 These practices are really the orientation of them is around caring, like deeply caring for yourself as opposed to improving yourself. And there's a distinction between that. Am I doing this to improve myself or am I doing this to because I actually care for myself? And when we care for ourselves, I'm a mom, when I care for me, I will show up in a more caring space for my kids and for my partner. In our family, it's like, mom is not well, nobody's well. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. So that ego driven striving of setting outcomes simply to fulfill yourself without looking beyond into those intrinsic values is that slippery slope that leads us to burnout that leads us to checking those boxes, but still not feeling content, happy or fulfilled with life. Yes. And we live in environments that overstimulate that. So, so social media, the emphasis on extrinsic rewards, the emphasis on, you know, capitalism, all these things that basically overstimulate our drive system and our threat system. So I studied, I study Paul Gilbert, who is one of the researchers out of the UK that has started something called the Compassionate Mind Foundation. And Paul Gilbert has this sort of rough layout of the human brain and the human brain system that we have these three systems. We have a threat system that detects threat. And when we are engaged in threat, we're fight, flight, freeze. We have a drive system that's all about dopamine and going and getting resources. And for many of us that are strivers, when our threat system is activated, we go into drive. At least that's when I talk with strivers, they see the relationship between those two brain systems, right? I'm threatened, so I go into drive, or I'm threatened. And so I shut down. I procrastinate. I can't do, I can't apply for that job. I can't put myself out there in that relationship. I like do the anti-striving. But there's also a third system. And this is what I've gotten really interested in and what Debbie and I spend a whole first chapter of our book on, which is the Compassionate Mind. And what's interesting about the Compassionate Mind is that it can down-regulate our threatened drive. And actually, we can use compassion and the parts of us that are connected to a larger whole that are connected to a greater good that are about, not competition, but collaboration, to not only soothe our own nervous system, but then orient our behavior towards a more prosocial behavior that benefits all. And that's what I, you know, that's what I see. When I look at psychologists that are doing, like they're doing amazing things. They're out there in the world. People like Jud Brewer, you know, that are like major producers, they're, they're striving, I guess, but they're doing more of a compassionate striving, more of a conscious striving. And that's what I'm really interested in helping people engage in, getting into different habit loops where the, the cue may be the same, but the behavior is values and the reinforcement is intrinsic. And I think in this context, compassion makes sense towards others, but many of us may be struggling with that self-compassion, right? We've realized that if we keep striving, we attain external success, recognition, attention, approval, and acceptance. And we may feel comfortable being compassionate towards others, but not towards ourselves when we're not meeting those goals, when we're not getting that attention, approval, and acceptance that we look for. And I love that you touch on this because self-compassion is so key in all of this. And many of us don't even have a daily practice around it. We've heard meditation, we've heard eating, right, or exercising, but there are things we could do in our daily lives to practice self-compassion to unlock that healthier form of striving. Do you have a daily self-compassion exercise that you could recommend to our audience to try? Well, I think self-compassion is, when you boil it down, is, is how you're relating to yourself, right? So I teach a Tuesday night, during COVID, I started teaching this free evening group once a week, mainly because my practice was so full and I just wanted to help a lot of people. And I also needed it for myself. And one of the things that we'll do is just place our hand on our heart and a hand on our belly, and we will slow our breath down. So the first part of self-compassion is getting your nervous system down-regulated. Getting your nervous system into more of a compassionate place where you are engaging in, engaging your vagal tone. So hand on heart, hand on belly. And actually, Kristin Neff, who I interviewed for psychologists off the clock, it's going to be coming out. She talks a lot about hands on the body. So the first part is self-compassion. You can even just in the moment, like think about like a parent, like a loving parent that would put their hands on your cheek or a hand on your heart. Sometimes I'll be in a session with a client and I'll just keep my hand on my heart or a hand on my belly. The next part of compassion and self-compassion is really about the languaging that you are using towards yourself. And so in my 20s, part of my recovery was also studying with Thich Nhat Hanh, who's a Zen master and he had a monastery in France where he was in exile from Vietnam. And so when I went to go study with him at Plum Village, one of the things that he talks about is watering seeds, that your mind is constantly producing those thoughts, right? And then which seeds are you going to water? Which seeds are you going to cultivate in your mind? And if you're cultivating and watering and fertilizing the seeds of compassion, you're cultivating an inner coach that is encouraging, warm, that is on your own side. And actually how the research pans out is that when you do that, when you practice self-compassion, you are actually more effective. You actually perform better. There's a tremendous amount of research on self-compassion, on everything from performance to telomer length, right? So if you need the buy-in, Google self-compassion, and there's decades of research now just demonstrating the effectiveness of this. But for me, it's just the buy-in is the practice of when I have a thought that is critical, judgmental, which I guarantee you, I'll have them all day long, I also will turn my mind to the thoughts that are helpful and align with my values and that help me in that moment as a way to water those seeds in my brain, which actually turns out to be neuroplasticity, right? The more you pay attention to things, the more that things get water. They know that Tignan was on to something many years ago around changing our brains and the connections in our brains. So those would be the two practices I would recommend. And it's not like I wake up in the morning and do a self-compassion practice. It's more like, whoa, I am feeling really threatened here. I am feeling my drive is on overdrive. How do I slow down my breathing? How do I put my hand in my body? Or, whoa, my critic is out of control, which it will be after this interview. It'll say all sorts of things about how much I talked and I talked too much and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll turn my mind to what's an encouraging voice here. What's a helpful voice? I think that analogy of seeds to water and recognizing that you don't have to let the garden become full of weeds and negative thoughts and that inner critic drive you to a place that's unhealthy, that doesn't allow you to really stay connected to not only who you are, but others. And it impacts all of our relationships, the harsher we are on ourselves. And it's interesting because so many of us think about, okay, I have to have this massive morning routine and this crazy evening routine just to be successful because that's what I see on social media. And really what we're saying is just get more in tune with how you're feeling and your body and recognize these signals. And when these signals are pointing to, you know, I should take better care of myself. I should be a bit more compassionate to the way I'm feeling or thinking about myself in this moment. It has such incredible impacts on how we show up, how we relate to others and how we relate to ourselves. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. You know, it's interesting. There's two things I want to respond to there that I think are important. One is that I'm talking about watering seeds and not about pulling weeds. So you could spend, I have a garden. I have a little homestead here. I'm in Santa Barbara and we have chickens and we're beekeepers and we grow a lot of our own vegetables and a lot of our own food and we homeschool. We're like the, this, you know, the homeschooler family, homestead family. But I could spend all day long pulling weeds in that garden and get nowhere, right? And the same is true with our minds that actually we could spend all day long trying to restructure our thoughts and change our thoughts. And the research suggests that the more you do that, the more that they tend to get, you know, rebound, right? But it's about watering seeds and that the watering of the seeds happens in our daily lives and that there's one of my real concerns that I see in the folks that I work with that is this sort of self-improvement deal that is what Pema Chodron actually has written about is sort of the subtle aggression of self-improvement that has an aggressive quality to it. It has a striving quality to it, which is I'm not, I'm never quite there. And I would say you are already there. You were, you were born whole. You are whole. You belong. And these practices are really the orientation of them is around caring, like deeply caring for yourself as opposed to improving yourself. And there's a distinction between that. Am I doing this to improve myself or am I doing this to, because I actually care for myself? And when we care for ourselves, I'm a mom. When I care for me, I will show up in a more caring space for my kids and for my partner in our family. It's like, mom is not well, nobody's well. My partner does all sorts of things to help, you know, because when we care for ourselves, we can do better in caring for others in that flow of compassion. Again, it becomes very important of where you're putting that attention. And there's this saying, those who look up go up, those who look down go down. And then also something to go along with that. We had Stephen Hayes on the show and he discussed how our brains work like a calculator with no subtraction and no delete. So again, we can't pull out all of these weeds. However, we can certainly focus our attention on what we want to grow more, right? The beautiful flowers or the weeds and our direction of where we're looking, if we're looking forward, that we're going to move forward, if we're continuously ruminating and looking at our past and our mistakes, we're going to get stuck there. Absolutely. And I would add that ruminating is an experiential avoidance strategy. And that blows people's mind. Like what? I'm not avoiding anything by ruminating. Oh, yeah, you are. Absolutely. You are avoiding the discomfort of feeling sad, disappointed, anxious. So what if you had sad, disappointed, anxious, and instead of ruminating about it, which is just a problem solving technique, like if I think about it hard enough, then maybe I can fix it. I feel like I'm doing something about it, right? If I go rehearse over and over again, that relationship or that moment where I said something that I wish I hadn't said, what if instead you turn towards those feelings and you practice some of these processes. So I, you know, I think it's important when we're talking about psychological flexibility, some of those processes may be acceptance, which is opening and allowing for that discomfort. And you can do that in an embodied way. You can do that. Can I make space for the anxiety or sadness in my body? If it were a shape, what shape would it be? If it were moving, how would it be moving? Can I make more space for it? Can I allow it to be there while engaging in another process? My values by taking committed action, even though this painful thing has happened, instead of ruminating in my head about it, what am I going to do in my life today that matters to me, that aligns with the type of person that I want to be in the world, right? So we have acceptance. We have values. We have not getting stuck in our heads, which is cognitive diffusion. We have perspective taking, which is our ability to zoom out and look at a bigger picture and look at ourselves as transcendent beings over time. There's me in this moment or me, you know, whatever yesterday that I'm ruminating about. But there's also like me that's interconnected to just being like human that makes mistakes. All humans make mistakes. And also there's like me that travels way back in time and we'll travel and continue forward in time, right? In the timeline of our lives. So what's important, like I think that some of the self-analysis in act that's kind of helpful is to start to look at our hiding holes and the ways in which we are just kind of like avoiding the discomfort and living that's keeping us in a roundabout of suffering. And Debbie and I, when we talk about experiential avoidance in the book, we use this metaphor of a roundabout. And it really came from in California, you probably relate to this AJ, they just started plopping roundabouts in places. And when you plop a roundabout in California down, like the Californians freak out. We don't know what to do about it. It freaks us out. We don't know how to get around this thing. And the worst part is the exiting it and the entering it, right? And so when you are caught in a roundabout of avoidance, it feels better sometimes just to stay in it, just go around. It's like Chevy Chase's European vacation. You just, I'm just going to stay in this thing over and over again, whether that's a addiction that I'm stuck in, or it's a, I'm not going to like exit this job that I really hate, or I'm not going to exit this relationship that I really hate, because to exit the roundabout requires you have to go through something, that discomfort of moving a lane over and like leaving it, right? And so we avoid, we experientially avoid the discomfort of the exit or of the moving towards the thing that's outside of our comfort zone. But just like a roundabout, when you, when you make that exit, you're being psychologically flexible, you're opening up and allowing and taking committed action towards your values, then all of a sudden the world opens up and you can go on any street and town you want. And that's what psychological flexibility is about, is the freedom to move fully in your life towards the things that you personally and chosen by you care about. What streets do you want to go on? It's not about the roundabout, it's about what you care about and what matters to you.