KF #26. Being Resilient Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, welcome!

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your area of expertise. Your book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think, has just taken off tremendously. Congratulations.

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And the title is so good. It’s so funny, Amazon auto-completes if you type, “Don’t believe everything you think.” It’s like, “Nice.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that’s a great advertisement, I guess, and a great slogan just to have all over Amazon. It’s what it should be, instead of all the stuff that we don’t need to be buying.

Pete Mockaitis
Don’t buy many other things here.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you take us through the journey a little bit of how you and your relationship to thought and the insights that you discovered came to be in your own personal lived existence?

Joseph Nguyen
A lot of what I’ve come to realize comes from, this is not new information. This has been here for eons, thousands of years, from everyone and so many different countries, cultures. I mean, I draw influence from Western philosophy, Eastern philosophies, Zen Buddhism, Christianity. So much cognitive behavioral therapy. Like, you name it, there’s probably some sort of influence there.

But I think the only time that I was able to actually integrate it into my life was when I sort of hit a rock-bottom moment where, after I really tried as much as I possibly could all the options that were available to me, like, I mean, there’s therapy, there’s acupuncture, acupressure, there’s going vegan. I did all these things and it didn’t really quite work until it forced me to look internally.

I was trying to do everything to change everything outside of me, so changing people’s behaviors, how they viewed me, how they judged me, wanting and trying to earn other people’s approval, love, all these sorts of things, all these attempts at finding what could only be found within. So, I think the moment where I kind of hit rock bottom, which was a point in my life where, I mean, I had a business that was growing. It was going great. I accomplished a lot of the goals that I had, but at the cost of my own mental health.

So, every single day, I was just so chronically anxious, borderline depressed. I was probably depressed. I just wouldn’t admit it to myself that that was it. And I just didn’t know when the next client was coming from. I didn’t know if we’re going to have enough money, food. My partner, now wife, she had a lot of physiological illnesses.

So, she had gastroparesis, and so she couldn’t eat, got a feeding tube, hospitalized multiple times. All of that was happening concurrently with, basically, my business falling apart. Then my business partner and I split. I went 50,000 into debt at around 21, 22 years old. And so, all of that happened within a span of about a year.

And so, that was probably the rock-bottom moment that I hit, where I thought, after accomplishing everything that I wanted, that it would give me this internal peace and joy, but it did the exact opposite. And that was because I didn’t realize where peace comes from, and it doesn’t come from manipulating the environment or other people or the world to whatever I think it needs to be. It comes from releasing that desire, that need to change everything outside of me except myself.

So, rock bottom, I think pain is a great motivator and catalyst for change. Most people, like myself, probably wouldn’t change if it wasn’t absurdly painful. So, I’m actually very grateful for those experiences, but it’s quite difficult to go through it. But that was the genesis of the turning point for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you for sharing that. That’s heavy, and it’s a lot. And I think what you’re articulating dead on, we just chatted with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who discussed the arrival fallacy, this notion, “Ah, yes, when this happens, then it’ll be smooth sailing. I’ll be happy. I’ll be free. I’ll be at peace. All my problems will be solved.”

And it just doesn’t work out that way. And sometimes we don’t believe it until, as you’ve said, we experience that pain. We have arrived and go, “Uh-oh, shoot, these feelings are still there, that lack of peace is still there.

Joseph Nguyen
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what then? What happened next?

Joseph Nguyen
So, it basically forced me to look inside, because I was trying all these modalities to help, and they did help to a certain extent, but it didn’t really change that much. And it puzzled me, because I thought to myself, “I surely can’t be the only one going through this. So that’s when I started looking for a lot of different solutions.

And then I started questioning my own experiences, and other people’s experiences too, which is I think most people, if not every single human, goes through extremely difficult and challenging events and times or even traumas.

And so, I started to ask myself and run thought experiments, where it was like, “If two people, have similar traumas, how is it possible that one person can spiral downwards and fall into a deep depression and isn’t really able to get out of it, while another person who has gone through something similar is able to make amends and make peace with the past and become okay with what happened?”

And not only that, but become empowered by what happened and go on to want to help other people not experience the same thing. How is that possible if we can’t go back and change the past? So, neither one of them went back to alter the events in any single way, which means it’s not the events that was changed, but their own thinking about what happened to them.

And so, that sparked an epiphany, which was, our emotions don’t come from external events, they come from our own thinking about the events, which is our own judgments, our own opinions, our own criticisms about the event, or even ourselves and our own thoughts about whatever happened. And so, that was what kind of made a giant light bulb moment for me, which is like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s no way to change the past, but I can always change the way that I’m viewing it. Is this helpful or hurtful? This sort of incessant nonstop negative judgment of life, of myself, of other people?”

And so, that spawned a whole slew of new questions for myself, which was like, “Why do I do that? Why do I constantly wish things were different? Why do I constantly tell myself that I’m not enough, not good enough, not smart enough, not whatever it is, and repeating these stories to myself?” And I never stopped to ask myself, “Is that actually helpful? When has overthinking helped me?”

And so, I realized then that overthinking doesn’t solve problems, it creates them and exacerbates them. And I just didn’t understand that I could just not judge, negatively judge, the things that are happening in my life or myself. That was an extremely liberating moment for me. And, I mean, most of the thoughts that we have, we have over 60,000 thoughts in a single day. How is it possible that every single one of those thoughts is true? There’s no way, right?

And if it were true that we are our thoughts, what happens to the thought that just passed our minds, that just left? We’re still here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d disappear.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re still here, right? So, that means we are something beyond our thoughts. Same thing with emotions. If we are our emotions, if I am depressed, or if I am anxious, if I am those things, or I am happy, what happens when those things pass, anxiety or happiness? I’m still here. How is that possible?

So, we are not our thoughts and we are not our emotions then. We are something greater than that. And that is the feeling and the space that I sink back into to finally find some peace because I realize that everything in life is transient, including our thoughts. And if we are the common denominator that is still here, then those fleeting things can’t be possibly us. That was the eye-opener for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Wow, there’s so much good stuff here, and I’m just drawing all kinds of connections. I recall I was in a therapy session once, and I posed the same question, and it’s like, “So, is it true that, like Nietzsche or Kelly Clarkson says, that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” Or, is it the opposite experience in which, “No, I had a bad thing happen to me and I’m somehow less strong, weaker, not as capable as a result of the experience”?

So, it’s like, “So which is it? And under what circumstances, and why, and what’s the distinction?” And he didn’t give me the easy answer, “That’s one of the greatest questions of therapy.”

Joseph Nguyen
He was amping you up, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, I mean, and that is one of the assertions, I believe, of cognitive behavioral therapy or of Shakespeare. There’s nothing good or bad, but rather thinking makes it so, and our cognitive distortions or our thoughts about things and judgments shape the emotional reactions and experiences we have. And we had a Navy Seal Alden Mills sharing some similar notions, like, “Hey, is this thought helpful or hurtful? All right. Well, then let’s bring some energy to the helpful thoughts.”

And we got some real wisdom there. It’s, like, we cannot be our thoughts, we cannot be our emotions, because our thoughts and our emotions are ever shifting and changing. And that sounds wise and familiar. Is this coming from a wisdom tradition? Or is this a Joseph original?

Joseph Nguyen
Oh, no, nothing is original from me. Creativity is just a blend of a lot of different parts and combining it into something seemingly new. But it’s all from Eastern philosophy, some Western, right, some Stoicism, Zen, Buddhism, in that there’s tons of psychology in there, right? Like cognitive behavioral therapy uses so much of this in terms of questioning our own thoughts, our own emotions, trying to figure out the root cause of all this. So, all of that, I definitely stand on the shoulders of many, many giants from centuries or millennia.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you put a stake in the ground, and it seems like you’ve got some real conviction here, that it is, indeed, our thoughts and judgments and overthinking, over-thoughts, about a situation that is the source of our depression, anxiety. And I’m thinking, is it the only source, the primary source? Are we sure about this? It sounds true-ish, but what’s our best evidence for it?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, in terms of emotions, there’s no way to really prevent “negative emotions.” Those will always come and go. What I propose in the book is less about preventing them, but to reduce the time spent experiencing those emotions. Because a lot of times, we are replaying and ruminating on memories of the past, and bringing them into the present moment and reliving that experience from a certain vantage point of it, which may or may not be true, I don’t know.

But if it makes us feel a lot of anxiety or depression or resentment, is that possible for us to change? And if so, then how? And so, in the book, I started to realize, like, let’s say there’s a lot of people in veteran hospitals or recovering in Alcoholics Anonymous or tons of people who have been through so many different things. How is it possible that there’s people that have gone through something similar, but then have different results?

So, it’s like, “What are they changing? They’re not going back in the past to do that, so they’re changing something now in the present moment to alter their experience.” And so, that’s where the book is coming from, which is like, “What can we do now that things have happened, and becoming more resilient, right?”

This is building and training emotional regulation and resilience rather than a prevention of emotions in totality, because a lot of times, sometimes emotions are very helpful. They help to protect us. They help give us signs. All emotions are messengers to help us and to show us what we need to pay attention to. That’s all emotions are.

But if we believe them to be the only source of truth and an ultimate conclusion about ourselves, then that’s where we run into trouble. And, let’s say, if we’re really depressed, then we might think about ourselves, and say, “We’re not enough. We’re not lovable. We’ll never find love.” These sorts of beliefs about ourselves, which is what I call “thinking” or “negative judgments,” those things are not necessarily that helpful and they harm us more than help us.

And so, is it possible to let those things go? And if so, how? So, for me, why I use the word “thinking” in particular is because it’s the best word I could find to explain the phenomena of just ruminating negatively on something. So I make a distinction in the book, thoughts versus thinking. A thought is a neutral observation or intuitive prompting about an event that happened.

Pete Mockaitis
“I would like to eat some food.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that is a thought.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, that’s a desire.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that could be a desire.

Pete Mockaitis
A thought and a desire.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, and then thinking, on the other hand, is a negative judgment about an event or your own thoughts. So, let’s take a scenario.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’m overweight. I shouldn’t eat all this food.”

Joseph Nguyen
Right. See, “should” is a great indicator that we’re thinking, right? That’s usually a preliminary word that we use before we judge ourselves. And so, an example of this is, let’s say it’s raining outside. A thought is, “It’s raining.” That’s a neutral observation. Thinking, on the other hand, would be something like, “Why is this happening? Why does this always happen to me? This rain completely ruined my day. I’m always unlucky like this.”

All of this thinking about the thought of it raining is not as helpful to us and is the source of all this suffering. So, let’s say we did have something planned and it rained and it ruined our day, that’s unfortunate, right? Like, we had plans, we planned for it, but is it possible to not let it ruin our entire day? Is it possible to let go of this emotional suffering within a few minutes?

And so, that’s why I say that’s the thinking part of whatever is going on. And although we can’t change the event or even our initial thought of it, we can always let go of the thinking or judgment about whatever is going on, and that’s where the power lies. For example, thoughts have no power over us unless we believe them to be true, right? So, the belief in the judgment is what causes this suffering and is the difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, now, as you use the word “thinking,” I am wondering if we could have other, do some other thinking, or judging about the rain in a positive fashion, in terms of, “At last, the crops will be nourished by this rain,” or, “You know what, let’s just frolic like a child.”

And so, in your definition, would you still call that thinking even though it has maybe a positive vibe or feeling associated with it?

Joseph Nguyen
I think there’s two different categories of what we can call positive thinking. On one hand, it could just be an intuitive prompting. An example of that would just be, “It’s raining. Let’s go outside and play in the rain.” It doesn’t necessarily have to skew towards, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened in the entire world.”

See, like where we can over-exaggerate positive thinking is equally where we can fall short of it because who’s to say it is the best thing in the entire world? Because if it’s raining here, it might flood somewhere else. So, it’s very difficult to just, ultimately and conclusively, say if this is good or bad. And so, if we are overly positive about something, then it opens us up for, “Well, what if that might not be the case?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, so it might feel good, but we’re not necessarily getting closer to truth or accurate representation of reality.

Joseph Nguyen
Correct, yeah. And we can skew both ways, and that’s when positive thinking can then open us up all sorts of cans of worms. But that’s not to say that positive thinking doesn’t work, and I don’t want to say that at all. It certainly does work, but the question is, “Is it sustainable? And is it based in reality?” So, if we observe the rain, and we’re like, “Oh, look, it’s like nourishing the crops,” like that’s a neutral and true observation, like it is feeding the plants and all that stuff, and we can feel good about that.

But what I also observed as well was, once we let go of the negative judgment about things, we are naturally at peace. We are naturally more joyful. We skew towards that way. And if you look at children that are a couple years old, they skew towards happiness. They’re smiling, they’re happy, unless they’re like hungry or like something is physiologically wrong. They’re generally just very positive, very happy, laughing all the time.

And that’s our natural state as well if we don’t negatively judge whatever situation is going on. If we let go of worrying about the future or ruminating and resenting the past, that is our default state. So, you don’t necessarily have to try to be positive. And other examples I love giving is, think about or recall a time where it’s like you were very anxious, or stressed, or overwhelmed. Like, how much thinking is going on?

Pete Mockaitis
Plenty.

Joseph Nguyen
Too much, right? But then if we flip and invert the question, recall a time when you were your happiest, in a total state of flow, and you lost track of time, how much thinking was going on then?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s, I guess per your definition of thinking, like, very little. Although, if you’re in a flow and doing a thing, you naturally have to—

Joseph Nguyen
You’re having thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, you’re having thoughts, but you’re not thinking in the Joseph-sense of the word.

Joseph Nguyen
Right, you’re not negatively judging the thoughts or experience that you’re having. You’re just in it, you’re fully immersed. That’s when you lose a sense of self, actually, and that’s when we are no longer psychologically suffering. And some people in the spiritual community will call this like the death of the ego. It’s when you just dissolve and you feel at one with everything. That’s what flow is and why a lot of times people will say like that’s this ideal state for humans to be in.

Athletes experience this very often when they’re in and playing a game during a competition. They’re not so much thinking about what’s going on. They are just intuitively responding and being there. And that’s like our ideal state that we’re in. Actually, the times that athletes think too much, they tend to miss the shots, or think too much about something and overanalyze, and that’s when they freeze and choke when they could have definitely done something different.

The same thing is true for our own lives. The more that we constantly just ruminate, judge, and criticize ourselves, other people, events, we tend to freeze, and go into fight-or-flight mode, and act as if our life really is in danger, and operate from a place of fear rather than love and expansion and joy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Joseph, we’re getting near a zone I’ve been pondering for a while, which is, you talk about when we feel a sense of peace or joy and flow, contentment. And I’ve been reflecting on the distinction between contentment and boredom. Because, in terms of an external view of the situation, they’re almost the same.

It’s like, “Nothing’s really happening right now.” And yet, when we feel bored, we’re restless, agitated, and, I guess, negatively judging, “I don’t like that nothing’s going on right now,” versus when we are content, it’s like, “Ah, nothing’s going on right now.” And that feels restful, rejuvenating, restorative, and we like and appreciate the space that we find ourselves in.

So, I guess that is perhaps one of many examples of the judgment we bring to a situation, shaping it, but I’d love your pro tip. If we find ourselves bored and would rather be content, what should we do?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, great question. So, boredom is not necessarily a bad thing. Boredom, a lot of times, is the birth of creation, new things, new hobbies, new thoughts, new ideas. If we’re not bored a lot of the time or sometimes, then we’re actually just recycling a lot of the same material from the past and constantly going and we feel like we’re in the hamster wheel. So, boredom is not necessarily bad. And when you see kids get bored, what do they do? They invent.

Pete Mockaitis
They invent some games.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly. That’s what humans do. When we’re bored, we create, and so it acts as a great motivator. But where things can go a little bit south is when we say, “Oh, instead of being content with what’s happening right now,” let’s say we’re on vacation, “I should be working. If I’m working these hours, I could make so much more money or I have all these emails I need to get to.”

You’re not able to actually enjoy yourself in the present moment, and you’re constantly thinking about the future and all these things you need to get done, that’s when the “boredom” or what we would call that in that case, that’s when it robs our peace and takes it away from us is when we think we need to be doing something else other than what we’re currently doing or experiencing.

So, in that case, what I love recommending to do is just to schedule those things and just, like, if you’re on vacation, like that’s the boundary you need to draw for yourself. But if we don’t draw boundaries, it will creep in. All of these beliefs that we have, all these negative judgments that we have about ourselves or what we should and shouldn’t be doing, they will come in unless we set that boundary for ourselves.

Like, “If I’m on vacation, my phone is off,” or, “I’m not taking emails or whatever it is.” But without those, they will creep in and they will start to fester and become uncontrollable at that point. And this is really a practice of presence more than anything else. Are we able to do and give our full attention to what is happening right now in front of us? Or, are we distracted and thinking about something else in the meantime?

Peace comes from being present. It is a natural byproduct of doing so. The more that we are able to do that, that’s the happier we will be, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m reminded of the Scientific Journal article, “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,” which, I think it was Kahneman and company looked at just that in terms of empirically checking with people and, “Hey, what are you doing? What are you thinking about?” and seeing the results. So, that’s that there. When you say boundaries, my first thought is sort of external things, like, “I will not be picking up my smartphone,” “I will not be answering emails on vacation.” Do you have some thoughts for boundaries we have, like with ourselves and our own thoughts or experiences?

Joseph Nguyen
Those are the most important boundaries because we can change everything external but if we don’t change anything internally then we’re still going to suffer a lot emotionally. So, some of the most important internal boundaries that you so aptly alluded to are the judgments that we’re making that is really at the core of our emotional suffering, of our resentment towards others, to ourselves.

If we don’t draw that boundary, and say, like, “We will no longer judge ourselves in this light,” then we’re going to keep doing it. And we do this mostly because we’re not even aware that there’s an option out, that, “Oh, we can just not judge everything that’s going on? Like, there’s a way that, as I go about my life, I don’t have to constantly narrate and say this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong, this should be happening, this shouldn’t be happening?”

We just aren’t taught that. Most people just don’t know, and I wasn’t aware of that until I was basically smacked in the face with it and had to hit rock bottom to find it. But that is probably the most important boundary to set, which is, “Can we let go of the judgments that we’re having about ourselves, the world, whatever’s happening? Are we able to enjoy it as it is?”

When we go about life, most of the time we judge everything, “This person’s good,” “This person’s bad,” “This person’s evil,” “This person’s not,” “This is beautiful or ugly.” Like, there are so many things that happen. But when we walk in nature, like how many of us are saying, “This flower is ugly. This flower is like beautiful,” or, like, “This tree is crooked or what”?

Like, we just observe and enjoy nature as it is rather than constantly pick apart every single thing that we think is wrong with this tree. As soon as we do that, that’s when we suffer. So, nature is a great way to reset because of that and it brings us back to our true nature, ironically, of just being aware and giving our full attention to someone without judging them. That’s what the basis of love is, unconditional love, which is to fully accept someone as they are without wanting to change them, without wanting them just to be something different.

Full acceptance of that is where peace comes from. This not only goes for people, but for situations, anything. That is the root of unconditional love. And use that thought experiment for yourself. Like, when do you feel most loved by someone? When they’re constantly judging you, nagging you, saying you should do this, saying you should be different, you should be better, you should be doing any of these things, or when they fully accept you as you are without judging? That is the goal of everything.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. My children would say, when we do hugs and kisses in flying blanket mode.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
But it falls into a subcategory of what you’re describing. I like that notion about the narration that we’re just doing it all the time, and it might not even seem too intense, like, “I’m such a stupid idiot.” But even just like, “Oh, oh, oh, the sun is kind of in my eyes. Oh, it’s kind of hot. Like, oh, I’m getting tired.”

Like, there you are in nature, you might not be condemning the tree for being crooked, but we are narrating and judging – well, I am often – experiences they’re in, in terms of like the air temperature or the illumination that is not perfectly aligned to the preferences I have in that moment.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, and that’s where all the suffering comes from, is just what we wish would happen, what we want the world to be. But peace comes from letting go of what we wish everything would be and accept it for how it actually is. And, yes, same goes for anything in life, people, even ourselves. In AA, like one of the first steps is acceptance. The five stages of grief, acceptance is what you’re trying to go for.

And in CBT, acceptance of whatever emotions we’re feeling is also a core component of the whole process. So, at the end of it all, like all these different modalities are pointing to the same thing, which is, “Can I let go of the judgment that I’m having of whatever is happening and going on?” Once we’re able to let go of that thinking mind, the fear-based mind and the judgmental mind, then we’re able to find a little peace.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you said that we have the option to stop the narration, and I am a frequent Audible listener who likes to pause my audiobooks. And I understand you’ve got a little acronym you can walk us through.

Joseph Nguyen
Yes, exactly. So, this acronym, I tried to make it as actionable as possible in terms of, I mean, what we’re doing is letting go of the judgments. That’s the whole purpose of this. And so, this makes the act of letting go a little bit more tangible. So, the first letter in the acronym is P, which is pause. So, pause and take deep breaths, and you don’t need to get fancy with it. Just take five deep breaths. There’s no specific way you need to do it.

But it’s been scientifically proven that taking deep breaths allows us to lower our heart rate, to regulate our emotions, and to come back to center. So, just do that in the beginning of anything, because it’s really hard to regulate or do anything or make decisions or come back to yourself when we’re in a fight or flight mode. Next is A, which is ask ourselves, “Is this thinking useful?” Just like the other psychologists you mentioned before, like, “Is this thinking making me feel the way that I want?” If not, the next step is U, which is understand that you have the ability to let that thinking or judgment go. We always have that power. We may not be able to control our thoughts, but we can always control our thinking about the thoughts, and therein lies our entire power to change our experience of life.

S is, say and repeat the mantra, “Thinking is the root cause of suffering.” You can use any mantra in this matter. Another one, for example, would be, “I let go and choose peace.” Any mantra rooted in truth will work, and it needs to be short and memorable. What mantras do is that it’s very difficult to think of two things simultaneously.

So, what it does is it focuses your attention on this one thing, which means you can’t be thinking about the future or ruminating about the past. So, it forces focus and attention on something that is true. So, repeating that for maybe 30 seconds to a minute is really all you need, and that will slow the thinking mind. It will calm things down significantly.

That’s the basis of Transcendental Meditation as well, what a lot of the Tibetan monks use to go beyond the mind and to achieve oneness with the universe. But we take it here and you’re able to use it in real time.

Then E, the last step is to experience your emotions fully without resistance. So, we’re not trying to bypass the emotions by just not thinking about it. We’re actually removing the judgment of the emotions because what we resist persists. So, if we are resisting the anxiety, it usually gets worse, which is why a lot of times, when someone has a panic attack, they’re much more prone to more panic attacks simply because that’s how, it’s just like self-fulfilling, so to speak.

It’s like once we experience something and don’t want it to happen, we just put up a wall and just constantly resist it. But in physics, an object in motion will stay in motion, right? But also, for every force, there’s an equal and opposite force happening. So, if you have this force of an emotion and you’re resisting the emotion, that emotion is going to constantly be there and it’s going to stay stuck unless it passes through your system.

Anything that is stuck creates a significant amount of suffering. So, for a slightly more comical and light-hearted example is, like, if you eat a lot of food and it doesn’t pass through your system, what happens? Like, a week, a month passes, it’s going to be very painful and it’s going to cause all sorts of issues.

The same thing is true for our thoughts and emotions. The more that we hold on to our thoughts and don’t let them pass through, the more it’s going to cause us a lot of emotional suffering. Thoughts, emotions, all these things are transient and meant to pass through us, just like water flowing through a river.

As soon as a river is dammed up, that’s when wildlife begins to dwindle, fish begin to die, all these things start to happen. But as soon as the river is able to flow, that’s when life begins to flourish. That is the same thing for our own lives. So, letting thoughts and emotions pass through us without resistance. So, the way to do that is to create space within ourselves, to honor and hold the emotions, and to not judge them.

See them as another entity, like our inner child, or even one of our own children, and to hold them within our hearts, and to give them space to be there, without judging them, without saying, “You shouldn’t be here. Why are you here again?” That’s what we say to these emotions a lot of times, like, “Why are you still here, anger?” And we’re angry at the anger, and so it just compounds.

But as soon as we say, “Oh, you’re welcome here. You’re not an enemy. It’s okay.” As soon as you give children space, time, and attention, things begin to settle and we’re able to regulate. The same thing is true for all of our emotions and it passes so much more quickly when we’re doing this rather than kind of putting up a wall. So that’s the whole entire process.

Pause, take deep breaths. A, ask yourself, “Is this thinking helpful or useful?” U, which is understand you have the ability to let that thinking go. S, which is say and repeat the mantra. And E, which is experience your emotions fully without resistance.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And if I may put some numbers into this, so you had a mantra, I counted, it was about seven words. Is that around the length that we’re thinking about? Like, if you push it to 20, it’s outside mantra zone?

Joseph Nguyen
Probably. It just creates so much more thinking and you’re probably going to have to try to remember, “Am I saying it right? Did I forget a word?” And you’re trying to make it as simple as possible so that you don’t have to overthink it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then with experience, I think when I’ve resisted, historically, it’s been almost out of a fear that, “If I begin to experience this sadness, this sorrow, this grieving at this deeply unfortunate thing that has occurred, then will it swallow me? Will it persist for a long time and impact the things I need to do this day, this week, this month?”

And so, I can sometimes push away. But you say with the water flowing situation, and that which we resist persists, we are better off experiencing it fully. I mean, Joseph, for those fellow aversive pushers, away-ers…

Joseph Nguyen
Master push-up-ers, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
…how long are we in for a rough emotional experience if we allow it to hang out?

Joseph Nguyen
I will say shorter than if you’re resisting it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Joseph Nguyen
So, the irony in it is that, when we’re pushing it away, we think that we’re not dealing with it but we’re still suffering. We’re constantly thinking about it, we’re wishing it were different, we’re ruminating on it constantly, but what we don’t understand is that when we just allow it to be there, that it passes so much more quickly.

I think neuroscience is saying now that it takes about 90 seconds for an emotion to be regulated in our bodies. The only reason why it’s prolonged most of the time is that we begin ruminating on the event or judging the situation that happened, and it resets that time period. So, we’ll go 90 seconds, and right before that, we think about it again, we’ll judge it again, and it keeps prolonging the cycle.

And so, it only takes a few minutes to do this and to let go, and it’s not like the entire emotion will go away, but the intensity of the emotion will be drastically reduced than what it was when we were resisting. And, over time, as you build the muscle of emotional resiliency and emotional regulation, it becomes a little bit easier to do every single time. And the threshold in which we become overwhelmed is significantly expanded, so we can take on a lot more in life.

We’re able to do a lot more. We’re able to endure a lot of these events with a lot more grace and a lot more love. But, yeah, it’s definitely scary to kind of allow these emotions to come in because we think that we might not be able to handle it. We might crumble under the emotion. But you have to ask yourself, like we were saying before, like, “Am I my thoughts? Am I this emotion?”

And think about all the difficult times and trauma that you’ve been through, and all the trauma, like, you’re still here. So, I mean, you’re greater than every single emotion that you’ve ever experienced. And the same is true now and it will ever, and it will be true forever because those things are not us.

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, beautiful stuff. Could you share any final thoughts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, I would run micro-experiments with yourself. Like, you actually don’t have to believe anything that I’m saying, ironically, like the book title. Test it out for yourself. See if it’s true, if thinking is the root cause of your emotional suffering. And the way that you can test this out is to try to suspend judgment, negative judgment about yourself, your own thoughts, your own emotions, external things, people, circumstances.

See if you can suspend judgment for about seven days. That’s it. You don’t have to do a month. You don’t have to do a year. Just see if you can let go of the judgments that your mind is creating, for seven days and see how you feel afterwards. If it significantly improves your emotional well-being, awesome! Continue doing it.

And if it doesn’t, that’s completely okay, and you can find another modality that might work for you. But at the very least, try it and see what happens. And it is only through our own lived experience that you know what truth is, rather than just taking someone’s word for it. So, that’s what I would encourage everyone to do, and just see for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joseph Nguyen
One of my favorite quotes is actually in the book, which is from Jonathan Safran Foer, which is, “I think, I think, I think. I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, very good. Very good. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Joseph Nguyen
The neuroscience study that I was alluding to before, I don’t know exactly what experiment it was.

But they were studying about how long it takes for our emotions to actually pass through our systems, and it was about 90 seconds, which was mind-boggling to me because I thought it would take, you know, like multiple minutes or at least like, I don’t know, 10 minutes, for like, if you’re angry of something, like it feels like it takes way longer than 90 seconds.

So, that was a profound shift in me to realize that, “Oh, my gosh, like it is possible to let go of a lot of these emotions quite quickly.” And it’s actually important to follow this. You don’t have to follow this process, specifically, but you can follow any process, but it’s really important to do it in real time as you’re going about your day.

So, this process is, if you’re experiencing something in traffic, or your boss says something, or your parents say something, or your friends says something that creates a negative emotional reaction within you, it’s important to use the process then rather than only use it in the morning or in the evening like meditating, right?

That way you are actually strengthening your emotional resiliency throughout the entire day. It’s a little bit easier to find peace when you’re alone in your room and it’s dark, your blindfolds are on, there’s like Zen music, right? It’s like a little bit easier to find peace there, but the true test is, “Are you able to find peace while also, like let’s say your boss is screaming at your face, or making fun of you, or your friends are doing something that you don’t really approve of, or your parents are criticizing you in front of other family members?

That’s the time that you’re truly tested for, if you’re able to find peace. And this is something that you can use during those times rather than you need to bust out like a 30-minute meditation just to find a little bit of alleviation. So, that’s one other thing I would do, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And a favorite book?

Joseph Nguyen
This one’s very interesting, maybe slightly controversial, but it currently is Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Joseph Nguyen
I like to use this particular framework on just when I’m doing work because I have issues, a lot of times. Just like procrastinating like most people or just putting off things that I know I need to be doing. And one of the most effective things that I’ve done is to follow the SPA methodology, which is just, if I’m overwhelmed by something, just take the next smallest possible action, so SPA, and doing that.

So, if it’s, “I need to write another book,” that’s a pretty big task, pretty scary, daunting, and it’s like, “Am I able to bust out a whole book in this one session?” Now, that’s typically what the mind thinks of. But if I break it down to the smallest possible action, like, “Am I able to just open the Word document? Can I just do that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I can definitely click on Notion and open it up. I can definitely do that.” And if I still can’t do that, “Can I just sit at the computer desk?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Joseph Nguyen
So just keep breaking it down.

Pete Mockaitis
“Sit up from the couch.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, sometimes it’s hard, right? Sometimes it’s really hard. And so, it’s okay if we need to break it down into those baby steps, but that works wonders for me. So, it’s like, “Can I write one sentence?” And when I write one sentence, I’m going to want to write another sentence, like I’m just going to go.

And, lo and behold, there’s like a couple dozen sentences, a couple hundred words pass, and that was way more progress than if I force myself sit down and write my book. That’s a big task. So, smallest possible action is what I like to default to when I am frozen in procrastination or analysis paralysis.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear it quoted back to you often?

Joseph Nguyen
Our emotions don’t come from external events, but from our own thinking about those events. That is something that people just didn’t really realize, and so it’s like a massive epiphany moment for them. Other ones are just like, “I didn’t realize that I could just stop judging. I had no idea I could just not listen to that incessant negative critic in the back of our minds, and that I could just be and just be present. I don’t have to be thinking about something else or doing something else. I can let go of whatever that incessant chatter is, and to finally find a little bit of peace.”

Yeah, that big epiphany was like, oh, yeah, during the times that we are happiest, like we’re not really thinking about anything else, or ruminating on anything. We’re just there, fully engrossed by the moment. And so, those are probably like some of the biggest nuggets that people have gotten.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to get in touch or learn more, where would you point them?

Joseph Nguyen
Probably, I would say my website and newsletter, so JosephNguyen.org, J-O-S-E-P-H N-G-U-Y-E-N.org. You’ll be able to find like my newsletter there, sign up for it. I do have a YouTube channel. I don’t post that often but a lot of the content there is evergreen. All my socials are just itsjosephnguyen, I-T-S and then Joseph Nguyen. Those are probably the best places to find me, but email is where you’ll be able to be up-to-date on any new projects I’m working on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Joseph Nguyen
Let go of the fear of being judged. The more that we’re afraid of being ourselves, to be awesome at our jobs, the less effective we’ll be. And sometimes being ourselves will ruffle a few feathers. People will judge us one way or the other, even if we’re playing conservatively and not really showing that much at work.

People are still judging us anyway. So, we might as well be judged and criticized for being who we truly are rather than masquerading ourselves behind something else. And the more that you’re able to be yourself, the more awesome you’re going to be at your job, the more that you’re able to lean into your own gifts, your own talents, your abilities. All of that is usually held back if we’re afraid of what other people are thinking.

So, stand up for yourself, do what you believe is best for the work that you’re doing, and definitely defend it, and to not just let it be pushed over. Because at the end of the day, if you’re coming from a place of love, generosity, true selflessness, and wanting to do the best that you possibly can, there’s no shame in that at all. So, if you’re going to be criticized, definitely be criticized for doing what you believe is right, rather than hiding behind and playing it small.

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, beautiful. Thank you.

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been such a pleasure and so much fun with you. I love your energy.

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, welcome!

Jon Rosemberg
Hi, Pete, it’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about thriving. You got a whole guide to thriving, so let’s discuss that exactly. But first, could you maybe contrast? You talk about thriving versus survival mode. Could you paint a little bit of a picture of what each feels like in practice?

Jon Rosemberg
For sure. And, Pete, have you ever felt like you’re in survival mode?

Pete Mockaitis
I think the answer is yes.

Jon Rosemberg
Yes. And what does that feel like?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s not pleasant, you know? It’s sort of like I’m just trying to get through the day, and the responsibilities, and the stuff, and the calendar, and the to-do list. It’s a little bit harried, hurried, rushed, stressed, maybe elevated heart rate and more.

Jon Rosemberg
That’s a beautiful definition of survival mode. And what I especially loved about your definition was that initial exhale, the “Ahh!” So, yes, that is survival mode. And survival mode, evolutionarily speaking, is a highly adaptive mode to be in.

A few thousand years ago, if you were in the savannah and you heard, you know, like a rustle in the bushes, going into survival mode was really helpful because it allows us to focus all of our energy on what we need to do to survive. And it can be really, really helpful.

However, today, most of the challenges and threats that we face are not physical, they are psychological. So, survival mode sometimes gets triggered in moments that may not necessarily be the most helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And that picture is nice. I just recently saw a Kurzgesagt video, they have these amazing animations, all about stress and it painted that very picture in terms of, you know, a beast in the wilderness and what that’s like. And so, I’ve heard that kind of a storyline, if you will, before about, “Oh, in the ancient times, this is very helpful, and now it’s almost counterproductive for us.”

But I’m wondering, you know, we feel what we feel. Jon, to what extent do we even have control over that? I mean, stuff happens. Emotions, reactions naturally flow from those things. So, to what extent can we have mastery versus we are a victim of these circumstances?

Jon Rosemberg
I love that question because it goes exactly to the heart of the book. The capacity to make intentional choices, which I call in the book agency, that realization that even in the most-dire of circumstances, we still have a choice, is the foundation for going from survival mode to thriving.

What is thriving? Most people think that thriving equals success. So, I’m going to say this very clearly. Thriving is not success. How do we measure success? We measure it with money, power, and reputation. These are three things that if you see somebody who’s got a lot of them, you say this is a successful person, right?

Thriving, on the other hand, it’s about agency, so the capacity to make intentional choices. It’s about belonging, i.e., being able to connect, to have meaningful social connections with other people. And it’s about meaning. It’s about seeing something in life that gives you a sense that your life matters, and that the people around you matter, and the way you navigate this world matters. So, it’s slightly different.

Now, I want to be very clear. I’m not arguing against success, because I think success is very helpful and very useful. And, by the way, I want success just as much as the next guy. What I’m suggesting here is that, maybe there’s a bit more of a balance that we can have between what success is and what thriving is. And that, in that balance, in that nuance, there may be a lot of well-being for all of us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds pleasant. Could you perhaps share some studies, research, or case studies associated with folks who made the leap from frequently being in a survival mode to doing the thrive thing regularly?

Jon Rosemberg
So, last year, there was a study published at Oxford that studied, I think it was 1,200 companies. And what they wanted to understand was the correlation between the well-being of employees, i.e., thriving, and stock market performance, the value of the company. And what they discovered is that the top 100 companies that had the highest levels of well-being outperformed the S&P 500 by 11% on average.

That’s a really compelling business case for anybody to say, “My business is going to outperform the S&P because, partly, it’s one of the variables,” and I’m implying causality now. This is just a correlational study, but I think it’s still a very compelling data point.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, I could see you might argue it both ways, “Well, yeah, well, it’s easy for them because they have so much ample cash flow and appreciation, etc. They can afford to invest in their employees.” But I suppose it is also the case that there are large flourishing companies that are big in revenue and profit, and yet are low on thriving, and could see all the more goodness with more thriving. Can you paint a chain for how more thriving means more profit?

Jon Rosemberg
Exactly. Well, what we know is that when we’re thriving, we can lean into our agency. So, this capacity to make intentional choices. And thriving usually means that we’re in this space where we’re calm and we can think more clearly. And that drives innovation. And we know that innovation is a great way to create value.

It also drives better social connection and stronger social connection. And it’s interesting because, Pete, if there was a medicine out there that increased your survival rate by 50%, decreased your risk of cardiovascular disease by 29%, decreased your risk of stroke by 32%, decreased depression and increased your well-being, if there was a drug that did all of those things for you, would you take it?

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds good, sure. It could have side effects, but looking good, yeah.

Jon Rosemberg
No side effects. The drug is social connection. So, when we are thriving, we are more capable of connecting with other folks. And that social connection is what creates great organizations. You know, what I learned, I spent over two and a half decades in the business world, climbing the corporate ladder as fast as I could.

And one of the things that I learned too late in my career, I might say, is that there are two types of value that you create at work. One of them is productive value. So, this is how good you are at your job. Can you create an Excel spreadsheet that beats everybody else? Or, today, can you work with AI better than everybody else? Can you create a project plan? Can you deliver a project on time and on budget? All of these things are productive value.

The other value that sometimes gets really overlooked, especially for folks that are getting into leadership positions, is relational value, is the ability to create those relationships and those connections that allow big groups of people to work together and do really amazing things together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds super. Can you share, when it comes to social connection, what’s the state of play with regard to humans, professionals, workers, and social connection?

Jon Rosemberg
Well, Surgeon General for the US, Vivek Murthy, published a report a couple of years ago where he spoke about, or he described the loneliness epidemic. We know that there’s people more lonely today than ever before.

And if you think about this, Pete, today, somebody who’s 18, 20 years old can get a job, and they can rent their apartment. And if they don’t want to, they don’t have to see anybody else for the rest of their lives, right? You could order food in, you could get everything that you need delivered to your doorstep, you get a paycheck working remotely.

So, technology has given us a lot of advantages, but it has also created certain gaps in places where we, otherwise, had to interact with people. So, there is a loneliness epidemic out there. And one of the ideas that I present in the book is this notion that when we’re thriving, it’s easier to connect with others. And when we connect with others, that has a ripple effect.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so the social connection contributes to thriving, and the thriving contributes to social connection.

Jon Rosemberg
You got it. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Kind of like a circular, I guess, virtuous cycle up, or a doom cycle down.

Jon Rosemberg
I love that you just use that, Pete, because that’s exactly how I describe it in the book, as a spiral. There’s a spiral from survival mode to thriving. And sometimes we’re up and sometimes we’re down. And I think one point that you made at the beginning of our conversation, which is that, sometimes, external circumstances are outside our control. And that happens often, right?

We get laid off or we get fired from a job or, you know, a disease, we get sick. Like, there are many things that happen. What I’m trying to suggest here is that even in the worst of circumstances, and by the way, one of my teachers, I would call him, is Viktor Frankl, who wrote a great book called Man’s Search for Meaning, and Viktor Frankl was in concentration camps in Nazi Germany.

And it was him who argued in that book that even within all that suffering, he discovered a place where he could choose his attitude. And what he noticed was that the people who survived that horrible situation were those who could find meaning in their suffering and were those who could see a different perspective of what they were experiencing. Not the strongest ones, not the ones who had the most muscle, the ones who were taller or bigger, the ones who had more money. It was the people who found meaning.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and fun fact, I believe Man’s Search for Meaning is, when I ask about favorite things, comes up the most often as favorite book, favorite quote. So, it’s a powerful book and a beautiful one. And so, in practice, let’s say stuff happens and we’re freaking out, what do we do in the moment?

Jon Rosemberg
So, I went deep into the research and tried to understand, “How do we create more agency? If agency is the capacity to make intentional choices, supported by the belief that those choices matter and have an impact on the world, how do we increase that?”

And as I reviewed the research and I reviewed all the fantastic work that has been done by scientists over the past two and a half decades, because this is a relatively new topic, this topic of thriving, in science, I mean, philosophers have been talking about it for thousands of years. So, there were three things that came up that seemed really, really important. And I summarized them in an acronym, AIR.

And AIR stands for A for awareness, I for inquiry, and R for reframing. And when we are faced with a difficult situation or a difficult emotion or a negative thought, using AIR as a practice, can be a really powerful way to develop the skill that is agency and go a little bit more from survival mode into thriving.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, awareness, inquiry, reframing. Could you share with us, what that can look like in practice?

Jon Rosemberg
Of course. So, my youngest son, who’s nine, went to summer camp earlier this year. But three days before going to summer camp, he broke his arm and he had a cast all the way up to his shoulder. So, while his friends were jumping in the lake, he was playing with a Rubik’s Cube. And I’m going to try and use this Rubik’s Cube to explain a little bit how AIR works.

So, when we’re going through a difficult moment, it feels like the Rubik’s Cube is right next to our face, right next to our eye, and we can only see one of the little squares, right? You’ve probably heard people say, “I feel like I’m seeing red, right?” Like, we’re actually just seeing one color, one square of the Rubik’s Cube.

What awareness does is it allows us to create some distance from the situation. It allows us to actually notice that, “Hmm, okay, what’s happening here is not just red. Red is actually just one square amongst nine other squares. And if I actually start kind of looking at the Rubik’s Cube, I can see that it has six sides and each side has nine squares. So now I have a lot more information.” That’s what awareness does for us.

Then we go into inquiry. And inquiry is actually getting to understand what the situation looks like. And that’s asking a lot of non-judgmental, curious questions about the situation. And that means, basically, it’s like playing around with the Rubik’s Cube, just figuring out the different formulas and the different combinations that you can see in a Rubik’s Cube.

And reframing is when you find a combination that works for you. And that might be solving the Rubik’s Cube or it might be something different, but it’s a combination that works for you in the moment. So that’s a short, brief description of how AIR works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so understood, with the Rubik’s Cube analogy, you can visualize that and notice that you could be way zoomed in and that’s not so helpful. Could you walk us through that as applied to a situation?

Jon Rosemberg
So, after two and a half decades in the corporate world, I decided to go into a startup, and we did great. We raised a Series B of $150 million. The company was growing at double digits every month. We were, as the kids would say, crushing it. And as we raised this money, I flew to LA to buy some new facilities because we were expanding the business to LA.

And when I flew back, I got hit with COVID and I was on a call with the technical team about some sort of technical stuff, and the call got really heated up and I was deep, deep into survival mode.

Pete Mockaitis
Heated up, tell me more, Jon. Were they pointing the finger at you?

Jon Rosemberg
They were pointing the finger, or at least that’s how I interpreted it in the moment. That was the interpretation. I was so close to the situation, I was seeing red. So, what I did is I shut off my laptop and turned off my phone. And in that moment, I was able to gain some awareness. I got some distance from the situation and I said, “Goodness gracious, am I angry right now?” I noticed the heat rising in my body, my chest got tight, my breathing got shallow, my shoulders got really tense.

So, I heard my kids playing in the basement, and I went downstairs to the basement and they were sitting on the floor playing with Legos. So, I sat on the floor with them and I started playing with them for about an hour. And as I was doing that, I started, well, number one, I was present with them. I was able to actually sit with them and share with them, which is something that I hadn’t done for months.

So, that experience, to me, it allowed me to find a little bit of thriving in that deep, deep state of survival mode. After that, I went and sat on my chair and I started reflecting in one of my favorite chairs, and I started reflecting on the situation. And the reframing for me was, in that moment, it was, I had two kids because I wanted to be a dad, and I’m not actually being a dad. I’m present, like they see me at breakfast, they see me at dinner, but I’m not physically present, but I’m not present with them. And that was really, really challenging.

So, Adriana walked in, my wife, and she said, “So, are you okay?” And I said, “I’m done, I think I’m done.” And within two weeks, I decided to unwind myself from that job and to walk away. So, my reframe in that moment was seeing the other option that I hadn’t seen before. Because for the longest time as I was working, I said, “If I quit this job, I’ll be living under a bridge in two weeks.” And that felt very real to me.

In that moment, I realized, “Well, what’s the point of all of this that I’m doing if I cannot be present for the people that I love and that I want to be with?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the awareness of, “Hey, I’m getting really angry. It might be wise to go do something else.” And then you’re inquiring, asking those questions and then reframing the prior belief that you had, and sort of seeing new things come from it. Understood.

What’s interesting with regard to the inquiry, can you share a few more of those specific questions? Like, “What’s the point of this?” What are some more questions you were inquiring there?

Jon Rosemberg
Yeah, so, “What are my options right now? What’s important to me? What are my values? What is it that I want to do with my life? What does this look like for me if I continue down this path for the next two years, three years, five years? How is this impacting my health? How is this impacting my relationships? How is this impacting my sleep?”

So, all of these questions, asked in a non-judgmental way, and what I mean by that is that we have to actually be curious about it. Because if I’m asking a question and I already have the answer, it’s not really a question, is it? So, we want to challenge ourselves to do this.

Now in that moment, it was a process that I did internally as a result of burnout and a very difficult experience. But in day-to-day life, we can do this in partnership with other people, with our friends, with a coach, with whatever it is that people that are around us, some people do journaling. This exploration can be a really powerful way to get to know ourselves better and then to make decisions that are more agentic.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like what you had to say about the genuine curiosity because I think it’s quite possible in that state, some of your questions can sound like, “What’s their problem? Why do I always have to deal with this bull crap? Why is this happening to me?” etc. Like, any number of questions that are not guided by a wholesome curiosity, but rather just stoke the rage beast.

Jon Rosemberg
You got it. And often, we tend to focus on things that are outside our locus of control. Instead of focusing on what we can change on what’s under our capacity to influence, we focus on what everybody else is doing. And, unfortunately, it’s really hard to change other people. Trust me, I’ve tried for many years and it’s very difficult to change other people. But we do have the prerogative to change ourselves and to grow in the way that feels most authentic to us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us another example of awareness, inquiry, and reframing in action that don’t result in a full exit, but rather being able to better deal with a current situation?

Jon Rosemberg
Yeah, what I love most about that question, Pete, is that you are hitting the nail on the head on the spectrum of agency, right? So, very low agency would be, “I have no choice here.” And if there is a moment in your life where you say, “I have no choice here,” number one, you are likely in survival mode. And, number two, there’s an open door there to practice AIR, to practice awareness, inquiry, and reframing.

Then if we go a little bit higher on the spectrum of agency, you could say, “Well, I can stay or I can leave, right? So, I only have two choices here. I either have to walk away or I can stay in my job.” If you had really high agency, once we’ve really developed agency, then you start seeing, instead of black and white, you start seeing a rainbow of options and opportunities in front of you.

So, you could say, “Well, I could stay and modify my job, change my hours, go to part-time, change my boss, move to a different division, whatever that looks like. Or, I could leave and go to another job or rest or, you know, paint for, I don’t know, whatever it is.”

And I understand that for a lot of people, there’s actually not a choice available to them, right? Because if you have to pay the rent and you are living paycheck to paycheck, this doesn’t necessarily happen. And this is why the developing agency in the moment is so important.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Whenever I hear the phrase, “I have to,” or, “I can’t,” I get skeptical. And so, you know, and maybe I am on the autistic spectrum and I take things super literally at times. But I think, “Is that really true?” And I’m thinking about the book, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

Jon Rosemberg
Marshall Rosenberg. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And he really brings up some points, like even if you think you’re stuck, it’s kind of wild what you can do. And he gives an example of, he thought, “Well, I have to keep…” He said, “I don’t like paying taxes because they’re supporting…” at the time, I think, the Vietnam War. And he was against the war. And he said, “Well, I guess I have to pay taxes because, you know, I mean, that’s the law and I’m a citizen.”

And he said, “Well, you know what? I suppose if I didn’t have income, I wouldn’t have to pay taxes.” And so, he made some dramatic changes. And then he also challenges teachers who say, “Well, I have to do all this frequent testing of the students because it’s required by the district, and that’s just a part of my job.” And he’s like, “Well, you also have the option of changing your job.”

So, it’s a more accurate framing of the situation is, “I need to do this testing for my students frequently if I want to retain my job and my income here. So that is my choice. Do I choose to play the game and maintain my job and my income here? Or do I choose something else? Well, I guess I am going to keep my job here.” But even working through that process contributes to more of the thriving feelings.

Jon Rosemberg
Absolutely. And I love so much that you brought up Marshall Rosenberg, because I think this is exactly what he’s arguing for in these examples, is this idea of reframing, changing the framing of the situation. And we get to do that. And one of the important concepts here is that we tend to buy into these absolute truths, right, that something has to be true.

And one of the interesting things in science that I don’t think has become as widely popular as it should be, is that science thrives on dissent. It thrives on challenging. If you’re a scientist that agrees with all of his, hers, their peers, you are highly unlikely to succeed. The whole point is that we want this type of creative dissent.

So, when somebody presents you with a premise, is there an opportunity to do a lot of inquiry and challenge that premise and figure out if it’s really true? So, one good example that has worked really well is a lot of people say, “Well, but two plus two is four.” Well, but two plus two is not always four, right? There’s an axiom that tells us that the first number is zero, and then you add one and it’s one and then two and then three and then four. That’s the axiom that we, a lot of us do math with or arithmetic.

But if you’re looking at a clock, right, after 23:00, so if you say 23 plus two, it’s not 25, it’s one, right? So, it’s a different axiom that we’re using. So, what I’m trying to present here is that we get to challenge the things that we believe to be true. And this is a uniquely human capacity and it’s incredibly powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And then, you get me thinking in terms of, well, if our objective is to get to four, there’s many ways that we might achieve the getting to four. And perhaps addition is not even the operation that we’re after in a given situation.

Jon Rosemberg
You got it. So, we can come at things from different angles once we have awareness. Once we move that Rubik’s Cube a little bit away from our face, we can actually start exploring all of the angles. And it’s a practice, right? It sounds easy when I say awareness, inquiry, and reframing, right? It sounds so simple. But many of us spend years, if not decades, trying to bring more awareness to our lives.

So, mindfulness is something that can work to bring more awareness, and a mindfulness practice, being able to be present in the moment. Those are some of the things that we can do in order to hone our skill of awareness. And then inquiry, learning to ask good questions, that’s a difficult skill. That requires a lot of practice, right? And then reframing is actually seeing different angles. And all of those things require, they’re like a muscle, right? And if we go to the gym to get buff, we can practice this to gain more agency.

Pete Mockaitis
And one place you advocate practicing this is by examining our beliefs and seeing if there’s some limiting beliefs. Can you expand on this?

Jon Rosemberg
Yeah, so beliefs are like lenses that we have over our eyes, and they kind of filter the world for us, right? There’s lots of evidence to suggest that beliefs are so powerful that they can even change the way in which we react to pain.

For example, the placebo effect, and this has been documented many, many times that when you’re in pain, you can take a placebo, and they tell you that it’s pain medication and your pain actually decreases. So, our beliefs are very, very powerful filters with which we navigate the world.

One of the things in the work that I do coaching clients is trying to name the belief, right? So, in my case, I said, “I believe that if I walk away from this job, I’m going to be living under a bridge in less than two weeks and I’m not going to be able to pay my mortgage, etc.” I had to challenge that belief and say, “Well, is that actually true? Or, is there a different way to look at this belief?”

And I said, “Well, I have friends, I have a family, I have a social support network, I know people will help me out if I can’t have income, I have some money in the bank, or I can move to a smaller place.” So, there are all of these things. The moment you take that belief and you challenge the belief, then you can step into a world of options. Then you step into that rainbow of options as opposed to seeing the world in just white, just black, or black and white only.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Can you give us an example of some other limiting beliefs that you’ve seen folks successfully challenge and have great results on the other side?

Jon Rosemberg
I think the toughest belief to challenge, and I struggle with this every day, and I think it’s one of the big reasons why I wrote the book, and it’s a true line in the book, is the belief that, “I am not good enough.” The flip side of that is the belief that I have to prove myself.

Because we live in this system where productivity defines value, productivity equals value, I’ve asked dozens of clients the question, “What would your value be if suddenly you could not produce anymore?” And people are stumped. It’s really hard to respond to that question, “What happens if I can’t produce?” “Well, I could still talk my way through something, or whatever it is,” but you cannot produce.

So, challenging the belief that our worth is tied to our productivity is very liberating work, and it’s very challenging work, because this is a deeply ingrained belief.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so walk us through the process of that challenging and what might come out the other side.

Jon Rosemberg
I think it’s sitting with it. The first thing that we do is creating awareness, naming it, “Is this a belief that you’re buying into? Do you buy into the belief that if you don’t produce, you’re not good enough?” Pause for a second and just notice, “Is this something that sounds true to you? If it does, then get really curious about it.”

So, “Where does this belief come from? Whose voice do I hear in my head when I say that I believe this? What has this belief, how has it served me in my life? What has it done for me?” In my case, that belief allowed me to climb the corporate ladder ruthlessly for decades, right? So, it served me really well in many, many ways.

And, eventually, I came to the reframing of saying, “There’s fundamental value in just existing in just being a human. We are a wonder of nature.” Think about it. You know, earth has been around for what? Four billion years? And we’re here, you and I, Pete, having this conversation. That in itself, it’s a miracle. We’re sitting in this, you know, one galaxy out of, I think, there’s like two trillion of them in the universe, and this universe continues to expand. So, it’s really magical the fact that we exist.

So, is that fundamental value? And what challenging that belief did for me was allow me to give myself the space, for example, to end up thinking about the ideas that, eventually, I decided that I wanted to put into a book. So, I started to question. It’s existentialism. You start questioning why we’re here and what does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it is a powerful belief to look at directly, and we covered this on episode 500 with Victor Cheng, talking about Building Unshakable Confidence, and having the belief that I am valuable or worthwhile simply because I exist. And you could see that in wisdom traditions, or religion, Christianity being made in the image and likeness of God, or the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It’s interesting because it’s an idea that I purport to believe, and I like to believe it on my best days, and yet I do feel some discomfort. If I imagine a universe in which I am, say, in a vegetative state at a hospital, I am existing, but I am not doing or “adding value,” I sometimes think, “Well, yes, I value just because I’m existent, I am a human being.”

And other times it doesn’t feel that way, that the belief doesn’t feel true. So, yeah, no pressure, Jon, but how do we deal with that one?

Jon Rosemberg
I don’t know. I don’t know. This is a profound existential question that you’re asking, Pete. And I think the exercise of just questioning it is a pathway to thriving. Just being able, for a moment, to hold that notion that you have fundamental value just by existing, and just believing that 0.00001% in your life, I think that in itself, it’s a gift.

Listen, Pete, I struggle with it every day. You know, I’ve been doing this work, I went back to school and learned psychology so I could challenge that belief. I’ve read lots of papers and lots of books trying to challenge this belief, and I don’t have a clear answer. I don’t think there’s a recipe.

I actually, as a matter of fact, what I would suggest, and this is one of the things that I did in the book, and it was hard for me to find a publisher because a lot of the publishers kept telling me, “Jon, you have to be more prescriptive. People want to know exactly what they need to do.”

And I kept saying, “Well, I’m writing about agency. If I’m telling people that the whole point is that you learn what’s right for you and that you have to develop or you can develop, you don’t have to do anything, but you can develop this muscle that gives you access to thriving in your life, how am I going to sit there and tell you exactly how you do it?” I don’t have a recipe for it. I think we each have to find our own way through.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, where my brain is going is thinking that I have value just by existing even in that, you know, comatose state, because by providing an opportunity for others to be of service and reflect upon their gifts, their blessings, their capabilities that is of value and beneficial. And yet, I could see I’m already drifting into territories, like, “Well, then that’s not intrinsic.” It’s like, “It’s what I’m doing for other people by doing nothing.”

Jon Rosemberg
Exactly. Yeah, it’s a tough idea to grasp, especially because the system where we are living is built on this belief of productivity equals value, right? So, it’s really hard to think outside of that unless, you know, maybe we go to meditate in some mountain for 20 years, maybe we can access that. That’s not my choice.

Agentically speaking, that’s not something that I want to do, and I do want to be able to sit there sometimes with the discomfort of feeling like I’m not good enough or that I have to prove myself. And as I’m sitting with that discomfort, having a small window where I can challenge it, and I can say, “Well, maybe I do have fundamental value. Maybe I do have intrinsic value just for existing.” And that in itself can be quite comforting. At least it has been for me. And also, anxiety-inducing.

Pete Mockaitis
One perspective I like to bring to this is, as I think about my children when I watch them sleep, they’re beautiful, adorable, I love them, and they are doing nothing there, but I am not disappointed with them. I don’t want or demand or need them to be doing anything. Them just existing in that space, I find valuable and beautiful and excellent and full of love, with them doing nothing at all. They are just existing.

Jon Rosemberg
What a beautiful and powerful reflection, Pete. And I think that the emotion and the moment in which we experience that type of connection that you’re describing that you have with your kids, that’s thriving.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool, yeah. So, more of that would be great.

Jon Rosemberg
Oh, goodness. It’s not easy, right? It requires effort because we are designed for survival. Our bodies and our brains are designed for survival, right? There’s this evolutionary mismatch that has occurred where technology has taken us to this point where we have, listen, by all measures, we are living in the golden age of humanity.

And I know we see different things on social media. We see different things in the news. But if you look at access to water, access to food, access to education, access to healthcare. Longevity, Pete, 100 years ago, you and I would be buried six feet underground, because the life expectancy, well, I’m not sure how old you are, but life expectancy was 32. Today, it’s more than double that, right?

So, we are in this golden age of humanity. And for some reason, anxiety and depression seem to be one of those persistent things that we don’t understand what is happening. And one of the explanations that seems to make a lot of sense is that our brains and our bodies have not evolved to keep up with the world that we’re living in today.

So, what I’m suggesting is that agency may be one of the antidotes to this experience that we’re having as humans living in this age.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s big stuff, and you can sit with it for a while. And I think the word value is key there. And so, in terms of economic value, I say it may be true, you know, that if we’re not doing anything, we are not producing, you know, money, dollars, economic value, but in a deeper sense, our human value remains.

Jon Rosemberg
Exactly. And, you know, why do we see so many people who have supposedly made it, billionaires, trillionaires now, we’re going to start having trillionaires soon, why do we see so many people who have access, economically speaking, to all of the resources? I mean, the wealth distribution gap has never been larger in humanity either. So, why do we see people who have all of this and still struggle to thrive?

And we see it in the way they communicate. We see it in the way in which they relate to the world. This is a challenging thing to experience. And so, that’s why I want to make sure that we separate the ideas of success and thriving. And I’m sure there’s a Venn diagram where the two overlap, and that’s a happy middle. And that’s what I’m arguing for. For trying to find more moments of thriving, even if it’s at the cost of letting go some of the success, which is the hardest thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that Venn diagram approach because it also gets you thinking it’s entirely possible to thrive without being successful.

Jon Rosemberg
Yes. Yes. A resounding yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, Jon, we’ve gone into all kinds of profound places. Can you tell me, before I hear about your favorite things, a few of your top tips, your do’s and don’ts for getting more thriving going?

Jon Rosemberg
I would say the first thing is find time for reflection or for a practice that works for you, whatever that is. I tried to meditate for two years. I have a meditation pillow right here in my office, and I sat in that pillow. For two years, I sat on that pillow trying to meditate, and I hated it. My goodness, could I not do it. I just couldn’t do it.

I decided, one day somebody suggested a walking meditation. So, I put on my headphones and I went for a walk and I was like, “Oh, I can do this. This suddenly changed my life.” So, today, I go for even two hour-long walking meditations that I can do with or without headphones, guided or unguided. I had to find the activity that was the right fit for me.

So, a do is, find activities, test many different things, call them little experiments, or however you want to name them, test many different things until you find the one that works for you because there are lot of prescriptions out there that will work for many people. Listen, even cognitive behavior therapy, which is the gold standard for therapy in that world, only benefits about 40%, in the best case, 80% of people. So, it doesn’t mean that it’s for everybody. So, find whatever works for you. That would be the do.

The don’t is just waiting for something magical to happen. We have to use our agency, our capacity as humans to make change happen. It has to come from inside, right? Nobody can make change happen for you. It’s something that we all have to own and take it upon ourselves. And it’s hard and it’s painful. But in my experience, a lot of times the discomfort of staying the same, it’s much worse than the discomfort of changing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jon Rosemberg
One of my favorite quotes is from William James, one of the fathers of psychology, and I actually have it here on my wall, and it’s, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you can work on that for a while.

Jon Rosemberg
Yes, attention is a powerful resource and it’s non-renewable for humans. Once we’ve given it, it’s gone. And we have so many things fighting for our attention today. If we can be more agentic as to where we place our attention, that can be a life-changing practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s powerful. What I agree to attend to is, like, we need not attend to necessarily anything just because, “It’s all over Twitter,” “The headlines are saying this,” “My feed, all my recommended YouTube videos.” It’s like, “Yeah, and we always have that choice.” I can choose to attend to that. I can agree or I can disagree to attend to a matter, and we’ve always got the power.

Jon Rosemberg
So, let’s look at the numbers on this just very quickly. Every second, the sensory input that we get, it’s between 10 and 100 million bits of information. Every second. Only about 10 to 50 filter into our conscious awareness. And of those 10 to 50 that filter into our conscious awareness, usually there is a five to one negativity ratio. I mean, that’s the negativity bias that we look for.

You post something on Instagram and you get 20 likes and 300 comments saying, “You’re amazing.” But there’s one comment that’s negative and we will focus on the negative comment, right? That’s the negativity bias at play.

Imagine if we can actually learn how to better manage what we agree to attend to. It’s life-changing because you have 100 million choices, and you only get to do 10 to 50. So that’s a really powerful practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jon Rosemberg
It’s a book about therapy, actually. Her name is Marsha Linehan, and she created something called dialectical behavior therapy, and she wrote her autobiography. And one of the powerful ideas in that book that really resonated with me is the idea of dialectics, that two things that seem opposing can be true at the same time. And I think that’s a really powerful way to look at the world and to understand complexity.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jon Rosemberg
You can go to my LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn, Jon Rosemberg. You can go to my website, JonRosemberg.com, and, yeah, that’s the best way to reach me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jon Rosemberg
Yes, take the time to hone in the skill of agency. However, it works for you, just take the time to understand it and to play around with it. It can be life-changing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jon, thank you.

Jon Rosemberg
Thank you, Pete. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Shirzad, welcome!

Shirzad Chamine
Pleasure to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be talking about your body of work with regard to positive intelligence. Can you tell us what do you mean by that? And what’s a particularly fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans as you’ve delved into this research?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, what we mean by that is that your mind is very often sabotaging you. So, you spend a lot of your time in self-sabotage mode without realizing it. So positive intelligence is about how much your mind is serving you as opposed to sabotaging you. The higher your positive intelligence, the more you’re spending your time in the positive part of the brain, which serves you, as opposed to the negative part of the brain where you’re sabotaging yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now that’s an interesting distinction right off the get-go. Positive means serving you, negative means sabotaging, as opposed to positive means pleasant and enjoyable. Is that fair to say, we could be served by something that’s painful and unpleasant?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, definitely, serving you goes beyond just pleasant. Stanford kids I’ve lectured on positive intelligence, they call this work Jedi mind training. So, the reason they call it that is because they basically say what this work is about is the battle inside your mind between your inner Darth Vader versus inner Jedi. And so, we have both of those voices in our head. The question is, “How strong is one or the other?”

And we can talk about all the emotional experiences you would have if you’re in your inner Jedi mode, which are all positive experiences. Now the emotions can be empathy, curiosity, joy of creativity, being connected to meaning and purpose, being in calm, clear-headed, laser-focused, fearless action. All of those are modes of the sage where your mind is serving you.

As opposed to when you’re in inner Darth Vader, which we call the saboteur, part of your brain when you’re sabotaging yourself, you’re going to be experiencing negative emotions like stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, shame, guilt, disappointment, self-doubt, and all of those things. Your mind is not serving you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I mean, it sounds delightful to have some Jedi mind powers and to be less of a Darth Vader inside. Could you maybe share with us a story of someone who made a transformation and sort of what’s at stake and what could be possible for us if we get some great control over our mind and our inner saboteurs?

Shirzad Chamine
Well, I can tell you my own personal story, one of the most transformational days of my life. I actually started the software company that was venture-backed and I had attracted some of the luminaries of Silicon Valley to be my investors, board members.

Our first client was Hewlett-Packard. Everything was positive. Everything was awesome. I was a visionary leader starting a company. And then two years into this, the product was late, the customer was unhappy, a lot of our plans were not working, and so I was under a lot of stress.

And one day during lunch, I went out there and got my lunch, came back to our offices, went upstairs and where our offices was, and my heart sank because what I saw was the chairman of my board was sitting in the boardroom along with my president and my top VPs.

Basically, this was a palace coup. My president and top VCs had gone to the board and said, “We cannot work for Shirzad anymore. Under stress, he has become such a controlling, micromanaging, judging leader. We can’t stand working for him anymore. It’s either him or us. And he’s killing his own vision.”

So that was the most transformational day of my life, professional day of my life, and also the most painful because I had to figure out, “So, what’s happening here? Who am I? Am I that positive visionary leader that attracted all these people and investors to me to start the company? Or am I this negative micromanaging, controlling, judging leader that nobody wants to work for?”

And it just turns out, and it started my whole body of research here, and it turns out that I’m both of those. I have the Darth Vader inside, I have the inner Jedi inside, and the question is, “What conditions bring out my inner Jedi? What conditions bring out my Darth Vader? And how do I, instead of just letting it happen, how do I take command of that and make sure that my inner Jedi is running the show rather than the Darth Vader?”

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is high stakes, and thank you for sharing that. And I think you’ve already said it in terms of a lot of us, that is our experience in terms of the Darth Vader show up in a high-stress situation, either we’re just hungry and sleep-deprived, just very kind of biological, or the environment is full of stresses, expectations, pressure, too much stuff, and failures, disappointments, things just rock in our world. And so, in the midst of that, yes, indeed, what is to be done?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, so what we discovered, I mean, we have done a ton of research. My book is very research-based because I have more of a science, engineering background. And we did factor analysis with about 500,000 people from across 100 different countries. And we asked the question, “At the root of it all, what sabotages or what optimizes our well-being or performance?”

And from that research, we discovered there are 10 ways we self-sabotage. It seems like there are a hundred ways or a thousand ways we self-sabotage and screw ourselves up, but actually there are only 10 ways. And these are the Darth Vader’s. We call them the saboteurs, the ones that sabotage you. And they have names like the judge, the controller, the stickler, the victim, the avoider, the restless, the pleaser, and so on.

And most people have a few. Most people don’t have to worry about all 10, but so we do a saboteur assessment that, in five minutes, shows you how you self-sabotage. And these saboteurs go on hyper mode under stress. And so, stress brings, really fuels the saboteurs. So, if you have a controller, you become more controlling under stress.

If you have the avoider, you become more avoiding under stress and so on. And as you do that, these saboteurs actually generate more stress. So, they get us into a vicious cycle of deepening saboteur activation. And they have us generate some results, but we pay a huge price in negativity and loss of mental and emotional energy.

And, on the other hand, on the positive side, the Jedi side, we show you that you actually, your inner Jedi lives in an entirely different region of your brain. And we can help you energize that part of your brain, so instead of feeling stressed, you’re feeling empathy and curiosity and caring and love and creativity and all those wonderful things, you’d perform better and you feel better at the same time.

We can help you actually energize that part of your brain, build up your inner Jedi and quiet the saboteur region of the brain. It’s literally about brain rewiring.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, so you’ve got 10 flavors of saboteur, and I did take that, your fun little assessment and it was quick. Avoider was my top. But I guess I’m curious to know is, we talk about brain regions, first of all, let’s just hear what are the names of the brain regions associated with sabotage and with the good part?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, there are lot of different components that go into the region of the brain that I call the saboteur brain. In my book, there’s an entire chapter on it. There’s a neuroscience, 20-page neuroscience white paper on our website on it. So, there’s not a quick answer to it. But what I can say is that the saboteur mind is generally a little bit more left-brained, where also your thinking mind lives, as opposed to the inner Jedi, the sage mind, which we call the sage, that’s a little bit more right brain.

And so, we have ways, we have 10-second techniques where we quiet the saboteur region and where a lot of your fear, stress originates, and energize the sage brain region. And we can practice some of those together.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. So left brain, right brain. Sabotage is more right brain. And so, is that right? Is that correct?

Shirzad Chamine
The saboteurs are a little more left-brain, so they coexist with the part of the brain that the rational mind lives, which is one of the interesting reasons why, when you’re feeling stressed, you can’t think your way out of stress. The harder you think, the more you kind of dig a hole for yourself. So, the way out of a lot of this is not by thinking harder, but actually quieting the hard-thinking mind because your wisdom lives in a different part of your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, rational left brain. More, I guess, creative stuff, right brain. So, I guess maybe if I were to conjure up some images here, the saboteur is more like hard-charging executive, and the Jedi is more like artist, dancer, creator.

Shirzad Chamine
No, actually, so the saboteurs are quite different in their character. So, the controller is hard-charging, but the avoiders almost the exact opposite of the hard-charging controller. The pleaser is very different. So, there are 10 ways of self-sabotage. They have very, very different flavors to them.

And on the positive side, what our factor analysis research showed is that there are five Jedi superpowers, five-stage superpowers at the root of it all. The five core superpowers are: empathize, which is the ability to really feel empathy, love, and compassion for yourself and others; explore, which is about being in beginner’s mind, to truly explore what’s really going on with things, deep curiosity, beginner’s mind curiosity.

Innovate, which is the ability to really tap into that obvious out-of-box innovative thinking. Navigate, which is being connected to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, having an inner compass of what truly brings meaning and purpose to your life. And activate, which is calm, clear-headed, fearless action. And as you can see, these are very different flavors of the sage.

And what we show you is that, depending on the challenge in front of you, you may need empathy or you may need curiosity, or the explore power, or you may need activate – calm, clear-headed, laser-focused action. If the house is on fire, you don’t want to empathize with anybody. You just want to run and take action.

Pete Mockaitis
“That sounds really hard. Your house is burning down right now. That’s a tough spot.” Okay. Well, so you say 10 seconds, that’s pretty cool. So, you’re saying that there are 10-second techniques we can use to tap into each of these five sage modes.

Shirzad Chamine
Yes, we can try one right now. Let’s practice this together. Hopefully, everybody in our audience is going to do that. So please take two fingertips and gently rub two fingertips against each other with so much attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers. So gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers.

Now, this was about a 10-second, what we call a PQ rep. And each of these reps, if you had your head under a functional MRI machine, you would have noticed that what we just did ever so slightly quieted the saboteur region of your brain where all your stress and negativity lives and all your saboteurs live, and ever so slightly energized the inner Jedi, the sage part of your brain, but all of these, where you have deeper access to all of these five sage powers that I just told you about.

And so, one 10-second thing doesn’t change your life, but what if you did a lot of it? And what Harvard-affiliated neuroscientists have shown is that, with our body of practice that we show people, within eight weeks of practice, you will have rewired your brain so much that, in MRI imaging, you can see decreased gray matter in the saboteur region of your brain, increased gray matter in the sage region of the brain.

So, you literally are rewiring your brain so you have stronger Jedi and weaker inner Darth Vader’s, weaker saboteurs.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds delightful. And you’re reminding me of some of the studies on mindfulness meditation, I think, share similar-ish kinds of things in terms of there’s a rewiring of the brain and different regions look different. But I think a lot of people would have a much harder time doing the quiet breath meditation than they would feeling the ridges on their fingertips. So, I like having another tool in the tool belt here.

Shirzad Chamine
It’s exactly right. We even had a CFO of a company, a pretty well-known company, he actually taught, he’s a lifelong meditator, he used to teach meditation every weekend in his city and as a hobby.

And as he went through our training, he ended up saying it was life-changing and one of the reasons was, he said, “I’d learned to energize the positive part of my brain when I was meditating with closed eyes and mantra and music in my meditation room, all that stuff. But when I came to work, work was work. Work was stressful. I couldn’t close my eyes. I couldn’t do any of that stuff. So, I just didn’t know how to shift my brain activation where it counted the most, which is in the middle of meeting the challenges of my work.”

And what we have taught people is these 10-second exercises, and I just showed you one, there are many others. I can’t tell you how many CEOs, and I’ve been a CEO coach for many years, how many CEOs are sitting in boardrooms around the world and under the table, they’re gently rubbing their two fingertips against each other to make sure they keep cool and do well on a board meeting so they are very effective.

A vast majority of people who start meditation and mindfulness, a vast majority of them quit. They just don’t know how to sustain it. Nobody who has ever learned these 10-second techniques has told us they can’t do it. They continue doing it because it’s so easy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Shirzad, your fingerprints on the world, your legacy, that’s lovely. Well, lay some more of these on us, these 10-second techniques. I mean, I’m loving it. It’s quick, it’s effective. I can even feel it in myself in terms of, you know, we’re chatting, but there’s a little piece of my brain, which is like, “Oh, shucks, this is getting to the end of the day and there’s still a lot of stuff I got to get done.” You know, just a little bit of that, a little bit of that, you know, stress energy hanging out.

And just doing the fingertip stuff, there’s less of that. It’s like, “Oh, well, I will think about those matters later when I’m done speaking with Shirzad.” So that’s awesome. Let’s hear some more.

Shirzad Chamine
Okay. So, you have 10 beautiful toes, and try to find as many of your toes as you can. You may need to wiggle your toes a little to try to find as many of your toes as you can. So become really aware of your toes. Wiggle them if you need to. Try to find and feel as many of them as you can. You may not find and feel all of them, but as many of them as you can would be fine.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s so weird is that some toes really are much easier to find or have awareness of than others.

Shirzad Chamine
I know exactly, right? Some of them hide well.

Pete Mockaitis
Like the big toes are easy-peasy, but those middle guys have some trickiness.

Shirzad Chamine
Exactly. Some hide well. But one thing you can do, so you have been listening to our voices right now, so our listeners have been listening to our voices, and now if you become aware of any ambient sounds in the room. So, you’ve been in whatever environment you’ve been in, but listening to our voices.

Now become really aware of all the other sounds that you can hear. So become aware of all the other sounds that you can hear while you’re also, of course, listening to us. And you’ll notice there are some sounds you have not been hearing, even though they have been all around you.

And now this becomes intentional attention. And, once again, it’s energizing the positive region of your brain and quieting the saboteur region of your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I like that a lot in terms of you’ve given me three exercises, and intentional attention does, indeed, seem to be the thematic link across all three of them, and I guess it’s making sense. As opposed to our inner mental thought spiral of, “Oh, my gosh, what am I going to do about the situation? And this person could be really upset with me for these reasons.”

Shirzad Chamine
Exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we turn the volume down on all of that and turn the volume up on finger ridges or toes or whatnot.

Shirzad Chamine
Exactly right. And what you’re doing in all three of them, the reason we don’t use meditation mindfulness language is because who knows what meditation mindfulness is. So, the way we talk about this is for 10 seconds, you just took command of your mind. This is what we are building. This is what we are practicing.

Your mind is a dangerous and crazy place and it’s producing between 10,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day. Depending on which researcher you follow. That’s a lot of craziness because, I mean, think about how many of those thoughts are actually useful. A lot of them are a waste of energy and some of them are quite harmful.

So, the main thing we are doing here is saying, “Your mind is a crazy dangerous place, lots of stuff is happening there that are automatic and not really serving you. And it’s a very critical thing for you to learn how to command your own mind.”

So, when you command your mind to notice your fingertip ridges for 10 seconds, instead of thinking about yesterday and tomorrow, all the stuff that right now is not helping you, you’re becoming a commander of your mind and a commander of your life. And it is a literal muscle. It starts with the prefrontal cortex in the brain and then some other regions of the brain.

You’re actually energizing a part of brain and quieting others. You’re becoming commander of your mind and rewiring your brain to learn to be more and more in command in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Let’s hear some more 10-second exercises.

Shirzad Chamine
This one you can do with people, and so I use this all the time in interaction with people. Remember, these techniques we want to do in the middle of our life rather than when we are in a quiet meditation room.

So, you and I are talking right now, we are seeing each other on video, and so you and I can do this now. As you are looking at me, you have been looking at me, but now pay attention to something you haven’t really noticed in my face, so some real detail you haven’t noticed. Look at me, really look at me, and bring as much of your attention to looking. And in that you’re going to discover details you hadn’t noticed until now.

And as you do that, you are again energizing the positive region of your brain and getting more connected to me, getting more present and connected with me, which means we can have a better interaction. Now notice you can do this in the middle of having a tough conversation with someone. And you can quiet your angry mind or stressed mind by actually really, really looking at some detail in their face. What did you notice, by the way, Pete, that you hadn’t noticed until you started saying this?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I bet you’ve been through this many times, so you won’t be offended by anything I say. Well, I was noticing your beard has some darker portions and some lighter portions.

Shirzad Chamine
Aha. Okay, good.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, whether, what is it, the “Just For Men” or the “Touch of Gray” commercials. The dark says youth and energy, and the light says wisdom and experience. So, you got that going for you.

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, not offended at all. I love it. Awesome. So, you observed something that was…and now as you’re doing it, you were able to still hear me, be connected with me, but you were even more connected because more of your attention was present and connected with me. So, anybody can do this at any time.

And for those who are not in front of somebody to look at, what I would say is, right now, just look at something in front of you, whatever is in front of you, and see details in it that you hadn’t noticed until now. So, whether it’s your phone you’re looking at, your computer screen you’re looking at, the wall you’re looking at, whatever, just really look at some detail you hadn’t noticed until now. And notice what it feels like to be truly looking at things rather than kind of looking at things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what’s sort of fun about that is the word epiphany seems too strong, but there’s an emotional sense of surprise and novelty of discovery that somehow feels potent.

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah. Pete, I love how much of a lifelong learner you are. I love that you delight in this. So, let’s go further. Take a look at the palm of your hand right now. And so, everybody in the audience, please take a look at the palm of your hand, and look at it as if it’s the first time you’re looking at the palm of your hand.

And begin to notice all of the lines in the palm of your hand, small lines and longer lines, all the ways they cross-connect and cross sections. Notice that the palm of your hand is not of one color, but many, many shades. Just look at all the shades of the lighting and coloration of the palm of your hand. Notice it’s clearly not flat, but it has all sorts of hills and valleys.

And, very slowly, begin to close down the palm of your hand and see how many muscles get involved as you slowly close down the palm of your hand. This is an absolutely exquisite, exquisite, unbelievable, marvelous thing, creation that you’re carrying with you, the palm of your own hand, with endless beauty and fascination, and we just started really looking at it.

And imagine if there is this much more to discover and be fascinated by in the palm of your own hand, what else is there available to you if you really pay attention as you go through your day every day with yourself, with others, with events and life itself?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, what’s really interesting, Shirzad, as I do this is, it is amazing, the nuances of the hand. And then it’s so funny, is that my brain can almost, by autopilot, go into, “It is amazing. That’s probably why the Tesla people have such a hard time making that Tesla robot, that Tesla Optimus robot. I wonder how they’re doing with that? And I mean, some people say they’re just going to take over the world with these Tesla.”

And so, it’s like, I’m just, it’s a totally different vibe, imagining what’s going to happen with the Tesla Optimus robots as compared to looking at your hand. And to the point about 10,000 plus thoughts a day, I think many of those thoughts are just kind of superfluous and they’re a little bit agitated, you know, like, I’m not worried about the robots taking us over, but it’s like ping pong, pinball bouncing all over-y, and that creates a little bit of a – anxiety is a strong word – but less of a calm, settled, centered, present vibe.

Shirzad Chamine
There actually is a bit of anxiety to it because there is no solidity to it, because it’s all over the place, because it is so random and so all over the place. And we kind of, this is the opposite of feeling centered, opposite of grounded, of that stability that comes with a real presence in the thing that you want.

And I noticed, by the way, you had shared with me right before we started, you said one of your saboteurs was the hyperrational. And the hyperrational, and we just experienced your hyperrational, which is the rational mind is a really, really wonderful tool that you have. You have been partially successful because you have a good rational mind, the rational mind is very helpful.

And yet, in the moment where you’re looking at the palm of your hand in search of the beauty and discovery of this magnificent thing in the palm of your hand, the rational mind of, “I wonder what Tesla is doing with this?” is not really helping. It is the wrong time to use the rational mind. It’s just distracting.

And of course, the bigger challenge with the hyperrational is when it comes to relationships and when it comes to conflict, people with a hyperrational too often think, “Okay, we are having a disagreement here. Okay, I understand, here are the three ways we can fix the problem.”

And the hyperrational goes into rational solution creation for issues of conflict with another human being, paying not as much attention to what truly matters in conflict, which is how the other person is feeling, and really having them feel heard and acknowledged and cared for.

And in that, the hyperrational is trying to solve the problem, and the other person feels that they’re not being cared for, heard, and that there is an intellectual arrogance that’s coming across saying, “I have the answers. Let me tell you.” And it’s all unintended, right? We think, “A rational mind is a good thing. Let’s use it,” but it’s not the right tool at all times, and especially not in relationships and conflicts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and that is one of the themes inside each of your saboteur profiles is an overused strength.

Shirzad Chamine
Exactly. So the overused strength in the hyperrational is the rational mind being overused and abused. That’s what makes it a saboteur. Another saboteur you shared with me was your pleaser saboteur, which I share with you. I have that, too.

Now the strength that I can guarantee you, if I hear somebody like you has the pleaser saboteur, I can just tell you what I believe is one of your greatest natural strengths. I believe you were born with the predisposition to be very sensitive and kind and giving and empathic. Those are wonderful, wonderful qualities. And those are some of my natural qualities, too.

When taken too far, and overused and abused, they become the pleaser saboteur. When we give and give and give and have a hard time saying no, having a hard time asking, having a hard time setting boundaries, and have a need to be liked as we are giving and to please others, which, of course, again, it costs us and it costs the relationship. So, the overuse of that empathy strength becomes the pleaser. And we can talk about every saboteur in that context.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious, with these 10-second exercises and your eight-week program, you mentioned rep, and so I immediately think about strength training, and there’s all kinds of studies about sets and reps and sessions and for maximizing growth or strength or endurance. And so, I’m curious, what’s sort of the volume, if you will, of reps that really makes an impact in reshaping our brains?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, what we have learned is that we need about six weeks of practice. In the book, I write about, you know, we have all heard about 21 days in a row of doing a new thing, begins to build enough neural pathways so that the new thing becomes a little bit more automatic, the old thing begins to take a backseat.

But that’s theoretically correct, but in practice what we find is that most people who start getting into a new practice, they have good days and bad days. So, they usually don’t go 21 days in a row doing the new thing and not doing the old thing. It’s a mix, back and forth. And so, what we find is we need you for six weeks of practice.

And during those six weeks, we need you to do about 10 to 15 minutes a day of these exercises of intercepting your saboteur, energizing your sage brain, and choosing more of a sage response. And then the positive ways of your brain have some fighting chance against the negative side because you’re laying neural pathways, building up muscles.

And this brings up the topic of, you know, we call our work mental fitness. And the reason we call it mental fitness is that we really want people to wake up to the fact that a lie you have probably told yourself all your life is that transformation, significant personal transformation, is mostly about insight, “If I do that, read that next book, do that next workshop, listen to that next podcast, and get the aha, I’m done. I’m transformed. I’m much better.”

But the thing is we all have experienced life-changing books, life-changing workshops, life-changing talks, where we say, “Oh, my God, this was life-changing.” Two months later, we are back to the same old behavior. Why? Because our old habits, which are the saboteur habits, they are automatic habits because they have been repeated enough so that they live in the brain in the form of neural pathways that automatically generates those reactions.

You can’t fight the muscle, and those are neural pathways. I call them the muscles and the mental muscles. So, your saboteurs have mental muscles. You don’t fight the muscles of your saboteurs with insight of your sage. You need to fight the muscle of your saboteur with new muscle of your sage. So, you need to build the muscles of your inner sage, inner Jedi.

And what we find is about a minimum of six weeks, about 10 to 15 minutes of practice for you to begin to feel the automaticity of the sage way of doing things against the saboteurs.

Pete Mockaitis
And are these 10 to 15 contiguous minutes or 10 to 15 interspersed throughout the day?

Shirzad Chamine
No, they can be interspersed. We created, when we found out most people can’t do it on their own because there are different things to do, and most people just can’t quite put it all together. So, we have created an app that a lot of organizations like Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, and others are giving to their employees.

The app guides the daily practice. So, we spend a whole week on doing these 10-second exercises, a whole week on focusing, a couple of weeks on focusing on our top saboteurs, and a few weeks of exercising our sage powers, each of the five sage powers, so that it all builds up into the new pathways. So that program ends up lasting six weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Shirzad Chamine
Well, I would love everybody to know that there’s a free saboteur assessment, in five minutes, you can get your saboteur assessment results, see how you self-sabotage, and that’s on PositiveIntelligence.com/assessment. And then if you want to go further, there’s a six-week app-guided program that also is on our website, PositiveIntelligence.com.

And the main thing that I’d love for people to just take out of this is that there’s bad news and good news in the work that we do with you as you get into this, and whether you read the book, or do the saboteur assessment, or do our app-guided program.

The bad news is that, as you get into this, you’ll discover that your saboteurs are far more destructive and damaging to you, to your well-being, and to your performance than you had any clue. That was one of my discoveries, devastating impact. That’s what was happening in the day that I, in the palace coup in my boardroom, my saboteurs were basically destroying my career and they almost destroyed my marriage.

Now the good news is much better than, much stronger than the bad news. The good news is, once you tap into your sage powers, your inner Jedi, you realize you are far more magnificent than you had any clue you are. You really are far more magnificent than you had any clue you are. Your saboteurs have talked you into believing a lot lesser of yourself than you truly are.

So, part of our work is to help you remember who you truly are and who you truly are is far more magnificent than you can remember.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Shirzad Chamine
“All that is not given is lost.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And a favorite book?

Shirzad Chamine
I think The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle was one that oriented me towards these ways of thinking early on in my practice.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a sound bite or a nugget you share that seems to get repeated a lot and retweeted, and folks are quoting back to you often?

Shirzad Chamine
“Take your hand off the hot stove.” And what we mean by that is that the pain is helpful for you for a second, a split second, because if you put your hand on the hot stove and you don’t feel pain, you’ll keep your hand there and it’ll burn to the bone. So, therefore, pain is very good for you.

Similarly, negative emotions are really, really, really helpful for you. Anger, shame, guilt, disappointment, stress, frustration, all these are very helpful to you as an alert signal that says, “Hey buddy, pay attention.” But if you continue feeling those feelings after that alert is delivered, you’re keeping your hand on the hot stove and wondering why life is so hard.

So, take your hand off the hot stove, feel those negative emotions, learn from the alert signal they’re delivering, then begin to do these 10-second exercises. Shift your brain activation so you shift to the positive part of the brain to figure out how to deal with the thing that’s causing you stress, upset, frustration, guilt, shame, whatever. Take your hand off the hot stove.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Shirzad Chamine
PositiveIntelligence.com and then PositiveIntelligence.com/assessment for the saboteur assessment. And then you can also, in PositiveIntelligence.com, see our app-guided program where you can actually build and rewire your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Shirzad Chamine
You spend every day in some habits that you just assume that they are important for you. They are hygiene habits. You brush your teeth. You brush your teeth, hopefully. Take a shower occasionally. Do physical exercise. There are a lot of things we do, we spend time and effort on. And it is astonishing that we do not spend any concentrated daily practice on mental fitness. We do physical fitness, physical hygiene, but we don’t do mental fitness.

And it’s the big missing, it’s the big thing that we are bringing in. So, I’d love for you to just ask yourself, “How willing are you to actually invest in daily practices that build your mental fitness?” Because from our research, what we are showing is that your mental fitness is foundational to you optimizing, both your well-being and performance and healthy relationships.

Are you willing to invest 10-15 minutes a day? Not just for a day, or for a week, for 6 weeks, but for six years for the rest of your life because that’s what it takes to significantly elevate yourself to a whole new level of mastery and activating your actual potential. That’s what I do every day. It’s in my calendar. I am going to do mental fitness as much as I’m also going to do physical fitness or even these other habits.

So, my challenge to the audience is really look at yourself and say, how much do you want significant shift and transformation? If so, are you willing to build and maintain the mental muscles it takes? Are you willing to commit to mental fitness?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Shirzad, thank you.

Shirzad Chamine
All right, Pete. This has been a pleasure. Wonderful questions. I really enjoyed this.