 Welcome back to the Art of Charm podcast and this month's theme in December is habit building. In the previous episode we spoke to one of our favorite authors Charles Duhigg, two great books The Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better. We talked about the structure of habits, how they're made up of a cue, routine and reward and how this makes them so powerful. We also talked about those bad habits that maybe you want to get rid of or as Charles would say replace and a lot more. If you haven't listened to it yet, bounce back to last week's episode. We don't want you to miss out. This week, we're so excited to welcome Lisa Wimberger, founder of the Neurosculpting Institute in Denver. She's also the author of Neurosculpting, a whole brain approach to heal trauma, rewrite limiting beliefs and find wholeness as well as new beliefs, new brain, free yourself from stress and fear. Who wouldn't want to do that? Thank you so much for coming all the way out from Denver to join us here today, Lisa. Thanks for having me. Now you've worked as CIA, FBI, Secret Service, the military and even homeland security on this very concept of Neurosculpting. Fascinating book. Johnny and I discovered it a few years ago. We've been passing it between ourselves using some of these techniques and tactics and then sharing it with the students of our programs and have really impacted not only ourselves personally, but the lives of the students who've come through the art of charm. You also hold a master's degree in education and additional certificates in neurobiology. What's going on in Colorado? I'm so fascinated by this. We're changing the world. We're changing the world. Well, at least that's my story about what we're doing in Colorado. Yeah, it's the home of the Institute, the brick and mortar, but we reach global audiences because we do everything online as well. I love being with people in person, but that's not always possible. So we have a really wide reach and we're just growing our programs They've always said that a sign of a good teacher is someone who's able to take complex ideas and distill them down for everyone to be able to easily digest them. And I feel that you've done a wonderful job with Neurosculpting. We felt that way and we're very excited to have you here. Awesome. Thank you. In your book, Neurosculpting, you start out by telling a great story of how you develop this idea and the techniques that are throughout the book. And we'd love to hear that story. I know our audience may not be familiar with your book. Johnny and I thoroughly enjoyed it and we've been recommending it to our boot camp students since. Awesome. Well, it came out of some pretty crappy times in my life. So I had a seizure disorder that I didn't know I had. I started when I was about 15 and I thought I was fainting and the recovery was just horrific. And I remember, I think the book starts with, I was recounting one of the moments in the bathroom. They typically, these seizures would happen either in the bathroom or when I was alone serendipitously. I don't know why they would happen then. But the way the book starts, I remember going into the bathroom, I was probably at the time 17 and I looked in the mirror and it was like I was on acid and everything just started melting. My face started melting. The room started pixelating and disappearing. And I remember hearing myself kind of utter something and I heard this voice go like, oh no, or something like that. And that was kind of the last I remember of real time. But then what happened on the floor is I was somewhere else completely. My consciousness never stopped. In all of my seizures, I've had many, many seizures. My consciousness has never stopped. It just flips to like another track. It's bizarre. So I remember meeting this force. I called her a woman but she's not really a woman. It was this like wave, this force that just took me and told me she was going to teach me about the way I could be different. And she started, you know, talking neurons and all sorts of things I didn't really know anything about. And then I started coming out of the seizure, which is usually when I know the consciousness is not real because that consciousness will start to pixelate too. And then there's this moment of, whoa, where am I? I don't even know what's real. And in my particular kinds of seizures, they were vasovagals. So that meant that my heart would stop. So they weren't cortical inducing a seizure. They were heart rate drop inducing a brainstem seizure. So it was from body to brain, not brain to body. That's why it's not considered epilepsy. So my heart would stop. And so in these moments where my consciousness would start to come back to reality, my heart would start pumping again. And it was excruciating. It was pins and needles throughout the whole body. But I came out of those seizures with these nuggets of something is happening to me because of an aspect of myself I'm not able to understand. This is not just physical. I'm not just sick. And so these little nuggets would come to me about needing to understand myself better. And that's where neurop sculpting started. And then eventually I got a diagnosis, which I didn't get my diagnosis until I was 30, which was that you flat line with vasovagal paralytic tonic seizures, which was a gift. This diagnosis was a gift because I didn't know I was seizing. And it caused me to go study, well, what is this cranial nerve? What is the brain doing? And that's where neurop sculpting came from, was, oh my god. Science was giving me all this information about how to know myself and how to navigate my own central nervous system. Whoa, I better use this. And honestly, I have a steeped meditation practice. I've been meditating since I was a child. And none of it was healing me. It was helping me cope, which is great. It wasn't healing me. When I started learning about the science, that's when light bulbs just went off like crazy. And I said, my meditation practice is missing a lot. It's missing strategy, application, tools, process, and my brain needs all of that. Because if I don't know how to get in the magical back door, I'm not going to circumvent these seizures. So neurop sculpting came from that need to figure out what was going on. No, I'm sure a lot of our audience has not heard of neurop sculpting. So can you break down what you mean by neurop sculpting? Yeah. So the mind likes to think thoughts. In fact, that's what it's designed to do. And it's designed to do this very efficiently and default to the most useful, life-preserving thoughts. Well, that becomes a default pattern. So in order to sculpt that pattern differently, we have to know how to feed the brain thoughts that will create new patterns. So neurop sculpting is a five-step meditation process, but it's very strategic because it uses the principles of neuroanatomy to understand what does the brain need first in order to be open and receptive? What does it need next in order to be compliant? What does it need third in order to remember a new pattern better? What does it need fourth to anchor that in? And so the steps are very methodical because that's what the brain needs. Whereas my meditation practice, through no fault of meditation, through my own misuse, had no strategy whatsoever. That was my misuse of the practice. It was an escape for me. It wasn't methodical. It was ambiguous and floaty, which I love. But it wasn't helping me ground into my body. And as a dissociative person, there's different phases of stress. I'm a dissociator. I can go numb, and I can just exit really easily. Meditation is like crack to a dissociative person in my experience. In order to the other stress responses? Fight and flee, which is much more grounded. And actually, fight and flee is mammalian and very sustainable. It's ugly, and it's not socially acceptable. Freeze is very acceptable because it's very quiet. It's very reserved, and it's controlled. But freeze is brainstem, and freeze will lower the oxygen rate in the body. And you'll go into profound parasympathetic inward, very inward. And a large mammal brain cannot handle that sustainably because there's not enough oxygen. Whereas fight and flee, you're adrenalineated. You're breathing fast. You're getting oxygen. Your brain is pretty OK. You just look terrible. You're loud. You're obnoxious. You're destructive, and society doesn't like that. So we kind of frown upon the more sustainable aspects of that whole spectrum. I think what's so fascinating, especially around the idea of neuroplasticities, I know growing up, if I hit my head, my dad would joke, hey, you're losing brain cells. You've got to be careful. And the old adage was, you have a finite number of brain cells. And throughout your life, you're just going to be losing them, whether you're hitting your head, you're drinking. Science now is not saying that at all, that we can develop these new pathways that our brain is a lot more malleable than we give it credit for. We have neuroplasticity at every level. We have synaptic plasticity, which is how we tone the gap between how the neurons speak. We have dendritic plasticity. We have plasticity of the action potential, which is the way the patterns fire. We have the ability to create new neurons in the hippocampus and possibly in other places that we have yet to discover. And we even have neuroplasticity in our muscles. So it's in us. It's us. And we are neuroplastic all the time. We're just on the default, reinforcing all of the default. And that is neuroplasticity too. It's just the subconscious efficient path that most of us don't really thrive with. And this is the habit-building month. And I know one of the most common questions that we saw coming in, and we're going to get to some more listener questions, is around this idea of if I'm a perfectionist and this is great, I want to start a new habit. I want to go to the gym. But we know that stress gets in the way, right? Your boss asks you to stay late. Now you can't get to the gym. And as a perfectionist, you're getting really stressed out. I didn't do this. I'm trying to set this habit. I'm trying not to break the chain. Break the chain. And then all of a sudden, we're kind of frozen up. What can we do in those moments to deal with that stress around building these new habits that we all want? Well, my favorite go-to pre-exercise for every single thing I do is shaking. It's just shaking, like vigorous, wild shaking for a number of reasons. So you're a perfectionist, right? You've got your agenda, which the universe really doesn't care about. But you do, and you think it's supposed to play out this way, and it doesn't. And so you get disappointed or stressed, and then you go into your self-talk about I can't or whatever your self-talk is. And then you go into stress because you feel disempowered. And now you're contracted. And so the bottom line is, no matter what the story is in your mind, you are likely contracted as your response, whether it's an inward clamping down in that paralytic response, or whether it's an outward, adrenylated, I don't even know if that's a word, but I keep saying it, adrenylated muscle contraction ready to fight. You have contraction. And the nervous system only knows two end states, contracted or expanded. And we live in a spectrum, and we move between those two points. So the first thing, changing your patterns beyond making your life perfect is you have to move out of contraction or you're not going to make a change no matter how small or great. So in order to dissipate those contractions, long before you have awareness, long before you have insight, you have to get that out of your muscles. And shaking is the go-to response. Twitchy, shaking like you watch your dog at the Fourth of July, and he's hiding, and his pelt is twitching. That's actually the neurogenic regulation response. And that is my go-to, because that will dissipate the contractions in the muscles. It will bring the adrenaline down, and then it will send signals back from the peripheral nervous system to the central nervous system that your muscles are soft. That goes back to the brain. Brain says, I must be OK for the moment. And if the brain says, I'm OK for the moment, now you have space to be creative, or motivated, or find your grounding, or your center. So even before meditation, it's shaking for me, always shaking. It's so funny, I'm picturing puppies shaking it off. We see it in the animal kingdom all the time, that when there's that intense state of stress and fight or flight, what does the animal do, the next thing, they shake it right off. It's not a metaphor. We take all these gems of neurobiological wisdom, and we call them metaphors. Oh, go shake it off. And what do you do? You don't. You just go somewhere else and do something else. But you don't actually shake at the institute, Neurosculpting Institute. We teach neurogenic tremoring, because it's critical. For people who are still too afraid to approach their mental stories, because that's tricky. So for people who are still not ready to go there, we get them to shake first, and it's profound. It's funny, we did some training back in the day to get better on camera, and one of the first exercises our coach gave us was to shake every limb in our body just to get loosened up, and it made a difference. I remember walking into serious studios, we're shaking outside, people are looking at us like we're crazy, and then we're in studio, and we're relaxed. Well, anytime that you're going to put yourself in a position where you haven't been before, I mean, it's going to be a contracted experience on your end because you're getting ready for the unknown. And so you need to be able to jump, or move, or it's the fight or flight, setting up. Absolutely. The amazing thing about shaking is if you do it enough, your body will remember that it will do it when it needs to. So what you'll find is after you develop a shaking practice, you'll find that you'll be in conversation with someone, and if they say something triggering, you might have a shutter move through you, and it will come out, and you'll start to twitch a little bit, and your body is remembering how to do it without you inducing it. So I shake all the time, and it's also something that my daughter who has suffered a lot of anxiety does not want to meditate. She doesn't want to look at the thoughts because she can't navigate them yet. But for her, shaking is amazing. We got a listener question here, Steve from Instagram. He asks, what are your thoughts when someone has all the pertinent information for the habit change that they need to make but their past thought patterns or ways of being get in the way? What tools do you guys utilize to eliminate this baggage so the person can effectively step into their new habit? This is a topic I'm always researching and practicing, so I'm very interested to see if you guys have any tools or strategies I'm unfamiliar with. Yeah, I mean, that's 90% of our students come with that exact thing. The first thing I do is I have them become aware of when the old story comes up, not to change it, just to be aware of it. And then literally shake in those moments to uncouple the body's default response to that story. So that would be the first thing. Then what we do is we create very specific meditations, neuro-sculpting meditations for people with their old stories. We don't want generic. We wanna get to the heart of what is limiting this person. So we look at what are those stories? And then in meditation, we have them look at where do they hold these stories in their nervous system? Nervous system never lies, ever. So if you get someone relaxed and safe enough, their body's gonna tell them where they're contracted around this and then we have them use a lot of creative visualization. To edit, change the story or change the body response. We use a felt sense. We have them use their own touch to anchor in new felt sense and replace the old one. So it's a lot, it's a little reminiscent of hypnotherapy, a little reminiscent of cognitive behavioral therapy, but it's a process. And then food. I am the biggest proponent of stress-based nutrition. There is a way to eat that's gonna keep you right in your old stories and there's a way to eat, that's not, and that doesn't mean omnivore, carnivore, vegetarian, vegan. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what does the brain need for you to build neurotransmitters, for you to have regulatory neurotransmitters being produced for you to have synaptic functioning. There's a way to eat for that and if you don't, then you can have all the tools you want and all the inspiration and all the gurus and all the books, nothing's gonna change. So it's mind, body, and nutrition. Well that's definitely something we've been talking a lot about here and how all of those things are connected. I mean you cannot do this work on yourself if you're not going to the gym or if you're not getting proper sleep. I mean it's all gonna be for nothing. Absolutely. I mean you make your neurotransmitters in your gut, but if your gut health is bad, good luck trying to be happy. Good luck trying to regulate sleep and mood and love and all the neurotransmitters that regulate those things. So let's unpack that a little more. We're talking about stories here, we're talking about pathways. When it comes to creating this new habit that Steve's looking for, obviously there are some stories tied to his current routines. There's some stories that he tells himself and I think the one thing that a lot of us may have not even thought of or realized is that our brain is always summarizing information and creating stories out of the information that's present. We don't have the time to hold all of this data and every lasting memory. So oftentimes our brain takes the bits and pieces that it thinks are important and creates a summary and then that's now stored in your brain for okay, this is how I handled the situation moving forward. So Steve here is trying to eliminate those negative thought patterns that are getting in his way, those negative stories that are keeping him from the habits that he wants. Let's first start with the mental side of things and writing the new story. Then we'll talk about the body and shaking and then we'll dive a little more into the nutrition because I'm fascinated by that. But when it comes to writing this new story and sculpting our neuro pathways, what's the first thing that Steve should be thinking? The first thing is until you anchor into your sense of safety around you, you're not gonna create a new story and you're never gonna break an old one. So even though it seems unrelated to the outcome, the outcome for Steve is I wanna go to the gym and maintain a healthy lifestyle. What's actually critical for him and for all of us is to first learn how to orient to safety because then you will stop defaulting to self-protective patterns. Now his stories that keep him away from the gym are self-protective patterns. They're derived from stories of whatever. I can't, I'm not good enough, I shouldn't, I was embarrassed by, I'll fail. So his preventative stories are based in self-protection. All of ours are. So first thing is I like to do a five minute exercise to prime any moment where I wanna break a habit is first I have to look around my space and say, am I dry, am I comfortable, am I fed, do I know where food is, do I have a bed to sleep in? Basic, basic needs until the limbic center, the midbrain understands it is safe even if it's just for this moment, you're not gonna break a pattern, you're just not. So a five minute daily exercise of, or maybe even three minutes, a couple times a day of noticing, oh, I'm not outside in the heat or the cold right now. You can even stretch it to a gratitude practice. That's what I was supposed to say. Yeah, and that'll do the same thing because if you notice you're safe, then you start to be grateful and if you can push yourself into gratitude, you're down-regulating the midbrain. That is the first step because until midbrain quiets, you're not gonna write a new pattern. A new pattern with focused attention is going to recruit a lot of energy in the front of the brain, which is not available when we're in default mode. So first step, ground into your basic needs being met in any moment. Do that as a daily practice. Long before you try to get to the gym, that's your daily practice. So what goes along with a lot of the train of thought where even other mammals, they have to make sure that they're safe first before they do anything else, before they make a bed, before they eat. That needs to be taken care of. And in philosophy, there's a rule of hierarchy of needs and that safety is at ground level before anything else can move forward. Before anything else and we are mammals. So what we see in the animal kingdom applies to our central nervous systems as well. So for Steve, it's a grounding practice of making, you can even make a checklist on a piece of paper. What are some of the ways that my needs are met in this moment? And generally it's basic survival as the starting point. And then beyond that, it's, oh, I have a supportive partner. Oh, I have a very comfortable place to work. You can get bigger and bigger. But that's first and that's step one. Down-regulate the limbic system is what that is doing. Then we have the physical side shaking it off, allowing yourself to physically be more relaxed. I'd love to hear more about this nutrition and how we really prime our bodies to produce great neurotransmitters. And a lot of listeners are into biohacking and care a lot about how we can up-regulate these neurotransmitters. Yeah, so I'm gonna break it down into the way a neuron functions so that you see the relevance of this. We have a cell body, the cell itself. And that cell needs a ton of energy to do things like translocate RNA and DNA and edit our DNA and run our mitochondria and create energy. We need energy in for a cell to be alive. And energy in is glucose. So glucose comes from carbohydrates. So there's this big no-carb thing, but that's actually not what's really happening. It's not no carbs, it's slow carbs. Meaning slow, long, sustainable energy in is slow, long, sustainable health for the cell. If we regulate our blood sugar with the kind of carbs we eat, we are setting our cells, our neurons, all the cells in our body, but our brain cells, to be able to have the ATP energy it needs without stressing to create it. The faster those carbs are, meaning refined sugars, it's like a flash. It's like kerosene versus whale oil, right? What's gonna light your way for two weeks? Not the kerosene. So slow burn carbs is sustainable for the cell body. So whatever that is for you, if you're a vegetarian, well, actually if you're not a vegetarian too bad, you're gonna have to eat vegetables. And if you are a vegetarian- Hear that, Johnny? Great, you can eat vegetables. Slow, low glycemic vegetables are, of course, prime. That's the cell body. Then we have the axon, which is the tail that comes off the soma of the cell and it carries a charge, a length of distance. Now that length might be a micromilometer because that cell is talking to one right next to it or that could be the whole length of the spine because we have motor neurons in the brainstem that innervate lower lumbar. So we've got meters of length that has to carry a charge, that needs fat. You can't carry a charge without an insulation. And we saw in the 70s the no fat, low fat diet, what did it yield? It yielded massive coronary disease, massive rate hike in Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes because we actually need fat, so healthy fats. So now we've got slow carbs, healthy fats, which there's a ton of them out there, you know, olive oil, avocado, nuts, seeds, coconut oil. And then at the very bottom of that axon, that tail, is a warehouse of neurotransmitters just sitting there. We're making them, we're storing them, and they're sitting there. They're made from protein, they're amino acids, and if you don't eat protein, you're not gonna make neurotransmitters. I don't care how much you pray and wish that you don't have to eat protein, you have to. Doesn't mean you have to eat animal protein, but you must eat protein because without those essential amino acids, you're not gonna make serotonin, dopamine, GABA, tyrosine, none of them. And then you're not gonna have mood regulation or sleep regulation, or metabolic regulation. So, healthy sources of protein. So it's basic knowledge, eat your protein, your fats, and your carbs. Sounds balanced. Sounds balanced, right? Go figure. Not crash fat diets, but eating balanced. No, balanced, and you get to choose, if you're a vegetarian, you get to choose all of those out of a vegetarian diet. If you're vegan, you choose your fat protein and it's not a prescription for how to eat ethically, morally, it's just how to eat within your lifestyle choice that's actually gonna support your brain and neuroplasticity. Most of us don't know how to do that and we revert to sugar. Yeah, and when you think about it, I mean, the body craves homeostasis. When you're dumping in sugar, especially the amounts of sugar that it added in a lot of what we eat, you're not creating homeostasis. You are shocking the system with a ton of glucose. And even when we think we're eating well, like I might have a lunch, I mean a salad for lunch and think, ooh, I'm so healthy. But what's in that salad? Okay, greens, sweet potatoes. No, no, I don't put that in salad. Greens, bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers. Guess what? That's all sugar. It's all sugar. It's really good sugar. But there's no fat to slow the burn down. There's no protein to build the neurotransmitters and that is still not a balanced meal. So even when we think we're doing a good job, unless we know there are those three things present, we're gonna have a fast sugar spike and the brain is gonna have a fast sugar crash, which means it's gonna go limbic. The moment your blood sugar drops below threshold, you're limbic. Your cortisol goes up. You are in a flight for food. I think I've seen Johnny in that state in the gym actually. We call it hangry. Yeah, hangry Johnny. Yes, it's hangry. You're gonna go hangry for sure. And no, you're not gonna break a pattern then. No, you're not. Yeah, we're gonna be distracted by the hunger pains. Yeah, sure. Yeah, and then you're gonna reach for something fast because you tank too low and you're gonna perpetuate a cycle. And I was on this cycle before I knew anything about my body or nutrition. I mean, I grew up with a Sicilian mom and so you eat pasta every day. And not only do you eat pasta, but if you're lucky enough to have a Sicilian mother, she toasts breadcrumbs. She fries them up. So then you put toasted fried breadcrumbs on top of your pasta and then you take the piece of Italian bread that's loaded up with butter and you scoop the pasta with the bread. So you're breading pasta and you're eating it with bread. And I lived on that. And I was hypoglycemic. I had crashes that were so bad. I couldn't even, back then, before all cars had power steering, mine didn't and I would have a hypoglycemic attack. I couldn't even turn the car wheel. It was crazy, but you eat sugar, you crash hard, you're gonna crave a fast spike. And I was pretty violent back then, I would have to say. I was volatile, but I blamed it on being Sicilian. But that's not actually true. I mean, I could have just eaten more meat and fat. Well, it's one of the things that we've been discussing all month of habits and replacing them and the story that we tell ourselves. I mean, for yourself to have a mood swing and say, well, I'm just Italian, so that's what's gonna happen. We were talking about waking up earlier in the morning and some people, for myself, I used it when I was younger, like, oh, I'm a creative, I can't have too much structure in my life. And only to now, at being older, realize how much more productive I am with the more structured my day is. And these are these stories, right, that we need to change in order to allow ourselves to build these habits and they're powerful. We're made of stories. Exactly. We're made of, not to get too esoteric here, but we're made of illusions, all of it, from the earliest story we remember where we say I am. I am anything. That's a story. I loved Jill Baltitailer's work, My Stroke of Insight. She's the Harvard neuroanatomist who had a left hemisphere stroke and just annihilated her left hemisphere, but watched herself have the stroke knowing what was happening, watched herself go offline. And it took about eight years for her to recover. She was 100% right hemisphere functional in the beginning, which meant she didn't have a sense of I am because that's very left brain language center. She had a sense of being part of a cosmos. She didn't understand what a table was. She just saw waves of energy. Like, people weren't people, they were just waves of energy. That's how out of labeling she was being in her right hemisphere. As she came back online, things she used to attribute to this is just who I am. My preference for food, my preference for my favorite color, they weren't who I am. They were choices for her. And she literally over eight years as all of her personality traits started reappearing, she evaluated, do I want that? Wow. She said no to pieces of herself that were just who she was up until the stroke. She is amazing. She rewired her entire self through her, she had to learn how to read, she had to learn what people were, what colors were, and she chose who to be because we're made of stories and illusions. Now we don't all need to have a stroke. Yeah, thankfully, I was gonna say that we don't have to go through something that's traumatic and she survived, thankfully, but I think that's a big part of all of this is we self-label to feel better or sometimes we absorb labels that other people put on us because it allows us to move throughout our day but these labels are just that, we're pasting on ourselves, they're not, they're choices. And when we can actually view them as choices, we can start to choose something else. Right. And it doesn't mean it's easy to choose something else just because you are aware that you've self-labeled. It's still really hard, but being aware of it is the first step. I have so many clients who will say, well, that's just who I am. I probably can't help you then, you know? If you're not willing to make the choice to rewrite who you are, then we're not gonna be able to rewrite these pathways. The first breakthrough comes with, oh, maybe that's who my stories have made me, but it's not who I am. I think to go along with that as well is what other people see you as and the labels that they are placing on you. I know for myself, you mentioned it earlier, you're like, oh, well, you look like a musician. And I've gotten that for so long, and when people find out what I actually do, they're like, wait, this doesn't make sense. I'm like, it doesn't make sense to you, it makes perfect sense to me. And so there's two labels that you're gonna have to break out of your own and the one that other people are gonna put on you. And sometimes it's really helpful to be aware of what other people's labels will be, and if you want to connect and reach them, because I know you both work with helping people connect to people. So there's something very special about being yourself, but there's also something very powerful about knowing how other people see you and knowing how to work with that to connect more deeply. So the example I'm gonna use is I teach officers. Now, clearly the way I'm dressed here, which is very casual, is not how I would go into a police agency. In fact, I have to actually morph into something else. I straighten my hair, which I never do because wild and curly is not serious. I sometimes wear glasses. I will wear a very structured kind of gray suit. And I come in, I'm not smiling. I'm speaking their language. I'm not doing it outside of my authenticity. I'm doing it as me, but knowing how they're gonna see me and how that's gonna make them feel safe and related to and how they're gonna open up. So it's very helpful, but back when I was a teenager, I actually did the opposite. I would put on the fishnets and the denim shorts and go to dinner with my parents. And I'm like, what are you doing? Well, to go along with that, we were doing the first impressions episode and you were talking about how people would see you when you were younger. And for myself, if I don't instantly go up to somebody and introduce myself at a social event and they just see me, if I don't make that gesture, it's easy for them to write off, oh, he's a stuck up musician guy. He was too cool for school. And knowing that, I'm able to break out of that and compensate for that. And I might dress in a certain manner to help with that. Or my actions, I will make sure that I'm extra outgoing at certain events so that gets shattered immediately. Absolutely. We tell our students, we do a lot with the face at the Neurosculpting Institute. We teach a lot about the face because the facial muscles are very special. They not only speak to motor cortex, but they have a separate path that goes right to the brainstem, to the vagus nerve. Because when we're infants, what are we looking at? We're looking at our caregiver's face and not only are we reading social cues from the corners of their eyes and their mouths, but we're also mimicking that and programming. So facial expression can change everything. So if someone's not comfortable in their mind, dressing differently to appease or connect with people, then you don't even have to go that far. You can actually start looking at what is my face doing? And we do these exercises where people are asked to soften their frown, soften the corner of their eyes, do a genuine smile, not a fake one, and then all of a sudden, they're approachable. And all it takes is softening the back of the tongue, a little warm crinkle in the corner of the eyes, and it's a whole different ball game. Well, this is why we do video work in our classrooms. So everyone can see the, and we call it, what is it, there's resting bitch face or resting dick face or processing. And we have, well, and I know that you have done some work with the military and for ourselves as well, where these people who have put all these tactics together in order to look hard and to command certain respect in a fight or flight situation where their lives are at stake and seeing that played back in a civilian role and like, whoa, that's a bit hard. And so I'm softening that up. And something to also go along with that, all this data coming back with people who are getting Botox and not only for other people, not people who want to read anything but because they can't make those gestures, they also, they start numbing their own emotions to be able to read that, which is fascinating. It's amazing because the facial muscles are a direct conduit to brainstem and you just froze them. So you've just frozen the highway of how to read social cues. I did this really fascinating exercise. I teach neuro-sculpting also in the partner dance world because I'm a partner dancer. So that, I mean, if you ever wanna, I'm gonna invite you both to that as a little social connection weekend. But if you ever wanna have your stories come up, try getting like an inch and a half away from someone else and touching them and having to move in sync with them. It's, whoa, stuff comes up. So we did this exercise where I partnered people up and partner one was given a prompt, that partner two didn't know about and the prompt was think of a time where you were betrayed or alone. And it wasn't think about the other person, it was just go into a memory and they were asked to look at each other for 30 seconds and people were crying within 30 seconds. And in the debrief, the partner two would say, I don't know, I just felt so alone. And then the next exercise was partner two was asked to think about a time when they felt loved and accepted the entire room in 30 seconds with no words, the whole room changed. And people were giggling and the response was, whoa, I felt that. And that's not even an outward projection. That's a just ruminate on your story and look what you're doing to the world around you and then you wonder why you're alone, why you're not approachable. Now, when I grew up as an introvert, something happened in college where I just made a huge shift, a willful shift. But I grew up as an introvert and I thought sitting in the corner wearing dark clothes with my head down in my journal might be enticing to people but it's not. No one wants to approach me and it didn't dawn on me till college that I should look at people and what could that do? And really what it's doing is it's telling the vagus nerve you are safe. You're allowed and invited to connect with another human. Now, let's talk about rewiring the limbic system because a lot of our listeners and even the people that work in our programs and both the bootcamp and in our core confidence coaching program, in those social settings, they feel this anxiety. They feel it and all of a sudden they freeze up. They don't know what to say. They lose their train of thought and they turn inward and we see it on video work and class. I felt it myself in a lot of social settings. How can we train people to overcome that fight or flight response so that their fear is not holding them back and we can rewire that pathway? Yeah, that's tricky especially if you're throwing socially anxious people into large groups. What I would say is start small, start safe. Start with the people you feel safe with and when you're in interaction with them, note what you're feeling in your body. Just start to know what is safety. So okay, I'm with my one best friend who I can totally be myself with. Then go through the checklist. What's my temperature? What are my shoulders doing? What's my face doing? Go check your face in a mirror for a second and realize it's probably light and lifted. Just to start identifying, there are moments where you probably do feel safe. What do they look like? How do they feel? And then how can I take those feelings? And what we do is in meditation, we practice those feelings. We take what they might know even to a small degree and we practice and reinforce so that the subconscious remembers that as a more frequent experience. You don't have to be around someone else to practice how you feel about someone else. And so we have them anchor into what they know and then we have them practice it with high neuroplastic engagement, which is what the Five Steps does and so it becomes a little more familiar. Then when they go out into the social world, we have them access those meditations through their anchors. They create anchors either with hand gestures or with words and so we would prompt them to make your anchor gesture or say your anchor word. And if you get thrown, which you probably might, then go into the bathroom and shake. So there's like different kinds of layers of practices that you can do leading up to. And then even as important is let's say it didn't go the way you wanted. After that social interaction, we would do a meditation or give the student a meditation where they could uncouple from the self judgment that arose from not having gotten it perfect in the first place. So there's a whole repertoire of how to use physical and mental practices, preparing, during, debriefing, and then moving on. So you mentioned five parts. Can you walk us through the five parts? So step one is to calm the limbic system, which we said you could do by noting the way you're comfortable or safe or dry or warm in the moment. That's step one. What happens when we down regulate limbic is that we start to see an increased activity in the front of the brain, which is what we want, because we'll be able to harness that to create very detailed new thoughts. So as we're seeing an increase in prefrontal activity, we wanna really boost that. So step two is boost the prefrontal cortex, which we do in meditation by imagining bizarre novel, humorous, interesting things, just bizarre things. And because it's guided meditation, the facilitator will give you interesting things to think about. What if the clouds were purple and the trees were yellow? And your mind's going, oh, it's interesting. So we're teasing the prefrontal cortex in step two into alert, awake, and ready. Now we've boosted plasticity. So now we have to apply that boosted plasticity to something, to either a pattern we wanna change or a story we wanna create and believe. So step three is you have to tell yourself a story, either an old story in a new way or a brand new story. But we tell it very specifically in step three. We want bilateral stimulation of the hemispheres, because normally our default patterns will lateralize us and we don't know how. Some of us are very left brain dominant, some are right brain dominant, we don't know. So in order to maximize our ability to create anything new, we wanna jump across the midline. And we do that in neurosculpting with the facilitator using left brain language center triggers and right brain language center triggers. So the facilitator will spell, ask you to make a list and prioritize that list, very analytical stuff, and then we'll ask you to give colored texture shape sound symbol to that list, to give a felt sense or even a smell. And so we're helping the person in step three cross the midline while telling a story. And really what this is doing is recruiting more real estate in the brain for that moment, which is placing a higher neuroplastic value. The more sense and bilateral stimulation in any moment, the more learning is happening. Think of sports, you have to counterbalance to get better in anything, you know? So that's what step three is doing. Step four, if we've made a change, a new story or an edit to the old one, we want to remember that. So we scan the body, we have to become aware of what the body's doing in that moment to see where is it holding this story right now. If it's holding it in a positive way that we like, well let's remember it by offering a felt sense, putting my hand on that part of my body, making a hand gesture. And if it's holding a negative story and I want to shift it, can I breathe and shake a little bit, notice a shift and then anchor into remembering the shift with a hand gesture or a touch. And then in step five we give it a linguistic cue, a linguistic anchor. What word, what silly word, funny word or meaningful word can the person think of? And so by the end of the five steps of the guided practice, they've boosted plasticity, down-regulated limbic, crafted with a lot of neuroplastic value, a story or an edit, remembered it with two different anchors and then came out of it. So now you've got the anchors to play within real time, you've got the meditation to repeat for reinforcement and then you even have just steps one and two as a separate just getting grounded meditation into safety. So there's so much application from just one meditation and in classes we teach people how to do this for themselves and in private practice we'll craft these meditations specific to the person's stories so that we get really relevant to them. Now Emily from Instagram asks us, I have a really hard time establishing a morning habit. What will help? What will help is establishing a bedtime habit. That is the first most, you want a morning habit well you need a bedtime habit and a lot of us don't have one. Many of us go to bed at different times every night or we have sleepless nights or we think we're sleeping but we are snoring through sleep so we're not getting deep sleep. I mean sleep, you mentioned it earlier, sleep is critical, critical to breaking habits. So I would say before you go to the morning routine I want to know what your bedtime routine is. How many hours of sleep? And keep it consistent. Keep it consistent and that's difficult but to keep it as consistent as possible. Now that might mean if you go to bed at 10 p.m. on Monday and 1 a.m. on Saturday you might need to give yourself permission to wake up later Sunday morning. That's what I mean by consistency. It doesn't have to be the same time every night but you should be getting about the same amount of sleep every night moving that wake up time to account for it. And so that might make someone feel like they don't have a morning routine but it'll actually prime the brain to be much more compliant to whatever routine you want if you're regulating your sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene is critical. Yeah, when we lose sleep or stressed we're not gonna be able to form these new habits. I think the big one that worked wonders for me and this goes back to what Charles Duhigg was saying around these cues, right? These signals that allow us to fall into a pattern. My cues in the morning I roll over on my left side and I used to grab my phone as an alarm clock. So what did I do? I put my five minute journal where my phone would be. I'm doing the same thing. So now I'm swapping out, grabbing my phone and staring at Instagram and I'm turning and seeing oh there's this notebook that I should write in. Absolutely. And now I'm guilty of myself a little bit. You animal farmed yourself. I love that. You actually keep the structure and sneak in a replacement. Exactly, yes. And the same thing with brushing my teeth. I know that every morning I'm going to reach for my toothbrush. So if I put a post-it note right above my toothbrush then it's going to remind me, okay now it's time to form this new habit. This would be a great time to attach this cue to something new. So we're swapping. Right and so I'm going to give you an add-on for that. Now reach for the toothbrush with your non-dominant hand and brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand because what you're going to do is boost your prefrontal, whoa, what is happening here, curiosity and you're going to actually have enhanced plasticity. So now, if you go to brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand and then you read that post-it note you're actually taking the input in with higher neuroplastic value. And so we teach our students to change up their patterns within their routine, it's a paradox. You have this routine but structure doesn't mean you sacrifice curiosity and novelty. Structure gives you a safe container for extra curiosity and novelty. So yeah, I'm going to drive to work but can I hold my car keys in the other hand when I walk to the car? Can I stir my tea in the Australian direction? I guess it's counter-clockwise. You know, any small habit you can flip within a safe environment, which is that structure, you're going to boost neuroplastic value and your brain's going to be ready to make habit changes then. I also want to add one other thing here and we talked about this in a previous episode as well is sometimes in the morning especially we haven't carved out the space for that new habit, right? A lot of us have a morning routine that is rush, rush, rush, right to the last minutes snooze, snooze, snooze. Okay, now I gotta get my coffee and I'm already out the door. So I've also, as we said in the challenge, this month has been wake up an hour early, set your alarm earlier, which leads to the next question. Josh has a great one here. His question, hey, J, hey, Johnny. The habit I'm trying to build is to get up an hour earlier to work out before I have breakfast with my wife and our two kids. However, I'm getting some pushback from my partner who's not so happy with my alarm going off at 5.30 in the morning and all that follows. And I get that. But I know that working out in the evening is not gonna work well for me though. And I'm usually beat up when I get home. Your explanation of willpower being a battery really hit home for me. Any advice? Earplugs, or your partner. You know, a big thing there is if this is so important to Josh, then he should have a conversation with his partner of this is something that he wants to do and there should be a compromise of I need this to happen. It's going to help me be happier and it's gonna allow me to be more productive. What can we do together here? What can I do for you so that you can give me the space to do this thing that is going to allow me to be more functional and be better? And I wasn't joking about the earplugs because that's what I have to do because my husband and I are on completely opposite schedules. So I'll sleep with earplugs and it works fine. I mean, I still hear a little bit but there are those compromises if you know it's important to somebody, how do you support them in doing it? Well, I know that there are ways to be woken up with a vibration, there are ways to be woken up without noise, have night lights that'll guide you out of the bedroom so you don't have to flip on the lights. Like, obviously be conscious of your partner's needs and desires but to Johnny's point, being honest that my health is important to both of us. I want to be here for my children so I'm going to prioritize my health. What can we do to work together so that I can get this done in the morning? You know, there was a, thinking about the compromise, there was another part that I couldn't stop laughing about and it's anytime that I've ever was in a relationship where she was going to get up earlier than I would, for me to know that I get to sleep in and she has to go to work, made me feel a lot better. And I- I don't think his wife is in that mode. But you know what, what if you could adopt that framework and you know, my daughter will set her alarm, she sets like five alarms, she starts waking up super, super early because she loves the idea that ooh, I get to cheat and go back to sleep. So she has this framework around that makes it a win. So what could we do to change the framework to a win? I love the idea of ooh, I get to sleep in late. Well it's, this is, I love this subject so much because there is a stimulus and then there is a response and then there's that space in between. And I just so happened to one of our other coaches, Michael, and I had been discussing some things and he has me going down the Victor Frankel road at the moment. So you know, where it is, it was the one thing the Nazis could not take from him was his response to the stimulus that was going on. And being able to tell yourself whatever story you want to, for your perspective on what's going on. And for myself, we started this challenge and AJ and I were already getting up a lot earlier because we've been doing some training for some physical thing, we're a half marathon and now we're doing a half mutter. And with all this talk about the habit thing, there was a story that got stuck in my head of waking up before the sun was up, going to work out and earning my sunrise. And it's now dentist drilled into my head. That is your story. So now every morning I get up at five, I'm walking down the berries and I'm like, normally anyone I was like, what are you doing? You're insane. I'm fired up. I've already had two cups of coffee and now I'm about. Well, that helps for sure. But now I'm about to earn my day. And it's a beautiful story and it's an energizing story. It's a beautiful story. I think we should all adopt that one. Well, this is the thing that I find, a lot of people find difficult. We're moving into this world where everything's so technologically driven and everyone's looking for data and science and facts to back these things up. But when it comes to us and being a human and having to do, we also have to take into a fact that we have an emotional component that rides on and on our development that rides on these stories. And there is, there might not be no facts or data for these stories. It's a story that's going that you have to tell yourself in order to make certain things happen. Do I obviously know that I'm not really earning the sunrise, but it's a wonderful story to hold on to and put a smile on my face when I'm going to the gym. And my favorite thing about this is understanding that and being able to put symbolism and other stories and my own mythological ideas together of my own life. And it's a wonderful thing to play with. So it's like, yes, wait, let's have a factual component. Let's have a data-driven component. But let's also understand that we're a human being and though, and we can even use those, maybe to help some of these stories. I would even venture to say you might not even have factual data for the stories that have made you who you are. You know, some of us don't have any factual data for our fears. We saw it in someone else or we saw it on TV or we are afraid it might happen, but it never has. Or our families were afraid of it. I can't tell you, growing up, I was terrified of sushi. What? Why would you eat raw fish? What's wrong with you? You get parasites, right? So then I get to college, I finally have sushi. I'm like, this is delicious. I missed out my whole life. So there are stories we absorb from the world around us. There are stories we absorb from the people around us in the way that we were brought up. So a lot of us are holding onto these stories and holding onto these memories. And that's what I wanna talk about to wrap today because I think part of what we loved about the book as well as this idea of rewiring and rewriting these memories so that they can impact us in a positive manner. Absolutely, and you know, this is a slippery subject of rewriting memories because we're not talking about erasing your history. We're not talking about negating all the things that made you who you are. But every memory is remembered with a particular vantage point. And that doesn't mean there's not a million other vantage points for that exact same memory. So I like to view it as wearing a headlamp in my memory. Okay, so I've remembered this memory this way for so long and the takeaway of this particular memory is I was invalidated. Well, what if I just moved the headlamp in the same set of events and focused on a different aspect of that memory? Could I have a different take away of that very same fact in my life? And the answer is, yeah, you can. I have changed the way my memories have sat in my body with lots and lots of work. Doesn't mean I've changed what happened. So it goes to your idea of like, there is that response that we, that's our power. That's really our only power. It's the only power we have. How do we respond to the events around us? And no one can take it. And no one can take it. And I think what we forget is that most of us are pre-responding. And then waiting for the event to happen and then validating the way we feel inside and then using that as a takeaway and we disempower ourselves all the time that way. I think the other thing is just talking about it, right? When you share it with others and you share your vantage point, you might actually see and hear some new vantage points. Absolutely. I remember I got off stage giving a talk and I thought it went terribly and I was kind of beating myself up internally. And my friend who was just standing off stage was like, hey, what's wrong with you? You look down. And I was like, oh, I can't believe it. It didn't go well. And he's like, what are you talking about? There are people queued up here to ask you some questions. And that thing that you were demonstrating on stage, I can't exactly remember, but it was like, his vantage was entirely different than mine. But because I simply shared my vantage and my memory, I was able to look at it from a different viewpoint. But a lot of us, we take these negative memories and we try to hold onto them and suppress them and we don't share them with anyone. And a lot of times just the simple fact of sharing it with someone else can give you that new spotlight, that new headlamp. Absolutely. And all our stories that ever were, all the ones that are playing out now and all the ones that ever will be are completely malleable. One of my favorite things in our classrooms is just challenging all the participants in those stories all week long. And by the end of the week, they realize that they can't say certain things because that's now going to be challenged. And they can begin to start realizing that they have that power to rewrite that. And they have that power to challenge them, to ask why. Why are they starting to challenge them? They start asking them each other those questions because they start to pick it up. And now it's empowering. Yeah, absolutely. And then that's when you get to sit back and go, oh, look, it's working, that's amazing. So at the Neurosculpting Institute, our mission is to heal the world one mind at a time. And we do this by empowering people like you do to own their lives through brain-based practices and meditation and education. And so the invitation is to come learn with us. We have a robust online academy. You don't have to come to Denver, although if you came to Denver, I'd love to see you there. It's amazing. But we have live stream classes and learning, online learning academy. And there's really nothing in the way of you making changes that are going to empower your dreams. So that's the invitation, is come visit us at the Neurosculpting Institute. It's exciting when we discovered neuroplasticity, started teaching it and learning about the brain and then found Neurosculpting and its practices. It's been profound on our clients. Question for our audience this month, what habit are you going to start? We started getting up early. We started moving in the right direction. What are you working on to wrap? Obviously we're starting 2019 and how are you gonna do it? Exciting news, we're actually gonna be taking live questions in 2019, jazzing up these Q&A episodes for you. If you have questions, you can also record them at theartofcharm.com slash questions or as always, you can DM us on social media, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter at theartofcharm. Thank you so much for joining us, Lisa. It was a great conversation. And we will have to, we'll have to stop by the institute and see what was the close up thing you were mentioning? Oh, the Zook Dance Weekender that I'm gonna invite you to in a minute. Okay, sounds awesome.