we could just understand that it's at our darkest times, we actually are revealed. Your strength comes through, your courage, your determination, your tenacity, your resilience is what shows up. Or you have the potential to discover when we go through it. Because when life's great, it's great. We don't tend to push ourselves so much when it's great. And that's the cool thing, we get to have a rest when life's great.

Lisa: I always say this to people when I'm speaking.

Kim: I say this with hand on heart, to those of you going through a tough time I have something for you—this too shall pass.

Lisa: One of my favourite sayings of the world.

Kim: Absolutely. And then I also say to those of you in a really good place in your life, I've got some advice for you—this too shall pass. So we know that life is ebb and flow, high and low, in and out, dark and light. If we could come to accept that, then that is self-love. That is realising that actually when life's good, I'm going to learn more. I'm going to listen to different podcasts. I'm going to maybe study something. I'm going to read something. And I say read, not on a technology thing, I mean read a book. I’m going to immerse myself. I'm going to go to a retreat or a breakthrough. I'm going to take on coaching and mentoring. Because we don't want to just be great versions of ourselves, we want to be exceptional versions of ourselves.

And to do that, it's great to work on ourselves when life's great. Because then when the life hits us or the storm, or I'll say you either get a tap, a whack or a Mack. You'll get a tap when someone taps you or something upsets you. You'll get a whack when maybe you're thrown off guard or you've lost your job or your relationships over. We get a Mack Truck, major illness, losing someone, and it sideswipes you to the point where you're on your knees and you can't breathe. But if you've got those tools of resilience inside of you, or you know where to go as you breathe through each moment.

And let's face it, in order to heal it, you truly have to feel it. So that means we can't hide the emotions from any of these. Or that we say ‘Oh, everything's great’ when it's fricking not. Owning it with power and not telling your story as a victim is painful. But owning it and then saying but you know what I'm seeing someone or I'm doing this or I'm using my oils or listening to this podcast with Lisa Tamati. And I've literally met this amazing supplement that I think is actually going to work for me right now. Whatever you hear, don't take it for granted. And always trust that what you're hearing in the moment is a beautiful sign. There's always signs and opportunity of growth, passion, love and development. It just means that what your reticular activation system is filtering for. And whether you're looking for the good or more of the shit that you've just been through.

Lisa: Explain that RAS, Kim. What is it?

Kim: Well, we know there's a part of the brain that has memories. It has filters. It has this whole belief system. But let's look at it this way. What's your favourite car? Or what's a car you dream to own if you don't have it right now?

Lisa: Probably…

Kim: You’re not really probably not that materialistic.

Lisa: I drive around in a 20-year-old car. Let's just say a Ferrari just for the sake of… A red Ferrari.

Kim: A red Ferrari. Sometimes we could call that a penis extinction or a mid-life crisis awakening. But anyway, what's a nice car you like?

Lisa: Oh, I like Jaguars.

Kim: Jaguars. Let’s go with that. And what colour?

Lisa: A wine-coloured one.

Kim: Ah, wine-coloured. So that beautiful burgundy wine-coloured Jaguar?

Lisa: Yeah, not very common, probably. So probably not a good example. But you know what I mean?

Kim: However, it's now in your mindset. It's now in your memory. It's now in your reticular activation system. It's now a part—it’s become out of the 2 million bits of information we receive each day, we actually only have access to 136 bits. So I want you to think about that 2 million bits of information that is coming at you. But we are actually only able to process 136 in our consciousness. Because if you think about it, to access and process 2 million bits we'd be in constant burnout and overwhelm. So those 136 bits now we've just been spoken about a burgundy coloured Jaguar. That's come really close into the forefront of your reticular activation system. So you may find over the next 24 - 48 hours, you might just happen to see one. That's because you're now filtering for it.

You've got 136 bits of that seed. And particularly if we put it to the front of our values, and it became a value. Let's say, car’s not necessarily a high value. But being able to transport yourself or take people to and from places or you love adventure, and travelling. You have a real high value for adventure, a car is part of that. And so now, adventure is one of the highest values on your list of life values. Within that, if we dig deeper is the burgundy-coloured Jaguar. Now you're actually going to see it every time you're thinking of adventure. You might think now, actually ‘Bloody dammit, I've worked really hard, I deserve this’. And now all of a sudden, you start seeing ads for Jaguars or you start thinking. That's what we mean about pulling in the 136 bits of information into the reticular activation system. And now you're seeing it, now you're proving it.

Lisa: And this is why goal setting works, isn't it. Because you've set a goal. You've made that as a priority. So it's a scary one. And then everything that will help you get towards your goal, your subconscious is picking up those things and then saying, ‘hey, be aware of this’. So if you decide you want to run a marathon, it's probably a good example with us two crazy runners. Or ex-crazy runners. You start seeing articles about running and videos on running. You'll be aware of runners running around your neighbourhood that you might have ignored before because suddenly this has become a goal.

So your brain is going, ‘Oh, you wanted this? Well, I'm just making you aware. Here's some tools to get there’. So that's a really good example of the RAS selection really.

Kim: You got to remember too, and I want to make this really clear, it's something that I've learned just lately. If you have a goal to run a marathon, and it's really high in your priorities. You start off in the first week, and you're doing the pro there's maybe a 12-week program. Maybe they're doing one of your the Neal's program. Maybe they've got one of these things. And they’re in week one. They're highly enthusiastic and excited. Week two, they’re a bit sore. It’s hurting a bit, and they have DOMS setting in and now it's like it's not getting easier. In fact, the more you train, the more you realize that even though you don't realize you're getting better and stronger, you're pushing yourself more. And, so you're feeling worse. So by week three, usually within those 21 days, we're starting to go maybe a marathon isn't the goal at all. Or you still keep saying it's a marathon but now you're not going out for the longer run. Now what's happened is your goal is not matching your value.

Now, this is the real essence of the work. How do we make running a marathon one of your highest values? If I listed all your values, you may find health or adventure or pushing the limits or expanding yourself is number 10 on the list.

Lisa: And therefore won't get–

Kim: It's not gonna get done. Which is why so many of us, we set New Year's goals. We join a gym, we go along. And then we basically make a donation to that gym for the rest of the year. So the important thing to realize is that you have to have your goal aligned with your top three values. And if it's not aligned with any of your top three values, you're going to need some integration work to bring it up there if it's something you really want. Because otherwise, that's where the excuses come in or you get an injury. Was it an injury? Or was your subconscious mind delivering you the possibilities that you didn't have to do it? I find health and injuries and disease, and all of those things.

I think if you've read Bruce Lipton's book, The Biology of Belief, you'll know that what we believe we perceive. Where focus goes, energy flows. So if you have all of these things in your mind, if your focus is now on all sore and injury and it's too hard, I don't want to do it. Bang! You're going to find your energy goes that way. It flows that way. And hello, now you've got a reason, an excuse to physically pull out of the marathon. So you know, people would say ‘oh, no, I didn't mean to trip over the washing basket'. Well, how come for the last 365 days, the washing basket could have been there but you never–

The unconscious mind is one of the most powerful places to work, which is why I love hypnosis. Which is why I love timeline therapy. Which is why I love getting into. If you look at a mountain, the snow part on the top is your conscious mind. But in fact, everything underneath which is driving your behaviour, is driving your feelings, your beliefs and your values is actually the tip of the iceberg. That's right 95% of it is definitely coming from the unconscious mind.

Lisa: Yeah, and this is why we need to do the deep work. You just reminded me of a couple of things. Everytime that I do a big mess of a race in the past, I would get sick, or I'd have an injury or something would happen. And usually in the week or two weeks before the actual event. It was like my body's going, ‘I'm gonna stop you because I want you’... A part of me doesn't want to do it’. So you’re going to chuck a few obstacles.

You have to understand that when you override that, and you keep going, often that injure or that niggle, whatever that was, disappears. I saw that, firsthand, time and time again. And even when I was running through New Zealand, and I was doing 70Ks a day, and I was getting weaker and sicker and really, just absolutely blown apart after two weeks. And I didn't stop though, because I had an amazing team and I had a big why. Why I was doing this: charities and big responsibilities, so I keep going despite horrific pain and all the rest of it. Then my body went, ‘Oh, it's just not stopping, we better get on board with this’. And it got stronger and stronger. From the two-week point up until the six-week point, I actually got stronger and stronger. And I thought that it's all over. I could have a walking stick. I was walking, I wasn't running. I was having to go down sideways downhills, because my shins were so bad. And when I still kept going, then the brain went, ‘Well, we better get on with it because she's not going to stop, obviously’. And that's a really good example.

One of the other things I wanted to bring up because motivation follows action, not the other way around. So like when you don't feel like going training today, which is pretty much me every day. I don't feel like it, but I take action, I do something I might be just putting on my gym gear. And I've said this before, put on your gear, walk out the door, go to the letterbox and then see. Often, when you've just taken that couple of steps of action, then you're in the movement and you're like, ‘Oh, well, I'm out here, now muscle go’. Then it gets easier and easier and then you're in the flow of it.

It's the anticipation, sometimes, that stops you. And when you just get up, doing the press-ups in the morning, before I do anything else. I go and have a cold shower or do my heart rate monitoring my HRV. All the breath-hold techniques, and then I come out of the shower. Then I often do like my press-ups and stuff before I sit down at the computer. Because I've done it and if you have little tiny habits that you build in. It might be just teeny press-ups or teeny sit-ups. Every time you go to the loo. Whatever the case maybe you set these little wee micro-goals that you can't fail it. And that action creates motivation. Because you've actually done a little bit and you're pleased with yourself and that creates its own reward loop type of thing.

A lot of what you were saying was just lots. That's exactly what Paul Taylor, I've just had on my show. I'm gonna do Dr Don, would you know. All of this is very, very similar.

So, Kim, I want to go now into hypnosis because this is something that fascinates me. I haven't studied it. I want to, it's on my to-do list at some point in time. Tell me how the heck does that work and what's involved with the hypnosis process?

Kim: It's pretty cool. It's tapping directly into the unconscious mind. And I could use language with us right here and now where I could get us all into a very relaxed state. And every breath that you're taking, we're getting more and more relaxed. And as we relax more, we learn more. And the more we learn, the more we hear. And as we’re hearing new thoughts and opportunities, the more we realize we're capable of everything and anything. That's because we're extraordinary. So as I talk like that, and as I speak to you like that, it's almost putting you into a subconscious trance, which is kind of has your mind scrambling and not having to consciously think.

Your mind kind of goes on this beautiful journey. It's in that space, where you, I believe, we tap into the heart space. And when we tap into the heart or the unconscious space, we can put new meanings past the critical factor, past that critical person who knocks you or puts you down all the time. Here’s another question. If you hear yourself knocking yourself, who's talking? If you're listening, who's talking? And if it's you're saying it, who's listening? So I love the rabbit hole of the unconscious mind because it gets you realizing that everything is about programming. Everything is programmed. And so we want to program excellent computers.

Which is why when we watch people who do amazing things, we want to model ourselves off them or we want to learn how they did it. Which is why I love NLP and hypnosis together. But hypnosis really is the ability to tap into the unconscious mind, bypassing the critical factor so that we can get to the heart, the juice, the unconscious mind to create change. So that when you come out the other side, you see possibility and opportunity. Not all the negative shite that you were saying before, we may have had the session.

And I think it's just accessing it. We spend most of our time consciously thinking. Yet as I said at the beginning when was the last time you gave thanks to your fingernail for growing or your digestive juices for doing what they're doing or your hair growing or those bald maybe not growing, but it's a really beautiful thing. And I think things like flotation tank massage. Times when you get to deeply truly relax, when we let go of the physiology of tension around us actually allows the cells to almost breathe. If we breathe, if you followed Wim Hof or any of the amazing work with breath or James Nestor whose book I just—I love James Nestor’s book.

Lisa: I’ll introduce you.

Kim: Who, James or Wim?

Lisa: James. And Patrick McKeown as well.

Kim: I love that book Breathe, changed the way I looked at my breathing. I’ve been taping my mouth at night because we can go without food for a month. I've heard of people go a year without food. We can go weeks without water. But we can't go many seconds or many minutes without breath.

Breath is the essence of life. And when we go into a state of hypnosis, we are really letting go of the breath. And as we let go of the breath, we actually are able to access the intelligence of the cells. Intelligence of the higher vibration. Without going too wacky, I guess the other way to look at it is that we operate, we're aware that we can measure the speed of light. And I can't remember the exact measurement of it right now but it's bloody fast. But everything below that is all measurable. And from a conscious level, we understand it, you know, we've got vibrational frequency of plants, of oils, of food. We understand that there's a vibrational frequency to all things. But above the speed of light, where we go into the zero point field of quantum physics and true possibility and infinity. That's where the mind just– . It's so big and so bizarre, that you actually can't do anything but surrender to it and feel all possibility.

I guess the way to look at that, to try and bring it into some realm, is if we put one of our blood cells, if we put blood under a microscope, we would go down, and we'd see there's a whole lot of cells. Then we'd go further into the cell and then we'd see a whole cell and within the cell is a whole lot of stuff and life. Proteins and cytoplasm, DNA and RNA. But then if we go right into the DNA and RNA, we go further into that you'll see there's even more microcosms of cells and systems and structure. And if you keep going, the more you go, the more you see. There is nothing but space.

Lisa: There is only vibration.

Kim: And space. And then there's just the vibration.

Lisa: And this is science. There is nothing there. They’re just energy.

Kim: And we could do it to the chair you're sitting on. We could slice through a piece of that. And when the more we go into each of the wooden chairs, or this chair that you're sitting on structure, you'll see that that becomes nothing. And we can go the other way where we go up into us, here right now. From our cells into our blood systems, to our body, to our human system, to our environment, to our community, the place we live, into the planet, then we go beyond the planet into the galaxy, and then we realize the galaxies beyond the galaxies, all of a sudden, we're back to nothing. So we can go macro or micro. but the joy of this ride into quantum physics is that it means that everything means nothing, and nothing is no thing and no thing is everything and everything is something.

When I start doing that with my mind, it makes you realize that actually, if I bring it right back into that significant emotional event that occurred when I was a five-year-old girl. I just, through my own filter systems, through my own values, beliefs and upbringing, my personality, all of those meta-programs going on, I made it mean something. And I love this idea. What if life had no meaning? And it had no meaning that it had no meaning. What if we could actually realize that everything we think is true is actually just a limiting belief of perception of our idea of reality. That in fact, the only reality, the only truth I could actually give you right here right now, is that you and I both know, there's two truths, probably. One truth is that the sun will come up tomorrow. Whether we see it or not is another thing but we do know it’s the truth, the sun will come up tomorrow. And the other truth is we will all die at some point. But even that's up for debate because do we die? Or do we go to another realm in which we didn’t have past and future lives and soul journey? So I don't know.

Lisa: We could go like a huge, and I’ll be– no, I'm fascinated by quantum physics. And most of it, to be honest, is beyond my grasp, it’s a little brainy. But I know that there’s these bigger things out there and I'd love to riff with you for a couple hours on this subject. But we'd probably, people will be getting ‘what the hell are they talking about’?

Kim: What I'd love to say though, is just to finish off there, is just to realize that everything you've ever experienced is just a belief. It's not truth, it's just your perception. So it's never the truth. It's always up for bid, based on how you believe and see and perceive the world. Which is why there's conflict, which is why we have arguments.

But wouldn't it be beautiful, if I could just for a minute, put my shoe, try because I never could. But if I put my shoes and feet into your shoes just for a moment, and imagine it from your perception, your beliefs and your reality, I actually have more understanding.

Lisa: And more empathy.

Kim: I may not agree with it, I may not like it. But, my gosh, it's interesting that it's from your perspective. So every time we feel ourselves triggered, or every time we feel ourselves going into a place of anger or frustration or guilt or sadness or whatever that driving emotion is. Rather than sitting in the whirlpool of mud pit of it, ask yourself this question: For what purpose am I feeling this? Why? Or even just the question why? Why am I sad? Well, I'm sad, because he said that. Why does what he says make you sad? Well, because it's not fear? Why is not fear, not fear? Well, because I don't feel like I'm listened to. Why is it important that you're listened to? Because I feel so alone. Why are you feeling alone? Because I don't love myself.

If you really go to the core of all of it, I promise you, it almost gets back to the fear of not being loved or the fear of not being accepted. That's what everything that drives these emotions in our behaviours comes from.

Lisa: Wow, that is just absolutely amazing. And it's all automatic. Like we had these, Dr Daniel Amen talks about these automatic negative thoughts that just pop up all the time. And if we can separate ourselves out from our own brain, our own subconscious, our own programming, and just observe how these automatic thoughts just keep coming at you all the time. And then if you let them go, they'll go again.

Kim: Or know that those negative thoughts are part of the human experience. They are actually from an evolutionary, anthropological development point of view. We had to be on alert for the sabre-toothed tiger, we had to be watching our tribe or our kids, we had to be there. But we actually spiked ourselves into sympathetic dominants very quickly with that. Years gone by we also pushed ourselves very quickly back down into parasympathetic place. We had peace just to digest. Years today, we're living in the sympathetic dominant’s world.

So I just say with you, as the negative thought comes in, even ask that question, why am I thinking that and keep doing that? I always say our seven why's, and be really honest with yourself. Ask seven why's: Why didI feel that? Why am I thinking that?

I remember my grandmother. Here's another nice way of saying it. I was driving down the freeway once. This is years ago when she was still alive. She emigrated from New Zealand to Australia at 90 years of age. So I always say to people, if you think you’re too old for anything. I always say no. That's a limiting belief, right? So anyway, we're driving down the freeway, I was driving back to King’s Row which she was living over here. And she always used to put her hand on my knee and she'd say, penny for your thoughts. And this particular doubt, obviously had my jaw was clenched. I tell Grandma, ‘I can't talk about this one'. And she said, ‘Oh, Sweetheart, come on. A problem shared is a problem half solved’. So I turned the music up. So the children couldn't hear behind me. They were in their car seats. And I leaned over and said, ‘Grandma, I had this terrible thought, I'm going to have a car accident. A hit on car accident’. And the awful thing about that is that I've just read a book called The Secret which is all about the law of attraction. The more you think it, the more you might attract it. ‘Darling, that must be awful. Terrible’, she goes. ‘Oh, darling, you know, sometimes when we have a thought like that, did you ever stop to think that maybe it's your angels just asking you to drive more carefully’.

So ever since she said that whenever I've had a negative thought come in, like ‘Oh, I don't feel like going for a run God, you're useless. Might you go for a run’? I then go ‘Maybe my angels are asking me to go for a walk today instead'. Or maybe it's just important that I go outside on earth on sand or the grass and just take three deep breaths. Maybe the angels are just saying to me, ‘Your body just don't feel like a good run today, but do something more gentle, be more gentle’. And I think having that reframe ability is one of the most powerful things we can do as humans on the planet.

Lisa: Wow, what a wise Nana you had. Especially since you have a history, you've got a world record as being the youngest to do 24-hour racing.

Kim: Well, it's nothing to these days now. I ran 100 miles in less than 24 hours and I was the youngest woman.

Lisa: It’s not nothing and it’s crazy. I know what they take...

Kim: On a 400-meter track.

Lisa: Yes, I know exactly what it takes. You're not coming from a place of laziness, You’re coming from this place of being sensible and listening to your body and tuning into that. And I love what your Nana said, your grandma said, ‘What an amazing lady’.

There's another thing I just said, we'll wrap it up in a second because I have to go and pick up my mummy. But Paul Taylor talked, who I'm gonna introduce you to, who's doing all this crazy stuff. And he's been on the podcast. He talks about these two characters that you have in your head and he gets you to draw them. Your epic, uber you and your not so great, you. The one that's negative, or the one that's always pulling it down. And they actually put them into figures that you actually draw little cartoon bubbles, and what they are saying to you? And by doing this you're creating the distance to make it real. It puts it into a cartoon perspective of what's actually going on in your brain and this fight because otherwise, it's very ethereal. You know that you are, part of you wants to be this amazing, good person doing these amazing, incredible things and pushing outside your boundaries and being brave. And the other part of you just wants to crawl up and be negative and horrible.

Kim: And the beautiful thing of that, just on that note, is we could call that shadow or golden shadow. And if you ask the seven why's to each of those characters, you will be amazed. And this is why I love the work that I do, is that they both actually have the same purpose.

Lisa: Wow, to protect you.

Kim: They’re both to protect you, to guide you, to love you.

Lisa: They just don’t know the best way.

Kim: Exactly. And sometimes, it’s beautiful to actually integrate the two together as well. I just wanted to add that.

Lisa: I think that’s great. Because there’s what’s that negative one. If you think about it, why is it telling you something negative? Because it's scared?.‘You can't run a marathon? Who do you think you are? You're not good enough to do that’. That's the negative voice speaking. It's a negative little Lisa that didn't go. And then the other ones. ‘Yes, you can. I know you can make it. Come on, keep going’. And then when you put that into the perspective of why is that negative voice saying that? Because it doesn't want you to fail, it doesn't want you to get hurt. It's like your overprotective mother, who's actually holding you back from what you can achieve. And then you've got the other one on the other side, the mum that's going ‘Come on, you can do that. I'm cheering for you!’ And just understanding that this process is going on in our heads.

As runners we know that voice very, very well. Because when you’ve been 100 miles out there, it's screaming. That negative voice is screaming that you just stop.

Kim: You know what’s so funny with it. I just finished with this one. I remember running this world record race and I remember this voice inside of my head for the first probably, I'll be honest, 14 hours of the race. It was saying ‘You’re a dork. What a stupid thing to do. Who does this? You're never gonna do this. What? You're a dork’. All of these things. And then I go ‘Oh shut up’, and I carry on.

Anyway, finally at about we call the graveyard shift, between 12 and 6 am. And the doctor comes out puts me on the scales and I was looking terrible. I'm dragging my sorry back around the track. He puts me on the scales and he goes, ‘I'm sorry, Kim, you've lost seven kilos, nearly seven kilos. We're going to take you out of the race. It would be wrong with me to let you race’. And in that moment this voice went, ‘You can't tell me I can’t run. You can't tell me’. I begged him to let me stay in the race. So for 14 hours, I've been fighting it then someone tells me I can't do it. This voice turns around and goes you can't tell me what to do. And then he said to me, ‘Listen to your team. You're gonna eat all this stuff. You're gonna have to take these supplements’. Then I ended up rising above it and then setting a world record and then when they said tom me I set a world record, I turned around and I was receiving the trophy I sat there and I thought, ‘Imagine what I could have done if I hadn’t spent fourteen hours on the track whinging’.

Lisa: All that energy being sucked into that negativity and I still haven't worked out how to shut it up completely. But it's a rebellious nature that comes out when anybody tells me I can't do something. It's like a red rag to a bull.

Kim: I think that's why I love so much with my–. I have a mentorship program where I have women every week coming into this. Every Tuesday night they show up with me and I pull their minds apart and I give them and I dance with it because now I have such a love. Whoo. We do that.

And then I'm super pumped that we now have live events happening, which are the essential self, key weekend, which then are the immersion events. Because for many of us to learn this, it really takes a process. But imagine immersing yourself into it for a whole weekend. And sometimes I think we make greater shifts in it by immersion rather than week by week or month by month.

And I'm only sharing this because I know that a lot of your listeners around the world, the ones on the Sunshine Coast, and ones going to be down in Victoria and Melbourne. But I just want people to know that it doesn't have to be my event. But look at something around you. What's going on? Even if it's someone doing a library talk, someone's offering something at the local—YouTube. Just keep your mind stimulated with possibility because it's through the possibility we have grown. It’s through the growth we become way more powerful individuals. And with that, we start to then look at our higher purpose, and what legacy are we going to leave in this life.

Lisa: Keep being curious. And I really encourage anyone who wants to reach out, to come on, maybe join her mentorship program where you’re doing that every week, and that's ridiculously good price like, it's super good value. So if you want to reach out to Kim and join her mentorship program there or join her in one of your retreats, we will give all the details in the show notes. But just briefly, Kim, where can people find out about you, contact you, ask you about all your own work that you do, your books and so on.

Kim: So two places. Thank you so much. I so appreciate you asking because I just really want this to work out. I really want people to know, the more love they have for themselves, the more they have to offer. But really to look it up kimmorisontraining.com is where you'll find the mentorship stuff. But also my beautiful products and oils, which I use throughout the whole time is twenty8.com. You can find me on Instagram, Kim Morrison and the number 28.

I love Instagram, I love being there. But I really, even if you just wanted to have a chat or to see the work that I do. Even the one-on-one mentoring that I offer. There's some breakthrough sessions that I now do that is a real 8-hour deep. You book me for eight hours straight, or we break it up into two-four hours, but do we have breakthroughs. But there's a whole lot of stuff. Plus I do international retreats and I'm launching later this year my spa, immersion and integration which is success, purpose, alignment, immersion. So that will be later this year, which I'm super pumped and excited for. It’s the goals I really live. I just, I'm so pumped.

Lisa: When do you ever have a rest?

Kim: You speak for yourself! Oh my god. Talk about you see what you see in another isn't totally present in yourself. So I see you and I go, well. And I see and realize and appreciate and respect. It's because we have this beautiful duality of love for one another.

Lisa: We do, we definitely do. You're a very special person. And I've got that little negative voice in my head gang. ‘You're not as good as Kim because she's doing all of that'. And the other one’s going ‘Yeah exactly’. And the other side's going ‘You should figure it out. You're also, you're doing amazing stuff too'. This is a classic example. I had to give that example because it's quite funny. And when you when you're self-aware enough to care crap, you're stupid busy.

But I really encourage people, kimmorrisontraining.com and 20, the word twenty8.com. Word twenty and the number 8 dot com. Check out what Kim does.

Thank you so much, my dear friend.

Kim: I love you and thank you for all the work you do. And I'm going to talk to that beautiful little inner critic right now. And she's just protecting you because she knows how much work it takes to do all of this work. She's just saying to you maybe not right now. Launching all those other ideas you've got in your head because I know we talked about our fear. Stop.

Lisa: Yeah, stop over. Thank you so much for your time today. You've been absolutely epic.

Kim: I love you lots.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

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Overcoming Obstacles and Building Businesses with Daryl Urbanski 0

Feb 25, 2021

Starting a business can be incredibly tricky. Statistics say about 80% or more of enterprises end up failing. If you’re a business owner or a founder, you know how there are so many factors to consider. Overcoming obstacles every step of the way is far from an easy feat. Moreover, starting a business requires a ton of research, but research alone won't guarantee success.

So what's the secret?

In this episode, Daryl Urbanski joins us to share the secret to building businesses and scaling them. You’ll learn about how his background taught him to be one of the leading business experts of this generation. He also discusses how to overcome obstacles and take your business to the next level.

If you want to learn how to be a successful entrepreneur, tune in to this episode!

Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up

You can also join their free live webinar on epigenetics.

Online Coaching for Runners

Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.

Consult with Me

If you would like to work with me one to one on anything from your mindset, to head injuries, to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations .

Order My Books

My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/

My Jewellery Collection

For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Hear Daryl’s insights on raising children and lessons gained from martial arts.
Learn the secret to overcoming obstacles and building successful businesses.
Find out what you need to become an entrepreneur.

Resources

NMN Bio by Elena Seranova
Lifespan by David Sinclair
The Dream of Life by Alan Watts
Learn more about Daryl’s group coaching and pay-for-performance model!
The Best Business Podcast with Daryl Urbanski

Episode Highlights

[7:02] How Daryl Started Out

Daryl was orphaned as a kid, and his stepdad was an entrepreneur.
His father showed Daryl that an entrepreneur was someone who is of service and respected by their community.
He wanted to be like that too, so he shovelled driveways and did a newspaper route for money at a young age.
Since Daryl was an orphan, he felt the need to be self-sufficient and self-directed.
At 17, he joined a company that was one of the early pioneers of early marketing, got interested in growing businesses, and the rest is history.

[10:45] Katimavik

Daryl was part of Katimavik, a Canadian social program in which ten children aged 17-21 live, travel and work across Canada.

Katimavik was a turning point in Daryl's life.

Daryl initially lived in a dangerous city. Katimavik was his way out.

It was a source of many experiences for Daryl.

[21:52] Youth Development

In raising his daughter, Daryl has a thing called neglect under supervision, where he tries to carefully neglect her in some ways to let her develop, grow and overcome obstacles.
He won’t stop her from falling, but he’ll try his best to catch her.
Growing up in a city is more about surviving in social dynamics than the social and environmental dynamics you find when you grow up on a farm.
Children would benefit from more physical activity in their lives. They'd develop differently, and would not feel the need to lash out violently.
Children need a better sense of responsibility and consequences — power and skill are earned.

[27:17] Lessons from Martial Arts

Martial arts teaches progression: your skills will develop over time, through with observation and training.
You learn about people and how your emotions impact decision-making. Martial arts isn’t just about training but also about recovery and rest.
The best way to get out of a bad situation is to prevent it from happening.
When he first learned martial arts, he thought it was about doing things to people. In reality, it’s about self-control and boundaries.
Martial arts also taught Daryl about overcoming obstacles and testing himself.

[39:04] The Secret to Building Businesses

There are many great places to start, and one of the hardest ones is getting something new going.
Always start with a market. Find a problem you’re willing to solve for people.
The purpose of a business is to locate a prospect and turn that into a customer who returns.
Figure out what problem you want to solve, then design it and do it in a scalable way.
The critical success factors for businesses are self-efficacy, strategic planning, marketing, strategy, market intelligence, money management, business operating systems, business intelligence and government and economic factors.

[46:05] The Next Level

Ask yourself where the customers are and where they want to go. Can you take them there?
Fix what makes your customers unhappy, find out how to get busy and aim for consistency.
What helps your team grow is documentation and training. Create systems. How do you communicate your vision and keep the team productive?

[50:23] Getting Out of the Startup Gate

The hardest part is dealing with the imposter syndrome and self-doubt.
It’s all about managing stress and avoiding burnout.
Many people sacrifice their health to make money but end up spending all their money trying to get their health back.
It is better to collect money first and then develop a product.

[56:39] Daryl’s Current Core Focus

Now, Daryl is focused on group coaching.
For people who want more dedicated attention, he has a virtual VP of Marketing service.
He also has a pay for performance model, where people only have to pay if they make a profit.

[1:00:05] On Keywords and Google Trends

Keywords can tell you how many people are thinking about this particular thing.
Keywords are a powerful tool from a market intelligence standpoint.
From keywords, you learn what people are looking for, where they are and more.
Make your marketing about your customer.

[1:04:03] What You Need to Be an Entrepreneur

Be transparent.
People need to trust you for them to give you their money.
You’re going to need all eight success factors, but most importantly, answer the question: ‘What problem are you solving’?

7 Powerful Quotes from this Episode

‘Life is full of challenges and hurdles, and through overcoming those we develop our character’.

‘Pain often…makes you stronger and makes you more able to withstand—that’s what exercise is all about. You hurt yourself, you get stronger’.

‘It’s not just training, but it’s also how to recover and rest…Silence is part of music just as much as music is’.

‘Prevention is so much better than cure…the best solution is, don't let them do it to you in the first place. Know it, recognise the signs and protect yourself before it happens’.

‘It’s not even about being the best, the smartest, the brightest. It’s about making the least mistakes’.

‘You don’t know what you’re capable of until you do it’.

‘Evolution is about growth and challenge and overcoming obstacles’.

About Daryl

Daryl Urbanski, Founder, President of BestBusinessCoach.ca & Host of The Best Business Podcast is best known for his ability to create seven-figure, automated income streams from scratch. First as Senior Marketing Director for Praxis LLC, now Neurogym, he generated over USD 1.6 Million in under 6 months with a single marketing strategy. This became almost USD 7.5 Million in just under 3 years.

After repeating this success with multiple clients, he set on a mission to help create 200 NEW multi-millionaire business owners. How? They’ll do better when they know better.

Daryl has quickly climbed the entrepreneurial ladder, gaining respect from thousands of business owners worldwide. From author to speaker, marketer to coach, Daryl's multifaceted business approach sets him apart as one of the leading business experts of his generation.

Enjoy the Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends, so they overcome the obstacles in their lives or start their own successful businesses.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript Of The Podcast!

Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: You're listening to Pushing The Limits with your host, Lisa Tamati. Thank you once again for joining me. Today I have another exciting podcast with a man named Daryl Urbanski. Now, Daryl is a very well known business coach. So today, quite something different for you. This is all about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Daryl is also a martial artist. So, he uses a lot of analogies from his sporting as we do in this podcast, from a sporting life and how that helps him in his career and also helping others build businesses. Now, he's helped over 1,000 businesses in his career in 50 different industries, and this guy knows how to grow and scale and overcome problems. So, he's a real expert in this area, and I really enjoyed our conversation.

Before we head over to Daryl in Vietnam, just wanted to remind you, if you're into finding out all about your genes, and what they have to say about you and how you can influence your genes to live your optimal lifestyle and be your best self, then make sure you check out what we do in our Epigenetics Program. So, this is all about understanding your genes and how they are expressing at the moment how the environment is influencing them, and then optimising everything, from your food to your exercise right through to your mindset, your social, your career, all aspects of life are covered in this really revolutionary programme.

Now, this programme is not something that we've put together; this has been put together by literally hundreds of scientists from 15 different science disciplines, all working together for over 20 years to bring this really next level cutting edge information about your genes and how you can find out how to optimise them. No longer do you need trial and error; you can work out what the best diet is, when the best time to eat is, exactly the right foods to eat right down to the level of, 'eat bok choy, don't eat spinach', that type of thing. And as—but it's so much more than just a food and exercise. It also looks at your health and anything that may be troubling you and future and how to deal with it. So, it's a really comprehensive programme, and I'd love you to check it out. You can visit us at lisatamati.com, hit the Work with Us button and you'll see our Epigenetics Program.

We've also got our online run coaching as normal, customised, personalised, run training system, where we make a plan specific to you and to your needs and your goals. And you get a session with me—a one on one session with me and a full video analysis of your running so that we can help you improve your style, your form, your efficiency, plus a full-on plan that includes all your strength training, your mobility workouts, and great community, of course. So make sure you check that out at runninghotcoaching.com.

And the last thing before we go over to the show, I have just started a new venture with Dr Elena Seranova, who is a molecular biologist from the UK, originally from Russia, and she is a expert in autophagy in stem cells, and she has made a supplement called NMN. Now, you may have heard of this nicotinamide mononucleotide. It's a big fancy word, I know. But you will be hearing more about this. It's been on the Joe Rogan show; it's been on Dr Rhonda Patrick show, some big names now talking all about this amazing longevity compound, anti-aging compound. Now, this is based on the work of Dr David Sinclair, who wrote the book, Lifespan: Why We Age and or How We Age and Why We Don't Need To. He is a Harvard Medical School researcher who has been studying longevity and anti-aging and is at the really the world's forefront of all the technologies to do with turning the clock back and who doesn't want to do that?

So I've teamed up with Dr Elena to import nicotinamide mononucleotide, our supplement from NMN bio into New Zealand and Australia. So if you are keen to get your hands on some because this was not available prior in New Zealand, I wanted a reputable company, a place that I could really know that the supplements that I'm getting is quality, that it's been lab-tested, that it was a scientist behind it, a lab behind it, and this is a real deal.

Now, I've been on this now for four months and so as my mom and my husband, and I've noticed massive changes in my life. Certainly, weight loss has been one of those things, that stubborn last couple of kilos that I've been fighting have gone without any muscle loss which has been really very interesting. It improves also cardiovascular health, your memory cognition, the speed of your thinking; all the things that start to decline as you age. And the reason this is happening is because we have declining levels of NAD, another big word, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. And this NMN is a precursor for NAD.

So, lots of big words, lots of science. f you want to find more about that, you can head over to lisatamati.com, under the Shop button, you will find out all about our anti-aging supplement NMN, and we're about to launch a new website which will be nmnbio.nz, but that's not quite up there yet, but it probably is by the time this podcast comes out. So, check that one out to nmnbio.nz, bio, just B-I-O. If you want to stop—well, not completely stop aging, but if you want to slow the clock down and get the best information that's out there then make sure you read Dr David Sinclair's book, Lifespan it's an absolute game-changer. You'll be absolutely amazed at some of the stuff that's happening and what they consider my mononucleotide can already do. So check that out. Okay, without further ado over to the show with Daryl Urbanski.

Lisa Tamati: Well, hi, everyone and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. Today I have the lovely Daryl Urbanski with me who is sitting in Danang in Vietnam. And Daryl, this is gonna be a little bit of a different episode because usually I've got some health science-y thing or some are elite athlete doing—well, not to say that Daryl was not an elite athlete because he is into martial arts. But Daryl’s specialty and what he's come to share with you guys today is, he is a business expert and a marketing expert, and also a mindset expert, I would like to say. So Daryl, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you.

Daryl Urbanski: Yes, it's an honour and pleasure to be here. We've had some good conversations, like minds, two birds of a feather. Just an honour and a pleasure to be here.

Lisa: Yes. Thank you so much, Daryl, for coming on today. So, Daryl and I cross pass by his lovely lady who organises half my life as far as the business side of things goes. So it's been a fantastic liaison. And—but Daryl was actually here on his own accord. And he's—so Daryl, I want you to give us a bit of a brief background, where have you come from, how did you end up in Vietnam? And what do you do for a living?

Daryl: Right, so I'm Canadian. So I'm from Canada, travelled all over the world, and I don't know if it's too short. So that's where I come from, I ended up in Vietnam. That's a long story. So I guess I'm Canadian. I'm in Vietnam. I help businesses or websites get customers and keep them to make more money. And that's really kind of it in a nutshell. It's been a long journey.

When I was a kid I was an orphan and my adopted family, actually my step adopted dad's the one that really raised me and his brother, my uncle. We would visit him every time we went to Toronto, and he was a bit of an entrepreneur. He also did some property management in that and every time we went to visit I almost felt like he was kind of like the Godfather. What I meant was people were always coming by with like, a gift basket or to thank him for something. So the impression that was put in my mind was like to be an entrepreneur is to be of service to the community, and to get people's respect and adoration for the good that you're bringing. And that was really like—I know, there's all sorts of different like your salesmen, and everyone's got different images. But that was when I was a young kid, I was like, ‘Wow, I want to be valued by my community, too’. So that really laid an impression on me at a young age.

Again, I didn't have the lemonade stand, I didn't mow lawn, but I did shovel driveways. We have so much snow in Canada in the wintertime. We would shovel driveways for money. I did have a newspaper route. And just at a young age, I just kind of felt, maybe because I was an orphan, but I felt the need to be self-sufficient and self-directed. Yes...

Lisa: How to be your own ship, really.

Daryl: Yes, sort of. Yes, I just—I also had issues like I did air cadets when I was a kid. There's some other kids, they were using their authority outside of cadets to try to, like, lord over people and stuff. And right away, I kind of learned at a young age, you kind of have to be careful—you can manage up, let's just put it that way. It's not just managing down, but you can manage up, and you can choose who's above you too, it's a two-way street. So I really laid an impression on the young age. And then when I was 17, I added a co-op in university with the company called marketme.ca and they were just one of the early pioneers of online marketing. Got me into the whole business growth avenue and that...

Lisa: The rest is history. Yes, now that's fabulous. So you from like, in my young years, like I was an entrepreneur from the get-go. I never fit in in anybody's corporate square box. Tried—I tried, I failed. Did you have that feeling like you were just outside of like, you just wanted to be in charge? Because you've been in business, basically, since you were 17 years old. And you've learned a heck of a lot on this massive business journey that you've been on. And you've helped—I know that you've helped over 1,000 businesses in 50 plus industries. And you've really grown into this role of helping businesses scale up and grow and develop your own systems around this.

But did you have an idea when you were that 17-year old that this was where you were going, and this is the direction? Or has it sort of meandered throughout time?

Daryl: No, I was—because I think I had a lot of, they say, like everything, I'm not maybe everything that I am and not knowing my biological roots, and that as a kid left me really to kind of be given the path of self-discovery, you could say from a young age. A lot of confusion, maybe anger in my younger years as well. But what really made the difference, at least in the earliest days, was that when I was 17, I ended up at Canadian government programme called Katimavik, which means ‘meeting places’. Inuit, which a lot of people call them Eskimos. But now we say the people of the North, the natives of the North they’re Inuit, which means snow people. Eskimo means meat-eater or flesh-eater. So they don't like being called Eskimos, you call them Inuit, but Katimavik is an Inuit word, and it means ‘meeting place’. And it's a government programme that's been on and off over the last 40-50 years in Canada.

And really what the—when I did it with the terms of the programme where it's a social programme sponsored by the government, 17 to 21-year-old youth, and then what they do is they put a group of 10 kids together, and the group of 10 kids is supposed to represent Canada. So, what that means is that they grab some from the east coast, the west coast from up north they try to make it, so it's representative. Like we had half guys have girls. French, we have three French speakers, right? Then the English speakers. We had an Inuit guy Kenny, who when he came, he actually didn't even speak English. We always knew when the phone was for Kenny because we didn't—it all be like, '[mumbles] Kenny this is for you, I don't know what's happening, either it's a bad connection, or this is someone who talks in their language'.

And that programme, what we did—when I did it was we spent three months in British Columbia, three months in Alberta, and three months in Quebec and in every province, there was a house. In that house, there is a project manager, project leader...

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: ...basically he was someone that would go to the house, and they were there, the whole duration of the programme. And this isn't a pitch for the programme, but I feel like it was—my life was really before and after.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: Because life skills I got from this...

Lisa: That's cool.

Daryl: ...so every place would have a project leader, and they would organise full-time work for all ten kids. And you were like a volunteer full-time worker, and in exchange, the government and I think this businesses may be paid a reduced hourly wage, I don't really know the details of it. But you worked for free, and in exchange, the government paid your grocery bills, they paid your rent and your travel expenses, and you got 20 bucks a week for like toothpaste and whatever else you wanted. And that was—it was a fantastic programme. I learned so much when I was in Alberta and British Columbia. I worked at a native band office, which is in Canada, we have a lot of native land, and that's land, like, we were the original immigrants. We took over the landmass, and then we gave the natives, ‘This is your land’, and so it's like a country within a country, and a band office is like their government office.

Lisa: Right.

Daryl: So, I actually worked at an Indian band office, Similkameen Valley band office and Iwe helped build sweat lodges. We did all sorts of stuff. I work there newsletter, helped communicate with the community. In Alberta, I was a seventh-grade teacher's assistant at a middle school, and a social worker assistant and I worked with a librarian as well. And then in Quebec, I was actually a mayor's assistant for three small town, 150 people. But you had a full-time job in each place, and then after work when you came home, the 10 of you were basically instantly signed up for any community events that were going on.

I remember in the small town of Karamea we built something like 20 out of the 25 of their Christmas floats for their Christmas parade. We did soup kitchens, music festivals, like, you name it, and there's just like, instantly—if there was something out of the community like the project leader would know about it and just drag us, and we just show up be like, 'Hey', and it was like ten pairs of hands. Like just we were coming just to make things happen.

So every three months, you had a full-time job, evenings and weekends, except for Sunday. You basically anything in the community, you were instantly signed up as a volunteer, and every two and for two weeks, every three month period, you would build it, you would stay with a local family for two weeks to like, see how they live. And that was really insightful because I didn't know any other family or how the family operated. But then I got to see inside the workings, like,

I remember this one family, I stayed with the three, the parents, the father was in finance, and he was always, like, his suit and his hair's so proper. He was very strict and very like this. And his kids on the other side, they had like mohawks, spike collars and black nails and eyes. And it was so funny because I felt like it was a yin yang. I felt like the kids were the exact opposite in the extreme of the parents, and just watching the dynamics of people. And also every week, a boy and a girl would stay home from their full-time jobs, and they would be the mum and dad in the house because we had a budget like for groceries and they would have to cook and clean. So that nine months experience when I was 17, I came out of that with more life experience than a lot of people and…

Lisa: What an incredible programme and how lucky...

Daryl: Yes.

Lisa: ...for you, like, because so many kids go off the rails, as they say at that point yet, and they get lost and to have the sort of a structure of development and experience must have been a real game-changer for you.

Daryl: Yeah, I mean, we moved around a bit when I was a kid, but we ended up settling in a city called Kingston, Ontario, which also happened to be the penitentiary capital of Canada. And so it was a unique community because you've got Queen's University, which is one of the top three universities of Canada. You've got the second-largest military base. It's almost one of the largest government employment cities. So you've got these high-income earners in the public sector, and then you've also got this great university. Some of the largest businesses out of Canada, actually, even in Kingston, like we've got one of the largest real estate investment trusts. There's a company that makes the shafts for all the pro golf clubs outside of Kingston. It's kind of weird, you got these unique massive spikes of success. But then because of the penitentiaries, a lot of families move to Kingston to be closer to the family. So then you have these areas where there's like when you get out of jail, you just settle in the town that you're in, and so it's weird, and I actually didn't think I was gonna see my 21st birthday.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: I was in high school, and I didn't—I had a friend that was found in a lake rolled in a carpet...

Lisa: Oh, gosh.

Daryl: ...and things like that. And I didn't think I was really gonna make it.

Lisa: So, really dangerous areas to be growing up as a youth.

Daryl: But then, I always say when you live in a city, you don't live in that city, you live in your bubble in that city. So my bubble was mixed. It was a mixed bag. I was in the middle—I grew up in a nice suburb, but through school and all that, I got involved with lots of different things. But in this group one day, they spoke at my high school, and they're talking about, 'Yo, we're getting to travel Canada for free'. Like, I was like, 'Hey, that sounds great. I need to get out of here. I don't see a future. I don't see a future', and I signed up and that was what I did. And then after that because of being involved and so I almost got kicked out.

Now, after the first two months, I was on my last warning, you get three warnings, and you get sent home. And every time you make them, you have to write a commitment to improve. And I was like, I just thought I think that project leader didn't like me, but I was like, on it by a hair. And it was so funny because I remember when I made the first three months, we moved to the second location, I was like, 'Wow even if I get kicked out now. Now I've learned everything that I could learn from this programme'. Three months, Alberta and I met all sorts of new people and new experiences. And I was like, 'Wow, I made it to six months. Now that I'm going to Quebec, now I've learned everything, I mean, so good'. And then the next three months, and then I finished it like, 'Wow, I made it to the end. Now I've learned...

Lisa: You're an expert.

Daryl: ...programme, right. But now here it is years and years later, and I met because they were like family, the other ten kids, right? And I still catch up with them every now and then, like I learned through, 'Why? You got a kid? You got three kids'?

Lisa: In other words, we all say we're no’s all the time. And then we're actually just at the beginning of our next journey. And it's all stepping stones to the next part of learning and stuff. But what a fantastic I wish we had a programme like that here because I mean, it must cost a lot to run and be really difficult to organise. But man, they could change lives, say for kids who are just lost and don't quite know what's the next step and how many of them are be.

Daryl: It's a fantastic programme. It's actually I don't think it's running in Canada anymore. Again, because of the cost that it gets government funding, it gets taken away. The Trudeau lineage is the one that started—they tend to be behind it. There was a big scandal in Canada 'we something charity' and it sounds like that they were going to give a billion dollars in one organisation that does something like that. But of course, it got into, like, where's money going and people arguing and is that a good use and I think nothing happened at it. But it's a shame because...

Lisa: It changes your life.

Daryl: Well, I think right now there's a ton of people, especially the younger kids who need a sense of responsibility. I think in some ways, I don't want to go on a big rant. But I think life is full of challenges and hurdles. And it's like, through overcoming those we develop our character. And some people, they just have such a cushy like...

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: .Things have become so politically correct. We've softened all the hard edges. I remember seeing in Toronto, they replaced a bunch of the kids playgrounds, because kids were falling and getting hurt.

Lisa: Yes, yes.

Daryl: Like, yes, but that's, like, you climb a tree, you fall, like, you don't...

Lisa: There's no consequence to anything anymore. And there's no, like, yes.

Daryl: It's like participation awards versus achievement awards. Like, we really, in some ways, become a society of participation awards versus achievement awards. And that's...

Lisa: I totally get it. I totally agree. Because I mean, I'm showing my age, but I grew up in the early 70s and stuff, and it was a rough ride. I'm lucky to be alive.

Daryl: Not everyone. Not everyone made it in adulthood. Yes.

Lisa: And, but you know what, I wouldn't change that for the world because I don't want to be wrapped up in cotton wool and bounce around like a bunch of marshmallows for the want of a better expression. I want to be able to climb trees and cycle. I had to laugh yesterday. We live in a little village that, sort of, no police around here. And you've got all sorts in, and it's a lovely village, it's a sort of a beachy resort-y place. But you get the kids, they got no helmets on, and the other ones are on scooters, and there's three of them hanging off it and other people with their youths, and the kids are on the back, which is all illegal, right?

Daryl: Right.

Lisa: And I'm not saying it is good, but I do have to smile because it reminds me of my childhood because that's where...

Daryl: A little bit recklessness, a little bit of foolishness. We don't want it, but the world has real limits.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: And especially as a parent, like I have a daughter now and it's like, I call it careful neglect. I try to carefully neglect her in some ways to force her to develop and grow.

Lisa: Beautiful.

Daryl: It's like neglect under supervision, that's probably the best way to do it. Because if I always do it for her, and then I'm not there like they say kids who grew up with a single parent tend to be more independent than kids that have two parents, although kids with two parents tend to do better overall. I want a blend of that. The kids with single parents, they are more independent because that's expected of them. There's not all—you can't...

Lisa: backup.

Daryl: It's not all the swaddling.

Lisa: Yes, no, I totally agree. And like, not even just for kids, but like dealing with my mum with her disability, I had to—and people would criticise me heavily, but I used—I make her do the hard stuff. Like, if she's struggling to get out of a chair at night and she's tired I don't get up to help her and not because I'm an asshole but because I need her to learn which muscle it is to push and people would, like when we're out in public that'd be standing there watching me watch her struggling and I'd get abuse sometimes. Like, ‘why aren't you helping’?

Daryl: Yes, yes.

Lisa: That's all I'm doing. I have to do it all the time with her because I'm teaching her new difficult tasks all the time. I'm having to put her through some painful regimes and training. And because I've been an athlete all my life, I understand that pain often, when in training, in difficult training sessions and stuff make you stronger, and make you more able to withstand. I mean, that's what exercise is all about: you hurt yourself, you get stronger, you hurt yourself, you get stronger. And with mum's training, it's very often like that. So okay, she's not a kid, but it's the same principle. I have to let her go.

Or winching out when she got her driver's license, and I would let her drive my car and go around town. I mean, I'm still panicking half the time, a nice—and for the start, I would shadow her, like from behind. She didn't know that I was following her way right through the town where she went so that she had that backup. But she didn't know she had that backup.

Daryl: As I actually had been saying that to Kathy, but my daughter, I'm like, I won't stop her from falling, but I'll do my best to always catch her.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: I'm not gonna try to stop because sometimes you're like, 'Your daughter and you try to pad the room'. And I'm like, 'I gave her a pair of scissors'. This is when she was really young, gave her scissors, 'Don't, she'll cut herself', and I'm like, 'Yes, and it'll be a valuable lesson'. 'You're right'. And I'm right here, and it'll be a vet ship. She'll learn a valuable lesson; I don't know if she doesn't, I feel like that's partially where we have things like all these school shootings and that. These kids aren't growing up on farms. They've never been kicked by a horse or a goat, or they've never hit themselves in the foot with an axe. So they playing these video games of extreme violence and sexual violence in the movies and they feel these emotions, like really common as a teenager. They have access to such powerful tools.

I'm Canadian, but in the States, they sell guns at Walmart and so you've got a kid that's angry, he's got no real sense of the reality of the world around him in terms of like, what happens if you fall out of a tree and break your ankle, that's so distant because they grew up in a city and it's just, it's more just surviving and social dynamics versus a social and environmental dynamic.

Lisa: I totally agree.

Daryl: And I go to school, and they lash out with guns, I really feel that if those kids grew up with more hard labour in their lives, more physical—even if they just had more physical training conditioning. You play hockey, you get hit too hard, like something like that, it would have less school shootings because they still feel the same emotions, but one, they'd have different outlets, and they would also kind of respect it better. It's like my jujitsu. You mentioned I do jujitsu.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: I feel like it's very—when you guys are new, you get a lot of these strong guys, and they try to tough on everybody. And they just, it's useless. And they get beaten up by the more skilled ones. So then when they develop skill, they're kind of like a 'Hey, like, I know what it's like to be the one getting beaten up'.

Lisa: Yes. Which is the correct method.

Daryl: Like, the power, the skill is earned. So, you treat it with better respect.

Lisa: Humility is always a good thing. And I think learning.. I've taken up skimboarding with you, and I don't bounce very well at 52. But it's really important that I do something that I'm really useless at.and I'm having to learn a new skill. And I sometimes ski myself because if I don't get the stage, that's when you start losing those skills. And I don't want to lose any of my abilities, and I've still got good reactions and stuff like that, so I want to keep them. So I constantly want to push myself outside that boundary.

So let's dive in a little bit to your martial arts, and then we'll get onto your business side of things because what you've done the years is just incredible. What sort of lessons have you learned—I mean, that was one—but what sort of lessons have you learned from doing Jiu Jitsu in the discipline that's required for this very tough sport?

Daryl: Yes, that's great. So yes, I did jujitsu for about six, seven, maybe eight years. I haven't trained, probably in a couple years now. I've been doing more kind of CrossFit and my own physical training, but I think the lessons are through any—you learn about progression over time. You learn things like the fundamentals are fundamental. You kind of learn the basics, but then you get bored with those, and you want to learn the fancy, advanced stuff, but then it's hard to apply it and get it to work. And then through just time and observation and training with the greatest you understand it really is about the fundamentals. Virtue is doing the common uncommonly well.

The fundamentals that we learned are the stuff that's actually working against the highest level black belts. The basics that you learn, you see that happen at the highest level World Championships in the biggest competitions, and the really great to the ones that can do the basics and just walk through everyone with them. Like, 'How are they able to do that so well'? Everybody knows what's happening. Everyone knows what to expect, but they can't stop it from happening anyhow.

Another lesson was it's a game of inches in the beginning because jujitsu is kind of like a submission wrestling, submission grappling.It's not so much punch and kick.It's more about pull, roll, and just and using things like gravity. So there's things about drilling how practise makes perfect. You learned the rule, like 10,000 hours that it's if I've been training for 200 hours, and you've been training 10 hours, generally speaking, I have a major advantage. If I've been training 2000 hours, you've been training 100 hours, typically speaking, I'm gonna just mop the floor with you because I've—there's nuance detail and you can almost endlessly drill into the fundamentals.

And then there's just the progress. You've talked about learning new skills. Last year, I learned how to handstand walk. I can now handstand walk about 20 feet, I'm gonna be 38 in a couple of months.

Lisa: Wow, I can't do that.

Daryl: Yes.

Lisa: I'm jealous.

Daryl: It’s specifically for the skill development, for the neurological developments, to like to balance in a totally different way and physical development. So I mean, you just see you learn about people, you learn about how your emotions impact your decision making in certain respects. You learn about how it's not just training, but it's also how to recover and rest. And we talked about this I think before I interviewed you for my podcast, like, silence is part of music just as much as music is, the difference is it's intentional.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: Silences, intention. So it's about doing things with intent. Taking a concept like I want to learn and get good at this and breaking into pieces. And I was talking about this to my friend yesterday. Actually, I forget how it came up. But he's talking about something, and work, and the situation, and how to avoid, and I remember I was training and I was fortunate to do some training with Rickson Gracie in my early parts of my training career, legendary fighter guy.

And I remember I kept getting caught in these triangle chokes. Triangle choke is a type of choke. And I kept getting caught in these triangle chokes. I remember asking, like, 'How do I get out of it'? He says, 'Well, don't let them put you into it'. I'm like, 'Yes, I know. But I already got into it. Now what do I do'? he's like, 'Don't let them put you into it'. And I just wanted—I wanted the cure, and I was like, 'Yes, but I want it' and there are, there's some things you can do. But the real answer is...

Lisa: Prevention

Daryl: ...prevention is so much better than cure. Like, well it's good...

Lisa: Great principle.

Daryl: You're in it, like, you gotta panic, you got two or three options, you got to panic, you're gonna spend a lot of energy, you're gonna flail and struggle, it's gonna be close. We can talk about how to do it. But really, the best solution is, don't let them do it to you in the first place. Note and recognise the signs and protect yourself before it happens.

Lisa: That is a great law for the whole of the health paradigm that I live under.

Daryl: Yes. How do I deal with heart problems?

Lisa: Prevention, prevention.

Daryl: Prevention. Yes, exactly. And you know proactivity.

Lisa: Yes, occasionally,you will still get caught out and you will still and then you want to know those tricks. But in the first line, let's learn prevention and then we'll look at how do we get out of this mess?

Daryl: And another really—which kind of ties in and then we can if you want to move on, move on. But this one, I think is also really, really, really important. When I first learned martial arts, I always thought it was about doing things to other people, I'm going to do this too, or I'm going to use your leverage against you. I'm gonna do this to the world. What I've really realised is two things. One, it's not even necessarily about doing things. It's about two things it's about not doing things externally, it's about self-control. It's about boundaries.

So we just talked about 'Don't let him put you into it'. That means that I have to have boundaries around things. Will I let him grab me here? Well I’ll not allow that. Well, I let him grab me there. And I'll be like, 'Okay, whatever. And I'm going to try to do some'. So again, when people start and forgive me, I don't want to go on a huge long rant on this. But when you start, I'm going to do this to you, going to do that to you and I'm trying to do this...

Lisa: You got to be kidding.

Daryl: ...and so I don't even care what you're doing to me. When you get—later, it's like what do I accept? What are my boundaries?

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: What situations do I let myself enter into? And that was—and then the other thing is that a lot of times it's not about what you do. It's not even about winning. It's about who makes the fewest mistakes.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: It's really—it's not even about being the best, the smartest, the brightest. It's about making the least mistakes.

Lisa: Wow...

Daryl: In this situation, how many doors do I open for my opponent?

Lisa: I totally...

Daryl: These things are great, right?

Lisa: Yes, yes, yes.

Daryl: There’s just me posing on the world and more about controlling myself.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: And am I allowing myself to be manipulated this way? Am I allowing myself to be grabbed here? Am I allowing his energy to mess with my mindset?

Lisa: Wow, that is gold.

Daryl: In a tournament, I've seen them lose the match before it even begins. Get you two guys step up, and the rest get in there, and they like their eyeballing on each other.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: You see one guy like and he's just kind of coward. Like he lost before we even get started. So...

Lisa: I haven’t seen that in ultramarathons are—another sporting analogy, but I've seen when people start bargaining with themselves and you do during an ultra. You start saying, 'Well, if I just get to there, I'll be happy with my results’. Or if you start to negotiate with yourself as how far you can get. And when I'm when I see people going, 'Well, I've at least done more than I've ever done before and therefore it's a success'. And when I start to hear talk like that, I know we're in the battle, like we are in the battle. And if they don't change the mindset, they're not going to because they're no longer in that, 'I'm gonna do this, come hell or high water there in the' Well, it's okay to fail and it is okay to fail. But in the battle, you don't want to be in that mindset. You want to be in that mindset, like, 'I'm going for this and I'm giving it everything I have.’

When you start to negotiate with yourself where ‘It would be okay if I got to that point, and therefore this is the longest I've ever run and therefore that's still a success'. When you start doing that type of bargaining with yourself, you're in deep shit basically because you've got to tune your psychology around too because otherwise, you're going to give yourself a way out.

I remember when I was running in the 220k race in the Himalayas that extreme altitude and I had a point where I just completely broke after going up the second path, and it was about—I'd been out there for 40 plus hours in a massive snowstorm. I had hypothermia. I had altitude sickness, asthma. I was just completely good enough reasons to be pulling out. And one of my guys came back to me, and I said, 'I think it's only two kilometres to the top of the mountain because you're calculating in your head'. And he came back and said, 'No, it's six kilometres to go'. And that just completely broke my mentality because six kilometres, I was going out 3k an hour, it was two hours of hell, and I couldn't, and it broke me. And I just fell into a heap and started bawling my eyes out, and everybody was giving me permission to give up. They were like, huddling around, 'You're amazing. We're so proud of you and you did everything you could', and then there was one guy. And he came over, and he shocked me, and he wasn't smiling, and he wasn't patting me on the back, and he was like, ‘Get the F up now’.

Daryl: You're so close.

Lisa: ‘You're so close, you're not failing, and I'm not letting you fail and get your ass up off the ground. And I'm going to stay here with you. And I'm going to walk you up top of that mountain’. And that was key because it got me over that psychological break—I broke, but he picked me up, and he got me back on my feet. And I followed his instructions. I just did what he told me to do, put one foot in front of the other, and he got me over that hump, literally. And it's this type of stuff that you learn through sports; it's just so valuable.

Daryl: It's just overcoming obstacles and just testing yourself. You don't know what you're capable of until you do it. You can spend all day reading a book about tennis, but until you're out there actually playing it. And there's learning you have to learn, you can learn through reading through lecture through conversation, personal experiences, and through other people's experiences and that's...

Lisa: That's what this is about.

Daryl: Yes, I mean Alan Watts has this great video called The Dream of Life. Imagine if every night you went to sleep, you could dream, however many years of life that you wished and because it's your dream, you can make them as wonderful as you want it. And so for the first—let's say you're dreaming 100 years of life every night. And maybe you do this for a couple of years, every night for a few years, you're dreaming 100 years of life. And all these lives that you're living, they're all the most filled with all the pleasures and all the wonderful things that you could possibly want. And what do you think would happen? And over time, you would kind of get bored, and you would want some risk and some adversity. And then eventually, you would want to be able to dream and go to sleep, and not know the outcome. ‘I want to go to sleep. I want to have this adventure, but I don't want to know the outcome’.

And that's kind of like that's almost like life. And if you could dream a lifetime every night in your—in a life of eighty years, you could possibly dream the life you're living right now. And that's the whole thing of evolution. Evolution is about growth and challenge and overcoming obstacles and...

Lisa: Yes, obstacles like phone calls coming in the middle of your podcast.

Daryl: But, we got—everyone’s with me.

Lisa: I think people listening to my podcasts are quite used to interruption. You just cannot stop the world from functioning half the time like somebody's phone is somewhere.

Daryl: Murphy's Law, you just gotta keep on recording. If you wait for perfection, it's never gonna happen.

Lisa: Exactly. You could panic now and start editing for Africa or another way, you could just get it out there and apologise for what happened, which we'll do. So, Daryl, I want to move now because I think there was absolutely brilliant and really insightful.

I want to move into the business side of things. And you've had a really successful business. You've taken lots of businesses to the million-dollar in a plus businesses from scratch, you've done that over and over again. You've helped people scale up and develop these systems and mine the data and work out all this complicated world of online, which is I'd struggle with daily so I want to know from you, how the heck do you do this? And what are some of your greatest secrets from building businesses over a long period of time now?

Daryl: That's a great question. There's a lot of different places to start; I think one of the hardest places and where I've had the most failure myself is getting something new going because well, one, it's just not my superpower. But if you've got someone that's got a proven concept, and that's really how in the beginning, I should look it up.

But I got my seven-step rollout system. It's like you always start with a market first. So that means you always have to start with a need and or want so because you can't—the idea of selling ice to Eskimos. It's not about doing mental gymnastics and pushing something on someone that they don't want. That might happen in the world. There might be people that invest a lot of time, energy and resources in that but I have no interest. It's really tough to be like I'm gonna generate this demand. It's not there. The demand already exists. People already want to feel beautiful, people already want to be entertained, people already want to travel and to explore the world. So these needs and wants and that already exists. The idea is that you want to stand in front of it. The demand and want is already there and it's constantly evolving. And every time someone a business comes out, and you create a new product or service to fix a problem there'll be a new problem.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: Because now, like before the internet, the issue was how are we going to have these conversations like we can? You’re New Zealand, I'm in Vietnam, how will we do this? Well, now Zoom is created. These companies created tool, and they created tool. And now here's Zoom, but then what's the next issue? And then what's the next problem? So problems are markets, not demographics.

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Daryl: Not demographics, the problem is a market. This is the problem that we solve for people. Once you've got that a lot of it—for me, it's like different ways that you can go, but the purpose of business is to locate a prospect, turn that prospect into a customer and then make a customer your friend.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: It's really a big part of it. It's tough to have a business survive. There are businesses that survive off one-time sales, but the vast majority of businesses need recurring business, recurring freight, ongoing relationships. And a lot of businesses aren't thinking about how to do that. And so, your business is a service to the world. And so the first thing you have to figure out on a small scale, ‘What problem do I solve’? And when you solve a problem, you kind of need to create, I call it a black box. This black box maybe is a mystery to the outside world; we can use a dentist's office people come in crying and in pain on one side, they go through the black box, which is a series of checklists, checklists for this, checklist for that, checklist for next thing, okay, check that we did this, this, this, this is this, boom, they leave smiling and happy on the other side. So that's the black box. That's the problem-solving box.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: The problem-solving box, all the company is one group of people solving a problem for another group of people via a product or service.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: Before that problem is, and you've got it, now you need to design it. Here's some people solve problems really well, but they don't do it in a way that's scalable. So the rule of 10,000. Now I know how to solve the problem. Now I know THE kind of the type of people having that problem. How do I solve 10,000 of these problems for people, think, if I had to bake a pie if I'm trying to bake one pie versus bake 10,000 pies...

Lisa: It's going to be more efficient.

Daryl: there's a different mindset that you got like, I need a bigger kitchen, I got to do that. You've got like planning in batches, and food storage, it changes the nature of things. And then you got to kind of go out and find those people and that's like a marketing function.

So there's—actually, I can share this. So last year, I actually spent like $40,000 hiring all these research teams to help get down to what are the critical success factors for small and medium-sized businesses?

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: We came up with eight, there's actually nine, but the ninth one is government and economic factors. And it's not realistic that a person is going to influence.

Lisa: No.

Daryl: Not one person.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: No, it's not realistic. So the ones that we can influence is things like self-efficacy, which means your ability to be effective with your time, your energy, just yourself and through others. So it's like leadership is part of that, right? Your time management is part of that like mindset might be part of that. But self-efficacy, strategic planning, marketing strategy, market intelligence. So these are different market intelligence is understanding the needs, wants desires, problems of the people of the marketplace, and the competitors, the available options.

So it's market intelligence is like, what's going on out there? And then marketing strategy is how am I going to get my message across. Then you have sales skills and strategies, sales strategy. And then you have money management. You have business operating systems, which is—it could be technology, it could be simple checklists, it could be meeting rhythms, it could be a hiring process, that's the operating systems.

And then you've got business intelligence, and business intelligence is like the awareness of different things. So for example, like you are working with my partner, Kathy. She's helping you with your podcasts, you're getting greater awareness on how many downloads are we getting and how many people are sharing the downloads and how many people are listening and then coming my way—that's all business intelligence stuff.

Daryl: It's the idea of not just doing activities, but to actually measure… Right. But it needs to be aware. It’s like wearing a heart rate monitor, right? Like how's my—that's an intelligence system. How's my heart rate doing? How's my heart rate variability?

Lisa: Yes. I do all of that.

Daryl: What's my sleep pattern?

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: Am I waking up twenty nights? That's like business intelligence. Those eight factors really are the critical make or break focus points for business.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: And anything that you would do for a business should back into one of those. So, team building activity. Well, that's kind of self-efficacy, maybe operating systems, it depends. You're going to do a podcast, well, that's a marketing strategy, right? And then the strategic planning is the plan strategically of how you're going to pull the strings together. And like, we know how you plan you develop, how you plan to meet people, is there a thought process and from all this stuff?

Lisa: And the hard thing is for the young entrepreneurial. I know we have a lot of people who, in business, starting businesses, or in developed businesses and wanting to scale further. You’re wearing so many hats at the beginning, like you're in charge of all of those departments if you like, and that is the very hard thing at the beginning. Once you get a team around you like we're at a stage now where we have small teams that are helping us with different aspects of what we do, and we're trying to outsource the stuff we're not good at. It's not our specialty, because we don't want to waste... But at the beginning, you have to do it all. And so you're just constantly wearing these multitasking hats and not being very efficient.

Daryl: Right.

Lisa: How do people get to that next rung on the ladder? And this is something that where we've been backwards and forwards going on for a long time. How do you get to the next stage? And how do you make an effective team? And how do you outsource certain things, but not the other things? And it's getting to that next level, isn't it?

Daryl: Yes.

Lisa: And at the beginning, you just forbought everything.

Daryl: If you've been doing a lot of activity, and you're not really sure what's working, a simple way to think about this is forget Uber and Grab and these other...

Lisa: Yes, this huge...

Daryl: Originally, if you were a cab driver, you would have a car, and your idea first figure out where are the people who need to be driven places and then pay money to do it. Maybe it's taking kids to school, maybe it's picking people up at the train station, or the bus station or the airport, maybe it's doctor's office appointments, right? Like every week for whatever.

But first, if you were the taxi driver, first, you'd have to figure out, how do I keep my schedule full every day? How do I keep myself busy every day? And so first, it's where are the customers? And where do they want to go? Right? Where are the customers and where they want to go? Can I take them there? You get paid in size over the relationship, and the problem you solve. What that means is if I want to get across town, but I have all day to do it, I can walk, right? But if I'm in a hurry, if my child is sick, and they're bleeding, and I got to get in the hospital in half the time, that's a bigger problem. I'll pay whatever, right? I can rent a car, I could bike, right? If I don't want to rent a car, I could pay more to have someone, you get what I'm saying?

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: I could pay someone to drive me. So there's a scale of problems. So first, like, where are the customers? What do they need? Where do they want to go? And then how do you get yourself busy? Now that you're busy what's going to happen is now you have to do is you have to train someone and had it on quality control. How do I deliver this consistently? What is my doing? Because when you do something for someone, why—what's making people really happy? What's making them not happy? Right? How do I make sure I have a consistent good experience for people? Good.

Now, how do I help more people? And then if you're the cab driver, you might have to take a pay cut? Because at some point, you might have to bring someone in and have them drive the car for half the day.

Lisa: So you can focus on the business. Yes, yes.

Daryl: You can focus on getting another car and getting that. And so there's this weird period where it's like, 'Hey, I'm busy full time, but I can't be any busier'. So I can charge more money, or I'm going to hire someone, give them some of the work.

Lisa: Yes. Big portion of the money.

Daryl: Right. They're gonna take a pint of the money. And now I'm going to get the second part going. And that's actually how Kathy got started. So Kathy is working with you. And one of the beginning she had some clients online, and I was like, 'What do you like doing the most? What's the one thing that you think you can do a lot of? And she really enjoys the writing component', and so we got her really busy. And then she hired someone, and then right? And then she was busy, and they're busy, she hired another person. And she had another person on now she had like a team of six, she's got some, like 26 people now. But in the beginning, she had like four or five, six, 'Hey, now you need a manager'. 'Okay, well, now I need a manager', okay, and that's your manager for the team and the next problem and building that out. And that's a really natural way to grow.

And part of what helps you do that is documentation and training, an edge explained, demonstrate, guide, and power. First, explain how you do it. Let me demonstrate it for you. So you can see it done. And then let me guide you in doing it with you. And then I'm going to empower you to do it on your own, make some mistakes and learn from them, and just repeat that process.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: So it's an edge thing. And that's creating documentations and systems. But then you've got to actually keep—now you're getting into a different level. How do you communicate a vision? How do you keep a team productive? How do you monitor progress? How do you—because we're talking about self-efficacy, right? If you hire someone that could be brilliant, but if they don't get the work done, and now you're getting into people skills, and how do I communicate? And how do I help them tap into their own internal motivation? So they're not just showing up, clicking on the paycheck, and just clocking out, going home just on their phone all day. So these are different tiers of problems that people fall into. So I don't know if I read a whole of...

Lisa: No, these are perfect, Daryl, and it does highlights here. There's always the next level.

Daryl: Crazy amounts of entrepreneurship.

Lisa: No, but, like getting out of the startup gates is the hardest part and you dealing also with self-doubt and imposter syndrome often, and can I do this? And people telling you you can’t. Your family members or friends going, 'What the hell are you doing? And you've tucked in your regular job for this'? And you know, that 80% or more of businesses fail. I can't remember what the statistics were, but they're pretty horrific. And you're wearing all these hats. And what you then see is a lot of people starting to burn out. And that's really like part of what we do is all about managing stress and not burning out and how’s the basics of health because you need to do all that in order to be successful because there's no use having millions of dollars in the bank, but you are dead because that isn't going to help anybody.

Daryl: I've seen that. I've seen people sacrifice—I see people make money and keep their health at the same time. But I've also seen a lot of people sacrifice their health to make money and then end up spending all that money trying to get their health back.

Lisa: To get their health back. And I must admit like I've—not for the—just for the business but saying in rehabilitating mum cost me my health. I ended up nose diving because you're working 18 hour-days sometimes and you just go and helpful either trying to make the mortgage payments at the same time by the hyperbaric chambers, or the whatever she needs and trying to rehabilitate, and running all these juggling balls that we all have in various combinations. And you can't work yourself into the absolute—into the grave if you're not careful. And that's why health and resilience and stress reduction and stuff is what we do.

Daryl: Yes, it's always best to have people—one of the biggest—and I've done this before, I've done this a couple of times, unfortunately. Better to collect money first and then develop a product. What I mean is like in my hometown, they're opening up a gym, and they were building, they bought this building, they were kind of doing rentals on the inside, and they set up a trailer outside. And they were actively marketing and were signing up people for the gym that was not yet finished being built...

Lisa: Brilliant

Daryl: ...so they're not yet open. And what happened was at some point, they just closed down the whole operation and left. And what it was is they had a pre-launch goal for themselves. ‘We need to generate this many new members in order to breakeven, or we stop’. And that's a really good thing, and you don't, it's like if you just get pre-orders, Elon Musk did this with, I think, the model three. He made $100 million having people prepay $1,000 on a car. He hadn’t built the factory to make it.

Lisa: Wow. But then it’s Elon Musk.

Daryl: Well, no, but, yes, okay, but I mean...

Lisa: Reputation.

Daryl: In any way you shape or form it because he built a prototype so he had something he could show people, and they could see and they could—he could articulate what his vision was.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: And then he said, 'Hey, if you want to get one and be one of the first you have to make a non refundable $1,000 deposit' and he created $100 million, which is proof of concept.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: Use that $100 million to build a factory and then charge them the rest of the money for the car.

Lisa: Brilliant.

Daryl: And that is of demand. And this is where people go wrong. For example, I like baking pies, my hobby is baking pies. I like baking pies. People praise me all the time for my pies. Man, it would be so great if the whole city just praised me for being such a great pie maker. I'm going to build this business for me and how great my pies are. I'm going to plan this logo, and I'm going to plan the layout. I'm going to plan the menu, and all this stuff. And then I make all these pies. And then what I do is I tell all my friends about my pie shop, and they go, 'Wow, Daryl, your brand color is so nice, and wow what a nice logo and what a nice menu', my friends come in and make an obligatory purchase.

Lisa: Yes.

Daryl: Because they're my friend, but that doesn't last. And then I go through the seesaw where they buy the purchase. They make a purchase. So now I stopped telling people about my pie shop because I'm busy making the pies. But while I'm making the pies, there's no one getting people to come.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: I deliver those pies, but they're just my friends. They're buying out of social, like social contract, you're my friend, not because it's something they need. And this business is to fulfill my ego as a business owner, it's not to provide a service to the community.

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: Because to provide a service to the community, I might like making pies, but I need to figure out who needs pies and I might find that there's some office buildings where these people are so busy, they don't have time to cook they're always on the go. And so I would make pies to go, and I would make a custom for their dietary nutrition perhaps. And now it's a symbiotic relationship. It's not a self-serving ego-driven business. It's fulfilling a need. That's something—that's why the market intelligence part is so big of those eight because it's how—you might not have everything else in line, but if you're trying to sell gourmet food to people as they leave in all you can eat buffet...

Lisa: And I've done this before I've made a course because I think it's what people want, and then worked out later on that, no, that's not quite what they wanted. They wanted something slightly different. So, we all always do now like questionnaires and polls, and ‘what is it that you need’? And how do you want this?

Daryl: It’s in the phase.

Lisa: Yes. And then start—yes because you can think you know what your customer wants and needs, but they will tell you better what they actually want and need. And so always listening to your customers and always seeing what direction are they going in and what do they need next is another good thing. So okay, I've done this part of the thing, but can you actually add on something else another service that will be a benefit to them, that you can provide to them, and create what you call the value ladder so that you have more things ready to go.

And all this is really, really complicated, but you've done this with lots and lots of people and lots of businesses and scaled them up. So, if anybody wants to like—coming to wrapping up the session now, Daryl, if somebody wanted to work with you as a business coach, where do they find you? And what sort of work do you do nowadays? What is your sort of core focus?

Daryl: Yes, good question. So, they go to bestbusinesscoach.ca, that'll redirect them to my main site, they can go check me out there. They can look up Daryl Urbanski on all the social media platforms.

Lisa: Yes, you’re pretty famous.

Daryl: Well, we're all famous now. We all have social platforms, so. But I am king in my own universe, that's true. I mean, that's it. And right now, really, what I'm focused on is group coaching. So when I had my martial arts school, I used to love being a part of an environment where people came to get better every day. No one goes to the gym, and they're like, ‘I want to break a leg today’, literally, ‘I want to get sick today’. They come and, ‘I want to get better, I want to fix this part of my jiu jitsu game’, or ‘I want to do squats because I want my butt to be’, whatever it is. But the idea of improving and improvement.

So I'm really focused on my group coaching mastermind, where I'm putting groups of people like that together. So it's a group coaching. And then for people that want more dedicated attention, I have a virtual VP of Marketing Service, where it's like, I can work with them or their team and be present in the meetings, it's a consultation, or I'm a consultant. I'm not necessarily executing or implementing.

So there's a good coaching programme, there's a virtual VP of Marketing. But then I also have a pay for performance model, which is with select people where it's a good fit, win-win-win. There might be an upfront payment just for some setup fees, $1,000, or two, or whatever, depending on the scope of the project. But really, they're only going to pay if they profit because I think that in the B2B space if you want to be a doctor and engineer and architect, you have to pass exams that demonstrate knowledge and capacity. But in the B2B space, anybody can say they're a life coach, anyone can say they're a business coach, anyone can say they're a marketing agency. There's no real way to separate them.

And you can get a certification. But there's not really any real scientific validation of these certification programmes. I just—these companies just create them, and you pay them a thousand bucks and go do a weekend boot camp. And now you're a business coach, and someone should bet their future, their life, their ability to pay medical bills and put their kids in school, on your weekend or dayment of so. I, like, I got away from providing marketing services and being paid a retainer. And I don't think there's anything wrong with people that do that if they provide... Well, I look for more for partnerships. I'm getting away from clients and more towards partnerships. We're like, ‘Man, I know some things. I've done some stuff, looking for people I can partner with, and it's a win-win’. And yes, so they just sort of…

Lisa: If I’m not successful, you're not successful.

Daryl: Right.

Lisa: So if you don't make it, you don't make it, that's the end of the partnership and move on to the next thing. Yes. And I think that's a great model. I think that well it works, it's really good.

Well, I think we've bloody covered a whole lot of areas there. Everywhere from use development through to martial arts through to Jiu-jitsu, and building businesses and overcoming obstacles. So it's been a real fascinating ride with you. I'm really stoked to meet you and Kathy. I think you're brilliant people. You're good people.

And I just want to give a plug to your podcast as well. Can you tell everyone where to find you? So you've mentioned your website, which we'll put it obviously in the show notes and stuff, but where can they find you on the podcast?

Daryl: Yes, just Google, The Best Business Podcast with Daryl Urbanski. It's not to be egocentric. It's just when I did the keyword research when I launched my podcasts, the most searched word term was best business podcast, so I was like that's gonna be my name.

Lisa: I didn’t do that, I wouldn have known to look for an SEO keyword search back in the day. I just went, 'Oh I'm all about pushing the limits, therefore I'm Pushing the Limits'.

Daryl: Keywords are fantastic, sorry to interrupt. Keywords are fantastic because in the privacy of my own home while I'm alone, I go into Google and I type in what are my actual thoughts. So keywords can actually be a sign of like mindshare. How many people are thinking this on what sort of ongoing basis. So if you check your keyword search volume, and not all businesses have to use keywords, but it's great from a research and market intelligence point.

I actually call the Google A to Z. A lot can be learned just going to Google and if you're a chiropractor, put in ‘chiropractor space A’ and look at what shows up. And then chiropractor space B, chiropractor space C, and just take note because these are suggested things is; Google's going, this is what people are looking for.

And if you just take an inventory of A to Z around your keyword and what you do, you can learn a lot about where people are, what they're looking for, the results that they want, you go to Google Trends, you put your keyword in there, you can see the trends over years of the search volume. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to relate to sales. But if there's 100,000 people that are interested in the topic, you might have greater success, instead if there's only a thousand. It just depends on your ability to reach and get a lot of…

Lisa: Google and all of that.

Daryl: Keywords are great. The internet is such a powerful tool. You can go on Amazon and look at other products and read the reviews. And you can go on Reddit, put your keyword in Reddit, you can see what people are saying in the forums, you can learn their language, their pain points, their wants and needs. There's a ton of—it's just the world's become so transparent, so well connected.

Lisa: I just learned half a dozen things that I didn't know, so…

Daryl: Yes. It's so great. It can just really make a difference, where are the customers? What do they want? What problem do I solve for them? And then how do you build a relationship? How do you get them to raise their hand? That's typically the first step.

Who here, who would beat you next? I call it the food court test. So, what I mean is a lot of companies—so think of a mall food court. Let's say I want to sell ice cream. So I could go into the food court, and I could get up on a table, and I could go, 'Baskin Robbins' and look around. A lot of people be like, 'What'? and the people who know me might come over and be like, 'Daryl, what are you doing on the table, man? How are you doing'? Like, 'What's going on? Come on down, how you doing? What's going on'? and be like, ‘Hey, what's going on? I got this nougat ice cream from Baskin', okay, whatever, right? That's one type of marketing. And that's about me, my company, my logo, Baskin Robbins. That doesn't mean anything to anybody. But if you instantly got on a table at a busy food court and I went free ice cream. Totally different things. People come to you, like, what free ice cream? ‘Yes, here we have eight flavours. You can get a free sample if you like. And then it's $3 for a tub of ice cream for $5 for two, which flavour would you like to try first’?

Lisa: Brilliant.

Daryl: Totally different analogy. Totally different situation. Totally different, right?

Lisa: Yep.

Daryl: And the flavours that I would make. I can make the flavours that I want. I could be like, 'Ooh, Cheez Whiz and pickles or a bubble—or like nuts and bubblegum' together at last, right? Like, but that's for me, and you can experiment with that. Or I could just go on to Google and go Ice cream, ice cream A, ice cream B, ice cream C, and be like, what are the top—go to Google Trends. What are the top ice cream flavours?

Lisa: Wow.

Daryl: Hey, these ice creams are the top. Now I'm delivering something the world wants and needs and is looking for.

Lisa: It was such a good analogy, Daryl. It's really good. I'm gonna go on to Google Trends and see. This just so—I think the hard thing for entrepreneurs is that there is so many things you need to be good at, that you don't even know where to start half the time. Is it product development is it...?

Daryl: It fails because people put their money down. And it looks—you can even go—look, you just be transparent. Look, I don't even have the product ready yet. This is what I'm thinking of doing. Would you be willing to put a percentage down to save your spot? Would you be willing to get a discounted deal if I give you...?

People like they say the two hardest things to get people to do with you is have sex and give you money. They require the highest level of faith and trust in a relationship. And we all know people who maybe it's not so hard. If I just walked into a stranger on the street and asked him for money, it's going to be they're going to react as if I asked them to just have sex with me like, 'Who are you? I don't know what? I'm just gonna give you my money'. It's gonna be the same sort of reaction. So you have to build that trust. And but you also need to say, 'Hey, if I'm going to build this amazing product. Are you in or not’? like what's going on?

And then after that, it's really those eight categories: self-efficacy, strategic planning, marketing strategy, market intelligence, sales strategy and skills, money management, operating systems of the business and then business intelligence. And again, you need all of them. You need all of them. Those are the eight areas, but the number one thing is, ‘what problem am I solving? And are people proving the demand is there with their wallets’?

Lisa: And it's not just my—what I want for my ego, but what is actually required out there in the world. And I think that's a really—even that answering that first question was a biggie. That pie analogy was a good one.

Hey, Daryl, look, I've taken up enough of your time today. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. I highly recommend everyone go and check out The Best Business Podcast and then hop over onto Best Business—what was it .ca?

Daryl: bestbusinesscoach.ca

Lisa: bestbusinesscoach.ca, go and see Daryl over there. Thanks very much, Daryl.

Daryl: Goodbye, everyone.

That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

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EP 89: HOW TO DEAL WITH FAILURE AND HOW TO PERSEVERE IN THE FACE OF RESISTANCE 0

Oct 22, 2018

The number one thing that stops us from taking on massive challenges and chasing our dreams is the fear of failure. The "What if" machine goes into overdrive and we get in our own way, stop our chances of success before we even begin.

In this episode Lisa discusses this fear and how to stop it robbing you of your true destiny, from reaching your true potential and achieving your dreams.

She also talks about experiencing resistance and how not to give up in the middle of the storm because the calm, the breakthroughs may be just around the corner.

We would like to thank our sponsors

Running Hot Coaching:

The online training platform run by Lisa Tamati and Neil Wagstaff.

Do you have a dream to run a big race, maybe a half marathon, a marathon or even an ultramarathon?

So who are we?

Lisa's own Mindset Academy - The Path of an Athlete. An in-depth online programme that teaches you how to develop mental toughness, resilience, leadership skills, a never quit mentality, mental wellbeing and the keys for success in anything you set your mind to.

For more information go to: Mindset Academy

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Ep 17: Paul Rangiwahia - Artist/The Mental W.O.F. 0

Jun 29, 2017

Paul Rangiwahia is an artist on a mission. For years Paul's works have sparked intrigue and discussion for their quirkiness, their kiwiana style but now Paul has produced a very special piece of work called "The Mental W.O.F" which provides viewers with a daily dose of wellbeing. Made up of a set of 45 rules that Paul tries to live his life by, wisdom and principles to live a happy and fulfilled life. This artwork has gone viral and is encouraging and inspiring people all around the globe but Paul's journey to developing this set of principles has been through the school of hard knocks when two years ago his business failed and he was made bankrupt. He hit rock bottom before rediscovering his real passion for art and making this apparent disaster, which saw him lose his family home and everything he had worked for, into a turning point for good in his life. The Mental W.O.F was his start back to wellness and now he shares through his works and his speaking, his experiences and what is really important in life. You can see the Mental W.O.F or get your inspiring copy at www.paulrangiwahia.com

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Ep 14: Pro surfer Maz Quinn on Pushing the Limits 0

Jun 8, 2017

Maz Quinn is New Zealand's best known and most successful surfer.

A four-time winner of New Zealand's national surfing championships, and winner of the 1996 Billabong Pro-Junior Series, Quinn comes from a surfing mad family - his younger brother Jay and sister Holly have both won national titles, his mother is an advocate for Women's surfing and his father was a national official.

During the 1990s, Quinn took part in the World Qualifying Series and in 1999 Maz became the first New Zealander to win a WQS event and in 2001 he became the first New Zealander ever to qualify for the World Championship Tour, in doing so becoming one of the world's top 44 ranked male surfers.

In 2009, Quinn helped to stage the Quiksilver Maz Quinn King of the Groms, a national surfing event for youth.

In this interview Lisa finds out from Maz what it's like to be on the world tour, what the pressures are like, how hard it is to qualify, the setbacks and successes along the way, how it feels to surf alongside legends of the sport like Kelly Slater and how he faces up to his fears when surfing the big waves.
Maz opens up about how his parents guidance put him early in his life on the right road and what life has been like after the lights went down and the circus of the tour was over.

He talks about women in surfing, the state of the tour now and what surfing holds for the future and hones insights from his sport for life.

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Ep10: Sir John Kirwan with - Lisa Tamati 0

May 18, 2017

Sir John Kirwan KNZM MBE is a New Zealand rugby union coach and former player of both rugby union and rugby league.

He scored 35 tries in 63 tests for New Zealand, making him one of the highest try scorers in international rugby union history, and was part of the New Zealand team that won the first Rugby World Cup in 1987. He also played rugby league for the Auckland Warriors in their first two seasons. He is the former head coach of the Blues in Super Rugby, and the Japan and Italy national teams.

In recent years, he has spoken openly about his battles with depression and been honoured for his services to mental health.

He has written two books on depression and mental health the first "All Blacks don't cry" details his journey through depression to wellness, offering help and tools for those suffering from this debilitating illness and the second "Stand by me" was written for parents of teenagers facing mental illness issues.

Kirwan is married to Fiorella, Lady Kirwan, with three children Francesca, Niko and Luca. Kirwan speaks fluent Italian and good Japanese, a result of a playing career in Italy and coaching career in Japan.

On the show he talks with Lisa about some of the tools he uses to stay, how we need to help our athletes transition out of the sport and back into life at the end of their careers, about what greatness is to him and how to deal with failure in life and much more.

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Ep 9: Annie Doyle - Pushing the Limits 0

May 12, 2017

Meet Annie Doyle, a Sydney-based, 56 year old dedicated old mother of two. Working hard as a Chief Financial Officer for a large disability organisation she somehow finds the time to also be a mountaineering machine who is on a mission to become the first Maori woman to climb the Seven Summits (The highest mountain on every continent and well regarded of as the Holy Grail of mountaineering)
She’s 6/7ths of the way there. Her transcontinental summit quest started when she reached the top of our very own Mt. Kosciuszko in 2005 and then Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro the same year, followed by Mt. Elbrus in Russia in 2006, Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina in 2007 and both Mt. McKinley in Alaska in 2009and Vinson Massif in Antarctica in 2013. Only Everest awaits her. Unfortunately luck hasn’t been on her side…yet.
In 2012 she positioned for her first attempt but bad weather made the Khumbu Icefall too dangerous, again she made another attempt in 2014 but the mountain closed following a tragic icefall avalanche that killed 16 Sherpas.
In April this year, she was readying for her 3rd attempt, this time from the Tibetan side, but the sheer devastation of the catastrophic Nepalese Earthquake once again closed the mountain and rocked the climbing community to its core with the loss of so many lives. Annie’s 7th summit awaits another season.

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EP 8: Dean Karnazes - The Road to Sparta 0

Apr 27, 2017

Dean Karnazes is the most well known ultra marathon runner on the planet. He has written 4 books and is a New York Times bestselling author.

He was named by mens health magazine as the fittest man on the planet and by time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet.
His running exploits are too many to even list but some of the highlights include running the Badwater ultra-marathon 10 times. Running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days (about which a book was written), he was the winner of the racing the planet 4 desert series, has run 350 miles non stop (i.e. going without sleep) and has done 10 x 200 mile races. He has been featured on The late show with David Letterman, on 60 minutes CBS news, CNN, ESPN and has been on the cover of Runners World. He is a US ambassador using his running talent to spread a unifying message around the world. He is an accomplished businessman and holds business and science degrees and has done post graduate work at Stanford university and has worked with a number of fortune 500 companies. He is uniquely positioned to demonstrate how the lessons from sport can be applied to business.

He is a philanthropist and has raised large amounts of money for various charities and has inspired literally hundreds of thousands of people to their feet.

His latest book is highlighted in this podcast. "The Road to Sparta" details his journey to retrace the footsteps of his ancestral countryman Pheidipides of Greece who ran 153 miles from Athens to Sparta in 490 BC to recruit the Spartans into the battle the Athenians were waging again the invading Persians.
The story tells of this history but also his journey back to his roots, being of Greek descent and follows his race doing the Spartathlon the grueling modern day ultra marathon 153 miles that has to be completed in under 36 hours and goes from Athens to Sparta.

Host Lisa Tamati has run alongside Dean during ultra marathons and is uniquely qualified to interview this legendary athlete.

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